The Roman Church and Multiconfessional Europe in the Early Modern Period

The essays collected in this volume invite a reconsideration of the relationship between the Roman Church and multiconfessional Europe not in terms of abstract principles or fixed models, but through the shifting interplay of norms and practices, claims to universality and strategies of accommodation, memory and oblivion. What emerges is not a coherent and unified policy, but a plurality of responses and strategies elaborated within a complex institutional machinery, operating across diverse political, legal, and confessional settings. Taken together, these essays invite a reconsideration of the place of the Roman Church within the history of multiconfessional Europe, exploring the processes through which religious pluralism was contested, negotiated, and, at times, strategically exploited by the Roman Curia and its envoys. What emerges is neither a coherent and unified institutional will, nor the linear unfolding of a preconceived programme, but rather a dense field of practices, languages, and dispositifs through which the Church of Rome sought to operate within political and legal environments often alien to its own normative frameworks. By placing Rome and multiconfessional Europe in sustained dialogue, this volume does not seek to offer a definitive model or a new grand narrative. Instead, it aims to open a field of inquiry attentive to conflicts, tensions, and mediations, foregrounding the questions that arose when the universal claims of a millennia-old institution confronted the fractured religious landscapes of early modern Europe.