Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (review)

Despite its slightly flippant main title, Father O'Malley has produced a serious survey of the historiography of the period designated in the subtitle. He does not study primarily the Council of Trent, although he acknowledges its centrality, but rather investigates the significance and implications of the various names used by historians for the whole era and reviews the history of the naming process from the late seventeenth century to the present. In all he discusses sixty historians—German, French, English, and Italian—in the body of the book and cites even more in the endnotes; all are conveniently listed in the twenty-eight-page bibliography. What he gives us, however, is not a dull catalogue of names of authors, titles of their books, and sketches of their contributions to the subject; instead it is a lively account of their relationships and interactions. He devotes one entire chapter out of the four to the work of Hubert Jedin, who advocated the double term "Catholic Reformation (or Reform) and Counter-Reformation" to encompass the full reality of the historic changes in Christianity. Among the later writers he emphasizes those who preferred the terms "confessionalization" and social disciplining. At the end he assesses the relative strengths and weakness of the four principal names: (1) Counter-Reformation, (2) Catholic Reform or Catholic Reformation, (3) Tridentine Reform and Tridentine Age, and (4) Confessional Age or Confessional Catholicism. He concludes that all four of them, not to mention the many other terms that were proposed in the last two centuries but were never widely adopted, are inadequate to characterize the age; he does not intend to reject them but to complement them with his own category of interpretation. He propounds the admittedly "bland and faceless" designation "Early Modern Catholicism," which offers definite advantages.

Father O'Malley's exposition and critique of the positions of the various historians are clear and fair, and his presentation of his own thesis is persuasive. This reviewer hopes that his lead will be followed by future historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.