“A Dramatic Year:” 1572 and the End of Christendom”
- Monday 24 June 2024, 14.00-15:00, optionele discussiebijeenkomst van 15:00-16:00
- Europahuis (Blijde-Inkomststraat 5, gebouwnummer: 118-12, 3000 Leuven, België)
Op maandag 24 juni geeft Christine Kooi, historicus aan de Louisiana State University, een lezing over haar nieuwe boekproject rond het jaar 1572.
Hier volgt de blurb:
The year 1572 was, as even Fernand Braudel, that least événementielle of historians, had to concede, “dramatic.” Its most notorious event was the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France that summer, resulting in the murder of 10,000 Protestants. Additionally, the Revolt of the Netherlands took up steam as the political and religious rebels against Philip II first won territories from the Habsburgs and set up new ecclesiastical regimes there. Meanwhile in England Puritan divines published their first public manifesto, the Admonition to Parliament, demanding the further reformation of the church in England. In Rome the reforming Pope Pius V, so instrumental in supporting the Council of Trent, died that year, and the College of Cardinals named as his successor Gregory XIII, who was equally zealous in his pursuit of church reform. These and many other events made for a religiously tumultuous year.
My paper will be a preliminary foray into my new book project, 1572: A Year in the End of Christendom, which examines the decades after the 1555 Peace of Augsburg as the Reformation worked itself out in various ways. In Reformation historiography, the second half of the sixteenth century has gotten rather less attention than the first, and I intend to shed more light on what the period can tell us about religious change in Europe. Given its dramatic nature, the year 1572 can be seen as a kind of prism through which to examine the ongoing disintegration of Latin Christendom in the later 1500s, a period which witnessed the emergence of confessional forms of Christianity, with distinct Reformed and Lutheran Protestant blocs and a newly rejuvenated Catholic Church. And with this confessionalization came the novel challenge of religious coexistence and competition. Using two particular events of 1572 – the publication of the first official biography of Ignatius of Loyola and of An Admonition to the Parliament – as a lens, my paper will explore some of the ways in which Latin Christendom splintered into rival confessions in the second half of the sixteenth century.
Optioneel: deelnemen aan de metadiscussie over dikke boeken voor een breed publiek, 15:00-16:00
Na de lezing en een Q&A is er, voor wie dat wil, een discussiebijeenkomst over een metathema: het schrijven van boeken voor een academisch én niet-academisch publiek. Aan de hand van Diarmaid MacCacCulloch The Reformation: Europe’s House Divided en een aantal prikkelende stellingen hebben we het met Christine Kooi over de uitdagingen en kansen die komen met het schrijven van grote syntheses voor geïnteresseerde leken. Hoe bepaal je je temporele en geografische kaders van zo’n omvattend werk? En kun je wel wetenschappers en “normale lezers” tegelijkertijd tevredenstellen?
“Huiswerk”:
- lees de introductie van Diarmaid MacCacCulloch The Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (9 blz.).
- schrijf de titel op van het boek dat u zou willen schrijven als u alle tijd van de wereld had.