| The aim of this project is to investigate how Europe's main missionary orders (the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Capuchins and the Jesuits) helped construct a confessionalised, disciplined religious identity within Catholic Europe between the early fifteenth and the early seventeenth centuries. It breaks with established scholarly traditions on confessionalisation practices that situate the beginnings of this phenomenon in the second half of the sixteenth century, as a Catholic reaction to the Reformation against the background of a decadent late medieval Church. Instead, this project aims to prove that the roots of this phenomenon should be sought in the religious reform programs developed within the major religious orders since the beginnings of the fifteenth century. The project also questions a scholarly tendency to single out the Jesuit model of missionary engagement as paradigmatic by comparing its missionary profile with those of the other most important late medieval and early modern missionary orders. This project will proceed from a comparative analysis of normative discourses in dominant genres of religious instruction and confessional self-understanding, namely: 1. sermons and comparable homiletic productions through which the confessionalised disciplined religious subject was given shape; 2. catechistic texts produced in the context of the formation of the confessional Catholic subject; 3. types of history writing that functioned as narratives of missionary self-understanding within the main religious orders; 4. missionary guidebooks and treatises in which confessional missionary objectives were dealt with in more general and abstract terms. These were all genres with wide-reaching edifying goals, geared to the transformation of normative social practices and offering strict guidelines for living a virtuous Christian life. The project will show how Europe's main religious orders used the normative discourses in these genres to develop truth regimes with clear-cut principles of in- and exclusion: teaching the populace how to distinguish between good Christians and the internal and external enemies of the Christian commonwealth (such as heretics, Jews, witches, and Islamic "unbelievers"). |
