The Inquisition(s) and the Christian East, 1500-1800

While inquisitorial control over Protestants, Jews and conversos, and even renegades and moriscos, has been thoroughly examined by many scholars, no studies of this kind have examined the representatives of the other half of Christianity, namely those believers coming from an Eastern background: Greek-, Arabic- or Slavic-speaking Orthodox, Armenians, Ethiopians and Copts, “Jacobites” and “Nestorians”, Maronites and others. The conference aims to fill this gap by bringing together orientalists and historians of various backgrounds, in order to examine the different ways in which Catholic ecclesiastical justice treated Eastern Christians in the early modern age.

Special attention will be paid to the theological and canonical debates about the orthodoxy of the Eastern Christian tradition; the confessional surveillance of Eastern communities residing in territories under Catholic government; the answers of the Roman theologians to the questions posed by the missionaries working among ‘heretics and schismatics’; and the importance of the documents in oriental languages kept in the inquisitorial archives for the history of these communities.

Our working hypothesis is that the comparison and confrontation with Eastern Christianity revealed some of the contradictions and unsolved problems of Tridentine Catholicism, while providing the Inquisition with a range of cultural tools and interpretative lenses that were then applied also in other contexts, especially in the framework of the missionary and theological controversies which shook the Catholic world after 1650.

Access to the conference is free but the number of seats is limited. To attend in presence or to follow the conference in streaming it is mandatory to register in advance at the address:
cesare.santus@uclouvain.be