Bruno Boute, Andreea Badea, Marco Cavarzere, and Steven Vanden Broecke, “A Product’s Glamour. Credibility, or the Manufacture and Administration of Truth in Early Modern Catholicism”, in Making Truth in Early Modern Catholicism (Scientiae Studies), edited by Andreea Badea, Bruno Boute, Marco Cavarzere, and Steven Vanden Broecke, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021, pp. 7–38.

This chapter furnishes the reader with a vademecum to the volume. It places uncertainty in the limelight as a key element for understanding confessional cultures and belief systems, and shows how early modern Catholicism struggled to find practical strategies for marrying deep-seated uncertainties with its aim of operationalizing an absolute and revealed truth. Inspired by Michel de Certeau and Bruno Latour, among others, this introduction argues that a methodological transfer between science studies, history of knowledge, and religious history offers a toolkit to reconstruct the credibility of past beliefs. It introduces the volume’s focus on the myriad of connected laboratories and work floors of early modern Catholicism, and on the untainted emergence of a universal truth from such a multifarious activity. This praxeological approach is illustrated in the subsequent survey of this volume’s sections and chapters.