Marco Cavarzere

An Insight from Beyond. How Protestants looked at the Catholic world in the early modern age

Historians recently traced back the roots of comparative history of religions into the seventeenth century and into a time where many works describing religions from all over the world (from America to China) appeared. It passed almost unnoticed that this early interest for “comparativism” was developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth century confrontation of Catholics and Protestants, as well as in a period of growing interest in antiquarianism.

The lexicology of these works on comparative religion itself was influenced by the religious disputes of the time. For instance, the word “idolatry” – often used in this historiography before the word “polytheism” took its place – acquired a strong religious connotation in the struggle between Catholics and Protestants. In particular, this comparative approach in the religious field became more apparent when these intra-Christian polemics began to stress irreconcilable differences in beliefs rather than just dismissing practices of the other side as corrupt and impious.

The project focuses on how this heated debate in the first decades of the sixteenth century turned into a more detached and “antiquarian” view on the religious differences, separating the Christian confessions of Western Europe. In doing so, we will analyze the editions of papal ceremonial books, printed in Protestant Germany during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Through this survey, we will try to show both the reasons behind these editorial enterprises and the changing approaches towards the Catholic world, as represented in these texts. Defining the Catholic ceremonies as the figurative representation of the “otherness” induced some writers to abandon sharply polemical tones. They began to be more descriptive, demonstrating a sort of “ethnological” approach, which was cleared of those earlier, highly moralistic goals. By exploring these gradual shifts, my aim is to shed some light onto the confessionalization paradigm in early modern Europe as a dynamic framework. At the same time, this allows to better understand the roots of a comparative approach to the history of religions.