From the “Land of Diverse Sects” to National Religion: Converts to Catholicism and Reformed Franciscans in Early Modern Poland

2001 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 482-526
Author(s):  
Waldemar Kowalski

Religious conversion is undoubtedly one of the most-explored aspects of medieval and early modern social history. Thefact that the literature concerning that problem is still significantly on the increase proves its scholarly importance. The subject has found a permanent place among works dealing with denominational relations in pre-partition Poland, and the list of such works is substantial. Theyshow a significant number of dispersed pieces of information con-cerning reconversions to the Catholic Church, with no lack of more general observations on this matter.

Author(s):  
Karolina Dłuska

The author of the article tries to indicate the relationship between the perceived presence of the Catholic Church in public life and the election preferences of Poles. The subject of the research here is the parliamentary elections in Poland in 2011 in the context of the perception by the electorate of the individual parties of the public presence of the Catholic Church in the selected aspects. Among them, the author points to: the issue of crosses and other religious symbols in public space, including the issue of a cross in the Sejm meeting room. She also recalls such matters as: religion lessons in schools, the religious nature of the military oath, priests appearing on public television, the Church taking a stand on laws passed by the Sejm and priests telling people how to vote in elections. The presented analysis is based on the results of the Polish General Election Study 2011.


Author(s):  
Anthony Grafton

This chapter examines the centrality of early modern ecclesiastical history, written by Catholics as well as Protestants, in the refinement of research techniques and practices anticipatory of modern scholarship. To Christians of all varieties, getting the Church's early history right mattered. Eusebius's fourth-century history of the Church opened a royal road into the subject, but he made mistakes, and it was important to be able to ferret them out. Saint Augustine was recognized as a sure-footed guide to the truth about the Church's original and bedrock beliefs, but some of the Saint's writings were spurious, and it was important to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. To distinguish true belief from false, teams of religious scholars gathered documents; the documents in turn were subjected to skeptical scrutiny and philological critique; and sources were compared and cited. The practices of humanistic scholarship, it turns out, came from within the Catholic Church itself as it examined its own past.


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 607
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Ignatowski ◽  
Łukasz Sułkowski ◽  
Robert Seliga

Building the brand of the Catholic Church is an area that is little explored in the literature on the subject. This issue turns out to be a very controversial area due to the nature of the activities and the sphere in which these activities are to be performed (marketing, ethics, religion, and faith). The article presents the results of qualitative research conducted among clergymen in Poland and is additionally based on the analysis of the literature on the subject. The theoretical considerations and research results presented in the article help to develop an understanding of the activities of the Catholic Church in Poland, aimed at strengthening the value of its brand. It should be noted that the generational change taking place in Poland forces the clergy to change their narrative and way of conducting dialogue. The previous generations, based on the faith and ethos of John Paul II, also expect modern forms of communication more and more often, which leads to building the brand value of the Catholic Church in Poland. The article discusses the specificity of the interdependence of the Church and marketing, identifies the issues of building the brand of the Catholic Church and the use of modern marketing tools in this process, and presents the results of its own research, which leads to the drawing of final conclusions verifying the research questions posed in the research methodology. This article may initiate an extended discussion on the controversial topic of the implementation of commercial marketing tools into management processes in the Catholic Church.


Author(s):  
Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara

This chapter introduces the book’s methodology, arguments, and scholarly significance. Most works on women and early modern religion focus on nuns, holy women, or religious “deviants,” and emphasize rising hostility toward female autonomy as officials moved to enclose unmarried women and intensive female religiosity (e.g. mysticism, asceticism). This book takes a different approach and examines ordinary laywomen, particularly the broad population of non-elite women who frequently lived outside of both marriage and convent in colonial Spanish American cities. Through an analysis of approximately 550 wills, as well as a variety of other source materials such as hagiographies, religious chronicles, and ecclesiastical records, this study argues that the complex alliances forged between non-elite single women and the Catholic Church shaped local religion and the spiritual economy, late colonial reform efforts, and post-Independence politics in Guatemala’s capital.


Author(s):  
Sarah Covington

Beliefs and practices relating to death underwent profound transformations in the early modern period and continue to provoke the interest of widely disparate scholars. Once the purview of demographic, medical, and social historians, the subject of death and dying has also been given literary and art historical treatments as well as treatment from a range of other interdisciplinary and theoretical perspectives. As Philippe Ariès once noted, if the historian (and one might add the student) “wishes to arrive at an understanding” of what death meant in the past, he or she must “widen his field of vision” to encompass different historical approaches and methodologies—and even then the subject still eludes. (Ariès 1981, p. 16–17; cited under Attitudes and Mentalities). No study of death’s history can escape the shadow of Ariès, even if his two works relating to the theme of death have been criticized for the selectivity of their sources and sweeping conclusions about collective beliefs. But as with many such ambitious and problematic works—Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias are others whose field-changing books come to mind—the influence has been enormous. Working from the perspective of social history and the Annales school of French historians, Ariès tended to focus primarily on the cultural and attitudinal aspects of death, with most of the books in this article reflecting this approach. But the biomedical and demographic aspects are also important, particularly in the context of an age that witnessed a revolution in professionalized medicine and, according to many scholars, resulted in the medicalization and eventually the “secularization” of death. Historians have also been influenced by the contributions of anthropologists, such as Jack Goody on ritual, Victor Turner on liminality, and Arnold Van Gennep on rites de passage (rituals marking the life cycle), all of whom have deepened understandings of the very different approaches to death that people held in the premodern past. Many practitioners of “historical anthropology” thus explored cultural practices and collectively held symbolic systems, each of which carried extensive implications for the study of funerary rites, burial customs, or rituals of remembrance. Indeed, the anthropologist Robert Hertz made such endeavors possible in his own work on funerary rituals and the psychological connections between the living and the dead or between the individual and the community. Such perspectives were also animated by a related turn in the study of memory, with such notable exponents as Pierre Nora and his “sites of memory”; as a result the use of tradition and commemorative ritual as well as an interest in epigraphs and tomb monuments has been applied to the memorializing of the dead with productive results. Most of the sections in this article select works that reflect these different theoretical approaches as they describe how death in the early modern world was an intimate fact of life and one that was confronted communally and with a common, consolatory language and set of rituals, all of which was a healthier way, perhaps, to face death than the medicalized isolation that often surrounds it in the early 21st century.


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