Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era

By John W. O'Malley

Book Overview

Counter Reformation, Catholic Reformation, the Baroque Age, the Tridentine Age, the Confessional Age: why does Catholicism in the early modern era go by so many names? And what political situations, what religious and cultural prejudices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave rise to this confusion? Taking up these questions, John W. O'Malley works out a remarkable guide to the intellectual and historical developments behind the concepts of Catholic reform, the Counter Reformation, and, in his felicitous term, Early Modern Catholicism. The result is the single best overview of scholarship on Catholicism in early modern Europe, delivered in a pithy, lucid, and entertaining style. Although its subject is fundamental to virtually all other issues relating to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, there is no other book like this in any language.

More than a historiographical review, Trent and All That makes a compelling case for subsuming the present confusion of terminology under the concept of Early Modern Catholicism. The term indicates clearly what this book so eloquently demonstrates: that Early Modern Catholicism was an aspect of early modern history, which it strongly influenced and by which it was itself in large measure determined. As a reviewer commented, O'Malley's discussion of terminology 'opens up a different way of conceiving of the whole history of Catholicism between the Reformation and the French Revolution."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674008138
• ISBN13: 9780674008137
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Good historiography overview

John W. O'Malley since the early 1990s has advocated the use of "Early Modern Catholicism" to identify the "Catholic side" of the Reformation. That is, however, not his primary goal in Trent and All That. For those who are familiar with his earlier efforts, he puts forth the name as, yet another, alternative to "Catholic Reformation," "Counter Reformation," and their many counterparts. The main purpose of his book is to...

Naming Catholicism in the Era of Reform

By what label should historians refer to the "Catholic side" during the era of the Protestant Reformation? In John O'Malley's, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in The Early Modern Era, the reader is introduced to the complexities surrounding the nomenclature of distinct historical era's, and more specifically, to the problem of naming the Catholicism of the late medieval/early modern era. Throughout the work, the...

A good basic introduction to the problems involved

This book provides an excellent introduction to the basic historiographical problem involved in studying the early modern Catholic Church: what should we call the period? The author reviews the various solutions, (Counter-Reformation, Catholic Reformation, Catholic Reform, Catholic Confessionalization, Catholic Revival) and the history of the use of those terms. Then he proposes an additional term: "early modern Catholicism,"...