The Renaissance Conscience E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 418

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

This book presents one of the first studies of the Renaissance notion of conscience, through examining theological manuals, legal treatises, letters and other sources of the period. * Represents one of the few modern studies exploring developments in scholastic and Renaissance notions of conscience * Synthesizes literary, theological and historical approaches * Presents case studies from England and the Hispanic World that reveal shared traditions, strategies, and conclusions regarding moral uncertainty * Sheds new light on the crises of conscience of ordinary people, as well as prominent individuals such as Thomas More * Offers new research on the ways practical theologians in England, Spain, and France participated in political debate and interacted with secular counsellors and princes

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Series page

Title page

Copyright page

Anonymous

Notes on contributors

Introduction

1 Jean Gerson, moral certainty and the Renaissance of ancient Scepticism

SCEPTICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

JEAN GERSON (1363–1429)

CONCLUSION

2 Conscience and the law in Thomas More

I

II

III

IV

V

3 ‘Guided By God’ beyond the Chilean frontier: the travelling early modern European conscience

4 Shakespeare’s open consciences

5 Women’s letters, literature and conscience in sixteenth-century England

I

II

III

6 The dangers of prudence: salus populi suprema lex, Robert Sanderson, and the ‘Case of the Liturgy’

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

7 The Bible, reason of state, and the royal conscience: Juan Márquez’s El governador christiano

8 Spin doctor of conscience? The royal confessor and the Christian prince

HOW TO BE A ROYAL CONFESSOR

ROYAL SINS

COUNCILS AND CONFESSORS

CONFESSORS AND FAVOURITES

THE PRIVATIZATION OF CONSCIENCE

Index

Renaissance Studies Special Issue Book Series

This series of special issue books is published in association with the journal Renaissance Studies. Both the journal and book series are multi-disciplinary and publish articles and editions of documents on all aspects of Renaissance history and culture. The articles range over the history, art, architecture, religion, literature, and languages of Europe during the period.

Also available:

Re-thinking Renaissance Objects: Design, Function and Meaning

Edited by Peta Motture and Michelle O’Malley

The Renaissance Conscience

Edited by Harald E. Braun and Edward Vallance

Spaces, Objects and Identities in Early Modern Italian Medicine

Edited by Sandra Cavallo and David Gentilcore

Approaching the Italian Renaissance Interior: Sources, Methodologies, Debates

Edited by Marta Ajmar-Wollheim, Flora Dennis and Ann Matchette

Beyond the Palio: Urbanism and Ritual in Renaissance Siena

Edited by Philippa Jackson and Fabrizio Nevola

The Biography of the Object in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy

Edited by Roberta J. M. Olson, Patricia L. Reilly and Rupert Shepherd

The Renaissance and the Celtic Countries

Edited by Ceri Davies and John E. Law

Asian Travel in the Renaissance

Edited by Daniel Carey

This edition first published 2011

Originally published as Volume 23, Issue 4 of Renaissance Studies

© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

Registered Office

John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom

Editorial Offices

350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA

9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK

The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of Harald E. Braun and Edward Vallance to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Renaissance conscience / edited by Harald E. Braun and Edward Vallance.

p. cm.—(Renaissance studies special issues ; 3)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4443-3566-8 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-1-4443-9678-2 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-4443-9679-9 (ePub)

1. Conscience—England—History. 2. Conscience—Spain—History. 3. Conscience—Latin America—History. 4. Renaissance—England. 5. Renaissance—Spain. 6. Renaissance—Latin America. 7. Civilization, Modern—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Braun, Harald (Harald Ernst) II. Vallance, Edward, 1975–

BJ1471.R46 2011

171′.609024—dc22

2011001675

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Anonymous, The Worm of Conscience (El Guzano de la Conciencia), in: Pablo Señeri SJ [= Paolo Segneri SJ (1624–94)], El infierno abierto al christiano, para que no caiga en el (. . .), Puebla: Pedro de la Rosa, 1780 (© Centro de Estudios de Historia de México).

Notes on contributors

Harald E. Braun is Lecturer in European History (1300–1700) at the University of Liverpool. His recent publications include Juan de Mariana and Early Modern Spanish Political Thought (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) as well as articles on reason of state, political theology, and political communication in early modern Europe.

Brian Cummings is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, paperback edition, 2007).

James Daybell is Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Plymouth and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is author of Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). He has published more than twenty articles and essays on the subjects of early modern women and letters. He has edited, with Peter Hinds, Material Readings of Early Modern Culture (2010) and is completing a monograph entitled The Material Letter in Early Modern England (2011).

Andrew Redden is Lecturer in Latin American History at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Diabolism in Colonial Peru 1560–1750 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008) and is currently completing a Leverhulme-funded project on Angels in the Early Modern Hispanic World.

Nicole Reinhardt is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Durham. Her research focuses on Italian, Spanish and French political and religious history. She is especially interested in religious discourses in political contexts and in religious interaction as a means of representing and constituting political power.

Rudolf Schüssler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He is working on the history of moral decision-making in Scholasticism and several subjects of practical ethics (humanitarian intervention, ethical aspects of global warming). Recent publications include Moral im Zweifel, 2 vols. (Paderborn: Mentis Verlag, 2003 and 2006) and ‘Locke, Kasuistik und die Wurzeln des Liberalismus’, in M. Kaufmann and R. Schnepf (eds.), Politische Metaphysik (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007), 257–284.

Christopher Tilmouth is Senior Lecturer for the Faculty of English in the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Peterhouse. His recent publications include Passion’s Triumph over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), and articles on Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and the English Restoration reception of Cartesian philosophy.

Edward Vallance is Reader in Early Modern History at Roehampton University. His recent publications include The Glorious Revolution: 1688 and Britain’s Fight for Liberty (London: Little, Brown and Co, 2006) and A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries, the Men and Women who Fought for our Freedoms (London: Little, Brown and Co., 2009).

Introduction

Harald E. Braun and Edward Vallance

That American influence in the Philippines will be combated desperately by those stealthy and malign methods of which the Spanish casuist is so consummate a master admits of no doubt, but to meet those practises by severity and repression would be to prove ourselves untrue to those principles which have made our country what it is.1

The contributions to this volume explore the manifold ways in which Renaissance men and women conversed with and let themselves be guided by their conscience. Drawing on a wide range of Renaissance media and strategies of communication, the authors illustrate how individuals in England and the Hispanic World often struggled to reconcile their private and public selves while establishing and protecting their spiritual and ethical identity.

The documents analysed in this collection of chapters – for instance letters, literary texts, theological manuals and mirrors of princes – seek and propagate as well as query and develop the means that allowed the Christian faithful to find their way out of the frequent convergence of personal, spiritual and political anguish. Together, they corroborate the vibrancy, diversity and fluidity of notions of conscience, moral cognition and practical judgement in the Renaissance world. They also confirm the polemical nature of much of what Protestant divines in England and elsewhere had to say about the ‘moral laxity’ and ‘sophistry’ of Catholic, mainly Jesuit or Dominican casuistry.2

In the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, this highly negative presentation of casuistry often focused on its Spanish proponents. Spanish casuistry was perceived as the intellectual complement to Habsburg imperial aggression and expansion, and its malign influence was made flesh in the person of Titus Oates, the fabricator of the ‘Popish Plot’ of 1678. Known derisively as ‘the Salamanca Doctor’ (because of his spurious claims to have a degree from that university), Oates’s career as a paid perjurer seemed to sum up all that was rotten about Iberian moral theology. As the quotation from the New York Times indicates, these assumptions about Spanish casuistic subterfuge persisted well into the modern era. However, the association of the casuistry produced by Spanish authors, especially Bartolomé de Medina, with lying for political ends concealed the significant intellectual debt owed by English Protestant writers to their Catholic counterparts. More often than not, the condemnation of Catholic moral theology was paired with ‘practical divinity’ catering to the casuistic needs of the godly brethren (often itself borrowing heavily from Spanish authors). The particular examples from England and the Hispanic World brought together in this volume illustrate that theologians and private individuals of different confessional allegiance all saw the conscience as the sphere where private and public interest clashed and where it had to be reconciled.

There are strong undercurrents of similarity, especially when Catholic, Lutheran or Reformed individuals sought to arrive at morally sound decisions in trying political circumstances. Of course, Protestants and Calvinists had to do without aural confession and the institutions and tools of doctrinal and social control associated with it. Yet religious authorities across the confessional boundaries sought to subject the individual conscience to tightening control or at least provide it with the means to guide and restrain it in the independent exploration of the self. Renaissance divines and theologians worked hard to embed and sustain the individual conscience as the locus of authoritative and objectively binding moral precepts. Wittingly as well as unwittingly, however, their efforts often created space for semi-autonomous negotiation of moral–political predicaments on the parts of the individual. Practical theology, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, provided individuals with the means that enabled them both to follow orthodoxy and pursue their personal agendas when negotiating the conflicting and at times seemingly irreconcilable demands of doctrine and daily life. Such ambiguity was fostered by the need to sustain the individual conscience in its ability to balance personal experience, external pressures and changing circumstances – a need acknowledged across confessional boundaries, albeit to varying degrees. The resultant variety of theological systems, strategies and practices make the ‘Renaissance conscience’ a cultural construct that defies easy summation on confessional, philosophical or political lines.

The chapters gathered here thus continue the critical and differentiating examination of the traditional image of many Renaissance theologians, philosophers and political theorists as adopting a deeply critical stance towards medieval understandings of conscience.3 The complex process from which the ‘modern conscience’ with its emphasis on sovereign individuality emerged can no longer be viewed as a simple substitution of scholastic ideas with pagan notions of moral self-awareness or as the eventual triumph of a revolutionary and secular rationality of ethical reasoning during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Conflicts and tension between religious doctrine, political authority and individual moral awareness, so often encapsulated in the collision between the private and the public, permeate a diverse Christian tradition feeding on pagan, not least Stoic, ideas of moral authority. This is evident in Lutheran emphasis on individual faith as a source of moral guidance, and even in Calvinist pessimistic anthropology with its, at times, contradictory stance on the presence of a divine creator in an utterly corrupted creation. Many early modern theologians, divines and philosophers engaging with the concept of conscience, including Luther and Calvin, drew consciously if critically on scholastic debate. More often than not, the rejection of scholastic theology as such went hand in hand with ambiguous adaptation of scholastic notions of the ‘inner self’ and individual moral autonomy. In search of practical solutions, Renaissance individuals teased out the tensions and adapted the conceptual means inherited from a medieval tradition obliged to classical inheritance. In so doing, they handed down a range of issues to thinkers of the enlightenment often blissfully unaware or wilfully indifferent to the medieval and early modern roots of notions of individual moral autonomy – whether Catholic, Calvinist or Lutheran. Again, the common focus of much of this engagement with medieval and pagan tradition is the collision between the private and the public, between personal moral conviction and external, familial, political or doctrinal pressures.

Pertinently, the case studies from theology and literature assembled here come from England and Spain, two cultural spheres with complex and noticeably distinct histories in terms of religious doctrine and the politics of religion. They highlight the fact that authorities and individuals across the confessional divide not only struggled with very similar issues, but did so with more or less explicit reference to shared scholastic and humanist traditions and with often similar outcomes in terms of the acknowledged nature and scope of individual moral autonomy.

***

The two chapters that open this collection demonstrate the importance of the late medieval context to the transformations of conscience and casuistry in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

In the first of our chapters, Rudolf Schüssler invites us to reflect on the roots of early modern notions of conscience and moral doubt, investigating the links between scholastic casuistry or Probabilism and Renaissance Scepticism. Fundamental epistemic and methodological differences aside, Probabilism and Neo-Pyrrhonism both scrutinized and challenged the ability of the individual to arrive at rational moral decisions. At the same time, both appeared to place greater emphasis on the need to make practical decisions in complex and confusing circumstances. Schüssler traces the controversial, contradictory, yet also complementary relationship between casuistry and Scepticism back to the work of Jean Gerson (1363–1429), celebrated theologian and Chancellor of the University of Paris. Schüssler presents him as an ‘innovative director of consciences’. Building on the sceptical elements inherent to medieval scholastic philosophy – for example Henry of Ghent, Jean Buridan and William of Ockham – he developed doubts about the nature and scope of moral knowledge into a benevolent and altogether less risk-averse approach to the resolution of moral uncertainty. Deeply involved in the struggles of his day, especially the efforts to overcome the Great Schism, the French theologian was sensitive to the precarious state of a scrupulous conscience forced to make momentous political decisions. Keen to lessen inner anxiety and facilitate vigorous action in the individual, he differentiated and reduced the degree of certainty required for decisions in a wide range of human activities. These included the thorny issue of personal religious beliefs and visions, an area that could easily lead individual experience into trouble with public authority. Though their sophisticated intellectual arsenal meant that Scholastics had no real need of Pyrrhonist sources, Gerson’s exploration of sceptical notions within the body of ancient sources approved by scholastic moral theology – for instance Socrates, Carneades and Cicero – may well have encouraged late medieval and early modern scholarly audiences and prepared them for the rediscovery and reception of ancient Scepticism. Gerson fanned and at the same time provided the tools to negotiate the crisis of uncertainty pervading early modern theory and practice of conscience – a crisis particularly tangible where the private conscience extended into the public realm.

The role of personal experience and political conflict in shaping and affirming the private conscience as the place where external pressures met with internal demands and profound changes of attitude is also brought out in Brian Cummings’s chapter. Cummings addresses that quintessential man of conscience, St Thomas More. He looks at the gulf between the modern dramatic presentations of More’s conscience, most famously in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons and that largely favoured by current historians and Catholic theologians (including the present pope). Bolt’s image of More as a man of principle, battling to preserve his personal ideals in the face of a tyrannical state (so memorably reinforced by the classic portrayal of More by the suitably dignified Paul Scofield) is sharply at variance with the view of current historians who have tended to see the idea of More as a defender of the individual conscience as deeply anachronistic. As a professional heresy hunter, More invoked a notion of truth as defined by the law and the authority of the church not constituted by individual belief. As Marvin O’Connell argued, ‘Conscience for More was the right to be right, not the right to be wrong’.4

Cummings suggests in this chapter, however, that, if not the liberal icon created by Bolt, the historic More may have moved towards the end of his life to a more ‘modern’ understanding of the conscience, or at least to an understanding of conscience which was no longer poles apart from those evangelicals he had earlier sent to the flames. Cummings demonstrates that the scholastic notions were not the only influence on More’s idea of conscience. Other conceptions, most notably the flexible, prudential and circumstantial application of conscience depicted in St German’s Doctor and Student also held sway, an influence that was borne home by More’s own work as Lord Chancellor in the equity Court of Chancery. The complexities evident in More’s conception of conscience became more pronounced as he himself became the subject of state persecution. In place of the words attributed to him by his earliest Catholic biographers, clearly indebted to the scholastic tradition and the certainty that the authority of the Church overrode the ‘truth’ of the King and his ministers, More’s final letters reveal a man less certain of tradition and the weight of authority as the basis for a good conscience and more reliant on his own conception of the truth. If a long way from Bolt’s ‘hero of the self’, the forces of the reformation and the legal change that accompanied them forced More to adopt a much more radical, and perhaps more ‘modern’ conception of the conscience.

Both Schüssler and Cummings demonstrate the extent to which Renaissance concepts of conscience adopted and transformed scholastic and humanist traditions. The following three chapters illustrate the predicaments of early modern men and women seeking both to probe and articulate as well as suppress the voices of their inner selves. These case studies include factual as well as fictional reflections on the pangs of conscience, and share an awareness of the sometimes very public nature of the private conscience. Laying bare the travails of one man unwillingly crossing the political and cultural borders of Christianity, Andrew Redden thus provides another striking example of how the conscience could both succour and pain the early modern individual. Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, seasoned colonial soldier, nobleman and governor of Valdivia wrote his treatise Cautiverio Feliz (Happy Captivity) in 1675, many years after he had been captured and subsequently released by Mapuche warriors in southern Chile. Núñez de Pineda meant to advise and correct the king of Spain on the government of this far-away corner of his empire, and make the journey of his private conscience a template for imperial reform. Yet he also, and more than anything else, wished to fulfil a promise given to his Mapuche captors. The promise was not to forget them and to inform the Spanish that their heathen enemies were their equals in terms of reason, piety, and love of peace as well as justice. During his captivity, Núñez de Pineda had come to regard his conscience as the fortress of his identity; yet he also discovered and preserved it as the uncomfortable witness to the humanity of the Mapuche and the cruelty and ignorance of his countrymen. Cautiverio Feliz is the detailed account of how his conscience grew into what it ought to be in a Christian faithful – the fierce and constant tribunal of actions past, present and future. It no longer allowed him to view Mapuche refusal to accept Christianity as anything but resistance to ruthless aggression and misguided condemnation on the part of his countrymen. Such a stance would not have taken him much beyond that taken by Las Casas. His captivity, however, exposed him to a deeper, more troubling experience. The compassion and innate sense of right and wrong he experienced and discerned in the Mapuche not only exposed the profound similarities between Mapuche and Spanish frontier society, it also led Núñez de Pineda towards a sense of universal conscience, related to but not conceptualized in terms of the scholastic notion of synderesis. Thus it was his conscience that frequently forced him to acknowledge that life among the Mapuche made him shed his Spanish identity like layers of clothes. Arguably, his notion of conscience ensured that the experience of captivity would be transformative and shape him into a man who continued to live his life on both sides of a brutally contested frontier.

The apparently strikingly modern moral dilemmas of Shakespeare’s characters continue to appeal to twenty-first-century audiences. But as Christopher Tilmouth’s chapter demonstrates, Shakespeare’s presentation of conscience in The Rape of Lucrece and Macbeth, was indebted primarily to Renaissance conceptions of it as an externalized arbiter, not an internalized voice. Tilmouth notes that both classical and Renaissance writers on the conscience advocated imagining an external judge of one’s actions as a means of keeping to a virtuous life. Shame, here, was vitally important as a discouragement to immoral action, even if a man’s moral choices were only imagined to be exposed to public view. Such a view was elaborated in Renaissance conduct literature, especially the genre of advice to princes, (prefiguring the content of our last three chapters) which emphasized the importance of cultivating the appearance of virtue and majesty not just to enforce moral values but, in a more reciprocal sense, to make themselves agreeable to their observers. This description of the princely conscience as also a public conscience is evident in Shakespeare’s Lucrece, where Tarquin’s iniquity is presented as the inversion of the royal moral exemplar that it should be, a foul mirror of vice whose reflection will cast Rome itself into a sea of moral turpitude. Lucrece too, though, feels caught under the unblinking gaze of conscience, against which Tarquin’s promise of secrecy affords no barrier. Following Galenic anatomy, Lucrece’s outwardly spotless appearance is no protection either. The division between flesh and soul is, instead, permeable, porous. Her body as much as her mind makes Lucrece complicit in Tarquin’s sin, the lack of intellectual consent to his actions insufficient to expunge the sense of shame.

The transparency of Lucrece’s conscience is also evident in Macbeth. Macbeth’s sense of guilt over his actions is famously externalized and visualized in the supernatural apparitions that haunt him. Even though these visions remain unseen by other characters, they reflect Macbeth’s terror at the prospect of the exposure of his crimes and the shame that will follow. Once more, the conscience is imagined as something on public display rather than something private or sequestered. Macbeth can only commit his foul acts, like Tarquin, by deluding himself that he does them whilst the gaze of conscience is directed elsewhere. This self-delusion is exposed by the personification of this externalized, shaming, judging conscience in Banquo’s ghost, which now appears to torment and try Macbeth. It is this apparition that, though unseen to any other characters, prevents Macbeth from adopting the public mantle of kingship.

Conscience, for Shakespeare’s characters, then, is not set apart from the world, but embedded in numerous social and power relations. So, too, the idea of conscience deployed in women’s letters is only deceptively private. James Daybell’s chapter demonstrates that while these letters at times seem to offer a tantalizing window into the soul of their authors, the conventions of letter writing as a form of communication made women’s responses by turns stylized and strategic. Rather than being simply repositories of ‘facts’ about the private religious opinions of their writers, womens’ letters in the Elizabethan and early Stuart period afforded their authors an opportunity to create public religious identities. This epistolary representation of conscience could be used both to command religious conformity from family members or dependents and to evade accusations of religious heterodoxy. Conscience, once more, is depicted as a public entity commanding outward as well as inward agreement. In practical terms too, women’s conscientious letters were often public documents: subject to scribal publication as exemplars of virtuous living and feminine piety.

The final three chapters in this collection explore further the dynamics, methods, institutions and trends of early modern negotiation between the private and public spheres of moral agency. They all deal in various ways with the role of conscience in giving counsel and directing the policy of princes. As with the women’s letters discussed by Daybell, Robert Sanderson’s ‘Case of the Liturgy’ was likewise less a genuine private case of conscience than public justification of the author’s own liturgical practice. Edward Vallance demonstrates that Sanderson’s complaints about its unauthorized publication were somewhat disingenuous: scribal publication, almost inevitably, led to pirated, printed versions of the case. The publication of the ‘Case of the Liturgy’ also revealed the broader implications of the notion of prudential choice, as applied by Sanderson in his case. Sanderson justified his actions in modifying the Anglican liturgy by referring to the Ciceronian maxim, salus populi suprema lex, more often associated with the Parliamentarian cause. In Sanderson’s hands, however, rather than being an integral part of the ‘neo-Roman’ theory of liberty identified by Quentin Skinner, it was an axiom confirming the ultimately absolute prerogative power of the king. When the king was able to exercise this personally, the role of the theologian was to support the monarch in using this power wisely – as Sanderson did as Charles I negotiated with Parliament over the future of the Church of England in 1647. But when the monarch’s own will could not be easily discerned, as when Charles II was in enforced exile during the 1650s, it became a power which, in the monarch’s absence, could be presumed to be bent towards the service of the public good (in this case the preservation of Anglican worship.) These absolutist elements to Sanderson’s thought were brought home in the Restoration period, ironically, when used to defend the assault made on the Anglican monopoly on public life by James II.

Sanderson had wanted to protect the Church of England against the arbitrary exercise of power, but his works were ultimately used to justify the submission of the church to the monarchical state. Harald Braun’s chapter in turn deals with a Spanish Catholic theologian keen to draw up guidelines that would satisfy as well as confine the conscience of prince and counsellor. Juan Márquez OSA (1565–1621) sought to map the treacherous ground where matters resolved within the private conscience were likely to have serious repercussion for the public sphere. His treatise El governador christiano sought to protect and prevent the private conscience of prince, magistrate and ambassador from becoming the medium for the creeping secularization of Spanish political discourse. In order to reach out to politicians increasingly disparaging of conventional tools of moral advice, Fray Juan retold biblical narrative in terms of reason of state. Reinvigorating the mirror-of-princes genre, he fashioned a vernacular text promoting one bold, overarching assertion, namely, that political practitioners need look no further than the Old Testament for instruction in the practice and finesse of statecraft. Márquez’s ambition is to keep the princely and ambassadorial conscience on the straight and narrow. Although scholastic theology and casuistic strategies underpin his argument, the Augustinian sought to achieve his goal not by carefully differentiating individual cases and contexts of moral decision-making. Rather he chose to interweave and blur the boundaries between competing terminologies and genres (reason of state, scholastic moral theology, ancient philosophy) and resolve moral predicament within carefully crafted biblical–historical exemplarity. Readers were to be instilled with a sense of security rooted first and foremost in the status of scripture as the source of doctrinally orthodox yet at the same time eminently practical political instruction.

Despite the best efforts of its author, the reader of El governador christiano had still license to draw his own conclusions from a text more often than not affected by the moral ambiguity of its source. Nicole Reinhardt concludes the volume with her exploration of the issues evolving with the rise of the royal confessor to the position of counsellor per se at the early modern Spanish and French courts. Only the confessor could claim the (moral) authority and competence to negotiate between divine law and the prince’s private conscience of the king. No other counsellor, allegedly, was equally challenged providing advice that would balance private interest, Christian ethics and the common good. Reinhardt compares normative texts such as Martín de Azpilcueta’s Manual de confessors y penitentes (1552) and Cardinal Bellarmine’s De officio principis Christiani (1619) with the practice and gradual institutionalization of the royal confessor in seventeenth-century France and Spain. Bellarmine called upon the confessor to be ‘judge’ as well as ‘doctor’ of the royal conscience. Modelling himself on the iconoclastic prophet and acting as ‘anti-courtier’, the confessor was to become ‘the most efficient tool to implement and guarantee the ideal of the Christian prince.’

In seventeenth-century Spain, royal confessors acted through confession, membership of councils and juntas as well as written pareceres on specific issues required by the monarch. Strikingly, there was no division between lay and clerical councillors. Confessors did not shy away from speaking in terms of reason of state, and lay officials readily employed arguments from moral theology. Formidable opponents of the royal favourite, royal confessors, in turn, were harshly criticized for having become courtiers and favourites themselves. In seventeenth-century France, Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, favourites as well as ecclesiastics in their own right, tightly controlled and partially absorbed the role of the royal confessor. Père Nicolas Caussin (1583–1651) dared challenge Richelieu on foreign policy and over the confessor’s duty to correct the sins of a king acting as a private and public person, and ended his life in banishment. Louis XIV in turn abolished the favourite andrestricted the royal confessor’s influence on strictly ecclesiastical matters such as appointments to benefices.

Overall, Bellarmine’s approach was not easily reconciled with the reality of life at court, where the confessors competed with officials and courtiers for influence and the right to define the relationship between private conscience and public interest. By the eighteenth century, the hard lessons about the difficulty of operating in the private as well as the public sphere led to the effective privatization of the royal conscience in France as well as Spain. The confessor ceased to be a counsellor and politician, and the king became master of his inner forum.

The gradual privatization of the royal conscience and the other case studies in this volume indicate a shift to greater autonomy of the private individual when it came to the exploration and negotiation of moral solutions. Historical reports of the death of casuistry, however, whether in its Catholic or Protestant manifestations, are greatly exaggerated. The chapters in this collection point to the complex relationship between the discourses and technologies involved in keeping a good conscience in the age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, confessional war and imperial expansion. They also remind us that the conscience was a vital and heavily contested concept already in the late medieval period. Undeniably, conscience and casuistry underwent a transformation during the early modern period, a process driven not least by the ongoing need to gauge the public dimension of private decisions. Yet this change emerges in constant conversation with a multi-layered tradition and transforms the terminologies and methods of establishing moral agency from within. Rather than undergoing a ‘decline’ in the early modern era, therefore, conscientious and casuistic language remained at the core of political and theological discourse.

The complexities of this transition defy easy categorization, and we have yet to obtain a more detailed understanding of change and continuity in the languages and concepts of moral agency from the early modern period to the present. Not least the renewed interest in casuistic reasoning in the modern age, as a method by which to resolve incredibly divisive ethical issues such as abortion, reminds us that a case by case approach, far from encouraging moral relativism, often provides the only hope of resolving such dilemmas.5 The editors and contributors hope that their reflections on the Renaissance Conscience make a contribution to our still modest knowledge of the ways in which medieval and Renaissance discourses on conscience anticipated, interacted with and impacted upon modern notions of moral autonomy.

Notes

1 From letters to the editor, New York Times, July 21 1902, ‘The Philippine Friars’.

2 On the manifestations and uses of casuistry in early modern England and continental Europe see the introduction and contributions in H. E. Braun and E. Vallance (eds.), Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004); also S. Tutino, Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570–1625 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); and E. Del Río Parra, Cartographías de la conciencia española en la Edad de Oro (2008).

3 For the debates and literature on late medieval and Renaissance notions of individual moral autonomy and agency see for instance, S. Knebel, Wille, Würfel und Wahrscheinlichkeit, Das System der moralischen Notwendigkeit in der Jesuitenscholastik, 1550–1700 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2000); and D.C. Langston Conscience and other Virtues, from ‘Bonaventure to MacIntyce’ (University Park PA: Penn State Press, 2001); also T. Potts, Conscience in Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); and H.-D. Kiltsteiner, Die Entsteung des modernen Gewissens (Frankfurt/Main: Insel Verlag, 1991).

4 Marvin O’Connell. ‘A Man for all Seasons: an Historian’s Demur’ Catholic Dossier 8/2 (March–April, 2002), 16–19, quoted in B. Cummings, ‘Conscience and the Law in Thomas More’, in this volume, pp. 464–486.

5 On the modern application of casuistic reasoning see A. Jonsen and S. Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), esp. iv; J. F. Keenan and T. A. Shannon (eds.), The Context of Casuistry (Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, 1995), 5; a recent critical examination is R. Schüssler, Moral im Zweifel, 2 vols. (Paderborn: Mentis Verlag, 2002 and 2006).

1

Jean Gerson, moral certainty and the Renaissance of ancient Scepticism

Rudolf Schüssler