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Friday, October 6, 2006
Newberry Library, Chicago
There has been much scholarship in the last generation on the intertwined
use of law and religion in early modern Europe to "discipline" populations.
Discipline in this context does not mean "social control" so much as an ambition
to cultivate virtue, godliness, industry, and civility. Curiosity about the
nature and effects of early modern legal-religious discipline have animated
studies of the English "reformation of manners and morals," of Calvinist
consistories and Scottish kirks, and of Continental and Irish "confessionalization."
Many of these works, particularly those under the rubric of confessionalization,
have proceeded comparatively and inquired into the similarities and differences
among the methods and implications of Calvinist, Lutheran, and post-Tridentine
Catholic programs. On this view, criminal justice and police regulations,
church courts and consistories, poor relief, censorship and confessional
propaganda, manuals teaching proper behavior and private devotions, catechizing,
the Inquisition, and ecclesiastical visitations served as techniques deployed,
variously, by Calvinists, Lutherans, and Catholics pursuing parallel disciplinary agendas.
This work on early modern Europe suggests a valuable way to look at New World
colonization, which presents a particularly rich site for the comparative study
of linked legal-religious discipline. Comparisons might be made less among
confessions than among empires. England, Spain, and France each worried
about encouraging piety, industry, morality, and order among settlers whom they
viewed as unruly, quick to violence, overly greedy, liable to cultural degeneration,
and too ready to elevate short-term personal advantage over long-term communal
and imperial goals. With varying degrees of commitment, each sought to
Christianize, order, pacify, and "civilize" indigenous peoples and slaves.
A comparative study of New World legal-religious disciplinary efforts opens up
a host of questions. To what extent did the English, French, and Spanish empires
see themselves as facing similar or different disciplinary challenges and to what
extent did they employ similar or different techniques? Can one understand the
seemingly disparate disciplinary institutions and practices of the English,
French, and Spanish empires as functional substitutes? How did disciplinary
techniques familiar from Europe require adaptation given colonial conditions—in
particular, given the exigencies of territorial expansion, the existence of
unprecedented racial and ethnic diversity, and the presence of forms of
community and relations of domination unknown in Europe? In what ways did
religious syncretism and notions of religious freedom coexist with, or flow out of,
disciplinary efforts? What tensions emerged between the virtues that disciplinary
programs were designed to encourage — for instance, between Christianization and
civilization, or between piety and industry? How does the adoption of a
comparative perspective alter inherited understandings of patterns of cooperation
and rivalry among legal and religious authorities in the British, French, and
Spanish empires? To what extent were disciplinary strategies developed in the
colonies imported back into European metropoles? In what ways was the British
empire a special case given its significant number of multi-confessional jurisdictions
(for instance, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Ireland), which set it apart
from the confessional monopoly obtaining in the French and Spanish empires?
By encouraging a comparative perspective, the conference hopes to enrich, and test,
claims about the nature, causes, and implications of legal-religious discipline
made from within one national historiography. Contrasting multiple empires could
reveal common sequences and dynamics or could highlight the unique and distinguishing
features of a particular system liable to be overlooked if examined in isolation.
The conference on "Law, Religion, and Social Discipline in the Early Modern Atlantic World"
is an offering of the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History, organized
by Prof. Richard Ross of the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) College of Law
and History Department. The Symposium will gather yearly under the auspices of the
Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago in order to explore
a particular topic in the comparative legal history of the Atlantic world in the
period c.1492-1815. Funding has been provided by the University of Illinois College of Law.
Last fall, the Symposium presented a conference on "Membership in Communities and States
in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Legal Rules, Social Judgments, and the
Negotiation of Citizenship."
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