Giving toProblems of Faith: Belief and Promise in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
The half millennium before the Enlightenment in Europe is often referred to as the “Age of Faith,” and indeed the Latin terms fides (faith) and credere (to believe), along with their various cognates and vernacular translations, shaped how medieval and early modern Europeans made sense of themselves, their society, and the cosmos. These concepts were central to religious discourse, but likewise both fides and credere were at the heart of legal discourses of oath-taking and witnessing, social discourses of honor, scientific and philosophical discourses of epistemology, economic discourses of credit, and others as well. Literate Europeans in the “Age of Faith” thus worried excessively about what faith was, what it meant to believe, and many other issues.
This sense of faith as a problem has not been well represented in the scholarly literature. With the recent return of religion to the center of the human sciences, scholars of medieval and early modern Europe have increasingly stressed the need to “take belief seriously.” This has often come to mean that faith should not be subject to rigorous critical analysis because it is fundamentally irreducible, hence any attempt to analyze it is tantamount to a secular attack on religion. In this seminar, the conveners intend to suggest that “taking belief seriously” precisely means that faith must be questioned, dissected, and analyzed, not because we decide that faith is a problematic category but because our subjects did.
This Collaborative Research Seminar will bring together a wide array of scholars in different departments at UC Berkeley who have come to realize from different disciplinary perspectives that faith was a problem for pre-modern Europe rather than simply the background against which other problems can be analyzed. Our purpose is thus to give institutional life to this idea and to constitute a community around it.
Conveners
Ethan Shagan is Professor of History and Director of the Center for British Studies. His research and teaching interests include the history of Britain from the 15th to the 18th centuries, with an emphasis on religion and politics; the history of Europe in the era of Reformation and Counter-Reformation; and the social and political uses of religious ideology.
Albert Ascoli is Terrill Distinguished Professor of Italian Studies. His principal field of research and teaching is Medieval and Early Modern Italian culture from the 13th to the 16th centuries, with comparative interests in the classical Latin, English, and French traditions.