This session explores the presuppositions of Catholic Studies as a field within religious studies, and the long, complex, and shifting relation of contemporary Catholicism to its past histories. The three papers gathered here suggest that insights into facets of this dynamic relation can be found in very different aspects of the Catholic past. The first paper argues that the emphasis on Jesus’s bloodied embodiment in early modern Spanish Catholicism occurred in the context of Spanish debates over purity of blood and forced conversion. The second puts discourse about paganism in early medieval pastoral literature into conversation with contemporary debates about Catholic enculturation. The third interrogates Catholic Studies itself, in its relation to the “medieval,” the modern, and the "non-modern." In querying these varied relations to the past, we hope to encourage conversation between scholars of premodern and contemporary Catholic studies.
As Bynum shows in Christian Materiality (2011), premodern Christian devotees rejected the contemporary assumption that there is a profound distinction between living and non-living, body and object, animate and non-animate. This has significant implications for the study of late medieval Passion devotion. My case study focuses on the new emphasis post-1492 in Spanish Catholicism on Jesus’ bloodied embodiment, an emphasis which began in a climate marked by a newly-homogenous Christianity, the Inquisition, and the beginning of empire. Proposing that Pierre Levy’s term “hyperbody” best expresses the devotional depiction of Jesus’ body as fully yet inordinately human in its suffering, I take the first Vita Christi written after 1492 as a case study, showing how the Castilian archbishop Prejano drew on physiological and material discussions of blood to render Jesus’ embryology, fetal development, and torture in light of the Spanish debates over purity of blood and forced conversion.
Following the publication of working documents for the 2019 Synod on the Pan-Amazon Region, various elements within the Catholic Church condemned these documents as heretical by virtue of their allegedly "pagan" and "pantheist" content. This line of critique has endured through subsequent years, raising the question: why do some decry ecologically oriented Catholic moral theologies as heterodoxical endorsements of nature worship? Any attempt to address this question must look to the historical role of paganism in the Christian imagination, specifically to the pastoral developments of the Early Middle Ages – a period of constant encounter between religious “others” and dynamic emergence of syncretic religious formations in Europe. This paper will bring works of pastoral literature by Pope Gregory I, Caesarius of Arles, and Martin of Braga into conversation with the goal of exploring key characteristics of “the pagan” in the medieval (and perhaps contemporary) Catholic imagination.
If Catholic Studies is the quest to integrate diverse fields by uncovering the Christian worldview which inspire a variety of cultural products, then Medieval Studies cannot be reduced to Catholic Studies. The contemporary emphasis on the global Middle Ages only emphasizes this point. Nonetheless, if we approach the Middle Ages with tools developed to study other “non-Modern” societies, we can uncover aspects decidedly “non-Modern” aspects of the Middle Ages. Not only does this uncovering disrupt the idea that the Middle Ages readily flowed into Modernity, but it provides Catholics with resources to expand our imaginations in an un-Modern, or apo-Modernist, direction. In this paper, I pay special attention to the promise of this approach to the understanding of ritual today, allowing Catholics to appreciate aspects of the liturgy and of liturgical practice which we may not realize were operative or which might strike contemporary practitioners as superstitious or meaningless.