This is the first book-length study of the political and theological views of Thomas White (alias Blacklo) and his followers the Blackloists. It both complements and opens up new lines of inquiry in the context of the current scholarship in two main areas. On the one hand, historians of early modern England are paying a tremendous amount of attention to the English Catholic Church, stressing the importance of the Catholic perspective in order to get a more accurate picture of England's religious and political history. This study responds to these suggestions by analyzing a group of English Catholics greatly influential in a complex period of the history of England. On the other hand and more generally, the volume explores the question of the intersection between politics and religion during the 1640s and 1650s in a historiographical context in which the manifold and complex link between the language of natural law and the language of theology in the history of English Republicanism is currently being taken into a greater account by a number of scholars. In this context, White's political theory can be used as an extremely interesting case-study to show how natural law bridged the complexity of the relationship between theological and secular arguments put forward in the debate around issues such as the nature and limit of government and the relationship between subjects and governors. As well as providing a detailed study of White and his views, this book also provides a modern edition of the full text of his most important political treatise The Grounds of Obedience and Government, a distinctly Catholic version of contractualism, that appeared to offer succour to a militantly Protestant republican regime.

This book examines the Catholic elaboration on the relationship between state and Church in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Among the several factors which have contributed to the complex process of state-formation in early modern Europe, religious affiliation has certainly been one of the most important, if not the most important. Within the European context of the consolidation of both the nation-state entities and the state-Churches, Catholicism in England in the 16th and 17th centuries presents peculiar elements which are crucial to understanding the problems at stake, from both a political and a religious point of view. Catholics in early modern England were certainly a minority, but a minority of an interestingly doubled kind. On the one hand, they were a "sect" among many others. On the other hand, Catholicism was a "universal", catholic religion, in a country in which the sovereign was the head - or governor - of both political and ecclesiastical establishments. In this context, this monograph casts light on the mechanisms through which a distinctive religious minority was able to adapt itself within a singular political context. In the most general terms, this book contributes to the significant question of how different religious affiliations could (or might) be integrated within one national reality, and how political allegiance and religious belief began to be perceived as two different identities within one context. Current scholarship on the religious history of early modern England has considerably changed the way in which historians think about English Protestantism. Recent works have offered a more nuanced and accurate picture of the English Protestant Church, which is now seen not as a monolithic institution, but rather as complex and fluid. This book seeks to offer certain elements of a complementary view of the English Catholic Church as an organism within which the debate over how to combine the catholic feature of the Church of Ro

This book is about the relationship between belief, credibility, and credulity in post-Reformation Catholicism. It argues that, starting from the end of the sixteenth century and due to different political, intellectual, cultural, and theological factors, credibility assumed a central role in post-Reformation Catholic discourse. This led to an important reconsideration of the relationship between natural reason and supernatural grace and consequently to novel and significant epistemological and moral tensions. From the perspective of the relationship between credulity, credibility, and belief, early modern Catholicism emerges not as the apex of dogmatism and intellectual repression, but rather as an engine for promoting the importance of intellectual judgment in the process of embracing faith. To be sure, finding a balance between conscience and authority was not easy for early modern Catholics. This book seeks to elucidate some of the difficulties, anxieties, and tensions caused by the novel insistence on credibility that came to dominate the theological and intellectual landscape of the early modern Catholic Church. In addition to shedding light on early modern Catholic culture, this book helps us to understand better what it means to believe. For the most part, in modern Western society we don't believe in the same things as our early modern predecessors. Even when we do believe in the same things, it is not in the same way. But believe we do, and thus understanding how early modern people addressed the question of belief might be useful as we grapple with the tension between credibility, credulity, and belief.

Robert Bellarmine was one of the most original and influential political theorists of his time. He participated in several of the political debates that agitated early modern Europe, such as the controversy over the Oath of Allegiance in England. Bellarmine presents one of the clearest and most coherent definitions of the nature and aim of temporal authority and its relationship to spiritual authority. The king has jurisdiction over the body, the pope over the conscience. This distinction was crucial for the history of early modern monarchies: the conflict between state and church ceased to be concerned with physical persons and was no longer a contest for the consciences of subjects.
The political thought of Bellarmine was at the center of post-Reformation debates on the relationship between state and church; on the nature, aim, and limits of temporal government; and on the relation between religion and natural law. He posed in a novel, controversial manner the relationship between public and private spheres, thus opening up questions central to what we consider "modernity." This accessible edition of some of Bellarmine's most important works in fresh translations will be interesting for a wide readership of both scholars of political thought and the educated general public.
Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621) was a Jesuit cardinal and a celebrated professor of theology at the Roman College, of which he became rector in 1592. He was also a highly ranked member of the Inquisition and of the Congregation of the Index, as well as Pope Clement VIII's main advisor in theological matters. However, Bellarmine's work risked being included in the Index of Prohibited Books for insufficient support of papal authority. At the same time, he was considered a major enemy of the absolute authority of sovereigns, such as James I of England.
Stefania Tutino is an Assistant Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Knud Haakonssen is Professor of Intellectual History and Director of the Centre for Intellectual History at the University of Sussex, England.

Stefania Tutino shows that the hermeneutical and epistemological anxieties that characterize our current intellectual climate are rooted in the early modern world. Showing that post-Reformation Catholicism did not simply usher in modernity, but indeed postmodernity as well, her study complicates the well-established scholarly view concerning the context of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic response to it. Shadows of Doubt provides a collection of case-studies centered on the relationship between language, the truth of men, and the Truth of theology. Most of these case-studies illuminate little-known figures in the history of early modern Catholicism. The militant aspects of post-Tridentine Catholicism can be appreciated through study of figures such as Robert Bellarmine or Cesare Baronio, the solid pillars of the intellectual and theological structure of the Church of Rome; however, an understanding of the more enigmatic aspects of early modernity requires exploration of the demimonde of post-Reformation Catholicism. Tutino examines the thinkers whom few scholars mention and fewer read, demonstrating that post-Reformation Catholicism was not simply a world of solid certainties to be opposed to the Protestant falsehoods, but also a world in which the stable Truth of theology existed alongside and contributed to a number of far less stable truths concerning the world of men. Post-Reformation Catholic culture was not only concerned with articulating and affirming absolute truths, but also with exploring and negotiating the complex links between certainty and uncertainty. By bringing to light this fascinating and hitherto largely unexamined side of post-Tridentine Catholicism, Tutino reveals that post-Reformation Catholic culture was a vibrant laboratory for many of the issues that we face today: it was a world of fractures and fractured truths which we, with a heightened sensitivity to discrepancies and discontinuities, are now well-suited to understand.

Robert Bellarmine was one of the pillars of post-Reformation Catholicism: he was a celebrated theologian and a highly ranked member of the Congregations of the Inquisition and of the Index, the censor in charge of the Galileo affair. Bellarmine was also one of the most original political theorists of his time, and he participated directly in many of the political conflicts that agitated Europe between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Stefania Tutino offers the first full-length study of the impact of Bellarmine's theory of the potestas indirecta in early modern Europe. Following the reactions to Bellarmine's theory across national and confessional boundaries, this book explores some of the most crucial political and theological knots in the history of post-Reformation Europe, from the controversy over the Oath of Allegiance to the battle over the Interdetto in Venice. The book sets those political and religious controversies against the background of the theological and institutional developments of the post-Tridentine Catholic Church. By examining the violent and at times surprising controversies originated by Bellarmine's theory, this book challenges some of the traditional assumptions regarding the theological shape of post-Tridentine Catholicism; it offers a fresh perspective on the centrality of the links between confessional affiliation and political allegiance in the development of the modern nation-states; and it contributes to our understanding of the development of 'modern' notions of power and authority.