CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Muntán, Emese Annamária |
|---|---|
| Title | Negotiating Catholic Reform: Global Catholicism and Its Local Agents in Northern Ottoman Rumeli (1570s-1680s) |
| Summary | In my dissertation, I examine the plural manifestations of Catholicism in seventeenth-century Ottoman Europe, with a focus on Bosnia, Slavonia-Srem, and the Banat—regions to which I collectively refer as northern Ottoman Rumeli. My work engages with a number of research questions that have been central in the international scholarship on early modern global Catholicism, but which so far have rarely been asked in the context of Ottoman Europe. These questions include: What did it mean to be a Catholic in different contexts throughout the world in the early modern period? 2. What were the criteria according to which someone was regarded as belonging to one denomination or the other in the eyes of religious authorities? and 3. How did global, local, and microregional variants of Catholicism interact and shape one another? While I address these issues and analyze the complexity of the regional variants of Catholicism in seventeenth-century northern Ottoman Rumeli, in the process I also situate the area in the history and historiography of early modern Catholic missions. My work specifically focuses on how the sacramental reforms of Trent were received and negotiated in the religiously and legally pluralistic context of these areas. Within this interpretative context, I primarily analyze two topics, marriage and baptism in the context of communities where people with various ethnic and denominational backgrounds lived in close proximity. At the same time, I also examine the multilayered local contexts and multi-confessional agency that could create such local variants of confessional meaning-making. Thus, while I demonstrate what it meant to be a Catholic missionary as well as a Catholic subject in early modern northern Ottoman Rumeli, I introduce other, non-Catholic actors who also shaped the impact of Tridentine reforms in this region, in particular the Serbian Orthodox clergy and the local Ottoman judges (kadis). With this approach, I shed light on heretofore less explored interactions between Catholic missionaries and other local communal representatives. At the same time, I bring various groups of people in the center of analysis, who were the catalysts of these interactions, but who, in the traditional institutional history of the missions, figure as rather ‘passive’ participants. Overall, the dissertation demonstrates that the implementation of Tridentine reforms in the analyzed areas was informed, circumscribed, and complicated by a range of factors, including local demography, geography, the specific nature of the local communal and religious leaders as well as the peculiar dynamics of their interactions, and not least, the local articulations of communal as well as denominational belonging. Accordingly, the shaping of different decrees eventually became a sort of ‘power game’ among Catholic missionaries, the Roman congregations, Orthodox clerics, Ottoman judges, and various local groups and individuals (Catholics as well as non-Catholics) on the ground. |
| Supervisor | Krstić, Tijana |
| Department | Medieval Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/muntan_emese.pdf |
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