Understandings of Knowledge in the Bulwark of Truth: The Roman Censor's Writing Desk (17th Century)
Research Question
This research project seeks to localise how plural concepts of knowledge were put to use in Roman censorship proceedings that sought to manage, and gave conversely new impulses to, Catholic plurality.
Project Description
Pluralisation is the worm in the apple of the urge towards confessional unity. The dynamics engendered by censorship, which has come to be considered a constitutive practice of early modern knowledge cultures beyond its at times brutal, repressive features, furnish the researcher with excellent materials to investigate the plural, situational and functionalising notions of knowledge and truth as they were being put to use by Roman censors seeking to come to terms with a dynamic Catholic plurality in the Low Countries.
Selected Publications
Editorship, together with Andreea Badea, Marco Cavarzere and Steven Vanden Broecke (eds.), Establishing Credibility in Early Modern Catholicism. Making and Administering Truth. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming.
‘Inquisitori Romani e ingegneri della salvezza nelle Fiandre: la “Guerra dei confessionali” nel Secondo Seicento alla luce della censura libraria’. In: L’Inquisizione Romana e i suoi archivi A vent’anni dall’apertura dell’ACDF, a cura di Cifres, Alejandro (Roma: Gangemi Editore 2018), 255-267.
Academic Interests and Catholic Confessionalisation. The Louvain Privileges of Nomination for Ecclesiastical Benefices (Education and Society in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 35). Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers 2010.