EUROPROP · Female Prophecy in Early Modern European Religion

Female Prophecy in Early Modern European Religion

During the 16th century secular and temporal powers fought to gain monopoly on the future, striving to gradually eliminate religious expectations from the domain of political decision-making. This project looks at this struggle, that peaked in this era, from the standpoint of female prophets, and from a transnational perspective. These women, sometime persecuted and often highly considered by religious and political leaders, explicitly advocated church reform, defended the Protestant Reformation and welcomed a more radical realization of it, or acted for the triumph of the Catholic Reformation, thus blurring the lines between orthodoxy and heresy and Protestantism and Catholicism. Through their cases, it will be possible to uncover the period’s religious complexity and fluidity and identify overlaps, intersections and conflicts within and at the borders of Christianity, making it possible to use the encompassing category of early modern religion. The project aims to create a theoretical account of female prophecy in 16th century Italy, Spain and England as a key to understanding early modern religion. It expands and deepens Weber’s theory by demonstrating women’s ambition and capacity to appropriate prophecy as a creative revolutionary force of history. The project identifies Italian ‘living saints’ and humanists; Spanish beatas and conversas; and English visionaries as privileged actors of prophetic charisma and challenges assumptions that prophecy responds just to national or local interests and debates. A transnational approach is needed to demonstrate the transfers of knowledge and exchanges in Italy, England and Spain in this era of extensive religious mobility and before the Universal Church was completely divided. The case studies include the Italian mystic Lucia da Narni, and the humanists Camilla Battista da Varano and Cassandra Fedele; the Spanish beata Maria de Santo Domingo and the conversas Teresa of Ávila and Francisca de los Apóstoles; the English Catholics Elizabeth Barton and Jane Wentworth, and the advocate of the Reformation Anne Askew. By including conversas and women from the tradition of the radical Reformation, the project will demonstrate, on the one hand, how female prophets moved outside confining ecclesiastical frameworks and, on the other hand, their departure from tradition. The analysis of the cases of humanists will illuminate the encounter between religious and secular cultures. By looking at the material and literary exchanges between prophets and prelates across the borders, both in well documented cases like the one of Lucia da Narni and Maria de Santo Domingo, and in less researched cases, the project redefines the idea of confessional mobility. The analysis will concentrate on the texts written by female prophets and their male counterparts (confessors, hagiographers and devotees), as well as by secular women. The corpus includes sermons, visions, spiritual letters and poems, hagiographies and inquisitorial trials, transcending the opposition between hagiography and history, and between religious and literary production. There are three main research questions: 1. What was the relationship between female prophets, the ecclesiastical authorities and secular powers that were involved in the early modern religious conflicts? 2. What were the processes of communication and exchange across borders and beliefs ignited by female prophets women that demonstrate the instability of the emerging confessional divisions? 3. What is their neglected contribution to, and inner critique of, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations? The methodology intertwines history of ideas, the history of concepts, early modern history and feminist political theory. It defines some core concepts forming the prophetic discourse – authority/authorship; spiritual/political/pastoral power; sacred/secular/individual/collective history; interior/exterior discipline; and religious/civic community – and aims to understand their semantic transformation. Several strategies will be adopted: case studies; comparative studies; cross-border influences and transnational legacies; mobility and pilgrimage patterns; and the penetration and innovation of prophetic models (e.g., Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena), both built and perceived.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз