Andreea Badea, “Credibility of the Past: Writing and Censoring History within
Seventeenth-Century 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. 191–210.

The chapter deals with the Curia’s reaction to Catholic historiography in the late seventeenth century. Authored by prominent Catholic thinkers, these books were widely admired throughout Catholic as well as Protestant Europe for their methodological approach. However, it was exactly their use of the historical-critical method that brought these authors into collision with Rome, which accused them of questioning the canonically attested truth that had already been defined with apostolic authority. Instead of simply banning them, censors and some factions of the Curia commissioned learned men to discredit these works, staging as absolute truth only the Roman historiographical version.