Saving Truth. Roman Censorship and Catholic Pluralisation in the Confessionals of the Habsburg Netherlands, 1682–1686

About the Publication

Bruno Boute, “Saving Truth. Roman Censorship and Catholic Pluralisation in the Confessionals of the Habsburg Netherlands, 1682–1686”, 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. 135–163.

Why were seemingly innocent didactic prints on seven articles of the faith that were, moreover, circulating in the Habsburg Netherlands for decades censured and prohibited by the Roman Inquisition in 1682? The answer to this question opens the way to a number of other conundrums that shaped early modern Catholicism in the Lord’s Vineyard in Belgium as well as in Roman palaces; to uncertainties that illuminate the dynamic relationship between truth and salvation, between orthodoxy and orthopraxy, between cognition of the faith and different forms of penitential practices in post-Reformation Catholicism, and between the drive towards confessional uniformity and a dynamic inner-confessional plurality.