Michael Printy

Bio: Michael Printy is an academic researcher from Wesleyan University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Catholic Enlightenment & Enlightenment. The author has an hindex of 8, co-authored 13 publications receiving 225 citations.

A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe

Abstract: (ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Brill's commitment to publishing a series of reference books and handbooks on the intellectual and religious life of Europe is to be praised, and this volume of heavily footnoted essays with extensive bibliographies will be particularly useful.The best aspect of this volume is its open struggle with its title term: "Catholic Enlightenment." Ulrich Lehner in his excellent introduction is the first to point out that the term is slippery. This volume of essays, he notes, is a companion not a manual . What the essays make clear in their own ways is that distinctively Catholic thinkers were engaged in a multiplicity of negotiations with exuberant rationality, Baroque spirituality, political philosophies concerning centralization of power, and moral philosophies of varying degrees of laxity and rigor. The essays emphasize the particular negotiations of individuals and religious orders. At the physical center of the book is Mario Rosa's depiction of the mediation skills of Pope Benedict XIV who was able to open spaces for Christian tradition and apologetics to be enriched by "the powerful flow of the new culture of Enlightenment" (227). However, most of the book is not about popes and papal pronouncements. Writing about Benito Jeronimo Feijoo in Spain, Andrea Smidt notes the pervasive issue for enlightened Catholics was to avoid the extremes of "blind belief and obstinate unbelief" (418). Tensions between the tendencies of Jansenists and Jesuits play a variety of roles in most of the essays. In France, Jeffrey Burson describes the psychological and cultural tensions between Jesuit optimism about moral progress and the more pessimistic social reformism of the Jansenist form of an "Augustinian Catholic Enlightenment" (65). Harm Klueting describes the inability of Austrian Jansenism to remain viable within the moderate Catholic Enlightenment as it was co-opted by politics and Protestantism after the Jesuits were repressed. In most of these essays the Jesuit and Jansenist relationship to centralized politics of different countries affects the way each promoted regional versions of enlightened Catholicism.Evident in all the essays is a Catholic eclecticism that undermines old reference-book traditions of hard categories and simple definitions. Jeffrey Burson, for example, writes of a "Jesuit Synthesis" that was "sculpted and refined in various forms by Claude Buffier and Rene-Joseph Tournemine" (79). This synthesis responded to radical statements in Spinoza and Descartes while adapting Malebranche and Descartes to Aquinas by way of Locke (79-80). This kind cut-and-paste thinking was usually regional and ephemeral. It responded to specific needs at specific times, usually supporting specific political and ecclesiastical situations. Andrea Smidt describes the predominance in Spain of a particular Spanish Jansenism, rooted in humanist, Erasmian, episcopalist, and Augustinian traditions peculiar to Spain. Michael Printy writes about rival Catholic enlightenments in the Holy Roman Empire that were not simply manifestations of anti-clerical or anti-religious ideas, but rather, "the culmination of several generations of pious renewal and revival" (173). …

Politics and Reformations: Histories and Reformations

Abstract: These twenty-three essays explore the historiographies of the Reformation from the fifteenth century to the present and study the history of religion from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, especially in Germany but also in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and colonial Mexico.

Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism

Abstract: 1. Introduction Part I. Perfect Societies: Rethinking the Church and the State: 2. The liberty of the German church: Febronianism and the German Gallicans 3. The German church and the absolute state 4. Church and empire in the eighteenth century 5. Collegialism: the rise of the state, and the redefinition of the church Part II. The Universal Church and the University Class: 6. Catholic enlightenment and the search for a bourgeois Catholicism 7. A program for reform 8. Pastors of enlightenment: reforming the secular clergy 9. Gallican longings: nation and religion in the German enlightenment 10. Conclusion.

History of Islam in German Thought from Leibniz to Nietzsche

Abstract: This is the book about German Orientalism I felt I could not and did not want to write, and I am very grateful to Ian Almond for having produced it. In a series of eight chapters, Almond, a professor of English at Georgia State University and author of three other books on related topics, discusses sequentially the place of Islam in the works of leading German philosophers and poets from about 1680 to 1890. Very welcome are Almond’s in-depth treatments of German thinkers – famously excluded from Edward Said’s Orientalism (1) – and his reflections on their sources; he has wisely chosen to focus, too, on the German reception of Islam and the Ottoman Empire, the part of the Orient that was most difficult for all Europeans to romanticize. Almond also reminds his readers frequently of the changing nature of European-Ottoman relationships against which works like Leibniz’s Thoughts on the Unfortunate Retreat from Hungary (1683) were written. All of these things make Almond’s book an important contribution to ongoing debates about the continuing validity of Said’s model, while his deep knowledge of the writings of all of these well-studied figures (Leibniz, Kant, Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, Goethe, Marx, Nietzsche) make the book an interesting and profitable read. It is the first step, though not an entirely unproblematic one, toward a new understanding of European-Asian cultural encounters in the era of European, rather than Ottoman or Chinese, empirebuilding.

Negotiating the Sacred: Spirituality and Reform in the Age of Enlightenment in the Republic of Venice

Abstract: Publication Date 2014-04-29 Availability Embargoed Embargo Period 2017-04-28 Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PHD) Department History (Arts and Sciences) Date of Defense 2014-04-03 First Committee Member Guido Ruggiero Second Committee Member Mary Lindemann Third Committee Member Hugh Thomas Fourth Committee Member Steve Stein Fifth Committee Member Laura Giannetti Abstract The continuing resilience, significance, and variety of religious culture in the age of the Enlightenment in the Republic of Venice are the overarching themes of this dissertation, which consists of a series of case-studies. Though the stories examined here are diverse and cover several aspects of devotions, practices, and beliefs, they all grew out of negotiations that took place at all levels. Each chapter showcases negotiations of the sacred among secular authorities, the clergy and their flocks, bishops and inquisitors, higher office holders in the Roman Church and in local branches of the Inquisition, and various members of ecclesiastic institutions. Together, these represent a more complicated religious Enlightenment than usually envisioned. Negotiations of the sacred unfold against the background of unapologetic quests for the miraculous and divine manifestations. Hence, the pursuit of modernity, which is still seen as the hallmark of the Age of Reason, actually never was very far removed from the sphere of religion and consciousness of the spiritual world. The examination of so many varied aspects of devotion, practices, beliefs, and the numerous uncertain attempts to constrain them within more rigorous boundaries (or to remove them from popular control) during the eighteenth century ultimately confirms that we – “moderns” – are the children of the Enlightenment in more complex ways than we might imagine.