The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The conclusion traces a history of religious gesture from the mid-seventeenth century to the present day. This period saw major changes in gesture and bodily habitus which we could characterise in three ways. First, there is the decline of uniformity, that is, the gradual abandonment of attempts to enforce bodily uniformity as a means of social discipline, whether in religious worship or in other forms of collective social activity. Secondly, there is the process that sociologists have labelled the decline of deference, whereby individuals in the modern West are, for the most part, no longer required to kneel or bow to social superiors, or to use gestures of reverence in sacred spaces. Lastly, there is the decline of formality, a growing discomfort with formal ritual which could also be described in terms of interiority or individualism, as a belief that the mind rather than the body is the true locus of selfhood. In all these respects it would be rather easy to see the world of early modern religion described in this book as a world we have lost. But I want to argue that this model is unsatisfactory, or at least incomplete.

Cultural confidence, moral superiority, and metropolitan elitism: these characteristics of the 1870s are exemplified by Harley Granville-Barker’s edited collection of essays, The Eighteen-Seventies (1929), which offers a nostalgic, aristocratic, Oxbridge, and high-culture account of this decade. But this present collection, in the spirit of the series to which it belongs, frames the 1870s as a decade in transition, and seeks to unsettle its conventional associations while acknowledging their force and legacy. Indeed, writers of the 1870s were especially adept at questioning their current temporal moment, often betraying an overdetermined sense of their place in time, and even of temporality itself.

This chapter considers poetry of the 1870s in the aftermath of the previous boom decade in magazine verse, with the flowering of shilling monthlies and popular literary weeklies, when periodical publishers became firmly established as the era’s primary poetry publishers, and when most readers accessed poems in ephemeral print. Literary accounts of the Victorian era conventionally consider poetry book publication as defining the era’s poetics, and certainly in the 1870s there were no shortage of prominent poetry volumes. But this decade also saw poetry defined in relation to magazine verse, and the value of poetry was integral to associated issues of ephemerality and modernity. This chapter focuses in particular on the place of poetry in two new periodicals of the 1870s: The Dark Blue and The Nineteenth Century.

The Introduction begins by unpacking a 1929 Taiwanese civil case where multiple parties were concerned with the formation of a marriage, showing how the case – and public debates as well as other civil and criminal cases presented in this book – evolved around sociolegal problems across the empire, social customs and new forms of family, masculinity tied to household relationships, and Taiwanese women’s agency. The argument of the circulation of gender ideals is followed using ethnographic and historical backgrounds on marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships in Japan and Taiwan from the late nineteenth century through the 1910s. Grounded in these historical contexts, the Introduction suggests gender was at the center of Japan’s international and colonial relations, the competition surrounding Taiwanese masculinity in society and law, and the contested formation of Taiwanese women’s agency in the colonial courts. The final section outlines the organization of Geographies of Gender by highlighting the shift in narrative from the larger historical circumstances surrounding the Japanese empire to the specific interactions between discourse and colonial law in gendered terms.

This chapter investigates how ideological and political motivations prompted Italian Hegelians in the second half of the nineteenth century to posit a contrived identification between the Renaissance and the Risorgimento, recognising in them a common revolutionary character. By focussing on Italian Hegelians’ interpretations of Giordano Bruno’s philosophy and Tommaso Campannella’s work, this chapter deals with ideas of modernity, interpretations of the Renaissance in nineteenth century Europe, and anticlericalism in the Risorgimento.

This chapter focuses on Italian Hegelians’ interpretations of Machiavelli’s political thought and argues that during the nineteenth-century Italian political language underwent a radical transformation: while the term Risorgimento had generally indicated a specific period of modern history (approximately from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries), by the end of the century that term began to be identified with the Italian struggles for national emancipation. At the same time the word Renaissance began to be used to indicate the period of early modern history between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, also identified with the birth of ‘Modernity’. The transformation of the language represents a change of ideas, of the way the intellectual and political leaders of the Risorgimento interpreted the failed religious and moral reformation in early modern Italy and how Machiavelli represents the ‘Italian Luther’.

Why have we been so quick to dismiss late nineteenth-century Haitian novels in the field of francophone postcolonial studies? What have we failed to recognize as francophone or postcolonial in these texts? And how can we now begin to revisit them? This chapter proposes to answer these questions by drawing attention to the historical predicament that led nineteenth-century Haitian intellectuals and writers to embrace the West’s narratives of civilization and modernity when such discourses were in fact integral to North Atlantic imperialisms and white supremacy. It first provides a historical overview of the Haitian novel from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century to its booming production in the early 1900s. It then sheds light on Demesvar Delorme’s Francesca and Louis Joseph Janvier’s Une Chercheuse, two novels that help us understand how Haitian intellectuals sought to exist in a Eurocentric, international lettered sphere. Finally, it concludes by considering some of the ethical and intellectual challenges we must face in order to do justice to such works and their authors.

The chapter discusses how questions of time and temporality shape and challenge global history, as well as historical studies in general. I take my cue from the specific temporality of global history itself and its role in defining the identity of the field. I move on to show, firstly, why time can be understood as history’s ‘last fetish’, as Chris Lorenz has phrased it, and how this makes itself known among global historians. In a second step, politics of periodisation are analysed as a particular challenge for de-centring history. Here, the recent debate about the ‘Global Middle Ages’ and the longer history of the global proliferation of the ‘medieval’ serve as an example. Finally, I turn to the question of synchronisation and contemporaneity, which presents both a promise and a problem for global historians.

The work of modernist poet and visual artist David Jones provides a retrospective vantage of the central claims of Liturgy, Ritual, and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Jones saw the nineteenth century as a moment of breakage with the past. This rupture, according to Jones, threatens the work of the artist by depleting the sacramental meaning of reality – that is, the ability of concrete things to signify unseen spiritual depths. In both a dramatic biographical encounter with the Mass during his time on the front lines of World War I and in his subsequent art and poetry, Jones turns to liturgical forms to confront the breakage that began in the nineteenth century. Viewed from Jones’s perspective, the Romantic and Victorian interest in liturgy takes on new significance for the overarching genealogy of modernity and secularization. These liturgical fascinations intervene in – and resist – the long story of modernity’s separation of the material and spiritual, the natural and supernatural.

This chapter traces the ways familiar depictions of Ireland are interrupted when we consider some of the rare co-imaginings of Irish and Pacific islands. When watched alone, Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934) presents the non-modern in modern Ireland. But when watched alongside Moana (1926, Robert and Frances Flaherty), Man of Aran reveals the traveling nature of non-modern tropes, as the Pacific non-modern and the Irish non-modern coalesce. The transoceanic movement of the “novel savage” is emphasized, and the quintessentially Irish becomes recognizably interislander. By tracing the connections between Ireland and the Cook Islands in Kenneth Sheils Reddin’s Another Shore (1945), as well as Charles Crichton’s 1948 adaptation, we see that Reddin draws on the seeming incontrovertibility of the Pacific’s arcadia to establish, first, Dublin’s modernity, then Dublin’s non-modernity, then the erroneous, nebulous nature of such categories. By tracing the transnational movement of tropes and stereotypes across Ireland and the Pacific, area studies divisions collapse and we recognize Ireland as part of a global archipelago of islands of discounted, nascent, imbricated modernity.

This chapter shows how antisemitism built on Christian anti-Judaism, including blood libel accusations but also the appearance of Christian philosemitism. Documents show Zionism was a reaction to antisemitism as well as to the rise of nationalism and also benefited from Christian restorationism.