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The Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment

Online ISBN:
9780197620632
Print ISBN:
9780197620601
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment

Ulrich L. Lehner
Ulrich L. Lehner
William K. Warren Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame
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Published online:
19 May 2022
Published in print:
27 July 2022
Online ISBN:
9780197620632
Print ISBN:
9780197620601
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

While studies abound about Catholic Reform and its institutional or social history, its spiritual motives and practices, what one could call its “inner life,” have been widely neglected. This book examines how these spiritual ideas and practices shaped the Catholic Reform and Catholic view of the world and led to a diverse but peculiarly theological imagination, a new outlook on the self and the world, and influenced human behaviors and sentiments. It tells the story of how the idea of the “inner reform of the soul” shaped a world religion. The historicization of these religious practices and beliefs makes this book also highly accessible to historians and anthropologists. It relies on a plethora of published and unpublished sources, and a wide field of secondary literature. Although the emphasis is on Europe, this book takes a global perspective by integrating material from Africa, America, and Asia as it was in this era that Catholicism became a “world religion.”

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