Academic Interests and Catholic Confessionalisation
Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance Editors
William J. Courtenay (Madison) Jürgen Miethke (Heidelberg) Frank Rexroth (Göttingen) Jacques Verger (Paris) Advisory Board
Jeremy Catto (Oxford) Daniel Hobbins (Columbus) Roberto Lambertini (Macerata) VOLUME 35
Titlepage 1. Frontispiece of Privilegia Academiae Lovaniensi (. . .) concessa, a printed book of privileges of the university of Louvain (1597) with the figures of Saint Peter and Saint Paul visualising the papal origins of the university’s most important privileges. [Catholic University of Louvain, Central Library]
Academic Interests and Catholic Confessionalisation The Louvain Privileges of Nomination to Ecclesiastical Benefices
By
Bruno Boute
LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010
This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boute, Bruno. Academic interests and Catholic confessionalisation : the Louvain privileges of nomination to ecclesiastical benefices / by Bruno Boute. p. cm. — (Education and society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance ; v. 35) Revision of the author’s thesis (doctoral)—University of Louvain. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18417-6 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Université de Louvain (1425–1797)—Administration—History. 2. Université de Louvain (1425-1797)— Finance—History. 3. Benefices, Ecclesiastical. I. Title. II. Series. LF4033.B68 2010 378.493’31—dc22 2010002835
ISSN 0926-6070 ISBN 978 9004 18417 6 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all right holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands
To my Grandfather Wilfried Boute (1914–2006)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ............................................................................ List of Illustrations ............................................................................ Prologue ..............................................................................................
xi xv xvii
PART ONE
The Weight of the World Chapter One The Appeal of Logic ............................................... 1.1. The sirens of Trent. Academic interests and Catholic reform ..................................................................................... 1.2. Society, and all that: The confessionalisation of academic interests ................................................................. 1.3. Achieving logic. Academic interests and Catholic confessionalisation ................................................................ Chapter Two The Dross of the Earth. Benefices and Academics in the Early Modern Period .................................... 2.1. The bishop’s men? Archbishop Matthias Hovius and his shepherds ......................................................................... 2.2. “Ce Chieff du monde ou concourrent tous les princes chrestiens”: Papal provisions for ecclesiastical benefices in the early modern period ................................................. 2.3. The ways of academia. Universities and benefices .......... 2.4. Pulling things together: Benefices, grants, and the fabric of academia ................................................................. Chapter Three The Jewels among Academic Privileges. The Louvain Privileges of Nomination to Ecclesiastical Benefices .......................................................................................... 3.1. “Pas une maille davantage”? Scholars in the pursuit of poverty .................................................................................... 3.2. “Le temps esclorra les occasions.” Poor scholars and nomination procedures ........................................................
3 4 34 43
63 65
85 109 125
133 139 155
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3.3. “Il a envie de la changer en simples bénéfices.” Poor scholars, miserly benefices? ....................................... 3.4. “Boèce a mis tant d’empeschemens.” Poor scholars and legal violence .......................................................................... 3.5. The litmus test of the market: Efficiency and necessity of the Louvain privileges of nomination ..........................
175 194 211
PART TWO
Assembling Academia Chapter Four Flashbacks: Performances of Academia 1588–98 ........................................................................................... 4.1. The pontiff, his cardinals, and the academics, 1588–98 ................................................................................... 4.2. “Veluti altare contra altare.” The battle of the schools, 1592–98 ................................................................................... Chapter Five The City of Grace. Academics at the Corte Di Roma 1598–1612 ........................................................... 5.1. “Quod nihilominus Lovanienses per favores Satagant.” Patrons, brokers and clients in the Rome of Clement VIII and Paul V .................................................... 5.2. Efficient grace. Grants, benefices and Augustine ............ 5.3. “Stilus Curiae, Je dis la longueur qu’il faut.” The machinery of abuse, 1600–05 and 1607–12 ..................... 5.4. The unbearable lightness of networks ............................... Chapter Six The Brabant University. Academics and Reform 1607–17 ........................................................................................... 6.1. The configuration of a context ........................................... 6.2. Academics and reform ......................................................... 6.3. Friends of friends. The abbot, the academic, and the court physician ...................................................................... 6.4. “Se bene sono dotti, sono nondimeno inesperti e di poca prudenza.” The 1617 affair ......................................... 6.5. The performativity of power ...............................................
221 222 268
313
316 349 407 422
431 435 445 462 474 482
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Chapter Seven Rondo Veneziano. Academics and the Papal Prince (1612–22) ................................................................ 7.1. “Si portano male questi Lovaniesi e troppo si usurpano, mentre vogliono anco in casa d’altri mettere leggi.” The diplomatisation of academic interests, 1612–14 .............. 7.2. “Sono insolentissimi quei Lovaniesi.” Confronting the papal prince, 1615–16 .......................................................... 7.3. Daughter of Rome—again. Academics and the Holy Father, 1616–22 .....................................................................
544
Epitaph ................................................................................................
585
Conclusions ........................................................................................ “Cum causa voluntaria sit, non necessaria” ............................. “Quia illud representant, quod venerari et adhorari opportet” ..................................................................................... “Imagines non respui” ..................................................................
595 595 609 615
Bibliography ........................................................................................ List of Names .....................................................................................
625 669
487
490 521
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In a book that considers knowledge the result of a coalition and its author an actor in a chain of many other actors, a word of gratitude is more than appropriate. It was a privilege to walk for many years with people such as Jacobus Jansonius, Jacobus Baius, Peter Lombard or Roberto Bellarmino, as well as with cunning nuncios, princely ambassadors, ambitious Jesuits and blasphemous heretics. Together, they introduced me to the fascinating world of Early Modern Catholicism. I could write this book in comfortable circumstances, thanks to the support of the Scientific Research Foundation-Flanders and the Research Unit Early Modern History at the Catholic University of Louvain, the Belgian Historical Institute in Rome, the Institut für Europäische Geschichte in Mainz, the Dipartimento di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea of the Sapienza University in Rome, and the Seminar für Mittlere und Neuere Kirchengeschichte at the Westfälische WilhelmsUniversität Münster. Over the years, I have been welcomed warmly by the staff of the Academia Belgica in Rome during my many research visits to the Eternal City. It is, indeed, above all people who provide for a stimulating intellectual environment. This book is a thoroughly reworked version of a doctoral dissertation that I defended at Louvain under the supervision of Jan Roegiers, to whom I owe my training as a historian and whose views have deeply influenced this book. I’m also gravely indebted to Hilde De Ridder-Symoens (Ghent), who has never ceased to enrich my work with her critical remarks, to support and to encourage me. In addition, I greatly benefitted from the comments of the other members of the jury, Eddy Put (Louvain), Helga Robinson-Hammerstein (Dublin), and Paul Trio (Louvain). At various stages, I could count on the critical eyes of colleagues and friends. Individual chapters or sections have been scrutinised by Maarten Van Dijck and Vincent Viaene (Louvain), Andreea Badea and Ursula Paintner (Münster), Arnout Mertens (Florence), and Günther Wassilowsky (Linz). Martin Stone (Louvain) heroically went through the entire manuscript before it was submitted, despite his many occupations as a researcher, a teacher, and a father. Jürgen Miethke (Heidelberg) reviewed my manuscript proposal, patiently commented on later versions, and wisely (but in
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vain) warned me not to step into the pitfalls of perfectionism. I am also grateful to Marcella Mulder of Brill Academic Publishers (Leiden), for her angelic patience and for the smooth cooperation, and Juleen Eichinger, whom I thank for the Augean job of turning my baroque writings into proper English. The list of other colleagues I wish to thank is inevitably incomplete, but I will give it a try anyway. Stefan Bauer (Fribourg and Rome), Jan Bleyen (Louvain), Paolo Broggio (Rome), Hans Cools (Louvain), Anuschka De Coster (Ghent), Luc Duerloo (Antwerp), Maria Teresa Fattori (Pisa), Simona Feci (Rome), Bertrand Forclaz (Fribourg), Wim François (Louvain), Willem Frijhoff (Amsterdam), Marian Füssel (Göttingen), Jason Harris (Cork), Jyri Hasecker (Münster), Marc Jacobs (Brussels), Alexander Koller (Rome), Diederik Lanoye (Louvain), Thomas O’Connor (Maynooth), Jan Papy, Gert Partoens and Toon Quaghebeur (Louvain), Wolfgang Reinhard (Freiburg-i.-Breisgau), Judith Schepers (Münster), Katelijne Schiltz (Munich), Violet Soen and Werner Thomas (Louvain), Moritz Trebeljahr (Münster), Elena Valeri (Rome), Steven Vanden Broecke (Ghent), David Van Reybrouck (Brussels), Agnès Vatican (Lille), Federica Veratelli (Ferrara and Lille), Maria Antonietta Visceglia (Rome), Wim Weymans (New York), and Julia Zunckel (Genoa and Münster) drew my attention to untapped sources, generously shared their research experience, their insights, or their data with me, and/or challenged my presumed wisdoms during formal and less formal discussions. I never could have learned to master the arcane art of managing enormous amounts of data without the help of Annelies Cousserier, Jeroen Nilis, and Fred Truyen (Louvain). The staff of the University Archives at Louvain, notably Guido Cloet, merits my special thanks for its excellent services and the pleasant atmosphere I could work in for several years. I am also indebted to Franz-Xaver Brandmayr, the Rector of the Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome, and Gerrit Vanden Bosch, the archivist of the Archdiocesan Archives at Mechlin, for their kind permission to use pictures of the treasures under their guard. I carry warm memories of the endless discussions with Johan Ickx, the archivist of the Penitenzieria Apostolica and of the Santa Maria dell’Anima, and of his and his lovely family’s hospitality during my frequent visits to the Tombs of the Apostles. This book would never have been without the sympathy and the support of friends, many of whom already figure in the list above. Here, I wish to mention especially Maarten Van Dijck, my brother in arms for over a decade, who has closely followed the coming into
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existence of this book from the start. Among those not belonging to historical tribes, I wish to thank especially David, Julie, Peter, Nurçin, Cathérine, Alessia, Riccardo, Gérard, and Durgi for their friendship and their encouragement. Just as much as to my friends, it is impossible to express my gratitude to my family in a few lines, but I hope to make up for it in other ways. My father provided me with the refreshing comments of the interested layman as he went through the entire manuscript, and could always be counted on for the more prosaic jobs that come with finishing a book. I also wish to thank my grandmother, my brothers, and Rudi and Gus for their caring and their unremitting support. And then, of course, there is Veerle, my loving life companion, who has patiently supported me during my endless travails and who had to share me with the ghosts of “my” clergymen for more than four years. That this book is also hers is an understatement. Antwerp, 14 September 2009
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Maps Map 1. Diocesan Reform in the Netherlands, 1559–1570 ......... Map 2. The Archducal Netherlands in 1609: beneficial regimes ............................................................................................
11 100
Figures Fig. 1.1. Patterns of attendance: graduation lists Arts and Theology 1572/85–1619/20 .......................................................... Fig. 2.1. Types of ecclesiastical benefices filled in by Matthias Hovius 1601–20 ............................................................................. Fig. 2.2. Frequency of Hovius’ interventions on a yearly basis per category 1601–19 .................................................................... Fig. 2.3. Papal provisions 1592–1644 (Per Obitum series): Orbis Terrarum ............................................................................. Fig. 2.4. Papal provisions 1592–1644 (Per Obitum Series): Habsburg Netherlands and Liège ............................................... Fig. 2.5. Papal provisions (sample): type of benefices ................ Fig. 2.6. Papal provisions (sample): geographical distribution ..................................................................................... Fig. 2.7. The collegiate university: Louvain staff members 1598–1621 ....................................................................................... Fig. 3.1. Share of Licentiati Artium (1598–1621) figuring in the libri nominationum ................................................................ Fig. 3.2. Share of Graduates in Divinity (STB) figuring in the libri nominationum ....................................................................... Fig. 3.3. Yearly registrations of nominations (1580–1640) ....... Fig. 3.4. Faculty nominations vs. university nominations ......... Fig. 3.5. Faculty and university nominations: outcomes ........... Fig. 3.6. Acceptations: geographical distribution (dioceses) 1580–97 ........................................................................................... Fig. 3.7. Acceptations: geographical distribution (dioceses) 1598–1621 .......................................................................................
31 69 77 92 104 105 107 130 141 142 157 158 174 177 177
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list of illustrations
Fig. 3.8. Acceptations: geographical distribution (dioceses) 1622–40 ........................................................................................... Fig. 3.9. Acceptations: types of benefices (entire population) ... Fig. 3.10. Acceptations: types of benefices (staff members) ...... Fig. 4.1. Graduations in Divinity: Regulars vs. Seculars ............
177 182 186 290
Plates Plate 2.1. Pedagogy of the Pig ........................................................ Plate 2.2. Van Dale College ............................................................. Plate 3.1. Bull Gregory XIII In Praecelsa ...................................... Plate 3.2. Nomination Letter ........................................................... Plate 3.3. Act of Insinuation ........................................................... Plate 3.4. Act of Acceptation and Procuration ............................ Plate 4.1. Frontispiece of Augustine’s Opera Omnia .................. Plate 4.2. Funerary bust Franciscus Oranus ................................. Plate 4.3. Promotion List of the Arts Faculty, 1593 ................... Plate 5.1. Portrait Peter Lombard from Waterford, Archbishop of Armagh ................................................................. Plate 5.2. Clement VIII: engraving from Serry’s Historia Congregationum ............................................................................. Plate 6.1. Hallae Lovanienses .......................................................... Plate 6.2. Portrait Jacobus Jansonius from Amsterdam, Regius Professor of Scripture ................................................................... Plate 7.1. The Archdukes Albert of Austria and Isabella Clara Eugenia: copperplate ..................................................................... Plate 8.1. Funerary busts Lambertus and Aegidius Ursinus De Vivariis ............................................................................................ Titlepage 1. Frontispiece Privilegia Academiae Lovaniensi . . . concessa ........................................................................................... Titlepage 2. Bulla Clement VII ....................................................... Titlepage 3. Fragment of a Portrait of Jacobus Jansonius .........
129 129 137 160 171 201 226 260 281 323 380 457 466 512 587
1 219
PROLOGUE
University histories often start with jubilees. This book will end with one. On 8 September 1626, in the beginning of the academic year, the University of Louvain celebrated its bicentenary anniversary. In the collegiate church of Saint Peter’s, weighty men in long, black gowns, in the presence of the archbishop of Mechlin and the abbots of Heylissem and Villers, broke into a solemn Te Deum to thank the Almighty for his unremitting protection over the age-old studium generale. Immediately after Mass, divine intervention in the academic enterprise was secured by means of a stately procession for the Holy Sacrament. God did not abandon his academics during the next two weeks of opulent meals and virtuous orations. While the university town provided for the scenery of other processions, friars of religious orders that could claim an equally long and venerable history conducted masses for the respective faculties and student bodies.1 Additional bridges between heaven and earth were built by the Supreme Pontiff, His Holiness Pope Urban VIII, who had granted plenary indulgences to the Louvain churches at the occasion of the jubilee. To add to all this lustre, which culminated in the final procession of the jubileum cross on 22 September, the Louvain Jesuits had adorned the front of their college with more than 50 emblems, one of which was a chronogram proclaiming the Alma Mater CoLUMen beLgII e CoeLo ConCessa UnIVersItas LoVanIensIs—the pillar of Belgium, sent from heaven.2 The learned men had reasons to appreciate this enviable position in heaven and on earth. Only a few decades ago, the university had nearly collapsed, at the nadir of a devastating civil war that had held Catholic and Protestant Europe in its spell. By 1626, the academics felt up to their task again to fulfil the role they ascribed to their venerable corporation: to be a bastion of orthodoxy on the Catholic frontier against the heretics and a seminary for Church and State.3 By referring time and again to
1 Programme of the celebrations in Recueil de documents concernants l’histoire de l’université de Louvain, KBR, Manuscrits, 22192 A, 112r. 2 Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus, 297. 3 Belgium, Flanders, and the Netherlands will be used as a common denominator for the area covering the contemporary French region Nord-Pas-de-Calais, the
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their role in society, Louvain academics had been able to safeguard their interests in this dark century, interests that were legally worded in intimidating papal bulls and in solemn princely charters. The privileges of nomination to ecclesiastical benefices wielded by the university and by the Faculty of Arts were considered to be the jewels of academic privilege. At first sight, these privileges seem to involve merely the financial aspects of the academic enterprise. Granted respectively in 1483 and 1513 by Pope Sixtus IV and Pope Leo X, such privileges were legal translations of academic claims to a protected niche in the clerical job market. Academic prerogatives in the field did not only provide learned corporations with a job agency avant-lalettre, however. The income derived from ecclesiastical offices was also used as a means to finance studies and teaching for university members who, by virtue of their privileges, were not bound by canonical residence. Considering this, a book about the privileges of nomination could have become a study on university financing that probably would cover a much longer period than the roughly three decades (1588/98– 1621/25) that will pass review in this book. The benefice system and the academic stakes in it have hardly been touched upon by historians of the early modern period, in sharp contrast with the prolific scholarship on the subject by medievalists. Moreover, university financing in general has only recently attracted due attention. Together, the international conference on Finanzierung von Universität und Wissenschaft vom Vergangenheit zum Gegenwart in 2001 and Ronald Sluijter’s case study of the administration and financing of the University of Leiden (1575–1812) provide enough insights to legitimise another in-depth investigation into this aspect of university history. However, most studies tend to treat financing as a matter only of accountancy.4 Economic structures are believed to support academic life financially, nothing less and nothing more. It is not much of an Benelux Countries, and swathes of territory situated on the western fringes of Germany. Flanders (Fiandra, Flandes) is a pars pro toto name borrowed from the region’s culturally, economically, and politically most advanced constituence in the 15th century: the medieval County of Flanders, including the French-speaking Stewardships of Lille, Douai, and Orchies. In the text, “Flanders” as a county will be used only in contrast with other provinces (e.g., Brabant, Namur). For a map of the South (Archducal, Habsburg) Netherlands, the Principality of Liège, and adjacent territories of the Dutch Republic (the United Provinces), see p. 100. 4 Cf. the various contributions to Schwinges, Finanzierung von Universität und Wissenschaft, and my conference report in Nieuwsbrief Universiteitsgeschiedenis. Sluijter, Tot ciraet, vermeerderinge ende heerlyckmaeckinge der universiteyt.
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exaggeration to argue that this approach can ignore academics completely, except for the fact that the enterprises under investigation happen to be universities. In contrast, the exclusively legal approach to the Louvain privileges of nomination over a relatively long period (1483– 1573) that I developed at the onset of this research5 put academics on the stage as institutional players on the benefice landscape alongside other groups but left unresolved the question of how, in return, benefices affected academics. In line with insights gained through recent studies that investigate the world of “Big Science”6 today, the goal of this book is to demonstrate that the financing of universities does not merely support an academic core-business but indeed permeates it; that interests that we would categorise routinely as “material” prove to be less prosaic than assumed at first glance. This is not to say that abstract social forces, embodied in hard material interests, shaped intellectual and religious life in Louvain colleges and auditories: On ne saurait se contenter d’inverser les termes (l’infrastructure devenant la “cause” des idées), en supposant inchangé entre eux, le type de relation qu’a établi la pensée libérale lorsqu’elle accordait aux doctrines la manuduction de l’histoire. Il faut plutôt récuser l’isolement [my italicisation] de ces termes, et donc la possibilité de ramener une corrélation à un rapport de cause à conséquence.7
Clio being “a good, somewhat careless girl, always prepared to follow the last prince who seduced her,”8 historians have often apprenticed themselves to the social sciences. Doing so, they replaced the religious bias of historical agents with a secular bias.9 But the concerns of 17thcentury theologians and contemporary social scientists are not necessarily those of the historians. The central argument of this book is that the privileges of nomination to ecclesiastical benefices were a constitutive element of the way in which the learned men at Louvain identified themselves and organised an environment in which their identity, role, and interests could flourish. Academics did not think of their privileges as the legal translation of particular interests. For without these privileges, academics
5
Boute, “‘Regnum,’ ‘Sacerdotium’ en ‘Studium’.” For an introduction to the phenomenon, read Galison, “The Many Faces of Big Science.” 7 De Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, 84. 8 Lepetit, “De l’échelle en histoire,” 71. 9 Gregory, “The Other Confessional History.” 6
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argued, the university would inevitably perish, churches would be deprived of learned and pious shepherds, and the Catholic frontier against the heretics would collapse. These seemingly hyperbolic statements will probably raise some smiles among this book’s readers. Many contemporaries must have smiled too. Academic claims in the field were often under fire until both the learned corporations of yore and the traditional clerical job market disappeared in the turmoil of the French Revolution. Nor did the appropriation of a primary role in the remarkable revival of Catholicism in both the North and the South Netherlands, by means of which academics hoped to legitimise their privileges, go unchallenged in the period under investigation. Jesuits, bishops, dynasties, curialists, and many others claimed the glory for this laudable enterprise too. This constatation is central to the research question of this book. The role of academics in society was apparently anything but evident for the contemporaries themselves. The historian cannot make it evident either by looking for an overarching explanation (or a bunch of them) of a sociological or culturalist bent without jeopardising the historicity of the phenomena being researched. But if invisible hands that defy time and context are to be banned from the historian’s analytical toolkit, explaining collective action may seem an impossible task. It is not, however. The protagonists of this story (humble academics, voracious curialists, great princes, ambitious Jesuits, benign pontiffs, and blasphemous heretics) were not paralysed by the slippery quality of the realities they worked with, judging by the self-confidence that resonated in academic memoranda or in papal decrees. Seen from this perspective, the most basic question that arises is one of credibility. In order to understand a phenomenon such as privileges that granted access to a particular niche in the clerical job market, we must explore how academics themselves managed to make obvious and credible claims about their role in society that, to put it mildly, sound slightly exaggerated. This problem of credibility applies to the academics themselves, their interests being the object of continuous negotiations, or even outward conflict, within the university; and also to the highest authorities in the realm and in Christianity. International historiography has paid a great deal of attention to the relationship between academics and power in the early modern period. Driven by the need for solid religious unanimity and for the human resources necessary to support it, the European centres of power, ecclesiastical or secular, Catholic or Protestant, never lost their
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interest in the centres of learning. General surveys on the relationship between the university and the emerging dynastic state rightly demonstrate the repeated intervention of the ruler in “his” universities, which in turn supplied jurists, theologians, and church ministers in an increasingly national or regional environment.10 Browsing through modern literature, one often gets the impression that the academics themselves hardly enter the picture, however. As one of the field’s heavyweights, Willem Frijhoff, recently pointed out,11 the whole evolution from medieval clerici vagantes to 18th-century Nationalgelehrte remains largely a story of passive university men adapting themselves from sheer necessity to the whims of princely policy. It is a history of “victims of their own success” deploring their lost autonomy and wallowing in outdated ceremonies that celebrated a glorious medieval past. This fits well into the general picture of universities in the early modern period as obsolete institutions that were out of step with intellectual innovations, a picture applauded by historians of the 19th and 20th centuries. “Until [well into the 1980s] it was generally thought that universities were in a sclerotic, even comatose condition in the early modern period, and that ‘the real life’ which the early modernists wished to study was therefore located elsewhere.”12 It does not help that universities in the Age of Galileo were involved in religious changes that to date are too easily associated with religious fanaticism, coercion, and shrinking horizons.13 Catholic universities such as Louvain are often situated on the wrong-side of our mental map, the “rich Roman life” being considered a pre-modern residual in the face of “modern” Protestantism.14 This reading of the history of early modern universities mirrors remarkably well contemporary recipes for
10 A survey in Hammerstein, “Relations with Authority,” and Stichweh, Der frühmoderne Staat und die Europäische Universität. For the reform of the Law faculties in France, see Julia and Revel, “Les étudiants et leurs études dans la France moderne,” Verger et al., Histoire des Universités en France, 113–25. With respect to Belgian and Dutch universities, see Jacobs, “Geleerdheid in opdracht,” 41–64. 11 Cf. Frijhoff, “l’Université à l’Epoque Moderne.” 12 Robinson-Hammerstein, “Recent Research,” 9. 13 Cf. Kaufmann, Universität und Lutherische Konfessionalisierung, 15, and the literature mentioned there. 14 It is telling that anthropologists in the second half of the 20th century, when increasingly barred from access to the primitive tribes in former colonies, privileged Mediterranean Europe as their favourite hunting ground. Lecture by Peter Burke, “History and Anthropology,” University of Leuven, 15 March 2004.
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the organisation of academic life. As a matter of fact, the contrast with the benefits of contemporary academic freedom, peer review, and the impressive performance of natural sciences is so humiliating for early modern university men that it reeks of Whiggery. During the last decades, historians have been more nuanced. Scholarship in political history has turned social and cultural, and it reveals that state-building in early modern Europe was not achieved primarily by coercion. Power is not just about sticks, but involves carrots as well, soft power being wielded via networks of clients with wide ramifications. Seen from this perspective, the following chapters may be read as a plea to add a chapter on academics to the book Power Elites and State Building edited by Wolfgang Reinhard,15 as Louvain dons, in spite of their carefully cultivated reputation as poor and disinterested clerics, prove to be difficult to distinguish from other elites sponging on the growth of state power. Also, if universities were not the avant-garde of humanism and the scientific revolution, they more often than not did provide the social, institutional, and mental frameworks that made these shifts possible, and scientific paradigm shifts, in return, were often smoothly integrated into academic curricula.16 If the impact of early modern academic research publications is anything but impressive, it is because universities were considered teaching institutions, which had to secure civility, not research centres. Finally, religious change, defined as a process of confessionalisation and disciplining monitored by religious and secular authorities, is no longer seen as a step backward in the history of western civilisation, triggering an unintended process of modernisation in Catholic and in Protestant Europe.17 During the last decade, the breadth of intellectual life in Catholic Europe has been attracting due attention.18 This is good, but it is not good enough, for two reasons. First, this presentation of things is still blurred by “presentism.” Biases are both inevitable and functional in our attempts to get a grip on a chaotic past.19 This does not mean, however, that historians should not get
15
Reinhard, “Power Elites, State Servants, Ruling Classes.” Cf. The survey in Porter, “The Scientific Revolution.” 17 Reinhard, “Was ist Katholische Konfessionalisierung?”; see also idem, Glaube und Macht. 18 Cf. Romano, La Contreréforme mathématique. 19 Read, by contrast, Behan McCullagh, “Bias in Historical Description.” McCullagh, and most historians including the sceptics, use another concept of reality. The 16
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their priorities right. Accounts of the past cease to be historical if the past continues to be reduced to a reflection of the present. Early modern politics based on personal relations managed by a hierarchical, monodimensional dynastic state are contrasted with the contemporary modern state as a multipurpose organisation regulated by abstract concepts such as Public Interest. The recent rehabilitation of academics’ supposedly poor scientific record in the early modern period is, in most cases, just that: a rehabilitation without any real reassessment.20 And the concept of modernisation contrasts modern societies with traditional ones. Religion was a prime mover in the teleological march towards modernity, but this “modernity” was still “incomplete” in the early 17th century. “In the mirror of the other, we have been seduced primarily by the self.”21 Second, this entails that that academics are ultimately still reduced to the role of exponents of something bigger, that they were still passive agents undergoing soft or hard state power, intellectual constraints or habitus, and religious change. This book is about academics “in action” when negotiating their identity, their role, their interests; when, in other words, they were participating actively in the production of society, the public realm, and truth. The contention that “the field of tension between the pursuit of autonomy and tutelage is one of the features of the history of universities”22 must be questioned. Academics were not confronted with absolutism or with papal universalism; they were more than just clients, brokers, and patrons; and they did not passively undergo tendencies of confessionalisation that supposedly kept them from walking more promising intellectual paths. They were, on the contrary, actively involved in shaping their world. In order to do so, university men developed tactics and strategies that were surprisingly modern. This, however, does not necessarily imply that Louvain dons were modern. It may also suggest that we have never been modern.23
possibility of combining bias with the existence of a reality out there will be one of the central themes of this book. 20 “En appauvrissant ainsi notre vision de l’université, nous nous privons de la possibilité de découvrir la richesse du passé qui est et demeure toujours irréductible aux exigences du present.” Frijhoff, “L’Université à l’Epoque Moderne,” 16. 21 Buc, The Dangers of Ritual, 11. 22 Jacobs, “Geleerdheid in opdracht,” 41. 23 Read Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes.
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prologue
All of this calls for an in-depth analysis of academic policy and practices that can be managed only when researching a relatively short time span and, at this stage of research, one institution, although comparisons with the situation at other universities will be prolific. The period under investigation coincides more or less with the reign of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella (1596/98–1621/33), during which the South Netherlands, at that time officially ruled by sovereign princes, gradually recovered from civil war. The durable reintegration of the Habsburg dynasty in the political field of the Netherlands and the restoration of the old faith were the code-words of archducal rule. The revival of academic life at Louvain must be situated in this context. The university would go through a “Silver Age” in the first half of the 17th century that, to contemporary standards, was modest compared with its international standing before the Revolt. It nevertheless allowed academics to play a major role in the Catholic Netherlands; in Northern Catholicism as a whole, due to the foundation of colleges for the Irish and Dutch clergy; and in Christianity itself, through affiliation with a university of repute in doctrinal affairs. It is not my purpose to present this period as a turning point in which a medieval school of Christendom became an early modern institution of higher education in a confessionalised context. The re-emergence of the University of Louvain as the pillar of Belgium was the result of hard work in a process of trial and error, not of an ethereal Zeitgeist. A bird’s-eye view on the academic world is provided in the first part of this book, The Weight of the World. Much of the debris left by mainstream historiography in Church history will be collected in Chapter 1, “The Appeal of Logic,” which furnishes the reader with a vademecum to this book. It does not only provide the preliminaries to our story. Historiographical outlines on the history of Catholic renewal in the Low Countries and on the university’s role in it in the course of the 16th century are combined with an analysis of the methodological implications and the implicit understandings that underpin them. Two models will systematically be scrutinised: the so-called classical position, which in Belgian historiography was upgraded from the 1960s onwards with the help of the insights of Delumeau and Le Bras; and the paradigm of Confessionalisation. In this context, it will become more clear why the central research question of this book was privileged over other definitions of the problem. Academics did not have to reinvent the world all over again in the beginning of the 17th century. In order to spare themselves such a
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tiresome travail, and in order to keep their world predictable, they made considerable efforts to transfer their glorious past to an uncertain present. Meanwhile, the reader needs an introduction into the language in which academics worded their interests, which in this case was largely devised with the help of a legal and/or administrative discourse over ecclesiastical benefices. The first part of this book will provide the reader with an introduction into the benefice system in general and into the link between universities and the benefices in particular (chapter 2, “The Dross of the Earth”), as well as into the privileges of nomination (chapter 3, “The Jewels among Academic Privileges”). The benefice system has often been associated with abuse or dysfunctionality. Chapters 2 and 3 will not even make an attempt to nuance this view but will seek to get rid of it altogether by ditching the normative approaches that inform much of older (and not-so-old) scholarship. The first three chapters do not pretend to draw a general “context” that has to add to the reality (i.e., logic) of the phenomenon under investigation. True to their mission, they will add instead to the confusion and introduce a first conundrum: that the academics’ staunch attachment to their privileges of nomination cannot solely be accounted for by the need of university graduates to gain access to a highly volatile and fluctuating clerical job market. This constatation will lead to a series of alternative explanations that are addressed in the second part of this book, Assembling Academia. A long-lasting conflict that saw clerics competing with academic nominees for benefices in the neighbouring Principality of Liège will serve as the Leitmotiv of this part. The conflict was given a new dimension when, in 1598, the year of the cession of sovereignty over the Netherlands by Philip II to his daughter Isabella and her spouse Albert, a delegate of the university was sent to the Rome of Clement VIII in order to have the privileges of the university once and for all confirmed with apostolic authority. Some preliminaries are required, however, academics having been embroiled with Rome over benefices from 1588 onwards. Chapter 4 will furnish the reader with flashbacks into the decade between 1588 and 1597. This time interval provides us, moreover, with excellent opportunities to investigate identity politics deployed by academics, against their competitors for benefices but also in opposition to other groups that challenged the academics’ role in society. The “Roman Question” would involve not only princes and popes but also books, learned cardinals, curialists in search of benefices, and heavenly patrons who badly needed to be defended against
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erring Jesuit theologians blinded by hubris and private interests. In their Flemish province, the storm troopers of Catholicism would never manage to cover themselves with the honours and prerogatives of Academia. Jesuits will make their comeback in every single chapter. Chapter 4, “Flashbacks,” will unravel a specific conflict (1592–97) that sheds light on the formation of solid interest groups out of a loose conglomeration of scholars. Academic rituals were at the heart of the debates in this conflict. Exploring the performativity of ritual practices, chapter 4 will question received wisdom about rituals as symbolic practices and about the role of (academic) interests as a prime mover. It will reach conclusions that will, in return, inform the analysis of academic practices in general and the practice of privilege in particular in the following chapters. More work has to be done, however, because the ubiquitousness of social networks in early modern politics has lured many a historian into reifying them into a political system. The period 1598–1612 will be treated in Chapter 5, “The City of Grace. Academics at the Corte di Roma,” which focuses on the power of networks and the performativity of networking strategies in early modern decisionmaking. Because Grace and Piety also involved the hereafter, this chapter will inevitably delve into the theological debates of the day in Rome as well as in Belgium. In the archducal period, “reform” would become a versatile notion that offered, in the course of the visitation of the University of Louvain between 1607 and 1617, ample possibilities to strengthen the coalitions forged by the pédans descole with the realm of power. Chapter 6, “The Brabant University. Academics and Reform,” will build on the previous chapters in order to investigate a phenomenon that, especially in the context of the emergence of the dynastic state, has often been used all too readily by historians in search of explanations: power. The Visitatio of 1617 is generally considered in historiography as a milestone in the “relations between the university and the authorities,” because of its formal appearance as the first organic law on higher education in the South Netherlands issued by the state. By going backstage, however, this chapter reveals that the assemblage of power is much more complex than suggested by the tautological sleights of hand historians traditionally try to get away with. A major row between the Privy Council and the papal nuncio concerning the overlordship over the university, with the academics seemingly trapped in between the two parties, provides for a grand finale to this chapter.
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The apotheosis of chapter 6 paves the path for chapter 7. “Rondo Veneziano. Academics and the Papal Prince 1612–22” returns to the ongoing Roman Question about the privileges of nomination. This chapter portrays a typical constellation in which interests in the periphery collided with those of the Roman curia and its nominal head, the Supreme Pontiff. Rather than reifying such constellations into the causes of events, this chapter adopts the opposite viewpoint and investigates how such constellations were construed around specific stakes. The collapse of familiar explanatory schemes—rites as symbolic practices, micropolitical networks, power, and political constellations—does not necessarily lead to chaos, however. In this chapter, an arrangement that will satisfy even the most realist historians, despite all the confusion in the previous chapters, will emerge. Eventually, a clear configuration materialised in which academics became the obligatory passage point to Catholic and dynastic restoration in the Low Countries, and in which a clear cause (“Public Interest” and the grandezza of the Apostolic See) generated necessary and inevitable effects (the confirmation of the university’s privileges in 1616). In the course of the 1620s, we will leave the learned men of Louvain to their own devices again and will start to pull things together. “Talking benefices” implies talking about secular clerics; about Church Fathers, about grants, pastoral theologians, sacraments, and devotional practices; about efficient grace and heretics; about networks crossing the boundaries between poor scholars and powerful protectors in Brussels and Rome; about the fragile boundaries between Heaven and Earth; and about the fabric of Academia in its entirety. This book has been informed by developments in Science and Technology Studies. From the early 1980s onwards, scientific practice and technology, strongholds of modernity, were gradually submitted to anthropological scrutiny. If science can be defined in terms of collective action, the problem that is central to this research field, the relationship between knowledge and its context, provides for a workable diagnosis when transported into other research areas as well. This book draws heavily on the work of Bruno Latour, John Law, Michel Callon, and others, as well as on the epistemology and the historiographical travels of Michel De Certeau. The merger of Actor Network Theory and Certalian theoretical insights will prove to be highly instrumental in the carrying through of a programme in which early modern academics can become full-blown actors again who were capable of distilling a credible logic out of a chaotic world, and who could make that logic work.
PART ONE
The Weight of the World
Titlepage 2. Bulla or papal lead seal. The backside of the Bulla traditionally figures the name of the reigning Pope: Clement VII (Giulio de’ Medici, 1523–34). [Catholic University of Louvain, University Archives]
CHAPTER ONE
THE APPEAL OF LOGIC
At the onset of this research, I wrote that “thanks to their societal position, academics had managed to pilot their medieval privileges, through the storm of Trent, into the early modern period,” when discussing the confirmation of the Louvain privileges of nomination by Pope Gregory XIII in 1573.1 There is, in spite of its candour, a lot in this assessment. It consists of a causal relationship; a range of factors that are being related to each other—society, academics, privileges, Trent—and a periodisation that determines the nature of these relations. Trent is believed to have caused a storm that demarcates early modern Catholicism from medieval Christianity. Academic privileges are introduced as an anachronism in a Tridentine Age, a residual of the Middle Ages that could nonetheless subsist due to political circumstances. Implicitly, this configuration rests on a strong opposition between religion and politics on the one hand, and on a concept of change in terms of diffusion on the other hand. In this diffusion model, the nature and the spread of religious change—identified by the popping up of new religious practices, cognitive systems, institutions, and so on and so forth throughout Europe and the world—are not problematic. Referring to the internal dynamics of the belief systems in question, in casu the Tridentine Spirit, will do. What has to be explained are the contingencies (social restraints or opportunities, mental frameworks, favourable or hostile political constellations, economic limits) that accelerate, deflect, distort, slow down, or undo the effects of religious renewal in specific circumstances, but that are fundamentally external to (religious) change and to the pervasive influence of Trent.2
1
Boute, “ ‘Regnum,’ ‘Sacerdotium’ en ‘Studium’,” 178. For a definition and a comparison with inertia in physics, read Latour, “The Powers of Association,” 266. 2
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chapter one 1.1. The sirens of Trent. Academic interests and Catholic reform
The arrangements mentioned above constitute the operational premises underlying the so-called Classical Position in Church History.3 Its acclaimed father, the famous historian of the Council of Trent Hubert Jedin, linked in his essay “Katholische Reformation oder Gegenreformation?” two formerly partisan concepts with each other. While the older, pejorative notion of counter-reformation had to denominate the contingent reaction of the Church to the challenge of heresy, Catholic reform was endowed with more positive connotations, that is, “Die Selbstbesinnung der Kirche auf das katholische Lebensideal durch innere Erneuerung.”4 Authentic Catholic reform, which had to remedy the abuses of the medieval Church, and counter-reformation became something of an item when united in the papacy, Trent, and the Jesuit order. The following quotation is central to Jedin’s analysis: “In Trent it was established that the early modern Church would be a pastoral and missionary Church. This was a Revolution that can be considered as significant for the Catholic Church as the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo for the natural sciences.”5 Although historians can elaborate on the historical context (i.e., the threat of Protestantism) in which the Church rediscovered its essential mission, the fundamentals of this revolution are eventually beyond their grasp.6 A comparably structured message was conveyed, from a very different perspective, in the 1970s by the French historian Delumeau. Deeply inspired by the school of the Annales, he ditched the cliché of a corrupted Church whose abuses needed to be remedied as the ultimate cause of the Reform(ation). Instead, he introduced the symmetrical concept of Christianisation to describe religious change in both sides of the confessional divide, an evolution that can be traced back long before the rise of Protestantism but that intensified when, between the 16th and 18th centuries, superstition, ignorance about the fundamentals of Christendom, and basically pagan religious practices gradually
3
Read Chapter 2 of O’Malley, Trent and All That, 47–71. Jedin, Katholische Reformation oder Gegenreformation?, 38. 5 Jedin, Katholische Reformation oder Gegenreformation?, 59. 6 “Die Erneuerung der Kirche im Zeitalter des Konzils von Trient is . . . ein übernaturliches Geheimnis, dessen letzte Ursachen wir nicht vollständig zu durchdringen vermögen.” Jedin, Katholische Reformation oder Gegenreformation?, 66. 4
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gave way to a more authentic Christianity both in Catholic and Protestant Europe.7 I have indulged in this short historiographical excursus for two reasons. First, the twin-concept Catholic Reform—counter-reformation combined with Delumeau’s insights have been moulding, to date, the bulk of Belgian historiography and remain influential elsewhere as well.8 A fair share of scholarship on the University of Louvain has to be situated in this tradition too. I have chosen to combine the following historiographical outlines with an impressionist introduction to Catholic renewal in the Low Countries from this perspective, even though this brings along the risk of doing some injustice to the works cited.9 Second, the examination of the concepts and the hermeneutical strategies deployed by historians in action is highly instructive. O’Malley pointed out in his inspiring essay on the renaming of Catholicism in the early modern era that students of the old faith are not particularly blessed, wrestling as they do with a wide range of labels which claim to characterise religious change and which inform, in return, their analysis. O’Malley’s own container concept—an early modern Catholicism sui generis—as well as Hsia’s related referent “Catholic renewal” indeed look good in titles for textbooks, general syntheses, or studies into the renaming of Catholicism.10 But they hardly satisfy in a book about academics and early modern Catholicism. That the classical position in Church history and the intellectual legacy of Delumeau continue to structure most of Belgian historiography on early modern Catholicism can easily be accounted for by applying the diffusion model to historiographical production itself and by defining, depending on one’s preferences, the context of scientific research either as an asset or as an obstacle. Jedin’s was a concept of Church history as a theological discipline, a subfield of religious
7
“Méconnaissance profonde de l’essentiel (my italicisation) du Christianisme, persistance parfois de cérémonies préchrétiennes et beaucoup plus souvent d’une mentalité paganisante: deux faces d’une même réalité intellectuelle et psychologique dans la France—et certainement dans l’Europe—du début de l’époque classique.” Delumeau, Le Christianisme entre Luther et Voltaire, 257. 8 A survey from a Jedinian point of view in Fühner, Die Kirchen- und die Antireformatorischen Politik, 40–42. 9 The reader may rightly suggest that I do little justice to Delumeau’s work by blending it with the Jedinian tradition. I am under the impression that this is exactly how most Belgian historians have read Delumeau, who proved to be highly absorbable by the classical position. 10 See also Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 7.
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sciences that was practiced, in the Germany of his days, behind the walls of theological faculties, and that had to integrate the history of the Church into a Heilsgeschichte.11 Most members of the small world of specialists in Belgium indeed used to dwell at the country’s Catholic universities. Faced with the dramatic downfall of traditional forms of mass Catholicism from the 1960s onwards, they found inspiration and reassurance in Delumeau’s work, while experiencing both hope and frustration in the wake of that other great reform council, Vatican II.12 Enter the socio-cultural reproduction of academic tribes via peer review, and the stability of the model is accounted for. For the tradition’s critics, all the elements seem to be present to indulge in what historians do best: deconstruction.13 1.1.1. “Que ceulx des Flandres se disoijent tant catholicques.” Catholic reform and counter-reformation in Belgium They should hold their horses, however, because the model works. Contemporaries such as the Jesuit Cornelius a Lapide could proclaim the Church of Mechlin in 1620 a paradigm for all churches of Christianity.14 This triumphalism reflected the spectacular revival of the Old Faith after the devastation of civil war. The cession of sovereignty over the Netherlands by Philip II to the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia and to her spouse Albert15 was perceived by their contemporaries as a turning point in the misfortunes of the South, a prophesy that fulfilled itself, as things hardly could get worse. The armistice of 1607 with the Dutch rebels and the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609–20) would constitute a key period in the economic and political recovery of the 11
O’Malley, Trent and All That, 58. “L’objet religieux (par exemple les prêtres, la pratique sacramentelle, la spiritualité) étant désormais traité en fonction d’une société (selon des critères communs à nous tous aujourd’hui, et non plus “religieux”), l’historien croyant ne peut plus que glisser subrepticement des convictions subjectives dans son étude scientifique. Ces motivations interviennent dans le choix de l’objet (relatif à un intérêt religieux) ou dans la finalité de l’étude (en fonction de préoccupations présentes, par exemple la déchristianisation et ses origines, la réalité du christianisme populaire, etc.).” De Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, 173. 13 “Modern” deconstruction by “post-modern” historians in Daddow, “The Ideology of Apathy.” 14 Cited by Mols, “De seculiere clerus,” 372. 15 A lot of ink has already been spilled over the limits of archducal sovereignty in the wake of 19th-century nationalist historiography. An assessment blurred by “allnetherlandish” nostalgia in De Schepper, “Les archiducs et les institutions.” Refreshing insights in Valladares, “Decid adiòs a Flandes.” 12
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South Netherlands in the first half of the 17th century. But above all, the period of the Truce was a continuation of the Eighty Years’ War with other means. It had a serious impact on a religious and political culture fuelled by a mentality of confrontation with the Protestant North.16 Catholic restoration joined hands with an economic and political revanchism nurtured by urban elites that aimed at restoring the South’s traditionally dominant position in the Low Countries, a perspective that until the end of the 1620s was not unrealistic.17 The re-emerging high culture of the South was highly ideologised, and one of its most visible aspects was the vitalisation of the old faith that came with the broader Catholic reconquista in the Northern Rhine area and in Westphalia. Its lasting effects are echoed in Voltaire’s unflattering comments on the 18th-century Austrian Netherlands as “un vrai pays d’obédience, privé d’esprit, rempli de foi.” It is tempting to consider the “Rich Roman Life” of Belgian (and Dutch) Catholics until the 1960s just an exotic epilogue to this tradition of religious fervour. Visitors to the region from all over Europe did so in the 19th century, when revelling in or taking offence at the exuberant displays of baroque piety in a region “où le Pape est Pape comme il l’est dans aucune autre contrée de l’Europe.”18 It is not surprising, in this context, that the reign of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella was considered “la plus brillante que le catholicisme ait vécue en Belgique avant 1830” by Catholic historians19 and the triumph of superstitious and intolerant bigotry by their anti-clerical colleagues.20 Historians may fret over the question of whether or not the Archdukes’ sovereignty remained in limbo after the cession of 1598, but all agree that the new rulers’ personal impact in the renewal of religious life was considerable. Older literature on the Catholic side portrays the Archdukes as models of devotion and piety. Under their auspices, traditional forms of piety such as processions and pilgrimages
16
This implied identification with the Seventeen Provinces of yore, which were to be restored under Spanish overlordship. Read Andriessen, Jezuïeten en het samenhorigheidsbesef. 17 Outlines and literature in Israel, The Dutch Republic, 410–20. 18 The words of the Catholic leader Barthélémy Dumortier, in his letter (Tournai, 5 January 1865), to Cardinal Antonelli, as quoted in Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See, 11. This book not only provides an excellent study in international politics in the 19th century but also dedicates a lot of attention to the specificities of Catholic Revival in a comparative perspective. 19 De Moreau, Histoire de l’Eglise en Belgique, 5, 7. 20 Put, “Les Archiducs et la réforme catholique,” 255.
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were rekindled, via their personal participation or otherwise. Scholars have good reasons to ascribe the monastic revival in the cities and towns of the South to the Archdukes’ interventions with reluctant town magistrates who balked at footing the bill for all this religious fervour, or to their own financial support to new foundations.21 The installation of the nunciature of Flanders in 1596, when the prestige of the court of Brussels was beefed up by the presence of royal princes, visualised and guaranteed the cordial relationship between the Holy See and its obedient son and daughter in the Netherlands. This, as well as the Archdukes’ protectorship over Catholics in an overwhelmingly Protestant Northern Europe, made them, alongside Ernest of Bavaria and Sigismond of Poland, cornerstones of Roman missionary strategies in the North Sea area.22 Recent scholarship has abandoned classical eulogies by putting the limits to the Archdukes’ commitment to Catholic reform in the limelight. They flinched, for instance, from curbing the rights of patronage of nobles, abbeys, and chapters in favour of bishops who tried to enhance their control over the recruitment of the parish clergy; balked at shouldering unconditionally the jurisdictional claims of the episcopate against the age-old competences of secular tribunals in ecclesiastical affairs; and did not abolish the privileges and exemptions of recalcitrant collegiate chapters that tried to escape the bishops’ disciplinary control.23 Their financial support was ill-managed, inclined as they were to subsidise conspicuous projects of the religious orders rather than to remedy the material needs of the newly erected diocesan seminaries. In other words, “ils n’ont pas précipité des solutions structurelles aux problèmes essentielles de l’église,”24 shouldering as they did a Catholicism of a Mediterranean bent.25 Seen from this perspective, the Archdukes are to be applauded primarily for having recruited the real champions of Catholic reform after the Jedinian paradigm: the bishops.
21 Data in Pasture, La restauration religieuse; Elias, Kerk en Staat; De Moreau, Histoire de l’Eglise en Belgique, 5. 22 Cf. Arblaster, “The Archdukes and the Northern Counter Reformation.” 23 A survey of the recurrent conflicts between bishops and collegiate or cathedral chapters that refused to be reformed (and dishonoured) by such zelanti in Pasture, La réforme des chapitres séculiers. 24 Put, “Les archiducs et la réforme catholique,” 263. Compare Gaulard, “La politique religieuse des Archiducs.” 25 Lottin, Lille, 315.
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That historians attending the classical school were “biologised” by the activities of the Belgian episcopate in the first half of the 17th century, should not come as a surprise. Until the second half of the 16th century, the battle against heresy had largely been conducted by princely councils and by an embryonic Netherlandish inquisition.26 From the 1550s onwards, however, a configuration emerged in which the Tridentine, Borromean bishop could flourish. The Tridentine decrees had already been introduced in the Netherlands and the other constituencies of the global Spanish Monarchy by the end of the 1560s.27 Their implementation had been stalled by the civil war, but became, alongside an anti-Protestant paranoia that would persist until deep in the 18th century,28 a Leitmotiv of Catholic reform again immediately after the Reconciliation of the obedient provinces. Contrary to the situation in the other large, compact territories of the Empire, the originally state-led, pre-Tridentine institutional model of reform29 would, in the Netherlands, merge to a great extent with the RomanTridentine model.30 Bishops were elected not by cathedral chapters but by the prince and his Privy Council in Brussels, in line with the course of things in France and Spain.31 The prince’s competence in the field had been legally sanctioned in the 16th century, when members of the Privy Council had drafted a thorough reorganisation of the Belgian Church, the scale of which was unprecedented in Catholic Europe.32 The bull Super Universas of 1559 substituted the six-odd medieval dioceses of the Low Countries with three new ecclesiastical provinces more or less corresponding with the Habsburg Seventeen Provinces, bar the duchy of Luxemburg—Mechlin, Cambrai, and the ephemeral 26 A good guide for the institutions of the Habsburg Netherlands in Aerts, Les institutions du gouvernement central. Outlines in Goosens, Les inquisitions. 27 Details in Willocx, L’introduction. See also Ignasi Fernàndez, Felipe II y el clero secular. 28 Quaghebeur, De concursus in het aartsbisdom Mechelen, 86–88. 29 Outlines in Fühner, Die Kirchen- und die antireformatorische Religionspolitik. 30 Compare definitions and parameters in Ziegler, “Typen der Konfessionalisierung,” among which Jesuit involvement, Tridentine profile (Tridentinisch-Römischen Typ vs. Konservativ-Reichskirchlich-deutschen Typ), princely model versus episcopal model, the vicinity of other confessions in neighbouring states, and the politics of tolerance resulting from it, the geographical morphology of political entities. 31 Hermann, L’Eglise d’Espagne, 46–47. More on the procedures in Passchyn, Het episcopaat, 4–6; for the procedures in Rome, see Jadin, “Procès d’information.” 32 The seven new dioceses erected in Spain (Hermann, L’Eglise d’Espagne, 20) were inspired by the same zeal for religious “reform” displayed by the monarch but cannot be compared with the overall reorganisation of the dioceses in the Netherlands. Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad española, 2, 18. On previous attempts to “nationalise” the ecclesiastical infrastructure, see Pasture, La restauration religieuse, 117.
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archdiocese of Utrecht. Each of these was constituted by five to seven relatively small suffragan dioceses that were designed for a thorough reshaping of religious life.33 The inflation of episcopal sees after the 1560s,34 the fact that none of them could call on significant temporal power, the official requirement of academic degrees in law or theology, the relatively poor remuneration of several episcopal mensae in the new dioceses,35 and a devastated infrastructure that had to be rebuilt from scratch36—all this apparently did not make the job very attractive for the high nobility at the end of the 16th century.37 Grands seigneurs, after a “democratic” interval during the reign of Philip II, were increasingly able to close the confessional gap with their university-trained competitors and gained gradually more ground during the reign of the Archdukes.38 But in the highly urbanised South Netherlands, where the position of the nobility was relatively weak, episcopal sees were, compared to France and, above all, the Empire, never a reserve of the nobility.39
33 Mechlin: Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent, Mechlin, Roermond, ‘s Hertogenbosch, Ypres; Cambrai: Arras (the same circumscription as the medieval diocese), Cambrai, Namur, Saint-Omer, Tournai; Utrecht: Deventer, Groningen, Haarlem, Leeuwarden, Utrecht. Van Ysacker, “Bilancio storiografico.” Several attempts were made, in the period under investigation, to establish a new diocese in Luxemburg to compensate for the loss of princely patronage over the northern dioceses. “J’aij aussij refere a sa sainctete le pieulx desir de V.AA. serenissimes de faire eriger au district de la duche de Luxembourgh un nouveau evesche representent en icelle la perte de la metropolitaine d’Utrecq, et de 5 eglises suffragains . . . quoij entendu sa sainctete pesoit beaucoup les difficultez, signamment ij estant interessees un archevesque de Treves, et ung evesque le Liege, et daultre constel oultre Rheins les eglises de Mets et Verdun.” d’Ortembergh, archducal resident in Rome, to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 1608, AGR, Audience, 443. Albert was no Philip, however. Compare Dandelet, Spanish Rome. 34 Cf. the sour comment of Cardinal Granvelle, himself a grand seigneur, back in the 1550s, in Postma, “Nieuw licht op een oude zaak.” The standard work is Dierickx, De oprichting der nieuwe bisdommen. 35 “Generalmente son povere le chiese predette levatane quella di Cambrai, ch’è di fondazione antichissima e nobilissima. Le chiese di Tornai, e d’Arras sono anch’esse dotate assai nobilmente per esser l’una, e l’altra parimente di fondatione molto antica.” Bentivoglio, nuncio of Flanders, to Borghese, Secretary of State, Relatione di Fiandra, 6 April 1613, ASV, Fondo Borghese, I, 269–272, 61r. Cf. Mols, “De seculiere clerus,” 369. 36 A case study of these efforts in Put, “Al de mannen van de aartsbisschop.” 37 The difficult circumstances in which Matthias Hovius, archbishop of Mechlin (1597–1620), was appointed are very instructive in this respect. Harline and Put, A Bishop’s Tale. 38 Cf. Deregnaucourt, “Diocèses et évêques.” “Dass der weitverzweigte Adel lange Zeit sich der Konfessionellen Abgrenzung entzog, ist ja bekannt.” Ziegler, “Typen der Konfessionalisierung,” 417. It remains unclear to which extent this assessment applies to the nobility of the Low Countries. 39 Cf. Reinhard, “Kirche als Mobilitätskanal.” The situation in France (Bergin, “Pour avoir un évêque à son souhait”) is less accentuated, but the old nobility remained
the appeal of logic 1559
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1570 Groningen Leeuwarden
Haarlem
Utrecht
Utrecht
R.
Middleburg Antwerp St. Ypres Omer
Tournai Liège Arras Cambrai
Den Bosch
Roermond L
Ghent
Bruges Thérouanne
Deventer
R. R.
Mechlin Tournai
Namur
Liège
Arras Cambrai
Map 1. Diocesan Reform in the Netherlands, 1559–1570 (L. = Liège; R. = Roermond)
Meanwhile, a series of bishops of more modest extraction, who could not invoke a noble pedigree to legitimise their position, had set the tone by transforming the previously aristocratic Church of the Netherlands into a Church of and for poor, learned, and pious men who drew largely on Trent and the Borromean model to frame their actions. In this context, it is not surprising to learn that historians and their students who dedicated several biographies to the Belgian episcopate in the early modern period were lured into creating an ideal-type that served as a yardstick against which the protagonists of their stories were measured. The 17th-century bishop in the Netherlands has to live up to a lot of expectations in historiography. Most of them did, in spite of deplorable circumstances dictated by financial, social, or political restraints. The dwindling of crypto-Protestantism, which remained a reality in the South Netherlands for another two generations after Reconciliation, is an important parameter for their successes, but not the only one.40 dominant until the emergence of an “episcopal nobility” framed by merit in the course of the 18th century. In Spain, the majority of mitres still was hauled in by the nobility, but commoners were not at all barred from the episcopal dignity. Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad española, 2, 18. For the situation in Italy, see Greco, La Chiesa in Italia, 29 sqq. 40 Under the Archdukes, the point of gravity in the repression of heresy had shifted definitively to the bishops. De Brouwer, De kerkelijke rechtspraak, 93–118, and Goosens, Les inquisitions, 137–72. Despite the lukewarm support of the secular authorities
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In order to measure the distance between le préscrit and le vécu, historians have dedicated a lot of attention to Catholic reform on the field. This implied a reconstruction of the circumstances in which a diocesan infrastructure emerged in the centre and on the periphery of the dioceses.41 Trent being a text written by and for bishops in the first place, it offered many suitable instruments to organise and coordinate a Catholic offensive at all levels.42 Beyond the level of the dioceses, provincial councils of the archbishops and their respective suffragan bishops figure in many scholarly works as crucibles in the re-Catholisation of the South Netherlands until 1607, when the last assembly of this type was celebrated in Mechlin.43 The Third Council of Mechlin (1607) and the Second Council of Cambrai (1586) attracted the due attention of historians because they provided, among other things, a framework for the erection of diocesan seminaries (Mechlin) and a provincial college at the University of Douai (Cambrai) dedicated to the training of poor clerics44—and this, several decades before the Tridentine decree Cum Adolescentium Aetas was implemented in most other regions of Catholic Europe. Until the end of the 17th century, however, the diocesan seminaries remained rather modest institutions that did not necessarily host a theologicum, and if they did, it was only organised after 1620.45 The restraints on the bishop’s control over the nomination of decent pastors for his parishes, as well as the opportunities provided
to the execution of the anti-heresy placard of 1609, the bishop of Antwerp felt in the early 1630s that the immediate threat posed by heresy was over. 41 Cf. Put, “Al de mannen van de aartsbisschop,” on the difficult circumstances in which Matthias Hovius managed to mobilise human capital for the good cause. 42 Definitions and frames in Lefebvre and Pacaut, L’Epoque Moderne. 43 The Third Council of Mechlin, which was to be convoked in 1578, was suspended by the civil war and the expulsion of the Catholic clergy by Calvinist city councils. After 1607, these assemblies were replaced by informal episcopal congregations. Cf. De Moreau, Histoire de l’Eglise en Belgique, 5, 293. 44 For Cambrai, see Deregnaucourt, De Fénelon à la révolution; the diocesan seminaries of Mechelen, Ghent, and Bruges are the theme of Roegiers, De oprichting en de beginjaren, Laenen, Geschiedenis van het seminarie van Mechelen, and the diocesan syntheses edited by Cloet. 45 More promising or wealthier students still attended the theological schools of the university, with or without grants financed by their diocesan superiors. The bishop of Ghent, Triest, even abolished his diocesan seminary and sent his students to the university instead. Cf. Roegiers, De Oprichting en de beginjaren, 110–13. On the upgrading of the diocesan seminaries to institutions that had to compete with the theological faculties by the end of the 17th century, read Leplae, Betwistingen rond benoemingen.
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by Trent to enhance his authority, were explored in a recent study on the irritatingly slow introduction of the concursus in the archdiocese of Mechlin.46 This study ties up with an old scholarly tradition in which the benefice system is a sitting target, curtailing, as it did, the bishops’ room to manoeuvre in order to recruit and appoint the diocesan clergy. Generally, however, historians are very appreciative of the successes of the episcopate in the course of the 17th century in the disciplining of an unruly bunch of clerics into spiritual and moral models for the flock. The standard rector of a parish in the 18th century appears more decently formed, better spiritually equipped (and proportionally duller) than his colourful predecessors of the 17th century, the result of a process of “clericalisation of the clergy” into a homogeneous group distinct from the laity in the Siècle des âmes. This was not only the result of better schooling and recruitment. Rectors of parishes were not left to their devices upon their entrance in the vineyard of the Lord. They were assisted and supervised in their tasks—the administration of the sacraments, the foundation and supervision of confraternities in their respective parishes, the teaching of the Catechism, the decoration of the church, and above all the setting of a moral example—by the deacons of Christianity, who from the beginning of the 17th century onwards functioned as the ears and the eyes of the bishop, as the “pivots de la restauration religieuse locale,” and as the spiritual guides of the rectors.47 Historians have at great length scrutinised the impressive source material assembled by the deacons of Christianity during visitations of parishes, a practice that was established early in Belgium.48 It is especially in this area that the influence of Delumeau and Le Bras (the founding father of the sociology of religions), can be detected. The interest in the church practice of the laity resonates in the many studies into the local realities of Catholic reform in the deaneries that, while still involving qualitative analysis, largely draw on quantitative data concerning mass attendance, attendance at dominical schools, and the observance of directives of the Church. The results of this research have not only informed the syntheses on the history of the
46 Cf. Quaghebeur, “Le concours diocésain,” and the more elaborate version of this article in idem, De concursus in het aartsbisdom Mechelen. 47 Pasture, La restauration religieuse, 122–23 and 204. 48 An inventory of sources and a complete bibliography in Cloet, Repertorium van dekanale visitatieverslagen.
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respective dioceses;49 they have also allowed detection of the different rhythms in the christianisation of, respectively, cities and countryside. In rural areas, phenomena linked with Catholic reform—disciplining of the clergy, dominical schools, confraternities, regular Sunday masses—could only be observed two decades or more after they had been introduced in the cities, that is, from the beginning of the Twelve Year’s Truce (1609–21) onwards.50 More recently, Le Bras’ sociological approach was also applied to studies into clerical populations inspired by international, mostly French, historiography.51 Prosopographical research has shed an interesting light on the largely urban and upper middle-class origins, the formation, and the career patterns of the pastors of the diocese of Ghent in the 17th century. It has revealed the relatively high proportion in 1700 of clerics, secular and regular, in the overall population of the diocese’s cities, as opposed to the situation in the countryside, where the infrastructure furnished by the benefice system was less prolific,52 and compared to the calculations for the archdiocese of Cambrai and for dioceses in France.53 These numbers cannot, of course, be extrapolated to the early 17th century, let alone to the decades preceding the Truce, but the clerical presence in a counter-reformatory bulwark such as Lille was already very substantial in 1600.54
49
Cloet, Het bisdom Brugge and Het bisdom Gent. His volume on the archdiocese of Mechlin is forthcoming. 50 Cf. Marinus, “Une Contre-Réforme à deux vitesses,” alongside other contributions to idem, La Christianisation des campagnes. 51 See, for instance, Tackett, “L’histoire sociale du clergé”; idem, Priest and Parish; Ferté, La vie réligieuse; Deregnaucourt, De Fénélon à la Révolution; Julia, “L’éducation des ecclésiastiques.” An impressive amount of scholarship exists for other countries as well: Sánchez González, “El clero rural”; Lazzaretti, “La figura del curato”; Comerford, “Italian Tridentine Seminars.” Other confessions: Barrie-Curien, “Clerical Recruitment,” and Van Rooden, “Van geestelijke stand naar beroepsgroep.” 52 Cf. Vanden Broecke, Rekrutering en carrièrepatroon. These proportions are higher than in France but correspond well with the data on Spain. The kingdom of Castile boasted one (secular or regular) cleric for every 89 inhabitants in 1591, 63 in 1768, and 73 in 1797. Hermann, L’Eglise d’Espagne, 25. 53 In the cities of Ghent, Oudenaarde, and Dendermonde, the clergy constituted respectively 12 per cent, 21 per cent, and even 23 per cent of the active population, while numbers in the countryside seldomly exceeded c.1 per cent (of the overall population). Vanden Broecke, Rekrutering en carrièrepatroon, 29–30. The high level of urbanisation in the core-area of the Southern Netherlands (Flanders and Brabant) should, of course, be taken into account. Compare with the 1 ecclesiastic for 60 to 74 inhabitants in the less urbanised archdiocese of Cambrai by 1716 (cities and countryside); which corresponds with the triplicate of 1 ecclesiastic for 215 inhabitants in France. Deregnaucourt, De Fénélon à la révolution, 62. 54 Lottin estimates that c.350 secular clerics lived in Lille in 1600 alongside 400
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Other groups that are considered more peripheral to Catholic reform remain underrepresented in scholarship. The deafening silence in recent literature on the rich world of the collegiate chapters in the early modern period is striking. Compared to “la France des 600 chapitres” and the 120 collegiate and 60 cathedral chapters in Spain,55 the Habsburg Netherlands and the neighbouring prince-bishopric of Liège proved to be a particularly fertile soil for canons, hosting respectively 78 and c.40 collegiate chapters, alongside the 12 cathedral chapters of the ecclesiastical provinces of Cambrai and Mechlin and the prestigious chapter attached to the cathedral of Saint-Lambert of Liège, the largest body of its kind in the Holy Roman Empire.56 L’on se prend à rêver devant cette plethora de chanoines et de bénéficiers alors qu’au début du XVIIe siècle, les évêchés des Pays-Bas souffraient, durement, du manqué de prêtres: on peut être étonné, à juste titre, que l’on n’ait pas songé, en ce moment, à supprimer les chapitres collégiaux pour utiliser les chanoines et les chapelains dans le ministère paroissial.57
This assessment sums up nicely why historians agreed, until recently, that religious renewal has to be sought elsewhere: in the daily struggle of bishops, deacons of Christianity, and pastors, to christianise the flock. In this enterprise, the venerable colleges of canons figure quasi exclusively as troublemakers who challenged, with reference to medieval privileges and exemptions, the authority of Tridentine bishops.58 Jedin’s image of a monolithic Tridentine Church of popes, bishops, new religious orders, and parish priests59 was substantially altered from within in another important research area. This has to be situated on the crossroads of Catholic reform, of theology, of the history of education, and last but not least of Church-State relations—another hobby-horse of Belgian Church historians that is deeply rooted in the confessional struggles of the 19th and 20th centuries.60 Alongside Borromean bishops and vigilant priests, Jesuits were, when compared
regulars, out of a population of c.32.000 (1 ecclesiastic for 50 inhabitants). Lottin, Lille, 85 and 117. 55 Loupès, Chapitres et chanoines; Hermann, L’Eglise d’Espagne, 21. 56 A list of the collegiate chapters in Pasture, Les chapitres séculiers, 23–69. 57 Pasture, La réforme des chapitres séculiers, 5. Cf. idem, La restauration réligieuse, 210. See also Put, “Les archiducs et la réforme catholique,” 263, and idem, “Matthias Hovius,” 132–33. 58 Cf. Mols, “De seculiere clerus,” 381–82. 59 Cf. O’Malley, Trent and All That, 69–71. 60 The standard work here is Elias, Kerk en staat.
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with their effectives in the order’s other provinces, indeed omnipresent in the Habsburg Netherlands, where they enjoyed substantial princely support.61 Antwerp was second only to Rome as a Jesuit hub in early modern Europe, and by 1643 the Provincia Flandro-Belgica hosted the densest network of Jesuit houses on the continent.62 In the highly urbanised South Netherlands, the “monastic invasion” of new and old orders in the beginning of the 17th century63 capitalised upon an educational offensive shouldered by princes and staunchly Catholic urban elites who considered education as the answer to the seeds of heresy: ignorance and lack of discipline. In a surprisingly short period, an educational network materialised that was largely dominated by the Jesuits and the Augustinians, and that simultaneously provided the infrastructure for the orders’ impressive pastoral activities.64 The papacy, for its part, was represented by the nunciature of Flanders, which also co-ordinated the missionary activities of Jesuits and secular clerics in the Holland Mission, and which was recently labelled by historians as a “reform nunciature.”65
61 In 1600, only four Jesuit provinces (Castilia, Portugal, Rome, and Toledo) out of 23 counted more members than the Belgian province (UAL, Ghent (not registered), 449). After Poncelet’s dated and rather parochial Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus, the history of the “Jesuit Low Countries” still awaits a thorough reassessment. But the order’s exceptional and unprecedented expansion (Put and Wijnants, Les jésuites) in Belgium speaks for itself: In 1588, the order counted 157 members; in 1600, 482 of them (or c.6 per cent of the c.8500 Jesuits scattered around the globe) manned 16 colleges (UAL, Ghent (not registered), 449). In 1611, the Belgian Province counted 959 Jesuits and was split in 1612 into a Provincia Flandro-Belgica (801 members in 1626) and a Provincia Gallo-Belgica (773 members in 1626), the first of which reached its peak with 867 members in 1643. Labbeke, De recrutering, 198–200, and De Moreau, Histoire de l’Eglise en Belgique, 5, 373. In 1640, the Jesuits had 43 residences in the Belgian provinces. Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus, 415. 62 Cf. Put and Wijnants, Les jésuites, 23. 63 Monographs on Catholic reform in the cities offer telling examples of a monastic tide that, after having been supported by local as well as central elites, gradually met with increasing opposition. See Lottin, Lille, and Marinus, De Contrareformatie te Antwerpen. 64 In the period in between 1585 and 1633, 64 colleges for the humanities were founded, most of them in the period of the Truce when intermediary and smaller towns sought to imitate the educational policies of the big cities. With respect to the total number of colleges, Jesuits took the lead (32), followed by the Augustinians (21), the Recollects (12), the Oratorians (7), and other orders (Dominicans, Premonstratensians, Carmelites). Cf. Leyder, “L’éclosion scolaire.” On the strong position of the Augustinians in Belgium, read Neveu, “Pour une histoire de l’augustinianisme,” 180. 65 Scholarship on the nunciature of Flanders deals with the papal nuncios as protagonists in the history of Jansenism and/or can be situated in historiography on the
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This does not imply, however, that Catholic reform was the enterprise of a unified, solid block after a Jedinian recipe.66 In fact, different models of Catholic reform co-existed, collided with each other, and threatened to undermine the entire Tridentine enterprise. Alongside the backstage stories of fierce competition between Jesuits, Augustinians, other orders and the secular clergy in the field of secondary education,67 the history of Jansenism, which in its early stages was a quasi exclusively Franco-Belgian affair, figures as an anything but edifying case in point in recent Belgian historiography. Ceyssens and his students have gradually uncovered the fields of tensions and the stakes behind the conflicts over divine Grace and Free Will, dogmatic debates that gradually extended to the field of moral theology, pastoral and sacramental practices, and ecclesiology.68 In the Jansenist controversies of the second half of the 17th century, divisions within the Catholic front that had been festering since Trent were brought to the surface.69 Within the classical tradition, this constatation leads inevitably to the question of whether or not Jansenism was an impediment to Catholic reform. Ceyssens’ assessment that anti-Jansenism was anterior to Jansenism, and that Jansenism was not a movement but a phantom created by its opponents,70 has become a commonplace in recent literature, much of which is underpinned by a strong dichotomy between pure religion (or knowledge) and society (or power). The offensive launched by the Jesuits in 1640 against the Augustinus of Cornelius Jansenius, bishop of Ypres, did not address the only question that the historians attending Ceyssens’ school have deemed pertinent: the question relationship between Church and State. A reassessment in Wauters, “Een labiel evenwicht.” The introductions to the editions and regests of the nunciature’s correspondence with the Secretariat of State in the series Analecta Vaticano-Belgica contain a lot of primary data on the Flemish nuncios and, from 1633 onwards, internuncios. A state of the art under the pontificate of Paul V (1605–21) in Boute, “‘Que ceulx de Flandres se disoijent tant Catholicques’.” A framework in Giordano, “Aspetti di politica ecclesiastica e riforma religiosa.” 66 Roegiers, “Jansenisme en katholieke hervorming,” 50. 67 Leyder, “L’Eclosion scolaire,” 1032 sqq. 68 In the 18th century, Jansenism would become an international phenomenon. A crystal-clear anatomy of the different phases in the history of Jansenism in Roegiers, “Van Unigenitus (1713) tot Mirari Vos (1832).” 69 Roegiers, “Jansenisme en katholieke hervorming,” 47. 70 Cf. Ceyssens, “Que penser finalement de l’histoire du Jansénisme et de l’antijansénisme?”
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of whether or not the former Louvain divine had interpreted correctly the Doctor of Grace. The goal of the Jesuit offensive was to discredit Augustinianism itself, and to substitute this age-old Christian tradition and corresponding pastoral models, which accentuated the importance of divine Grace for salvation, by Molinism, a more optimistic Christian anthropology that focused on Free Will and that had only narrowly escaped, due to political circumstances, condemnation in the Roman congregations de auxiliis divinae gratiae (1598–1607).71 Jesuit agitation against competing theological schools gained momentum when it was recuperated by curialists seeking to stage the Supreme Pontiffs as the ultimate initiators of religious renewal standing above the Council of Trent and the bishops. In contrast, proto- and early Jansenism has been connoted by French and Belgian historians with the development of a théologie de l’épiscopat, heralded by Trent and embodied by the (Belgian) episcopate in the first half of the 17th century.72 This ecclesiological tradition ascribed a central role in Church reform to the Borromean bishop, with the Apostolic See of Rome figuring as a primus inter pares, nothing less, but nothing more. Because of the opposition of (a minority of ) Belgian bishops against the first Roman condemnations, and because the soi-disant jansénistes tried to involve the secular authorities,73 “Jansenism” eventually became a versatile cover behind which to pick fresh fights over the implications of papal primacy or to renegotiate the feeble boundaries between Church and State in the Low Countries, in France, and, from the 18th century onwards, in other areas of Catholic Europe. These premises allow for an unequivocal answer to the inevitable question of whether “Jansenism” was an impediment to religious renewal or, in the opposite case, whether Roman interventions and Jesuit mobilisation had jeopardised Catholic reform.74 This problem has been tackled by the contrasting of the remarkable successes on the field ascribed to the Belgian episcopate, and the reportedly poor Tridentine record of a papacy that placed itself above the Council’s 71
The basics in Stella, “Augustinisme et orthodoxie,” 170–72. See p. 375–90. This attempt to make Jansenists or their predecessors toe the bishops’ line is not evident. “Dans leur très grande majorité, les évêques des Pays-Bas catholiques furent antijansénistes . . . la pluspart s’inscrivaient résolument dans la stratégie et l’ecclésiologie romaines et hispano-tridentines dont les jésuites étaient les plus actifs soutiens.” Deregnaucourt, “Diocèses et évêques,” 239. 73 More on this in Willaert, “Le placet royal.” 74 This is the central question addressed in Roegiers, “Jansenisme en katholieke hervorming.” 72
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sacrosanct decrees, an image that matches Paolo Prodi’s Machiavellian picture of papal centralisation in Central Italy.75 The nepotism and the political interests of a “baroque” papacy from the late 16th century onwards, the topos of the court (of Rome) as a locus of luxury and power that inevitably was hostile to religious interests,76 the anything but unconditional support of the Apostolic See to bishops trying to reform collegiate chapters or its refusal to shoulder them in their battle against the regular orders, the missionary activities of which escaped the bishops’ control77—all this feeds the conclusion that Jansenism was a highly fluid denominator for “post-tridentine reform movements within the Catholic Church that considered the implementation of the Council of Trent as a starting point for Catholic Reform rather than as its end,”78 but that were thwarted by Jesuit intrigues, Roman lust for power, and the political interests of ruling classes.79 Ceyssens and his students have convincingly exposed the rawness and the brutal force of 17th-century anti-Jansenist agitation,80 which, seen from their perspective, discredited typically Northern, more internalised forms of religious life and favoured the introduction of a Catholicism of a Mediterranean, Jesuit bent.81 But whether one takes into consideration the shadiness that accompanies the human condition in the history of anti-Jansenism and Jansenism, or explores instead the successes over omnipresent heretics in North and South, the actions undertaken by zealous bishops and vigilant pastors, the accentuated application of Tridentine decrees, the highly visible piety of the Habsburg princes, the spectacular monastic revival and the activities of new religious orders, the baroque piety of the populace—all this
75 Prodi’s sovrano pontefice risks being read as a scientific elaboration of Paolo Sarpi’s thesis, that reform had stalled at the curia, and that therefore the papacy was unable to lead reform movements elsewhere in Europe. A more inclusive assessment of the religious policy of the Holy See in Wright, The Early Modern Papacy. 76 “Cesare Mozzarelli . . . did much to rescue the court as an interpretative concept for use by religious historians from the tendency to identify it (at best) as merely ceremonial and cultural or (at worst) with irrationality, waste and luxury.” Ditchfield, “In Search of Local Knowledge,” 267. 77 These have been touched upon mostly in monographs that focus on the activities of one bishop or on Catholic reform on the field. For instance, Lottin, Lille; Marinus, De Contrareformatie te Antwerpen; Thijs, Van geuzenstad tot katholiek bolwerk. 78 Quaghebeur, De concursus in het aartsbisdom Mechelen, 76. 79 Roegiers, “Jansenisme en katholieke hervorming,” 61. Cf. Lamberigts, “Het jansenisme als poging tot katholieke hervorming.” For “Mediterranean Catholicism,” see Lottin, Lille, 315. 80 Cf. the evaluation by Wicks, “Doctrine and Theology,” 244. 81 For this contemporary distinction, see Hurtubise, “Jansénisme ou Jansénismes.”
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contributed to the coherent image of a revitalised Church in which historians of the classical tradition could and can mirror themselves. 1.1.2. The pillar of Belgium: Academic interests and Catholic reform It is in this context that a fair share of recent scholarship on the old University of Louvain, and more specifically the historiography concerning its theological faculty, has to be situated. Before his promotion to the episcopal see of Ypres in 1636, Cornelius Jansenius, the involuntary father of Jansenism, had completed a promising career at the Brabant university as Regius Professor of Scripture and a regent of the Theological Faculty.82 It is not surprising to learn, then, that the Roman congregation of the Holy Office compiled, from the early 1640s onwards, dozens of volumes on the doctrine professed by the Louvain divines.83 “C’est à Louvain que naquit et se développa, avant de se répandre à travers l’Europe entière, le conflit du jansénisme et de l’antijansénisme.”84 As a consequence, the history of Jansenism has largely been informed (or deformed) by scholarship on the Louvain Faculty of Theology.85 In analogy to the general outlines of the history of Jansenism, historians have good reasons to situate the antecedents of Louvain’s involvement in the previous decades. The attack of the Jesuits on the Augustinus is readily associated with the recurrent clashes in the archducal period between the university and the Society. The Louvain college was the town’s only religious house never to be incorporated into the university.86 The exclusion of the Jesuits from the public educational field in Louvain, in the centre of their most flourishing province beyond the Alps, was unique in Europe. Yet, Jansenius’ bickering with the Scholastics of the Society of Jesus was also about method, and it should be situated in the evolving ways
82
Biographical data in Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius. No other university figures that prominently in the inventories of the holdings of the archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Boute, “Undigested Past,” 271–76. 84 Ceyssens, “Les débuts,” 369. 85 “Le dossier doit être reconsidéré attentivement en prenant la juste mesure du jansénisme lors des querelles les plus décisives et celle de l’attitude des prélats en exercice, mesures trop souvent prises au travers de polémiques qui ne concernaient que des sphères assez étroites et des querelles universitaires, tant à Douai qu’à Louvain, qui constituent autant de prismes déformants.” Deregnaucourt, “Diocèses et évêques,” 239. 86 A recent synthesis in Quaghebeur, “l’écho européen.” 83
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in which the Louvain theologians perceived themselves and their craft in the 16th century.87 Historians tend to contrast the university’s international radiation in the 16th century with its mediocre antecedents in the 15th century. Founded in 1425, in the context of the second wave of university foundations in the Empire, the young studium generale had all the characteristics of a Magisteruniversität after the Parisian model, borrowing its institutional framework from its older sister institutions at Cologne, Vienna, and Leipzig.88 Its institutional morphology was completed in 1432, when Pope Eugenius IV gave his fiat for the organisation of a Faculty of Divinity. During the centuries to come, Louvain would remain a typical five-faculty university consisting of one faculty whose function would become more and more propaedeutic—the Venerable Faculty of Arts—together with the four higher faculties of Theology, Canon Law, Civil Law, and Medicine.89 The Faculty of Arts was the only one to develop in a way similar to the Oxford model, its role being reduced to the organisation of central examinations and graduation ceremonies for students who had been trained and housed at the faculty’s four pedagogies. The young institution, located in the most densely populated and urbanised area of Europe, quickly eclipsed the neighbouring University of Cologne and became one of the biggest universities in the Empire. But horizons widened considerably in the first decades of the 16th century, when the Brabant university became a hub of humanist learning that was a host to Erasmus and his brainchild, the Collegium Trilingue.90 Student attendance reached its highest levels in the history of the Old University. Erasmus euphorically suggested that 3,000 of them roamed the Louvain streets and auditories. In the first half of the 16th century, the Brabant university was second only to Paris and the Italian universities as an attraction pole for foreign students.91 87 Read the highly instructive article by Guelluy, “L’évolution des méthodes théologiques.” 88 As opposed to the “student universities” in Italy. On the foundation bull of Pope Martin V, read Van Mingroot, Sapientiae Immarcessibilis. On the local initiatives, cf. Nelissen, De stichtingsbul. 89 On the morphology of medieval universities, read Gieysztor, “Management and Resources.” 90 On the Collegium Trilingue, read De Jongh, History of the Foundation. 91 Details in Van Buyten, “De Leuvense universiteitsmatrikels.” Numbers of foreign students at Louvain, which in the period between 1527 and 1569 totalled 8.4 per cent (from 4.5 per cent in the previous decades), in De Ridder-Symoens, “Internationalismus versus Nationalismus,” 398. See also Dumoulin and Duchene, “Europeanisme.”
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Several other eye-catching events are signalled by historians to account for this internationalisation. The university’s overlord, Archduke Charles of Austria, took possession of his Spanish kingdoms in the very year that the Collegium Trilingue was founded. He dragged along a wide range of high officials and humanists from the Netherlands who often entertained excellent contacts with the academics at Louvain.92 Christianity would not only be headed by its protector Charles V, the successor to the Roman emperors of yore, but also by another acquaintance of the academics, Hadrian of Utrecht, a former Louvain divine who, after a booming career in the service of the emperor, was elevated to the chair of Saint Peter in 1522.93 The many lettered men who, in the wake of the papa Fiammingo, rushed to Rome in order to serve their pontiff and their clienteles in the North joined the university’s networks in the Eternal City. The Supreme Pontiff himself generously confirmed the new but heavily contested nomination privileges of his former colleagues at Louvain,94 privileges which Erasmus himself had advocated a few years before in a letter to Pope Leo X with reference to the orthodoxy of the university.95 Indeed, a few years before the Louvain Faculty of Theology, in tandem with its Cologne counterpart, had covered itself with the glory of being the first institution of Christianity to condemn the theses of Martin Luther.96 Humanism, heresy and doctrine, universal monarchy, and papal privileges that were under threat lured academics at Louvain continuously into a universalistic field of action from the early 1500s onwards. The “Catholic cause” merged with the policies of the Habsburg overlords of the Netherlands, Charles V and Philip II.97 The Habsburgs’ vivid interest in their fille bien amez has attracted a lot of attention in scholarship, translated as it was, among others, into the endowment of four new chairs in theology, three in law, and one in medicine.98 In the Faculty of Theology, the installation of royal chairs for 92 On the cultural and economic circuits of the Flemish diaspora in the 16th and 17th centuries, read Stols, De Spaanse Brabanders, Brulez, Marchands flamands à Venise, and Baetens, De nazomer van Antwerpens welvaart. 93 More on the circumstances in which Hadrian was elected in Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 35. 94 Cf. Boute, “Humanists in the Corridors of Power.” 95 Ed. Allen, Opus Epistolarum, 5, 527, cited in Boute, “Humanists in the Corridors of Power,” 9. 96 See De Jongh, L’ancienne Faculté de Théologie, 148–268, and Blockx, De veroordeling van Maarten Luther. 97 Cf. Frijhoff, “Universiteit en religie.” 98 Roegiers, “Was de oude universiteit Leuven een rijksuniversiteit?” 550.
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Scripture,99 Lombard’s Sententiae, Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, and the Catechism did not merely complete the 15th-century infrastructure and make Louvain, in numerical terms, the best-staffed university of the Empire;100 it also turned the old study programme upside down, adjusted it to its confessionalising environment, and drew a clear line between those who taught and those who did not, while renegotiating the hierarchies within the faculty’s teaching staff as well. The faculty’s five ordinary professors continued to comment on the books of Scripture or a treatise of their choice, each during six weeks of the year,101 but after 1560 the role of the bachelors, who until then had been charged with the lion’s share of lecturing as a part of their training, was reduced to rigidly orchestrated performances in the traditional disputationes under the strict supervision of their masters. The latter’s corporative visibility was enhanced by the introduction of oral examinations by the faculty’s commission as a requirement for graduation, alongside the traditional presentation of hopefuls by their respective masters, the regents of the faculty. Teaching had become the monopoly of a handful of professors whose orthodoxy was, in the eyes of the circuits of power in Brussels, more guaranteed; an assessment that was not challenged by the academics—if they had not suggested it themselves. Except for the Professor of Catechism, the professores regii or extraordinarii (in the period under investigation: the archducal professors) would teach daily, thus carrying most of the faculty’s renewed study programme on their shoulders.102 This evolution culminated in the Visitatio of 1617, which stipulated that regular attendance at the three archducal lectures was a prerequisite for students aspiring to degrees in Divinity.103 Guelluy has convincingly argued in the early 1940s that this evolution reflected the way in which the Louvain theologians had redefined
99 Trent’s Sessio V of 16 June 1546 did not extend its stipulations on the organisation of teaching of Scripture to universities (Laplanche, “L’enseignement de l’Ecriture Sainte,” 372), but Louvain’s chair of Scripture was installed in the same year. 100 Compare Kaufman, Universität und Lutherische Konfessionalisierung. 101 On the medieval study programme, read De Jongh, L’ancienne Faculté de Théologie, 72. 102 Guelluy, “L’évolution des méthodes théologiques,” 47. This argument had already been very successful in the attempts of the Louvain academics to block the foundation of a university in Tournai in the 1520s. See Boute, “Uitspraak van de Grote Raad.” 103 The ordinary chairs, and the content of the materials to be taught, were not even mentioned. OPB, 330–331. Already by the end of the 16th century, exam questions were statutorily drawn from the Summa and Scripture. Guelluy, “L’évolution des méthodes théologiques,” 47.
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their tasks in the universal Christianitas in the course of the heroic 16th century. Louvain controversialists such as Latomus, Driedo, and Tapper104 argued, in an answer to the humanist challenge, that Scripture was not to be approached with philological methods in the first place, as the language in which it was written did not, from their point of view, affect its doctrinal content. Its intrinsic message had to be clarified by the theology of the schools with the help of methods developed in the course of the previous centuries—that is, the scholastic heritage. Hence the importance theologians attached to a propaedeutic philosophical formation focusing on Aristotelian logic and physics, a cognitive integration which was reinforced by the flow of human resources from the teaching staff of the Arts faculty to the Sacra Facultas, especially from the 16th century onwards.105 Against the Protestant battlecry Sola Scriptura, they held that, in order to grasp the significance of Scripture, one had to be pious, and piety implied accepting the guidance of the infallible Church.106 In order to defend one of the auctoritates theologicae constituting the infallible apostolic Church of Rome, the Louvain controversialists became avid readers of the Fathers. The rediscovery of Christian antiquity by humanists, and its recuperation by the Protestants who tried to mine the assertions of the Roman pontiffs with the help of a primitivist philosophy of history, forced Catholic apologetics to reclaim their heritage. Generally speaking, controversialists tended to set the authority of the Fathers (who had to provide for continuity between the contemporary Church and its apostolic predecessor) and Scripture (which was believed to furnish sound proof for Peter’s primacy) on virtually the same level.107 The Louvain attitude towards the Fathers in general and the appropriation of Saint Augustine by the Lutherans in particular108 merits particular attention.109 Many controversialists developed a dual strategy towards the bishop of Hippo, first stating that “Augustinus
104 On their theology, especially in relation to Augustinism, see the contributions of Vercruysse, “Die Stellung Augustins,” Gielis, “L’augustinisme anti-érasmien,” and Schrama, “Ruard Tapper”. 105 Roegiers, “Professorencarrières,” and De Jongh, L’ancienne Faculté de Théologie. 106 Guelluy, “L’évolution des méthodes théologiques,” 62; on the notion of “pietas,” see Reinhard, “Papa Pius.” 107 Keen, “The Fathers in the Counter-Reformation,” 712. 108 The anti-Pelagian Augustine, not the “historical” Augustine. Leland Saak, “The Reception of Augustine in the later Middle Ages,” 368. 109 “If one had to name a single indisputable point of agreement in the diverse uses and explorations given to the Church Fathers by the theologians of the Roman obedience in the 17th century, that would certainly be the conviction that they were by
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solus” did not monopolise Christian tradition, and putting this into practice; and second, upholding a reference policy that highlighted the other Greek and Latin Fathers.110 At Louvain, however, Augustine was the common ground of the diverging theological constructions developed by the controversialists, who applied Scholastic methods to their reading of the Fathers and Scripture in order to confront the heretics, and their epigones in the later 16th and the early 17th century, who did not necessarily do so.111 Alongside the theology of the schools, marked by a high degree of abstraction and systematisation, positive theology evolved in the later 16th century into a science as well and developed a more psychological, interpretative approach to Scripture and the Fathers that aimed at engineering an authentic and concrete spirituality and religiosity. In the case of Michael Baius, Regius Professor of Scripture, president of the Pope’s College founded by Hadrian VI, and inquisitor-general of the Netherlands, this concern entailed the developing of a Christian anthropology that explored the modalities of conversion and of the working of divine Grace. His exercise in religious psychology drawing on Saint Augustine escalated, in the views of his colleagues at Louvain and in Spain, into a rejection of the scholastic heritage, which eventually led to the condemnation by Rome of 63 theses ascribed to Baius.112 This did not imply, however, that “positive theology,” as Driedo and Latomus had defined it, was stigmatised,113 nor was the humanistic heritage, institutionalised in the Collegium Trilingue from 1517 onwards, repudiated as such. As a matter of fact, the methods of text edition developed by the humanists would become powerful devices to advance the cause of their main point of reference, Augustine. The Louvain edition of Augustine’s Opera Omnia of 1577 was the result of teamwork to which several professors (some of whom had actively backed Baius’ condemnation a few years before) and dozens of students had contributed. The Louvain edition would remain the most authoritative edition of
right the fathers’ champions and heirs against the heretics who scorned them.” Quantin, “The Fathers in xviith Century Roman Catholic Theology,” 951. 110 On the Jesuits as avid readers of the Church Fathers, cf. Bertrand, “The Society of Jesus and the Church Fathers.” On the link between Greek patristics and Molinism, cf. the comment by Quantin, “The Fathers in xviith Century Roman Catholic Theology,” 975. 111 Guelluy, “L’évolution des méthodes théologiques,” 126. 112 An up to date bibliography on Baius in Soen, Geen pardon zonder paus. 113 See Delville, “Jansénius de Gand.”
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Saint Augustine in the Catholic world before the appearance of the Maurists on the scene.114 Scholastic theology, which as a body of doctrine offered the advantage of a systematisation of Catholic orthodoxy and as a dialectic and deductive method could be instrumentalised in controversies with the heretics, continued to occupy the lion’s share of an aspiring divine’s study programme, the more so after the conversion of the royal chair of the Sententiae into a second one of the Summa in the middle of the 1590s, but the science of the doctor angelicus was, in return, informed by the new theologia positiva exposing the wisdom of the Doctor of Grace.115 A more practical orientation of Thomism was sanctioned in the Visitatio of 1617, a comprehensive normative text of academic life, which stipulated that sterile speculation had to be avoided in the courses and that students should be equipped for the refutation of the heretics and for their labour in the vineyard of the Lord.116 Augustinianism and Thomism would indeed remain the obligatory passage points in the domestic doctrine of the Louvain theological faculty for centuries to come,117 an alliance that was visualised, by the end of the 18th century, in the faculty’s chapel by an altarpiece that represents the bishop of Hippo interpreting the Scripture while the doctor angelicus comments on this reading. In 1586, the faculty would stress once more its Augustino-Thomistic engagement when drafting the so-called doctrina Lovaniensis, a declaration of doctrine that would offer a reference frame for the next two centuries.118 This link was often fortified by the co-optation of one or two friars of the Dominican and/ or the Augustinian order, mostly the regents of the respective convents in Louvain, among the eight regents of the faculty—which does not 114
Cf. Ceyssens, “ Le ‘Saint Augustin’ du 17e siècle.” Quantin, “The Fathers in xviith Century Roman Catholic Theology,” 968. In the second decade of the 17th century, the syllabi produced by Joannes Wiggers, Regius Professor in Thomism from 1614 onwards, were informed by a deep concern about morality and pastoral practice that relegated the Aquinate’s intellectual approach to the background. Marcus-Leus, Joannes Wiggers Diestensis, 109. Cf. the strict division and juxtaposition both in function and method of scholastic and positive theology in Wigger’s work, Guelluy, “L’évolution des méthodes théologiques,” 110–11. 116 See p. 431–486. 117 “A Louvain, l’augustinisme énergiquement défendu par la fameuse Censura Lovaniensis prononcée contre Lessius en 1587, imprégna tout l’enseignement dispensé à la faculté de Théologie au XVIIe siècle.” Neveu, “Pour une histoire de l’augustinisme,” 177. “A desire to return to the Fathers ignoring the Scholastics, who were now regarded with suspicion, came to be affirmed especially in France and in the Spanish Netherlands.” Quantin, “The Fathers in xviith Century Roman Catholic Theology,” 955. 118 Roegiers, “Leuven en Rome,” 68. 115
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imply, however, that friars were allowed to teach, at least not in the capacity of official faculty professors.119 As elsewhere in the Empire, regular clerics had to clear more and more of the field for their secular counterparts in the later Middle Ages. In contrast to the evolution in all German and many other European universities, however, the secular clergy at the University of Louvain did not have to clear in turn the field for the Jesuits after the second half of the 16th century.120 Until the 1580s, the relationship with the Jesuit college, founded in 1542 as one of the first institutions of the minima societas in Northern Europe, had been good; the Jesuits had benefitted from the support of Louvain academics (including Baius, who became an icon of antiJesuitism afterwards) in the admission procedures before the States of Brabant.121 Bellarmino, a convinced Augustinianist, would establish during his seven-year stay in the Brabant city durable contacts with the Louvain secular clerics, and he may even have taught publicly with the faculty’s approval.122 Many of Louvain’s 16th-century theologians—Tapper, Driedo, Latomus, Molanus, Lensaeus, and Stapleton, to name a few—would deeply influence Jesuit theology and political thought all over the globe.123 The Louvain recipes worked, judging by the impressive performance of the divines. The secular clerics of the Sacra Facultas became the face of the university in the course of the 16th century. They performed as imperial (or papal?) inquisitors in the Netherlands,124 drew up, on the demand of Charles V, a list of the articles of faith as well as several indexes that would inform the first Roman Index in the 1560s,125 were active in the various phases of the Council of Trent,126 promoted the
119 This evolution can already be observed in the beginning of the 16th century. In the 15th century, several regulars (including, alongside Augustinians and Dominicans, Carmelites, Franciscans and Carthusians) constituted c.35 per cent of the teachers coming and going in between 1425 and 1525. Hamers, Het professorenkorps, 28; see also De Jongh, L’ancienne Faculté de Théologie. 120 See Krammer, Bildungswesen; Hengst, Jesuiten an Universitäten; a status questionis in Müller, “The Jesuitenssystem.” 121 Ceyssens, “Bellarmin et Louvain,” 182. 122 Biersack, “Bellarmin und die ‘Causa Baii’,” 169. 123 Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 120–21. 124 On this “Netherlandish” inquisition, see Goosens, Les inquisitions. 125 Cf. Martinez De Bujanda, Index de l’université de Louvain. See also Van Eijl, “Louvain’s Faculty of Theology,” and Fühner, Die Kirchen- und die antireformatorische Religionspolitik, 303–12. 126 Some data in De Ram, Mémoire.
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publication of its decrees.127 They assisted Arias Montano in the edition of his famous polyglot Bible, a project under the high protection of Philip II, whose patronage the academics avidly sought—and got.128 In the course of the 1570s, Philip sanctioned the Louvain allegation that an academic formation (under the guidance of secular clerics) was the most apt preparation for zealous, Tridentine pastors by founding King’s College, also designated as the seminarium bonorum pastorum. Their ability to interest their environment for the services they claimed to provide confirmed the Louvain theologians in their beliefs and, more precisely, in the conviction that they had a hold on Truth. Ses statuts nous la montrent consciente de sa dignité, jalouse de ses privilèges . . . un coup d’oeil sur l’organisation de l’une des corporations universitaires qui détenaient, à la fin du moyen âge, le monopole de la pensée catholique, aide à comprendre que les théologiens du xvie siècle aient parfois pu croire qu’ils avaient sur la vérité des “droits de propriétaire.”129
Meanwhile, and in close correspondence with this warm relation between the prince and “his university,” academics in Louvain seem to have strengthened, sometime in the course of the 16th century, their ties with the rising nobility of state in the princely councils, graduated robins, who were supposed to be more appreciative of the academic profession than of the old nobility of the sword. This link, as well as the high profile of the Louvain Faculty of Theology, strengthened the image of the university as seminarium ecclesiae et reipublicae, a notion which would remain central to the framing of academic interests later as well. The matter calls for further investigation, but this accommodation of interests between the power elites and academic circuits in Louvain in the course of the 16th century provided university men with ample tools to put forward their views on the management of the realm and of the sacred. For our purposes, the role of academic circuits in the diocesan reforms of 1559–61 is particularly interesting. Indeed, through their contacts with the Privy Council, Louvain academics managed in the 1550s to translate their view on the Church as a church for poor, pious, and learned men into a project for diocesan reform that served the interests of the prince and Catholic religion, and they actively intervened to design the new Belgian church accor-
127 More on this in Willocx, L’introduction. The academics’ attitude to Trent was more ambiguous, for various reasons (cf. p. 168). 128 See Lanoye, “Benito Arias Montano and the University of Louvain.” 129 Guelluy, “L’Evolution des méthodes théologiques,” 35.
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dingly. In an area where university graduates encountered few institutional obstacles in the hunt for benefices, the academics managed to draw the episcopal sees of the Netherlands, formerly the reserve of the high nobility, into their sights as well.130 Simultaneously, nine canonships were reserved in every cathedral chapter for graduated clerics who were to perform as the closest collaborators (and guardians of truth in their quality of episcopal inquisitors and book censors) of the new Tridentine bishops.131 That this Church was designed not only by themselves but also for themselves is illustrated by the fact that one-third of the freshly appointed bishops after 1559 previously had occupied a chair at Louvain and often had combined teaching with activities as inquisitor.132 Limits were imposed on the Louvain ambitions, however. The attempts of Ruardus Tapper, professor in theology c.1550, to transfer the management of the prince’s pool of benefices—the equivalent of the feuille des bénéfices in France—from the councils in Brussels to the Faculty of Theology in Louvain, in order to guarantee (and redefine) the moral and scientific quality of the appointed pastors, failed.133 Second, the initial plan to install the see of one of the two or three ecclesiastical provinces in Louvain itself, and consequently to merge academic and archdiocesan circuits, had to be abandoned as well, when the choice eventually fell on Mechlin.134 Last but not least, the same spirit of Catholic reform which had benefited the academics in Louvain for decades annihilated one of their major claims, the claim to a monopoly on the dispensing of higher education and academic degrees in the Netherlands. In 1559, not only was Super Universas eventually sealed in the papal chancery in Rome but also a new university was founded, after the Louvain model, in the Flemish and Francophone city of Douai,135 and this in spite of fierce opposition from the old Brabant Alma Mater—or, rather, from a few central figures in the Louvain market of academic patronage: many graduates from Louvain could now make, without these circuits, an academic career in the new university and probably were not inclined to complain. From then onwards, Louvainists would have to share their 130
Cf. Postma, “Nieuw licht op een oude zaak.” Dierickx, De oprichting der nieuwe bisdommen, 97. 132 Passchyn, Het episkopaat, 116–17. 133 Only the roll of benefices charged with pastoral care was concerned, which was split of from the general rôle des bénéfices. Van Peteghem, “Les rôles des bénéfices.” 134 Postma, “Nieuw licht op een oude zaak.” 135 On Douai, read Dehon, L’université de Douai dans la tourmente. 131
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claims with their competitors in Flanders. The secular clerics at the faculties of Arts and theology in the Flemish university shared a lot of views with their colleagues in Brabant, by whom they had, at least initially, often been educated and whose adherence to the AugustinoThomistic tradition they embraced. Douaisiens were consequently susceptible of defining their interests in the same way, which enhanced competition and co-operation alike. In the first quarter of the 17th century, academics at Louvain did not forget to stress in their memorandums sent to Brussels that the fate of the university was inextricably linked to the dynasty’s and that of Catholic religion—and vice versa. The crisis of the dynasty in the Netherlands engendered the deepest crisis in the history of the Old University of Louvain, the nadir of which should be situated in between 1579 and 1585, because of the civil war, the resulting devastation of the university’s hinterland resources, the plague, and, according to the learned men themselves, above all because of the university’s and the city’s unremittingly loyalist stance.136 The academics’ attempts to become a symbol of resistance against the heretic rebels (and thus a test-case for the dynasty’s patronage) were, with the benefit of hindsight, successful. The Habsburgs and the power elites of the Netherlands quickly involved the institutions of higher learning in their policy as soon as a relative pacification of the South Netherlands created a favourable environment to do so. Thanks to this exchange, the academics in Louvain (and Dole and Douai) managed to maintain their monopoly on higher education and on the dispensing of academic degrees, thus limiting the diversification and proliferation of higher education observed elsewhere.137 Louvain could continue to claim the role of the only bulwark of orthodoxy and the supplier of the region’s clerical elite. Princes and popes would continue to see to the observation of its cherished privileges, after the example set by Pope Gregory XIII and Philip II back in 1573. 136
A survey in Lanoye and Vandermeersch, “The University of Louvain.” By contrast, universities in North were founded by the Provincial States and, as a consequence, faced considerable competition from other institutions. Cf. Sluijter, Tot cieraet. The many colleges that were founded in the first decades of the 17th century posed no threat, as those which were erected with academic purposes were forcibly located in the two university cities and its personnel was integrated into academic circuits. Contrary to the situation in France the distinction between diocesan seminaries and the Faculty’s public auditories was not blurred. In France, Jesuit competition and, in the 18th century, diocesan seminaries turned most of the regional theological faculties into mere dispensors of academic degrees. Cf. Julia and Revel, Les universités européennes, 192–197. 137
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250
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100
50
STBBibl.
1620
1617
1614
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1602
1599
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0
Lic.Art.
Fig. 1.1. Patterns of attendance: graduation lists Arts and Theology 1572/85–1619/20
Fig. 1.1 lists the numbers of students graduating as Licenciati Artium after two years of training in Logic and Physics in the faculty’s pedagogies; and those obtaining the degree of Sacre Theologie Baccalaureus Biblicus after three to four years of studies in Divinity.138 Estimating overall numbers of attendance remains a highly speculative enterprise. However, graduation numbers in Theology as much as those in the Arts do correspond with total collapse and revival of academic life from the 1580s to the 1620s.139
138 About 70 per cent of the Biblici obtained the degree of Baccalaureus Formatus after the so-called “quinquiennium.” Only a small minority aspired to the Licentia or the Doctorate. 139 Promotion lists in Acta Facultatis Artium, RAL, OUL, 713–715 and Catalogus (. . .), RAL, OUL, 505. Estimating attendance in absolute numbers with the help of graduation lists is, in the absence of immatriculation registers for the period under investigation, a slippery enterprise because at least half of the students did not bother taking degrees: in 1597, the proportion of Licentiati Artium against the overall student population attending the pedagogies was 1:7 (based on Jesuit statistics; cf. p. 140); a yearly harvest of three or four dozen bachelors in divinity approximately
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This brings us back to our point of departure. Academics at Louvain had good reasons to consider themselves as the vanguard of Tridentine Catholic reform. Nonetheless, they stuck to the corporate organisation of their university, a privileged body that escaped episcopal control and that, as a consequence, does not fit well in the Tridentine picture. Medieval privileges of jurisdiction and, above all, the privileges of nomination for ecclesiastical benefices curbed the room for manoeuvre of the archbishop of Mechlin and the other bishops of the Habsburg Netherlands to recruit, to discipline, and to reform the clergy of their dioceses. From the point of view of the classical position in Church history, any book on the privileges of nomination wielded by the University of Louvain and the Faculty of Arts should consequently explore this contradiction between Tridentine zeal and a “stubborn” attachment to medieval privileges.140 Within the classical position, an in-depth investigation into the privileges of nomination should, first, apply the insights of Le Bras, by involving prosopographical research into academic benefice-holders that allow for a comparison with overall patterns that can be discovered in clerical populations. Second, this comparison should lead to a nuanced answer to the question of whether or not the privileges of nomination were instrumental, or an obstacle, to Catholic reform in general and the care of souls in particular. The privileges of nomination may have improved the quality of pastoral care by the end of the 15th century and in the 16th, when no other decent centres of formation for the pastoral clergy were around;141 they should be granted the benefit of the doubt at the beginning of the 17th century, when a dire need for spiritually and intellectually equipped shepherds induced the bishop of Antwerp to call for an amendment of the university’s privileges forcing academic nominees to apply for rectorships instead of canonships or altars.142 But gradually the abuses committed by represented a population of 300 to 400 students pursuing the “septennium,” the sevenyear study programme offered by the Sacra Facultas. 140 This approach resonates, for instance, in the outrage that “il est frappant de voir comment ces institutions tinrent, surtout pendant le 18e siècle, à leurs privilèges.” Quaghebeur, “Le concours diocésain,” 888. 141 Cf. Leplae, Betwistingen rond benoemingen, 41–42. 142 “Non foret forte inconsultum privilegium nominationis . . . pro tempore aliquo quoad prebendas suspendere (etsi non respectu professorum), isto enim privilegio contra bonum publicum iamdiu abutuntur . . . pauci ad pastoratus potissimum rurales se applicant, quod tum facerent, cum ita ad prebendas aspirare non possent.” Status Dioecesis Antverpiensis, 1608, ASV, Congreg. Concil., Relat. Dioec., 59A, 49v.
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Louvain nominees, the flawed selection procedures of the academic nomination boards, and the deficiencies of an academic formation for pastoral care would stick out like a sore thumb against meritocratic selection procedures introduced by the episcopal concursus; against the alternatives offered by diocesan seminaries; and, if not against the Council’s not always unequivocal decrees, against the Tridentine spirit itself. If, in the best of worlds, they did not systematically jeopardise Catholic reform, the privileges of nomination had definitely become obsolete in the course of the 17th century and above all in the 18th. Academics are, after all, no match for a Borromean episcopate.143 A third argument, then, is expected to elucidate the political and social constellations that allowed academics to preserve their increasingly embarrassing expediencies nonetheless. I have chosen not to drink this cup of sorrow. The reasons why I will not carry through Le Bras’ prosopographical program to its full extent, and why the economic or legal aspects of the Louvain privileges of nomination are not at the centre of my concern, are a matter of choice. Clerical populations, the functioning and conjunctures of the clerical job market, university financing, or the evolution of legal concepts are research topics that will have to be touched upon in the analysis, but they deserve closer investigation elsewhere. At this stage of research, any attempt to explore the financial impact would only get bogged down in sheer casuistry due to the lack of systematic and reliable source material. This is a book about academics and benefices in the first place. By contrast, the reason why I will not address the question of the expedience of academic privileges for Catholic reform (and why I consequently can stick to a much more restricted chronological framework) is not arbitrary at all. It is threefold: 1) such a definition of a problem is, in its present definition, irrelevant, as the privileges of nomination did exist until the end of the 18th century, and the (political) question of whether they should not have is, therefore, obsolete; 2) it is insoluble by historical method, which by definition should aim at the production of slippery, historical realities, not at the articulation of timeless normative standards; and 3) a shrouded, nuanced writing style that has to render the resulting evaluations more palpable will not change that.
143 On the privileges as a job agency for Jansenists, see Leplae, Betwistingen rond benoemingen, 21.
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chapter one 1.2. Society, and all that: The confessionalisation of academic interests
A blend of Jedinian reflexes and the insights, themes, and methodological innovations borrowed from Delumeau, Le Bras, and other tycoons of French historiography has provided for a powerful model of Catholic renewal in the Low Countries and elsewhere. But the model’s weaknesses have become manifest too in the course of the last decades. Recent research into late medieval and renaissance religiosity “has challenged the received wisdom that just because parishes were not functioning according to a post-Tridentine model the Catholic population was not having its spiritual needs met. It has made it incontestably clear that Christians of the 15th and 16th century looked to many sources besides the parish for their spiritual well-being—and it is not easy to prove that they were in every case less well served than they were after Trent.”144 The squeals about the ignorance of the flock or the savagery of rural populations reflect the intellectual and “scholarised” attitudes nurtured by ecclesiastical and civil elites of the time (or by contemporary historians) rather than the intrinsic quality of “popular” religious experience.145 Delumeau’s concept of christianisation reveals more about his own normative understandings of Christianity than about the supposedly pagan mentality of medieval Christians.146 The cocktail of abusive practices, frivolous conduct, absenteeism, and deficient ministry on behalf of the parish clergy is becoming more and
144 O’Malley, Trent and All That, 66. Interesting perspectives on the enduring influence of the “medieval” confraternities, which remained dominant throughout the early modern period, in Von Mallinckrodt, “Reichweite und Grenzen des Konfessionalisierungs-Paradigmas.” The assessment that the populace itself was calling for reform in contemporary sources (cf. Quaghebeur, De concursus in het aartsbisdom Mechelen, 42) needs to be investigated. On the function of il popolo and gli eretici in appropriation strategies deployed by clerical elites (in casu Roman diplomats), read Boute, “Que ceulx de Flandres se disoijent tant catholicques.” 145 “Je me demande si ‘l’explication’ qui, au cours du XVIIe, tend à interpréter ces résistances comme la conséquence d’ignorance n’est pas l’indice de la fonction qu’a progressivement reçue cette “reconquista” par le savoir.” De Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, 161. 146 An example of expert values in Church history: “Le résultat, en tout cas, fut une prédication qui parlait plus de la Passion du Sauveur que de sa Résurrection, du pêché que du pardon, du Juge que du Père, de l’enfer que du paradis. Il y avait là une veritable déviation (my italicisation) par rapport à l’affirmation de Saint Paul selon laquelle là où le pêché s’est multipié, la grâce a surabondé (Rom. 5:20).” Delumeau, La peur en occident, 627.
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more problematic as the evident cause of reform in general and Catholic reform in the early modern period in particular.147 In analogy to Delumeau’s notion of ignorance, abuse is not a historical concept that describes directly the ills of the Church but, rather, reflects its worn institutional reflexes when defining the challenges it faced and when trying to remedy them in a legitimate way.148 This is not to say that “all was well, actually”—many contemporaries would have begged to differ—but their terminology calls for investigation, not reification. Many commonplaces currently used by historians are informed by the way in which modern, emancipated Catholics have been looking back, since Vatican II, on the history of that other reform Council and its aftermath.149 The Aggiornamento has fuelled the persisting dichotomy between religion (which is considered an essentially personal experience)150 and external forces such as power and society, a binary scheme that tends to exempt an inner core of religion and the dynamics of religious change from historical scrutiny.151 It should not come as a surprise to learn that classical Church historians152 to date have bequeathed the same fate to phenomena that do not fit in the picture as the one reserved by 17th-century Catholics for their Protestant opponents: they are smoked out as obstacles to the spirit of Trent that are to be attributed to ignorance or human pettiness. In such a scenario, academics capitalising on political circumstances to safeguard their financial and social interests risk becoming sitting targets
147
Numbers on absenteism in Absil, “L’absentéisme du clergé paroissial,” 18–23. See also Bijsterveld, Laverend tussen Kerk en Wereld, 283, and, for a comparative perspective, Swanson, “Universities, Graduates and Benefices.” The obligation of absentee shepherds to install a deservitor to administer sacraments was generally observed in the later Middle Ages. On the toleration of the rector’s vices by his parishioners in rural communities, read Bijsterveld, “Du cliché à un image plus nuancé,” 233. 148 The arguments used in the reform councils of the later Middle Ages and at Trent should be understood as the slogans, functional clichés, and legitimate commonplaces deployed by reformers who turned to tested narratives in order to articulate both diagnosis and remedy. Stump, The Reforms of the Council of Constance, 177. 149 Zardin, “Controriforma,” 300; Ditchfield, “In Search of Local Knowledge.” 150 Cloet, “L’Eglise et son influence,” 62. 151 The “social turn” in religious history has not fundamentally changed this. “La mise en réserve d’un noyau dur intouchable, associée à la relative résistance du catholicisme à l’analyse scientifique de sa réalité, introduit une distinction entre objects sociologisables et objets non sociologisables.” Piette, La réligion de près, 23. Cf., in analogy, traditional intellectual history. “It is not the spread of accurate facts about nature that has to be explained, but only its slowing down or its distortion caused by backward minds, countries or cultures.” Latour, “The Powers of Association,” 267. 152 A good introduction in Johnson, “Religion,” 140–44.
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of judicious but judgemental historians, and their privileges become just another example of the shadiness of “Real Existing Catholicism.” This assessment is not new. From the 1970s onwards, historians have challenged the insularity of classical Church history. Their approach differs radically from the classical tradition in that its predilection for some informants over others (e.g., bishops vs. unruly canons or superstitious parishioners) was abandoned. Seen from this perspective, the question of whether or not this or that phenomenon favoured Catholic reform became outdated.153 In Belgium, the radical contextualisation of religious beliefs and practices has been achieved in studies investigating, say, the dynastic interests involved in the display of archducal piety,154 while overall Catholic reform in urban environments was unmasked in the course of the 1980s and the early 1990s as part of a civilisation offensive monitored by urban elites that had to mould—via charity, dominical schools, and parish attendance—an unruly proletariat into an amenable workforce.155 One of the most influential and systematic attempts to raise the profile of Church history as a historical science instead of as an ecclesiastical discipline was made in the early 1980s by the German historians Wolfgang Reinhard, a Catholic, and Heinz Schilling, a Protestant, the founding fathers of the famous Konfessionalisierungs paradigm.156 Confessionalisation should be conceived as “einen gesellschaftsgeschichtlich fundamentalen Wandlungsvorgang, der kirchlich-religiöse und mentalitätsmässigkulturelle Veränderungen ebenso einschliesst wie staatlich-politische und soziale.”157 The concept offers some indisputable advantages. First, it has converged with concepts central to social and cultural history—social disciplining and modernisation—being the process in which religion profoundly transformed patterns of behaviour.158 This
153 “Erstens trat . . . im Zuge der Reflexion über die historische Bedingtheit historiographischen Arbeitens die theologische Wahrheitsfrage erstmal in den Hintergrund.” Ehrenpreis and Lotz-Heumann, Reformation und konfessionelles Zeitalter, 10. 154 Cf. Duerloo, “Pietas Albertina,” idem, “Archducal Piety,” and Bérenger, “Pietas Austriaca.” 155 Cf. Thijs, Van geuzenstad tot katholiek bolwerk; see also Marinus, De Contrareformatie te Antwerpen, and articles by Soly on urban festivities and social relations in Antwerp. 156 A context and general outlines in O’Malley, Trent and All That, 109–17. 157 Schilling, “Die Konfessionalisierung von Kirche, Staat und Gesellschaft,” 4. 158 A historiographical context in Schilling, “Disziplinierung oder ‘Selbstregulierung” der Untertanen?’ 676–77.
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process paved the way for modernity, being conceived as the interiorisation of abstract values and ditto behavioural codes that are presumed characteristic to modern societies.159 Second, it lifts the artificial distinction between Catholic reform and counter-reformation, as well as the asymmetrical approach to Protestant reformation and Catholic reform. The schools of Reinhard and Schilling have highlighted the parallels and analogies in causes, processes, and effects of religious change in Catholicism, Protestantism, and Calvinism instead of joining the long and venerable tradition of bashing the old Church as a hub of reactionary immobility.160 During the following decades, Reinhard articulated and refined, first, the causes of confessionalisation; second, its manifestation in policy and in institutional innovations; third, its intended effects; and fourth, its more fundamental and unintended long-term consequences.161 The paradigm Konfessionalisierung has benefitted from the many criticisms it has provoked, such as the underlying assumption of ubiquitousness; the structuralist-functionalist bent of the model; its teleological flavour; its top-down, etatist approach to religion; its inherent inclination to privilege parallelism over the specificity of the distinct confessions; and its focus on the big picture that renders it difficult to apply to the Alltagsgeschichte.162 In the course of two decades,
159 On the modernity of Trent, read the contributions to Prodi and Reinhard, Il Concilio di Trento e il Moderno. 160 Already by the end of the 1970s, Reinhard had given the Weberian thesis its coup de grâce. Cf. Reinhard, “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung,” 226–52. 161 Respectively: 1) religious innovation and competition between different churches; 2) the sorting out of and control over orthodoxy; an accentuated educational policy; the marginalisation of dissidents and the appeal to distinctive rites and rhetorical devices; adaptation in the old Church; the introduction of specific educational institutions; and the upgrading or introduction of institutions charged with the socio-religious repression of deviance; 3) correct confessional behaviour/discipline; 4) the growth of state power; modernisation; possibly secularization. Reinhard, “Was ist Katholische Konfessionalisierung,” 426–27. 162 An introduction in Ehrenpreis and Lotz-Heumann, Reformation und konfessionelles Zeitalter, 67–71. See also Johnson, “Religion,” 150–51. With respect to the assumption of ubiquitousness, see Grochowina, “Grenzen der Konfessionalisierung.” The problem of the specificity of different confessions has been stressed by Kaufmann, “Einleitung,” 13–14. This argument is often linked with the classical concern about the intrinsic contents of religious beliefs. Ziegler, “Typen der Konfessionalisierung,” 417. A postmodern, ambivalent attitude towards the modernisation process, which triggered both democracy and totalitarianism, does not diminish the modernist and therefore teleological bent of the model itself; cf. the synthesis on modernization as a concept in historical narrative in Walker, “Modernization.” The characteristics of Modernization
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the model has been enriched with new insights,163 among others from the new cultural history.164 With respect to confessionalisation “from below,” Reinhard made it perfectly clear in the middle of the 1990s that, in analogy to the history of state formation, religious change was not merely a matter of blunt coercion, if we take into consideration the Catholic Church’s absorption capacity for popular religion.165 Schilling, for his part, has pleaded recurrently for a complementary approach that combines impulses to confessionalisation from the top as well as from below. Against the claim of fundamentalist micro-historians, that efficient causalities and historical realities are to be situated on a micro-historical level,166 he postulated the reality of long-term processes and the need to get a grip on fundamental changes, while convincingly demonstrating that many of the valid criticisms against the process of disciplining itself had been responded to by a methodological and thematic differentiation of research.167 This absorption capacity of the model makes it flexible enough to integrate the ever
theory are: the distinction between traditional and modern; teleology, i.e., the assumption that all significant data should contribute to, or deflect, the path to modernity; functionalism; the assumption of social coherence (in contrast to Marxism); a stress on elite studies; and negative or positive moral judgement. Confessionalisation from the top to the base more reflects the appropriation strategies and the self-image of the political and religious establishment (which provides the bulk of sources) than is does aptly describe the subtle negotiation process between popular and high religious culture. Cf. Boute, “Que ceulx de Flandres se disoijent tant catholicques”; remedies in Frijhoff, Embodied Belief. 163 Cf. Brady, “Confessionalization—The Career of a Concept.” 164 For instance, cf. Burschel, “Das Eigene und das Fremde.” The generalisation to religious history is mine. 165 “Immerhin steht fest, dass die Katholiken mit der herkömmlichen Volksreligion glimpflicher umgingen als vor allem die Reformierten.” Reinhard, “Was ist Katholische Konfessionalisierung,” 447. This assessment was translated, more or less at the same moment in the middle of the 1990s, in a methodological differentiation adopted by Reinhard in Power Elites and State Building, where different levels of observation were introduced. Reinhard, “Power Elites, State Servants, Ruling Classes,” 5–16. 166 Cf. the discussion of the relativist versus the fundamentalist stance in micro-storia, and the similar contributions in the book Jeux d’échelles. Revel, “Présentation,” 13. 167 “Angesichts dieser methodischen und sachlichen Modifizierung und Differenzierung sowie der seit langem vollzogenen Internationalisierung der Disziplinierungsforschung läuft die erwähnte Fundamentalkritik weitgehend ins Leere.” Schilling, “Disziplinierung oder Selbstregulierung der Untertanen,” 680–82, and idem, “Confessionalisation: Historical and Scholarly Perspectives.” In both articles, he reviews a few works that uncontestably belong to the confessionalisation school but that nevertheless integrate the insights of new cultural history (ibidem, 676) that resonates, for instance, in Burschel’s plea for a linguistic turn in the study of diplomatical correspondence of the Holy See. Burschel, “Das Eigene und das Fremde.”
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growing flow of new insights produced by an increasingly prolific historiographical industry.168 In this context, the question of whether or not the privileges of nomination were a functional, neutral, or dysfunctional element in the confessionalisation of the academic field seems to impose itself.169 An academic job agency avant-la-lettre may have contributed only marginally to the confessionalisation of Church hierarchy, and it did not enhance the clericalisation of Academia or the scholarisation of the clergy, in a highly urbanised clerical job market that was already characterised by a relative openness at all levels for university alumni and their old-boys’ networks. This suggests that rallying around academic privileges was the product of a pre-confessional diapason academics were reluctant to abandon and that privileges were little more than a symbolic compensation of their loss of autonomy and of the status inconsistency academic elites suffered in the face of competition by bishops, Jesuits, and other storm troopers in this overcrowded bulwark of the Faith. This definition of the problem demonstrates, however, that the confessionalisation paradigm is not radically different from the classical position. Qualifications such as “functional” or “dysfunctional” are central to the notion of any overarching process such as confessionalisation, but prove to be all but the secularised equivalents of “good” and “bad” in the classical narrative. The socio-cultural approach to religious history is marred by the same flaws, for three reasons. First, the paradigm claims to avoid the loopholes of the classical preoccupation about the truth or about intrinsic religious values by ignoring it, at least in theory. In practice, however, it does not.170 Some room for self-determination may be left for 17th-century academics in 168 “Angesichts der Verlagerung des historiographischen Interesses hin zur Mikrohistorie, Alltagsgeschichte und neuen Kulturgeschichte ist zu erwarten, dass die Konfessionalisierungsforschung in Zukunft auf die Frage nach der Bedeutung und Wirksamkeit staatlicher Konfessionalisierungsmassnahmen für die Lebesnwelt des ‘Volkes’ richten wird.” Ehrenpreis and Lotz-Heumann, Reformation und konfessionelles Zeitalter, 71. Cf. the classical tradition, which, inspired by a quick dechristianisation process after the 1960s, indeed delved into the question of whether or not Catholic reform had conquered the hearts and minds of the faithful. 169 Cf., for instance, Reinhard’s assessment of “nepotism” as dysfunctional two centuries before it actually disappeared, in Reinhard, “Nepotismus. Der Funktionswandel.” 170 “La question demeure pourtant, meme si elle ne peut être tranchée par la substitution d’une idéologie récente (marxiste) à une autre, plus ancienne (théologique).” De Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, 163.
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more recent historiography at the micro- and, to a lesser extent, at the meso-level, but the fundamental macro-historical processes construed by historians, the new guardians of truth, are believed to remain fundamentally beyond their grasp—otherwise they would not be unqualified, fundamental processes anymore but “merely” constructs of the contemporaries themselves.171 This assumption introduces a new asymmetry: that the historian’s model of reality should not be mistaken for the reality of the model is a theoretical problem, not an operational one; while the explanatory schemes fielded by historical agents are apriori dismissed.172 Second, both schools put their models to work in a very similar manner, i.e., by modelling practices observed in the sources into epiphenomena of a general trend, or by marginalising them as residuals of a pre-confessional or a pagan/medieval, past. Most of the historian’s practices are so self-evident that they disappear from sight, bar a highly formalised account of the methodology applied in the introduction to each book. As a consequence, the overarching process that has pain-stakingly been distilled from the sources seems to spread more or less on its own account, without any intervention by the historian.173 171 This is not to say that historical actors do not express themselves on the larger evolutions in which they were involved; but their role is reduced to that of mere informants, their constructions being necessarily contingent, qualified, rhetorical, normative, and, therefore, definitely less true than the models detained by experts. The God who was made present at Louvain in the ritual performances of the learned men is not untouchable any more; he is a projection of something else. “Ce que peut faire l’anthropologue avec les divinités africaines et le panthéon hindou, parraît si impossible avec le Dieu Chrétien.” Piette, La réligion de près, 13. 172 Cf. the analysis of the reaction to the downfall of positivism in historical sciences in De Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, 79–82. It is only put into practice with respect to competing traditions in religious history that have to be marginalised as irrelevant or superseded, a fate bequeathed to historians challenging the thesis of parallellism and equivalence. Cf., for instance, Burschel’s rather blunt repudiation of criticism from the traditional side. Only the qualifications ventilated by micro-historians need to be taken seriously, apparently. Burschel, “Einführung,” 57. Deconstruction post-factum is a common scientific practice. Read Latour, La science en action, 360–72. For the formalities in historiography, see De Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, 148–53. 173 This deletion can be strategic or tactical. Historians, like all scientists, tend to delete the messiness of their practices and the process of trial and error in order to make unqualified statements about the past. Also, uncontroversial research strategies become tacit tactics that are not worth mentioning, and concepts that once may have been revolutionary evolve into implicit understandings—but nonetheless continue informing the phenomena that are being uncovered. What remains is a performance of rigid methodology in the introductions to scholarly works. Law, After Method, 36. This introduction subscribes to this general rule.
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“We live in a world where, as Marx forcefully argued, a product’s glamour relies on the invisibility of its unglamorous (but often clamorous) production.”174 Third, in this diffusion model deployed by both schools, the basic explanatory schemes are tautological. Multiple and diverging practices—forms of social interaction, the spread of new devotions, or the obedience displayed by subjects towards an absolutist prince—become the result of an explanans that, in fact, is merely a generic term (respectively Society, confessionalisation/Catholic Reform, and Power) for the practices observed in the sources. What needs to be explained becomes an explanation itself, for the sake of explanation.175 This is not to say that both approaches—the classical position and Confessionalisation—do not work. They do, as a prolific and inspiring scholarly performance demonstrates.176 But the underlying concerns informing them need to be revised for the purposes of a book that wishes to present early modern academics as full-blown actors who are capable of making their own history. In both approaches, it is assumed that there is a logic out there that makes past phenomena more or less coherent and that can be wrought out of the sources, provided one applies the right method. But this quest for unqualified
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Highmore, Michel De Certeau, 3. Because of these procedural similarities, the confessionalisation paradigm may well be related to Catholic reform in the same way as 18th-century enlightened ethics is related to the religious normative systems of yore: it has relegated the contents and the vocabulary of classical accounts on religious change to the realm of private and contingent beliefs but took over their formal arrangements, the grammar, and the procedures that shaped them in order to establish a new body of social laws that, contrary to Christianity, “does not offer any hope of redemption.” Cf. Latour’s evaluation of the assumption that underlying structures out there can account for the durability of phenomena in here. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 67. Interesting perspectives on the relationship between the Enlightenment and religion in the chapter on “la formalité des pratiques” in De Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, 178–240. See also Gregory, “The Other Confessional History.” 176 Cf. new insights in the anthropology of science, where Nature eventually becomes the metaphysical spokeswoman of scientists. Read Latour, La science en action. The articulation of internal contradictions and inconsistencies does not aim at mining the credibility of the confessionalisation paradigm or the classical approach, resulting as it does from a different reading of the sources, not from the sources themselves (cf. Burke, “The Art of Re-Interpretation”). It seeks to question, while recognising the considerable debts towards the vast amount of inspiring scholarship assembled by historians of both schools, implicit understandings underlying both models by turning the theoretical problem of the relationship between the reality of the model and the model of reality into a discussion about concerns again. 175
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statements about a past that is believed to be ultimately coherent and definable tends to obscure that, when browsing through academic memorandums, correspondence, minutes of academic councils, royal charters, and papal bulls, the historian trying to make sense of the past is confronted with a wide range of actors doing just that: making sense of their world and their role in it. It is in this juncture that the problematic assumptions underpinning the processual approach shared by the classical school and the confessionalisation paradigm meet: because no reality whatsoever can be granted to the grand schemes early modern academics claimed to be at work, an external, but not less metaphysical deus ex machina— the innate urge to reform or to discipline; an academic “culture” or a matrix of perception—needs to be introduced in order to make something happen at all; and to make it happen in a more or less coherent way, so that convincing statements about the causes, the effects, and the properties of religious and political change in the early modern period can be articulated. Coherence, whatever its rhetorical strength, comes with a price, however: the fundamentals themselves are barely historical anymore, and early modern academics figure as hitch-hikers on the tide of history. Many problems can be resolved if the counterproductive assumptions in the previous paragraphs are simply inverted. Instead of claiming that the past is definable and coherent in principle but that flawed methodology and bias render it elusive in practice, the way to go is to assume that, although historical realities are elusive in principle, in practice coherence could be achieved by historical actors themselves, and that it is possible to produce workable accounts of this work-in-progress.177 This option, inspired by De Certeau’s later
177 This rules out two other options that, in my opinion, pave the path again for scepticism and postmodern relativism: first, history as a science auxiliaire. A good review in Weymans, “Michel De Certeau and the Limits of Historical Interpretation.” See also Burke, “The Art of Re-Interpretation,” and, of course, De Certeau himself: “De la sorte, l’histoire devient une auxiliaire . . . non pas qu’elle soit au service de l’économie, mais la relation qu’elle entretient avec diverses sciences lui permet d’exercer par rapport à chacune d’elles une fonction critique nécessaire, et lui suggère aussi le propos d’articuler ensemble les limites ainsi mises en évidence.” De Certeau, L’écriture, 113. With respect to the history of religion, cf. ibidem, 177. The other option, proposed by Peter Burke, is a “perspectivism” of sorts that may highlight the multiplicity of perspectives and the multifacetedness of historical events, but that does not explain how, in spite of these differences, collective action could be organised. Cf. Behan Mccullagh, “Bias,” 54 and 58; Burke, “Ouverture.”
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works on the formalisation of practice and on the demonic invasion of 17th-century France, affirms that “history is never sure”178 but turns this drawback into an opportunity.179 In the previous paragraphs, the operations of historians in action have been pulled out of the bottom drawer. It has become clear that their concerns and questions are not fundamentally different from those cultivated by the historical actors they are researching: both tried to instil some logic on a chaotic and unpredictable world. The assumption that the models unleashed by contemporary historians on the sources should be privileged over the images cherished by early modern academics must be ditched. Instead, a methodological and conceptual framework must be developed in which agents too can be nudged into action again. There is no need to panic. Chaos will not erupt; action will not become the reserve again of high-minded grand strategists who turned clear intentions into great deeds amidst forgotten masses without a voice; farmers will continue to plough; and law and order will eventually rule. The system will continue to work—but now academics themselves will do the job for us by making it work.180 If we go back to the moment where they could be observed in action, in correspondence, memorandums, or in minutes of university and faculty councils, they were doing exactly that, before dark forces from another world overwhelmed them.
1.3. Achieving logic. Academic interests and Catholic confessionalisation It has been pointed out in the Prologue that the central research question of this book is one about credibility. How on earth could academics believe that without their privileges, the university, let alone Catholicism in the Low Countries in its entirety, would inevitably collapse, and how did they convince popes and princes of their exorbitant claims? It has become clear in the previous paragraphs that,
178 De Certeau, La possession de Loudun, 9–18. “Simple and clear descriptions don’t work if what they are describing is not itself very coherent.” Law, After Method, 2. 179 A very interesting discussion on the past as a metonymy instead of as a representation, in Runia, “Presence.” 180 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 36.
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first, this question matters as much as other questions historians struggle with; and, second, that the dominant historical narratives are ill-equipped when it comes to answering this basic question. While academics claim that their privileges were central to Catholic reform, today’s omniscient experts would affirm that really, they were not, and if they were, that the learned men would have been wrong anyway, being unable to understand, let alone to shape, the larger schemes they were involved in. The remedy to this problem does not consist in ditching these larger schemes as such, but should get rid, for a start, of the inherent model of change as diffusion that turns them into explanatory and/or processual behemoths. It is this model that has paved the path for the mise-en-scène of overarching trends, structures, meta-narratives, and the like in the first place, and that inevitably raises unproductive questions about the functionality or the marginality of at first sight “medieval” academic privileges that had, in the introduction to this chapter, endured a Tridentine storm thanks to the Realpolitik of popes and princes. An alternative model of displacement in time and space of new religious phenomena is available. In the late 1990s, appropriation was advocated by Willem Frijhoff and Simon Ditchfield as an analysis tool for a history from below of religions and of religious renewal respectively in the Low Countries and in Italy.181 A convenient synonym of appropriation is the less familiar concept of translation, both the geographical and the linguistic connotations of which are a boon in a book in which social, geographical, and religious distances must be overcome. This concept is not only less prone to negative connotations; it also holds the procedures and modalities of appropriation in the limelight, which makes translation a more versatile concept in a research that focuses on credibility. In this translation model, agents
181
Cf. Frijhoff, “Toeëigening,” and Ditchfield, “In Search of Local Knowledge.” Appropriation, in this context, should not be considered as an illegitimate, “political” recuperation or distortion of religious practices and beliefs, nor should history from below be mistaken for an inversion of power relations or the introduction of an “interaction” between groups the hierarchical relations of which go, otherwise, unquestioned. It seeks to introduce the Actor Perspective without imposing classifications and models “from above”; nothing more, but nothing less. See Jacobs, “Actornetwerk.”
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who previously were reduced to lame ducks manipulated by the invisible hands of Society, Power, or the Tridentine Spirit, will swing into action again, the spread in time and space of state power, religious beliefs, or social practices being the result of displacements undertaken by chains of actors.182 This implies that religious renewal, social interaction, or state formation are constituted in action: when no one is there picking up pastoral directives, royal orders, or new devotional practices, transmissions abruptly come to a halt; the chain or the group of stake-holders does not materialise; there is neither power nor reform nor confessionalisation. The alignment of actors with each of these phenomena or, in the opposite case, their indifference or resistance to them, need to be explained instead of being explained away by generic terms such as Catholic reform, confessionalisation, or contingent social or cultural obstacles. Second, the invisible hands (power, the urge to reform) that, in the diffusion model, gave the phenomenon its initial impetus and its momentum cannot account for any trend (the growth of state power, reform) anymore. New incentives are to be found continuously in order to keep it moving. This implies that the first actor in the chain is not a-priori more important than the others, and that the attribution of the initiative to one of them by the contemporaries is a secondary strategy that calls for an explanation.183 Third, actors should not be considered mere recipients (or obstacles) but stakeholders who appropriate and transform the devotional model, the political programme, or the behavioural codes that are being translated into their own concerns184—otherwise they would not even have bothered
182 As a consequence, one should not confound the translation model for change with the so-called transfer studies in cultural history. A survey in Werner and Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison,” 36–37. 183 This implies that social, political, economic, or symbolic capital dry up immediately as sources of energy that are always available somewhere to explain anything. Cf. Latour, “The Powers of Association.” If, say, the power of the prince is to work, it needs additional devices to be transported from one situation or locale to another (legal devices, references to precedents integrating specific situations into a universal logic, objects such as state portraits, regalia, royal seals on princely ordonnances; dynastic affiliality, institutional or non-institutional power brokers, institutions, and so on and so forth). 184 “It is not enough for a cultural practice to be transmitted for it to have a meaning; it still needs to be assimilated, appropriated, encoded.” Frijhoff, Embodied Belief, 53.
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to participate in the displacement of the phenomenon in question in the first place.185 The logic “out there” that determines the contingent activities of agents in concrete situations is substituted by a multitude of actors wondering how to act as one in different circumstances, and with respect to shifting stakes. What matters for the historian is not the dark force that holds society together.186 The question should be how the socio-religious order was being held together, and at what cost. The hermeneutic and methodological consequences of this shift from a model of diffusion to a model of translation and the challenges it brings for historical research are far-reaching. 1.3.1. Lost in Translation? Uncertainty, collective action, and Catholic confessionalisation All this raises the question of what a history of religious renewal informed by a model of translation might look like. Three criteria need to be met: it should be an open-ended account that makes ample room for the uncertainties and concerns of historical actors; it has to focus on their practical means to overcome this uncertainty; and it needs to highlight the costs at which the solutions found could be transported, if necessary, to other places and other situations. “So rather than asking the question: ‘why has the (Tridentine) Church won?’ perhaps we should be seeking to understand why so many people chose to inhabit and adapt its cultural forms to their own social and spiritual needs.”187 Uncertainty, inhabiting, and adaptation are key-words in Michel De Certeau’s tentative survey of the history of early modern Catholicism in his essay la formalité des pratiques.188 De Certeau’s major accomplishment rests in the link he made between the shift of attention in
185 This is the bottom-line argument in Latour, “The Powers of Association.” Orders that are being executed, devotional practices that meet response, or widely received behavioral codes are therefore never a copy of the original, even though actors will claim the opposite when trying to impose logic on their activities. 186 This question is inextricably linked with the diffusion model, and its answer is rather predictable: society, power, or truth all over again. 187 Ditchfield, “In Search of Local Knowledge,” 296. 188 Cf. “La formalité des pratiques,” in L’écriture de l’histoire, 178–241. More in De Certeau, Le fable mystique, and idem, L’invention du quotidien, both of which were published in the first half of the 1980s.
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early modern religion towards disciplined behaviour, correct practice, and spiritual or theological method on the one hand; and the troubled relationship between socio-religious practice and orthodoxy on the other. As a consequence, he addresses the hobby-horses of both the classical tradition and the socio-cultural approach. Reinhard stages the purification of doctrine as one of the most visible (and unproblematic) exponents of a comprehensive confessionalisation process from the top;189 classical historians either engage in a sociology of religions that deems theological debates out of its range, or struggle with theological concerns that are irreconcilable with historical ones. By contrast, De Certeau introduces the reader in a siècle des âmes that, despite the performances of unity and self-confidence of a triumphant Catholic Church, was marked by a deep sense of cognitive uncertainty and theological imprecision even within the inner circles of the clergy. His is the story of a sublime failure to reach a viable consensus in many pressing doctrinal problems ranging from the primacy of Peter’s chair over divine Grace and Justification to the Immaculate Conception. For historians of the classical position, there are always enough dreadful political circumstances or providence around to account for divisions within the Church, or for the ambivalence of pontiffs who have to be categorised as santi or as politicanti anyway.190 In a translation model, unity is something that has to be achieved time and again by chains of actors. These apparently did not manage to find a workable and lasting consensus about an increasingly opaque socio-religious system. Large provinces of the faith were already privatised in practice long before enlightened philosophes strove to dismiss religion in principle to the realm of private convictions and local custom. Was religion “lost in translation” already in the early modern period? One wonders how the powerful building of the Apostolic Church of Rome in the 17th century did not crumble under the weight
189
Reinhard, “Was ist Katholische Konfessionalisierung?” 426–27. Notions from Vincent Viaene, “A Pope’s Dilemma. Temporal Power and Moral Authority in the History of the Modern Vatican,” at the International Conference World Views and Wordly Wisdom. Interchanges between World Views, Ideology and Strategy 1750–2000, Louvain, 16–18 November 2006. 190
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of an age-old doctrinal heterogeneity—let alone under the multitude of religious practices—that became even more apparent exactly when orthodoxy was to be systematised in the battle against the heretics; how it nonetheless could articulate, survive, and even contain the recurrent surges of indifferentism, atheism, libertinism, and the relativism of loathed politiques;191—and above all, how it could present itself as a monolithic, exclusive bulwark of orthodoxy towards both the pious and the heretics, to the extent that contemporary historians have been lured into treating the old Church as such.192 Enter religious practice and the gradual transformation of the faithful into practising Catholics. While the faith itself, as a commonly shared reference frame, became, under the pressure of confessional and intra-confessional antagonism, in many respects uncertain and unpronounceable in the public realm, practices increasingly became a substitute193 for orthodoxy rather than mere signs of it. Gestures that had at least the advantage of being observable, recognisable, and controllable amidst all this confusion over society and truth were formalised into procedures that rendered present their intangible and absent doctrinal referent.194 “Le geste l’emporte sur le contenu. Il devient le signe le plus sûr. A la fois, il pose et il ‘dit’ la croyance comme conduite.”195 This shift to a primacy of action was not entirely external to the re-definition, at Louvain and elsewhere, of the theologian’s trade as a practical science that had to be freed from idle speculation and to theologians’ growing preoccupation about the right methods that accounted both for truth and salvation. The formalisation of theological practices did not only result in distinctions between several theological subdisciplines, but culminated in the highly formalised administrative and legal procedures that were applied, for instance, by the Roman congregations of the Index and of the Holy Office.196 It is in this context that one should situate the redefinition of the theologians’ role from teachers of the
191 De Certeau, La possession de Loudun. Articulating deviance is entangled with the formatting of identity. Cf. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society. 192 A definition of the problem in Hersche, “Klassizistischer Katholizismus.” 193 Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation, 208–55. 194 Compare De Certeau’s comments on the formalisation of practice by sociologists reducing them to statistical units and to meaningful objects, in De Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, 1, xl. 195 De Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, 205. 196 Cf. the higher degree of formalisation in Roman censorship compared with university censors. Neveu, “Censures romaines.”
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Church in the Middle Ages over councillors of ecclesiastical jurisdiction holders in the early modern period to the “witnesses of tradition” at the Second Vatican Council.197 In this scenario, the focus on the homogeneity and the purification of religious practices (such as, for instance, the Romanisation of Eucharistic liturgy) was not an exponent of a process of social disciplining, but was intertwined with it, both enterprises aiming at reassembling the lost mystic body of society. This normalisation and standardisation of practices does not only resonate in the statistics of Le Bras and other contemporary sociologists of religions, but also in the status dioecesis dispatched to Rome in the 17th century by the Belgian episcopate or in the triumphant litterae annuae of the Jesuits enumerating the thousands of confessions and sacred hosts administered to the faithful. The stress on good practice did not only regard the flock, but also the Society’s shepherds themselves. The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises are not a theological treatise, but a methodological guide to be practised.198 Attempts to establish a more pure faith by withdrawing from the world199 would lead, in the course of the 17th and the 18th centuries, to the emergence of many “churchlets” within the Church, spiritual congregations of various hue and feathers that mainly distinguished themselves, or were identified, with specific religious acts, even though they often identified with controversial bits of the Church’s heterogeneous intellectual legacy as well.200 None of this was inevitable in the beginning of the 17th century, the period on which this book focuses; nor was the privatisation of the faith and religious practices altogether by the philosophes a logical consequence of evolutions within early modern religiosity itself. But distinctive practices that appropriated not only the heretics but also erring competitors within the Church as negative benchmarks were already in vogue long before they were structured by the duality of Jansenism and anti-Jansenism—especially in a bastion of the faith overcrowded with storm-troopers of Catholic reform.
197
Cf. Minnich, “The Changing Status of the Theologians,” and Grès-Gayer, “The Magisterium of the Faculty of Theology.” 198 Quattrone, “Accounting for God,” 657. 199 On the link between Jansenism, patristics, and a pessimistic view on the early modern Church, read Neveu, “Pour une histoire de l’augustinianisme.” 200 De Certeau, Le lieu de l’autre, 181–86.
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This calls for a thorough redefinition of the concept of confessionalisation. It remains a valid concept, because of its symmetrical approach to different confessions; its anti-“Weberian” connotations; its semantic link with identity, interests, and policy; and because it is not Catholic reform or counter-reformation. All this does not make confessionalisation a prime cause of social, cultural, and religious change or a transcendental process, however, nor will it be an overarching concept in this book. It has to remain, contrariwise, a generic term for an open list of either procedures or effects. With respect to procedures, confessionalisation refers in this scenario to widespread practices of distinction in a socio-religious sphere that consisted in appropriating heretics, other groups within the Church, or both, as a negative benchmark.201 By contrast, confessionalisation as an effect is either a synoptic snapshot made by the historian of the contingent and pluriform outcomes of negotiations over roles, interests, and identities in a religious context; or a mise-en-scène of confessional unity operated by full-blown actors; whether in (descriptions of ) Processions of the Holy Sacrament or in the dry status animarum. In line with the insights provided by the so-called performative turn, confessionalisation is, in both cases, a performance, generating as it does the phenomenon it seeks to describe. 1.3.2. The Art of Performance: Drama, achievement, or both? Methodological outlines Is this “performative turn,” after the social, linguistic, cultural, and ethical turns, really the answer to the melting down of icebergs such as Society, Power, or Truth? It depends on whether one adopts a narrow or a broad definition of performance. The narrow definition was adopted by Peter Burke in a review article on the thematic and methodological opportunities of what he calls the dramaturgical model. “Instead of drawing analogies between society and the theatre, the new approach dissolves the boundaries between them.”202 Burke situates the recent success of this model in the rise of postmodernity, as the “diffuse sense of fragility or fluidity of reality” that seeks to free agency from social determinism or even social constraints. Actors should be
201 202
Compare Roegiers, “Jansenisme en katholieke hervorming,” 45. Burke, “Performing History,” 41.
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allowed some room to exploit the system and its loopholes, and to pick different registers of speech or action according to the situation. The author proposes to re-christen the dramaturgical model as “occasionalism,” the basic point of which is that “on different occasions (moments, locales) or in different situations (in the presence of different people) the same person behaves in different ways”—an assessment that will prove helpful when following academics in the multi-tiered religious, political, and intellectual environments in which they were entangled.203 The co-existence of multiple registers and occasions are central to Burke’s proposal, which is rightly centred on remedying the danger of overextending the concept of performance posed by a postmodern reaction “that denies the cultural or institutional constraints on effective performances.” His solution, however, remains firmly embedded in the Euro-American assumptions that have proved to be counterproductive in the previous paragraphs. Burke’s main source of inspiration is Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice.204 This tycoon of French sociology has become something of an obligatory passage point in much of recent historiography. The complete absence of references to his work in the prologue of this book is conspicuous, the more so since Bourdieu has shed his light on the relationship between Homo Academicus and the realms of power as well as on the structure of the religious field.205 The emergence, maturing, or erosion of a scholarly habitus206 in an evolving academic field,207 which maintained the fiction of its autonomy from the political field via the image of a privileged ivory tower populated by unworldly pedants, might account for the success of university dons in defending their interests in some areas as well as their failure to do so in 203
Burke, “Performing History,” 36. An introduction in Bourdieu, Practical Reason. 205 Boudieu, Homo Academicus. An application in Füssel, Gelehrtenkultur. Bourdieu, “Génèse et structure du champs religieux.” 206 “Regulated Improvision” in Burke’s review. Habitus is to be conceived as a necessity sublimated into a virtue. It produces strategies that are objectively adapted to an objective situation. Social practices are guided by a “practical reason” rather than by rational calculation. The conditions of rational calculation are never met in practice, because information is scarce, practical choices are required, and alternatives remain vague. Habitus explains why people do “the right thing” more frequently than the laws of probability suggest. Cf. Bourdieu, Opstellen, 64–67. 207 Fields (Burke’s “occasions”) are to be understood as social microcosms (read: arenas of social conflict) that are defined by the resources and interests that are at stake, that have a specific logic and (false) necessity, and that therefore are related with the habitus of the field. See, for instance, Bourdieu, Practical Reason, 138. 204
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others. It does not, however, for the simple reason that habitus, a set of “field-specific dispositions” that inform the strategies of actors, is just another generic term for (standardised) practices that is turned into a tautological principle of these practices,208 based on the assumption that there has to be something out there that determines the apparent durability and the coherence of behavioural registers in specific social environments.209 What has to be explained from the historian’s point of view is, in analogy to Catholic reform or confessionalisation, once more transformed into an explanation that turns the multiple activities of actors into a passivity of victims who are unable to unmask, because of their docte ignorance,210 the brutal forces that determine them.211 This disqualifies Bourdieu’s theory of practice, and Burke’s occasionalism, as a conceptual framework in a research that aims at nudging early modern academics into action again and that has defined the problem of credibility as an obligatory passage point in order to do so.212
208 A good analysis of the tautological character of habitus in Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu, 74–84. In Burke’s line of approach, performative practices will succeed only if the habitus is adapted to the field in which it has to operate; which implies that again the effect—the success of a performance thanks to social recognition in this or that specific environment—is the format and the condition for its supposed regulating principles. The structuralist empires of yore are replaced by occasionalist baronnies that are smaller but not less despotic. Nonetheless, even this flexibility of Bourdieu’s model is limited. Cf. Jacobs, “Actornetwerk.” 209 Read the sweeping criticism of Bourdieu’s theory of practice in De Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, 82–96. 210 “L’explication que les agents peuvent fournir de leur pratique, au prix d’un retour quasi-théorique sur leur pratique, dissimule, à leurs yeux même, la vérité de leur maîtrise pratique comme docte ignorance, c’est à dire come mode de connaissance pratique n’enfermant pas la connaissance de ses propres principes . . . Il s’ensuit que cette docte ignorance ne peut donner lieu qu’à un discours de trompeur trompé, ignorant et la vérité objective de sa maîtrise pratique comme ignorance de sa propre vérité et le véritable principe de la connaissance qu’elle enferme.” Bourdieu, Esquisse, 202. 211 In the opposite case, it is not a regulating principle anymore, and actors, horresco referens, would start regulating their habitus themselves while actively organising the occasions (fields) they were engaged in. Actors are never more than flawed informants, “des trompeurs trompés.” 212 Bourdieu is a textbook case of a sociologist who is “playing God” by imposing his constructions on social actors and by treating their legitimations as sheer discourse hiding “objective” social relations. As for his article “Génèse et structure du champ religieux,” I share the assessment by Viaene who criticises the French sociologist’s methods by stating that “Bourdieu, shrouding a quite unsophisticated marxism in a typically French cloud of words, considers self-delusion to be the very essence of religion.” Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See, 16 n. 20.
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Again, there is a lot in names. Strip performance a priori of its performativity by reducing it to a “dramaturgical dimension,” and one has to resort, indeed, to invisible hands in order to account for the striking efficacy of all this role-playing. Burke turns his back without further comments on the meaning attached to the concept by music critics, psychologists of learning, and by economists “who attempt to measure the performance of certain industries” and by “the engineers who test the performance of ships, cars or aircraft.”213 If, by contrast, the meaning of performance is kept as open as possible, it may simultaneously refer to theatrical display as well as to achievement and its verification. In this scenario, historical actors themselves will do the job for historians by determining whether or not a phenomenon is a dramatic performance, an artefact, or a solid matter of fact that needs to be acted upon at once. Not only should we recognise that early modern academics recurred to performative practices in order to do so, but the performativity of their practices should not a priori be excluded (or taken for granted) either. Seen from this perspective, fluidity, fragility, and confusion become assets to build on, rather than pitfalls in a logical and coherent world that need to be filled as quickly as possible by habitus or field. All this calls for a full-fledged performative concept of Society, Power, and Truth, in which actors are allowed to overcome the uncertainties about what binds them and in which society, power, and truth “in action” are the result or an achievement, rather than a cause, of associations negotiated on the spot, in specific circumstances, around specific programmes, and with the help of practical means. This insight was first developed in another research field that, in analogy to religious history, inevitably has to tackle the problem of credibility as well: Science and Technology Studies (STS).214 In order to find a way out of an entrenched internalism-externalism debate in science studies,215
213
Burke, “Performing History,” 38. A good introduction into this research field and the many approaches to the topic is furnished by Vinck, Sociologie des sciences. 215 Many of the problems discussed in the previous paragraphs have surfaced in the context of the internalism-externalism debate between traditional history or sociology of ideas (respectively the classical position in Church history and Le Bras’ sociology of religions), which claims that only careers and structures of science can be accounted for while the inner core of science (respectively the Tridentine Spirit) speaks for itself, and the hard programme that seeks to develop a full-fledged sociology of knowledge 214
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Callon, Latour, and others chose to adopt a symmetrical agnosticism towards the models developed by sociologists as well as those professed by scientists, and they tried to nudge the scientists into action by exploring how they managed to turn their models of reality into the reality of the model.216 In his famous article on the domestication of scallops at Saint-Brieuc in France, Callon gave a convincing account of the successes and failures of scientists in rallying fishermen and scallops around their project, which in turn made them an obligatory passage point for both. The author explores the articulation of a problematisation by the scientists that could be translated (or so they hoped) into the interests ascribed to all the potential partners involved; the attempts to enrol them as stakeholders (interessment/enrollment); and their (eventually vain) attempts to lock their partners into a durable coalition (mobilisation) in which the experts of nature would have become indispensable.217 These concepts, or synonyms of them, will bounce back recurrently in the next chapters, which deal with the successes and failures of academics faced with the task of becoming indispensable themselves. Because of this focus on actors operating in chains or networks of other actors, this new approach was baptised Actor Network Theory or, not coincidentally, sociology of translation.218
(respectively the classical confessionalisation school and, for instance, Bourdieu on religion), in which society (or a more hybrid structure) has to speak for itself. 216 STS may have proven to be the Waterloo of critical sociology, which claims that there is an ultimate “social explanation” for every branch of human activity, including the hard facts of science. In contrast to peasants in the Bearn, say, or early modern academics, rocket scientists had the means to shout back. In the wake of the so-called “science wars” between sociologists and scientists, some sociologists stuck to the critical programme nonetheless. Other sociologists decided to withdraw behind the frontiers marked by Merton and to stick to studying the “structures of science” (financing, career patterns, symbolic representation) rather than the core of science itself. Bourdieu is an example of this position (cf. Bourdieu, Science de la science, and idem, Homo Academicus). His works account for the stability of academic or scientific elites and their socio-cultural reproduction, but do not attempt to explain the stability (or fragility) of scientific models and/or practices. A minority, however, decided that critical sociology had just met its nemesis, and that if its assumptions did not work for scientists, neither do they work with respect to muted Bearn peasants or pédans descolle in the 17th century. Cf. “The Fortunate Wreckage of Sociology of Science,” in Latour, Reassembling the Social, 93–99. 217 Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation.” 218 It is not a coincidence that Frijhoff, who also advocated a more “active” history of academics, also suggested that “pertinent terms used in recent theory include ‘actor network’ used when collective actions are analyzed historically, and ‘appropriation’ used when the actions of a historical subject are considered as determinants of the identity of the group.” Frijhoff, Embodied Belief, 24.
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Good synonyms for “Actor Network” are configuration or interpretive community.219 Seen from this perspective, Society becomes a chain of actors bundling energies with the help of a wide range of devices. This does not imply that such a chain of actors cannot take a rigid, Euro-American form that seems to defy time and context. As a matter of fact, the crystallisation of hard realities and constraints will occur regularly throughout the next chapters. But when it does, it calls, from the historian’s point of view, for an explanation, not reification. Most of the methodological tools to do so have already been touched upon implicitly or explicitly in the previous paragraphs. They all more or less derive from the symmetrical agnosticism towards contemporary models as well as towards the models of reality articulated by actors that is characteristic for Actor Network Theory.220 Only in this manner it is possible to explore whether these models worked, for whom, and how they were put to practice. For reasons of clarity, these methodological rules, which will be the touchstone for the next chapters, will be pulled together in this section.221 The most basic rule consists in keeping the social as flat as possible. This entails accepting that constellations, groups, position-holders, or “fields” are not a given but are continuously being formatted, mobilised, and dismantled. It is in moments of uncertainty and negotiation—in the many conflicts that will be analysed in the following chapters—that university men were forced to reflect on their role in society while simultaneously modelling the academic order into an interesting partner for potential allies within and without the university, and in which they sought to configure an environment in which their interests could flourish. Power structures, hierarchies, and interest groups will emerge, but now the attention will shift to the question of how they were devised, stabilised, and displaced in time and
219 Cf. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class, which addresses the same problems from the point of view of literary criticism. An interpretive community involved in the act of creative meaning-making is not to be mistaken for a social entity. It is a conglomerate of texts, readership, legitimate reading methods, and a wide range of other (f)actors. The meaning of a text is therefore not fixed. 220 The central text on symmetrical agnosticism is Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes, which challenges the asymmetry in research respectively into allegedly premodern and modern phenomena. 221 Most of these have been drawn from Latour’s textbook on Actor Network Theory, Reassembling the Social.
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space.222 Keeping the surface flat also implies getting rid of a-priori dichotomies between the centre as the source of religious or political change and a reluctant periphery, or between “power” or “society” and “religion.”223 If such dichotomies emerge (and they will, as already mentioned in the Prologue), it should be because of the work of actors, not of constellations.224 In analogy, actors may become grand figures carrying through proportionally grand schemes—a fate bequeathed, for instance, to popes, princes, and other powers that be. Yet, it becomes crucial to understand how and why they were nudged into action as great princes or benign pontiffs by other actors. Actors are mediators, not grand initiators or docile vehicles. This entails that a good historical account tries to multiply the actors involved rather than reducing them to a single, ahistoric regulator. At first sight, this may seem a recipe for chaos, but it is not. In theory, actors can reinvent the world all over again at every occasion; in practice, they seldom do so and try to avoid the tremendous costs in terms of time, financial resources, infrastructure, and tested alliances, not to mention the cost of credibility itself, that such adventures would bring along.225 In order to keep the world more or less predictable, a
222 The notion of accumulation does not rhyme well with the methodological principle of keeping the landscape as flat as possible in order to let actors bring in contrasts, reliefs, and asymmetries themselves. Concepts such as social, political, or symbolic capital or, for that matter, other structures cannot be used as explanatory principles, begging as they do for an explanation on how they were practically accumulated on the spot. On capital and the conversion of different forms of capital (here: symbolic and economic capital ), read Bourdieu, Esquisse, passim. 223 This is the central argument in Ditchfield, “In Search of Local Knowledge.” 224 As a consequence, this methodological survey is not a plea for a micro-historical approach in which fundamental causes and effects are to be sought on a microhistorical level, for the simple reason that the production of this distinction between macro- and microhistory needs to be explained. Cf. the historiographical survey of “microhistory” in Revel, “Micro-analyse et construction du social.” The “local” and the “global” will emerge in the course of the negotiations, and shifting hierarchies or causal relations between them will materialise now and then in the second part of this book, but their appearance on the scene calls, again, for an explanation, not reification. On this argument in particular, read Latour, Reassembling the Social, 173–218. 225 Laboratories are, again, a good example. As long as they are performing, nobody will wish to see them dismantled and the expensive laboratory tools dismissed as sheer artefacts. Compare Law, After Method, 19 sqq. The success of a scientific model, for instance, is determined not by either truth or society—that would be tantamount to tautology—but by the flexibility and the strength of the network supporting it. Scientific models tend to be maintained and fortified—until new stakes cannot be absorbed anymore, participants start to withdraw from the network and the model unravels.
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lot of actors that are not considered as such in mainstream humanities (hence the need to introduce invisible hands) were configured to stabilise volatile human interactions, to entrench social asymmetries, to reproduce painstakingly engineered matters of fact.226 To put it differently: objects, an open list of all non-human actors, have agency too.227 In most cases, objects—institutions, for instance, or worn rituals, but also other devices—seem to function in a more or less automatic, unproblematical way compared to traditional, more vocal social actors (groups, networks, position-holders, and so on and so forth). This is exactly what they are designed for: they are to perform as shortcuts that spare other actors the burdensome task of reinventing the world all over again. It is the basic point of this book: ecclesiastical benefices (which will turn out to be rather odd objects) made a difference in the volatile fabric of Academia. Because academic privileges were continuously under threat, conflicts over benefices become opportunities to study the formatting of groups but also to trace, in the process, the agency of benefices as mediators of these groups. 1.3.3. Traces The scope is endless: following the trails of “academics in action” via the traces they left in the sources. In a research that focuses on the world according to the academics, academic sources constitute the core of the materials used. Despite inevitable losses, the source material produced by the Old University of Louvain is abundant. It is distributed over three funds, preserved in two archival depositories. Two of these funds have found, from the 1980s onwards, a shelter in
On this subject, read the article by David van Reybrouck,‘Boule’s Error,” esp. 162–164 which revisits the “error” of Neanderthal primitivity from the point of view of ANT. 226 “Latour and Woolgar talk of reification, but perhaps the notion of routinisation better draws attention to what is most important . . . but if machines and skills and statements can be turned into packages, then so long as everything works (this is always uncertain) there is no longer any need to individually assemble all the elements that make up the package, and deal with all the complexities.” Law, After Method, 33. 227 For instance, scallops refusing or accepting to enter the schemes of scientists by attaching themselves to the latters’ domestication nets prove to develop activities that can be compared to the election of trade union representatives by the fishermen. Read Callon, “Some Elements.” An in-depth development of this argument in Latour, Politiques de la nature.
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the university archives of Louvain (UAL). The fund Old University of Louvain (UAL, OUL) hosts, among others, the collection of charters and a list of miscellaneous documents, mostly related to the theology faculty, that until recently were kept in the archives of the diocesan seminary of Ghent (UAL, Ghent). The documentary backbone is constituted by the vast Old University of Louvain list preserved in the State Archives at Louvain (RAL, OUL), and more specifically by the minutes of academic councils, the Acta Universitatis and of the faculties of Arts and Divinity. Boards were designed to build consensuses, not to deploy uncertainties, rifts between academic factions, or negotiations between dons in the corridors of the Louvain auditoria and colleges. This entails that many of the actors popping up in these minutes (faculties, institutions, or officials) are often presented as unproblematic, monolithic agents, an assessment that is, of course, valid for all the official or semi-official documents of the learned corporations (correspondence, legal treatises, memorandums sent to local, regional, and ecclesiastical authorities and tribunals) registered in the minutes or elsewhere. Yet, it is largely sufficient to pick up the trails of meaningmaking where they can be traced back, and minutes offer an excellent opportunity to do so in a more or less systematic way. This entails that shorthands such as, say, “confessionalisation,” “the university,” or “social resources” will be used recurrently in order to keep the text readable. It is up to the reader to judge whether my request not to read explanatory principles into such shorthands is just an excellent bit of sophism or not. This applies also to the prosopographical data in this book, which have been drawn from administrative (graduation lists in the beadles’ registers or in the Acta Venerandae Facultatis Artium, the books of nominations, attestations in the Acta of the university or the respective faculties, lists of accession to academic councils in the list RAL, OUL) or literary sources (academic biographies). Statistics are to be read as descriptions, not as implicit or explicit explanations that seek to introduce an effect of realism. They are not about concrete data but are about standardised practices that have already been modelled by historical actors before being crammed in graphs and tables. Therefore, they are not to be privileged over qualifications of academics on their practices. They rather aim at translating their qualifications into terms familiar to historians and, above all, will offer many opportunities to shed a light on how academics themselves organised their world.
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Quantitative data concerning practices in the clerical job market were provided by sources produced by ecclesiastical administrations in Belgium (Archivum Archiepiscopatus Mechliniensis, A.A.M.) and in Rome (ASV, Dataria Ap. and Camera Ap.). A wealth of materials putting academic consensus building into perspective can be found in other archives. First, there are the documents listed in the archives of the abbey of Park (Archivum Abbatiae Parcensis, A.A.Pa.) near Louvain, whose abbot was, between 1607 and 1617, princely and apostolic visitator of the university. This documentation furnishes us with many fragments of negotiations that never made it to the minutes. The abbot was also princely visitator of the University of Douai from 1616 onwards. This allows us to uncover negotiations and policymaking in other universities. The archives of the city of Louvain (SAL, Oud Archief), and more specifically the minutes of the city council, are not less instructive than those of the abbey of Park. It is also in these funds that documents accumulated by the States of Brabant, in which the university town had a seat as one of the four capitals of the duchy, can be retrieved. Both the States and the city were important mediators in academic policy in the second half of the period under investigation. They provide, among other things, backstage information concerning the visitation. In the general archives in Brussels (AGR), the lists Conseil Privé, Régime Espagnol (AGR, Conseil Privé) and of the Council of State (in AGR, Papiers de l’Etat et de l’Audience) contain an amalgam of documents and dispatches of the supreme administrative councils of the Netherlands, on the universities of Louvain, Dole, and Douai, but these have proved to be of secondary importance.228 The vast container series of the Papiers de l’Etat et de l’Audience in the AGR (AGR, Audience) contains many treasures. The Secretariat of State was the passage point for the masses of documents submitted by individuals and institutions of the Netherlands to the Privy Council, 228
The archives of the Privy Council at Liège (Archives de l’Etat de Liège, AEL, Conseil Privé) were heavily damaged during the last World War. The available fragments are instructive because of the lack of information on the recurrent conflicts between Louvain prebend hunters and Liège “nationals,” although they do allow establishment of a general context in which the borders between the South Netherlands and Liège proved to be highly permeable. Regests of the minutes of the Cathedral Chapter of Liège, which also seated for the clergy in the Liège States and the members of which also figured as members of the Privy Council of Liège, confirm these findings.
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the Council of State, and the court, but it contains a lot of other materials as well. Somehow, the correspondence of Andrea Trevigi, the Archdukes’ physician and an important mediator for the academics in Brussels as well as in Rome, ended up in this fund. The list also contains the correspondence of the Archdukes’ secretaries of state with the archducal resident in Rome (Négotiations de Rome, AGR, Audience), who will prove to be a pivot in archducal policies concerning the universities of Louvain, Dole, and Douai. At one juncture, these letters will take over the role of chronological backbone, in the absence of detailed information in the minutes of academic councils. University men had the tedious habit of appointing special committees charged with the Negotium Romanum. Needless to say, this affects the quality and the quantity of the information provided by academic institutions. Roman archives have similar flaws. The dispatches of the nunciatures of Flanders and Cologne to the Vatican Secretary of State229 could be examined in a more or less systematical way.230 But because academics did everything to avoid the routine of the curia when trying to push through a confirmation of their privileges, special committees of cardinals in Rome were charged with the negotium Romanum, and many documents probably never found their way to the archives of the Holy See.231 An interesting example is provided by the archives of the papal families themselves. The Archivio Segreto Vaticano was indeed founded by Paul V in 1605, but pontiffs continued to incorporate part of the massive number of documents accumulated during their pontificates in private archives, the papacy being embedded in a “sistema di famiglie.” As for the Fondo Borghese (Aldobrandini and Borghese) in the Vatican Archives and the Fondo Barberini (Borghese and Barberini) in the Vatican Library, the inventories drawn up by Pasture—though
229 Fragments of correspondence are scattered throughout the archives of other offices, the congregations (the Holy Office, for instance), or the tribunals. The archives of the nunciature in Brussels are lost. Muret, “La disparition.” 230 These funds have been made accessible via editions and, except for Bentivoglio’s nunciature (1607–15), regests edited by the Bibliothèque de l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome, as well as by German scholarship on the Cologne nunciature. They provide, together with the series Relationes diocesium that was gathered by the Congregation of the Council, ample materials to frame Roman perceptions and policy. 231 The archives of the Consistory, the Armadi, and of the Congregation of the Council were scrutinied as well.
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whether these are complete is a moot point232—indeed refer sporadically to materials concerning the “Roman Question.” Other archival institutions in Rome that need to be mentioned here are the Archivum Romanum Societatis Jesu (ARSI), the correspondence in the funds Flandro-Belgica, Gallo-Belgica, and the miscellanea in the Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia, as well as the Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (ACDF). Theology is never far away when benefices enter the picture. 1.3.4. The litmus test of description The body of sources that will inform the analysis is conventional. To an extent, this will also apply to the narrative in this book, which is above all descriptive. This notion has become a curse recently, and therefore demands qualification. The reader can expect a descriptive account that strives neither for exhaustiveness (several fields of academic policy will only briefly be heeded) nor for a “detached” reproduction of the mere facts. It does not wish to prove this or that party right or wrong, with or without nuances, nor does it envisage establishing the reliability of one source or informant over another.233 Value judgements, character assassinations, and attacks on credibility will be abundant, but they are those developed by the actors involved, and the reader is gently asked to relate unflattering qualifications such as “blasphemous heretics,” “plotting Jesuits,” or other colourful descriptions to them, not to the author’s opinion. Avoiding critique also implies keeping aloof from the normalising, synoptical gaze that merely introduces other biases under a different, scientific guise. The task of description consists in deploying academics as full-blown actors/mediators of the chains in which they were involved. As a consequence, few grand concepts will be used. The criteria and concerns this book has to respond to are situated elsewhere. If, in the conclusions, the academic field emerges as a coherent and predictable environment that furnishes the reader with a logical explanation of the many aspects of academic policy that
232 Pasture, Inventaire de la Bibliothèque Barberini . . . au point de vue de l’histoire des Pays-Bas, and idem, “Inventaire du Fonds Borghese.” Both inventories are incomplete, however. 233 “But what if historians didn’t care about which version of events was true?” Keynote paper “Telling more,” 12, by Luise White at the workshop Not Telling: Secrecy, Lies and History.
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will be heeded, or that is immediately applicable to other fields that were not discussed, it has failed. By contrast, if the world according to the academics turns out to be a fluid and fragile world that needed continuously to be devised, structured, ordered, and stabilised at great costs and by all means, but that nonetheless somehow worked, then it has succeeded.
CHAPTER TWO
THE DROSS OF THE EARTH. BENEFICES AND ACADEMICS IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD
In contemporary canon law, the concept of “benefice” has gradually lost ground to the term “ecclesiastical office.” The Codex Iuris Canonici of 1917 still contained 80 canons regulating the benefice system; by 1983, only one of them had survived.1 For centuries, however, beneficium had been widely used as a synonym for officium. Yet, canonists would insist that the former concept referred only to the economic aspect of the latter, i.e., its remuneration derived from Church property or from tithes. Beneficium non datur nisi propter officium: a benefice was only conferred in exchange for the fulfilment of the pastoral or other religious tasks to which it was perpetually attached.2 This ageold bond would evaporate in the turmoil of the French Revolution. Much Church property was confiscated and the principalities of the Church were gradually secularised; ecclesiastical tithes were abolished; and new financial constructions footed the bill of the diocesan clergy.3 The vast monastic and canonical worlds, hotbeds of privilege and exemption, were decimated, being constructed, as they were, around a religiosity that was now considered less useful. Throughout the 19th century, a configuration emerged in which the Church gradually streamlined itself into a universal nation state of popes, bishops, parish priests, and the Catholic masses.4 In this context, the notion of benefice disappeared gradually, being entangled with the administration
1
Gaudemet, “Préface,” in Bégou-Davia, L’interventionisme bénéficial, 3. “Im unterschied zu dem lehnrechtlichen Benefizium war das kirchliche Benefizium die Ausstattung einer Funktion, eines Aufgabenbereiches, und nicht die Ausstattung des Benefiziaten.” Kerff, “Altare und Ecclesia,” 851–52. 3 Carrion Piñero distinguishes, in addition to the historical one, five “new” benefice systems. “L’aspetto patrimoniale-economico,” 442–45. 4 Raedts, “De Kerk als natiestaat,” 153. General features in Coppa, The Modern Papacy. On Belgian Catholicism and its “Romanisation” in an international context, see Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See. 2
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of a patrimony that had largely been swept away and with an idleness that could no longer be reconciled with “public utility.”5 The notion that clerics had to be remunerated for their services stemmed from the 4th century, when the Church gradually emerged from the apostolic days as a major land owner, a dispenser of public services,6 and an attractive bait for equestrian and senatorial elites that distinctively despised the lowly crafts that had remunerated their “apostolic” predecessors and the rural clergy.7 As a consequence, the crystallisation of the clergy as a distinct group from the laity, in tandem with the ritualisation and hierarchisation that came with the transformation of an outlawed sect into a public church,8 was constituted in daily practice, as the shepherds increasingly withdrew from the flock’s prosaic activities. Creating distance between clergy and laity would remain a time-tested remedy for many of the Church’s ills in the future. The benefice system that would emerge sometime between the 10th and the 12th centuries was designed to do just that.9 In the wake of Gregorian Reform, a sophisticated legal system was developed that sought to prevent the feudalisation of ecclesiastical office and property in the early Middle Ages. Afterwards, beneficial law would continue to pass the test as a flexible, universal language ordering a large part of the Church’s infrastructure while providing for concepts and tools to define and to settle conflicts over the distribution of resources.10
5 Interesting perspectives, from a structuralist viewpoint, in Colagiovanni, “L’aspetto storico-sociologico,” 393–418. The notion of idleness resonates, for instance, in the already cited article by Put, “Matthias Hovius.” 6 Mollat, “Bénéfices ecclésiastiques.” Already in the 3rd century, churches in episcopal cities sometimes had large domains at their disposal for charitable purpose. Landau, “Kirchengut,” 563. Patrimonial expansion in the 4th and 5th centuries enabled the churches to maintain their buildings or to provide for new ones; and to take over from the state the old grain distributions now redubbed as Christian charity. A third portion of Church property was used to meet the needs of clerics, first in urban centres and gradually, but much later, in the countryside as well. 7 “Ma ben presto la Chiesa, uscita dal periodo di latenza e di persecuzione, riconosciuta come una delle tante persone giuridiche prima, privilegiata poi al di sopra delle altre persone giuridiche nell’ambito dello stato e poi messa alla pari dello stato e quindi, per l’aspetto spirituale, sopra di questo, affrontò ben diversamente il problema del sostentamento del suo clero; intervenendo la novità giuridica precedente, la consistenza patrimoniale propria poi, e l’assetto economico feudale infine.” Colagiovanni, “L’aspetto storico-sociologico,” 404–06. 8 Bell, Ritual, 216. 9 Different chronologies are discussed in Kerff, “Altare und Ecclesia,” 852–55. 10 A good analysis of the legal technicalities is to be found in Mollat, “Bénéfices ecclésiastiques.”
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The longevity of the benefice system was not determined by its innate resistance to change. Such an explanation is not only normative, suggesting, as it does, that it should have changed, but is also tautological. When assessing its remarkable resilience, the question that begs an answer is why so many clerics and laymen alike could inhabit the “benefice system” more or less comfortably in distant circumstances, periods, and areas. In this overview, the metaphor of a clerical job market will be used in order to shift attention from a seemingly inert system to a wide range of contingent practices deployed by multiple stakeholders, while on the other hand the limits to this sleight-of-hand will become apparent as we proceed. In order to do so, benefices will be visited in situ: in places where they were the object of administrative practices. In the next three sections, the reader will be guided through episcopal palaces with their diocesan administrations; through buzzing Roman offices where thousands of bulls regarding benefices were sealed each year; and through the corridors of colleges and austere university halls. Interestingly, universities appeared on the stage exactly when the benefice system came into existence, and both reached institutional maturity more or less in the same period. Universities and benefices were deeply entangled with each other from the start, an ecology that will come to life in the last sections of this chapter.
2.1. The bishop’s men? Archbishop Matthias Hovius and his shepherds The first site that can serve as an excellent observatory of the benefice system in action is the register left by Matthias Hovius, archbishop of Mechlin from 1596 until his passing in 1620. Of late, he has become a well-known persona in Belgian historiography.11 The canon of Saint Romuald’s in Mechlin, who in the early 1580s had to hide in a closet from marauding Calvinists, would become a pivot in the reconstruction labour that awaited all Belgian bishops.12 For the daily maintenance of the neglected vineyard entrusted to him, Hovius kept a register of his
11 12
Cf. Harline and Put, A Bishop’s Tale. See, for instance, Put, “Al de mannen van de aartsbisschop.”
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collations (advowsons of benefices).13 For many reasons, the catalogus collationum is a poor source for reconstruction of the dynamics of the clerical job market in the first decades of the 17th century. Paradoxically, however, its shortcomings will make for an excellent introduction to the conundrums of the early modern clerical job market. The register contains, for a start, a (much longer) list of ordinands than was drawn up separately from the catalogue of appointments to office. Tonsure and/or different levels of sacred orders were required for office,14 but the administrative separation in Hovius’ register between appointments to office and ordinations embodies the fact that sacred orders were not administered by the bishop in order to fill in recent vacancies.15 As a result, a more or less identifiable supply of tonsured and/or ordained clerics of different educational and social backgrounds had to cope with fluctuations in the supply of available benefices.16 Roughly, historians have observed a saturation of this market in the 18th century, when a surplus of clerics outpaced 13 Cathalogus eorum quibus ab illustrissimo ac reverendissimo domino archiepiscopo Mechliniensi collati fuerunt pastoratus, beneficia, deservitoriae etcetera, 1600–1620, A.A.M., Hovius, 11, 100r–124v. 14 The priesthood was the final stage for only part of the clergy. In the diocese of Ghent, 28.04 per cent of the tonsurati eventually became priests in the beginning of the 17th century; a proportion that rose to about half of the clerical population c.1700. The average of 35.8 per cent is comparable to numbers for French dioceses. Vanden Broecke, “Seculiere geestelijken,” 199. 15 This administrative division was closely entangled with other legal and financial practices. As they tended to be perpetually attached both in legal theory and in administrative practice to the ecclesiastical offices they remunerated, benefices could not be part of the episcopal mensa or treasury, and ordination by the bishop therefore did not necessarily give access to office. Canonists with episcopalist sympathies, such as Z.B. Van Espen, would claim, in the 18th century, that benefices were separated from the bishop’s financial resources in the course of the early Middle Ages. This may have been the case for a restricted number of benefices, but his statement probably aimed at bolstering the view that bishops should be in control of all ecclesiastical benefices in their dioceses (as they allegedly were in the ancient Church) rather than historical reality. Cf. Van Espen, Jus Ecclesiasticum Universum, Pars 2da, tit. xviii, cap.i. An introduction in the early history of the chapters in Belgium in Meijns, Aken of Jeruzalem? 16 There are, of course, the studies on clerical careers in France and the already cited isolated studies into the parish clergy of the diocese of Ghent (Steven Vanden Broecke, “Seculiere geestelijken,” and idem, Rekrutering), a few unpublished licenciate theses about the clergy of the diocese of Antwerp and Liège in the 18th century, or the canons of this or that collegial or cathedral chapter, but the clerical job market as such has never been studied, either with respect to the South Netherlands or in other Catholic areas.
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the number of jobs and the average time in between ordination and benefice-holding lengthened considerably.17 Although canon law stipulated that candidates for pastoral offices had to be at least 25 years old,18 by the end of the 18th century, fresh parish rectors tended to be in their mid- or late thirties.19 In the beginning of the 17th century, the balance between clerics and benefices may have been slightly less unequal but was nonetheless considered unsatisfactory: both were, to the despair of bishops and others, scarce. Three decades of continuing unrest had gravely disturbed traditional formation and recruitment channels, such as the universities; new ones, such as diocesan seminaries, were still under construction. A devastated countryside struggled to support the pre-war clerical infrastructure. In this context, it may be significant that the number of graduates in Hovius’ manual had doubled in the second decade, after graduations in theology and philosophy at Louvain had picked up between 1590 and 1610. The profile of the applicants in Hovius’ manual provides for another parameter. Holders of benefices were ideally secular clerics—an association that will be significant in the following chapters of this book. Yet, in the absence of secular priests, Hovius had to rely on 30 to 35 regulars (c.8 per cent of the appointed individuals)20 for 16.5 per cent of the parishes in the Catalogus.21
17 In 18th-century Spain, for instance, one out of three clerics did not dispose of a benefice. Hermann, L’Eglise d’Espagne, 25. In the archdiocese of Mechlin, in the concursus (comparative exam) of 1784, 1785, and 1786 respectively, 88, 77, and 70 participants competed with each other for 17, 13, and 9 vacant rectorships. Quaghebeur, De concursus, 60. In the diocese of Ghent, the normalisation of the clerical job market in the 17th century went hand in hand with a stabilisation of clerical careers from c.20 years in the parishes (either as pastor or as vice-pastor) to 25 or even 30 years for young priests serving as vice-pastors. Vanden Broecke, “Seculiere geestelijken,” 206. 18 Van Espen, Jus Ecclesiasticum Universum, Pars 2da, tit. xix, cap. i, § vii. 19 Quaghebeur, “Le concours diocésain,” 853–54. 20 Benefices for regular clerics did exist, the income of an abbey or other dignitaries in monastic communities often being separated from the religious community’s general treasury, but they were considered to be a category separate from the beneficia secularia that were to be manned by the secular clergy. On beneficia regularia (as opposed to beneficia secularia), see Mollat, “Bénéfices ecclésiastiques en Occident.” Full appointments to rectorships (18) are underrepresented in comparison with the temporary ones (38) entrusted to regulars. 21 In the first decade, nearly one of every four pastoral offices filled by Hovius was passed on to a regular cleric from nearby or distant abbeys, while in the second decade their share of benefices diminished to nearly 10 per cent.
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In total, the Catalogus Collationum registers 518 entries over the two decades in between 1600 and 1620, involving more or less 400 individuals and c.220 parishes in Hovius’ vast diocese of 439 parishes.22 Close to 30 appointments took place in neighbouring dioceses.23 The average of 20 to 25 vacancies filled each year by Hovius corresponds more or less with the total numbers of advowsons of rectorships in the archdiocese in between 1600 and 1620.24 But if one turns to benefices rather than to the 260-odd locations of parishes in the Catalogus collationum,25 the picture changes significantly. Out of the c.500 entries for the years 1601–19,26 only c.340 entries (rectorships and deserviturae)27 are related to the recruitment of shepherds for c.200 parishes within and outside the diocese of Mechlin. Another 158 entries listed the advowson of other benefices situated in various chapels and churches.28 Several conclusions leap to the eye in Fig. 2.1. First, canonships barely figure in Hovius’ register, although the diocese hosted, alongside the metropolitan chapter of Saint Romuald’s, 12 collegiate chapters attached to the oldest or most prestigious churches mostly situated in the diocese’s cities and towns29 and employed, in theory, between
22 Nearly 40 geographical circumscriptions out of 518 entries could not be identified. The neighbouring dioceses of Antwerp, Ghent, and Namur counted only c.150 parishes. Tihon, Dictionnaire des paroisses. Only the archdiocese of Cambray hosted a number of parishes similar to the one of Mechlin. Cf. Deregnaucourt, De Fénélon à la Révolution. 23 More than half of these were situated in the diocese of Namur, while benefices in Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent each passed the review more than once. The dioceses of Roermond and Den Bosch are last on the list. 24 Quaghebeur, De concursus, 99. In the much smaller diocese of Ghent (c.170 parishes), about 11–14 fresh pastors or vice-pastors entered the vineyard of the Lord on a yearly basis. Vanden Broecke, “Seculiere geestelijken,” 202. The Mechlin calculations exclude vice-pastors, the benefice attached to the rectorship being the reserve of the pastor. 25 Add the c.40 entries where the parish hosting the benefice in question was not mentioned or unidentifiable. 26 Bar the benefices that were granted in 1600 and in 1620, which were not fully listed in the catalogus. 27 Respectively, benefices destined for pastors and ad-interim assignments during the vacancy of a rectorship. 28 In total, 147 distinct benefices were registered in the catalogus collationum, which were situated in c.100 different locations, alongside those locations that could not be identified. 29 A standard work remains Schieffer, Die Entstehung von Domkapiteln. Case studies in Meijns, Aken of Jeruzalem?, and Bijsterveld, “De oorsprong van de oudste
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134 Canonships Rectorships Deserviturae Altars Others 24 4
Fig. 2.1. Types of ecclesiastical benefices filled in by Matthias Hovius 1601–20
150 and 200 canons.30 The proud colleges of canons were, despite their poor reputation in historiography, involved in many activities that went beyond adding lustre to the cult in their home church, duties that included, among others, the management of the other (urban) parishes and religious institutions in their immediate environment.31 They acted as big employers for dozens of chaplains and other secular clerics. Religious infrastructure, in addition to being much more developed in urban centres, may have remained more intact in the relative safety of towns and cities than in the countryside, just like clerical populations themselves.32 In this context, it is significant that the recruitment of the urban clergy, including the shepherds of these populous parishes, largely bypassed the diocesan authorities.33
kapittels.” On the development of the parochial system, see Lagré et al., Histoire des curés, 15–38. 30 Pasture, Les chapitres séculiers, 68. 31 Cf. the activities of the cathedral chapter in Ghent in Cloet, Het bisdom Gent, 129–35; Marinus, De contrareformatie te Antwerpen, 103–24; a standard work remains Loupès, Chapitres et chanoines. 32 Cf. p. 14. 33 Only c.30 entries concern benefices situated in towns, while the corresponding rectorships in larger agglomerations did not pass the review at all. At this stage of research, it is impossible to calculate the total number of “simple” benefices (beneficia simplicia), altars and sextonships that were, alongside rectorships and canonships, attached to the parish, collegial, and cathedral churches of the archdiocese of Mechlin; but their number must have been considerable in a highly urbanised area: even in the countryside, many parish churches hosted a few altars and other benefices.
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With respect to the offices that Hovius did dispose of, second, more than half of the appointments involving pastoral duties cannot be considered full appointments at all. The 174 deserviturae (for c.120 parishes without a shepherd) listed from 1601 to 1620 were temporary assignments that eased the spiritual needs of the flock after the death (or promotion) of their shepherd. Legitimate occupants of benefices, by contrast, had to be shielded from arbitrary intrusions by feudal warlords, and therefore they could not be removed from office. This permanence of office had remained satisfactory even after feudal warlords had become a distant memory, accommodating as it did the interests of the clergy with the spiritual needs this clergy ascribed to the flock. In the early 17th century, the distinction between temporary deservitores and full-blown rectors may often have been academic, in the absence of sufficient endowment; eligible candidates; or both.34 More practically, one wonders whether the appointment of deservitores implied much recruitment, let alone a recruitment policy, in the beginning of the 17th century. While they would become a bone of contention between bishops and other collators in the 18th century, deserviturae were probably not at the forefront of a Borromean offensive in Hovius’ days.35 If only the full appointments to rectorships in the catalogus collationum are considered, Hovius in fact only disposed of c.one-third (31 per cent) of the averagely 25 to 30 parishes that changed occupants yearly in between 1601 and 1619.36 Historians familiar with the benefice system will not be surprised. In the 11th century, Gregorian reformers had attempted to canalise lay influence in church affairs by stipulating that sacred offices had to be distinguished from other jobs by the specifi-
34 In the archdiocese of Mechlin, de facto permanent deserviturae in particularly poor parishes only disappeared after the first quarter of the 18th century. Quaghebeur, De concursus, 50. 35 In 1613, Deservitores tended to be rectors of neighbouring parishes, not fresh trainees from the seminary or vice-pastors the careers of whom needed a nudge from a supporting bishop. See, for instance, the enumeration of deservitores in the diocesan report of 1613 in Registra rescriptionum, A.A.M., Mechliniensia, 157. 36 Only in 1601–1605, the archbishop disposed of 40 per cent of the 90 rectorships receiving a new occupant; afterwards, only 28 to 32 per cent of nominations to rectorships were registered in the catalogus collationum. In total, c.520 rectorships changed occupants between 1601 and 1620. Quaghebeur, De concursus, 169. In the absence of figures for canonships or altars, it is impossible to calculate Hovius’ niche in the entire clerical job market.
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city of the procedures leading to their advowson:37 Churchmen always had to rubber-stamp, via a formal canonical investiture and instalment procedures, the appointment of other churchmen at some stage of the procedures. But canon law did not abolish the long-established rights of founders of benefices and their families as such.38 A considerable proportion of canonships and altars were still at the bestowal, under the supervision of the Church, of lay patrons. Research into the so-called Patronatsbistümer and other benefices under lay patronage in Spain and Italy reveals that the foundation of so-called private benefices in the early modern period was still a religious investment that enhanced the family’s links with the Hereafter; a safe economic investment, as the benefice in question fell henceforward under the protection of the Church;39 and a social investment that allowed a family to launch the clerical careers of offspring or clients.40 In the South Netherlands, the largest pool of benefices was managed by the prince (the king of Spain or, in the period under investigation, the archduke),41 in his position as successor to the counts of Flanders, the dukes of Brabant, etc., who had founded many chapters and churches for a blend of religious, dynastic, and geopolitical reasons—assets that 37 The claim that ecclesiastical patrimony in general and benefices in particular had to be treated differently from lay property (see above) was not an isolated one. Clerical office holders too were to be distinguished by “different” appointment procedures. Cf. Mollat, “Bénéfices ecclésiastiques.” 38 Refreshing insights on Gregorian reform in Bijsterveld, “Conflict and Compromise,” which portrays Gregorian reform as the outcome of negotiations rather than a victory of the clergy over lay usurpations. 39 Not all altars were benefices. See Pro Ruiz, “Las capellanìas: familia, iglesia y propiedad,” and with respect to the chaplains of guilds, Laenen, Histoire de l’église métropolitaine, 239. 40 They allowed their holders to be pickier, while less wealthy clerics were more inclined to go after the first vacancy that occurred, even if that involved a time-consuming and flat career in the parishes. In Italy, such benefices were also a gateway for nobles to a career at the curia. A very interesting introduction in Weber, Familienkanonikate und Patronatsbistümer. See also Sieglerschmidt, Territorialstaat und Kirchenregiment. The Low Countries hosted a series of noble chapters for women; read Koch, De kloosterpoort als sluitpost?. With respect to rural benefices, read Bijsterveld, “Les jeux d’influence et le patronage local,” 345–63. 41 Based on Pasture, “Les chapitres séculiers.” Pasture did not mention the collators and patrons of 32 chapters; 3 of them could be recuperated by Bijsterveld, “Les jeux d’influence,” 360. In Holland and Zealand, before the rebellion, half of the canons and one-third of the parish priests were appointed by the prince. Jongkees, Staat en Kerk, 23–41 and 270–98. At least half of the collegiate chapters in the archdiocese of Mechlin were partially or entirely manned by the duke of Brabant (i.e., the prince), the duke of Aarschot, and other feudal lords up to the archducal period. Read Pasture, Les chapitres séculiers, 48–49.
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were also used to foot the bill for the expanding group of state officials in the later Middle Ages.42 The “rolls of benefices” drawn up by Brussels and Madrid bureaucrats43 established a ranking order among the candidates for canonships in at least 15 chapters as well as for the dozens of altars and the rectorships at his bestowal in his respective duchies, lordships, and counties.44 Under the reign of the Archdukes, the roll of benefices was managed by the ecclesiastical councillor in the Council of State: Matthias Hovius, who, in his function of archbishop, was in close contact with the members of the Collateral Councils.45 The share of clerics involved in the temporal administration of the realm had fallen sharply in the 16th century, but benefices bestowed by the prince were still assets that could be used to recreate and stabilise power elites.46 The rigid boundaries between temporal and spiritual administration proved to be highly permeable for networks in which the bureaucrats and lawyers of officialdom, evolving into a nobility of state itself, merged with the new noblesse d’Eglise of self-styled poor, learned, and pious men who were often recruited from among their own offspring, friends, or clients.47
42 Case studies show clearly the impact of the swelling circuits around the dynasty on the benefice system. In the collegiate chapter of Saint Michael and Saint Gudula in Brussels, for instance, 80 per cent of the “major canons” between 1430 and 1559 who are known to have performed functions outside their church did so in the immediate surroundings of the prince or in his central councils. Only 37 per cent of the same group adopted additional functions within Church hierarchy. Van Hofstraeten, Beloond voor bewezen diensten, 163–70. Features in Houssiau, “Contrôleurs ou controlés,” 249–54. A case study in Damen, “Serviteurs professionnels et profiteurs loyaux” on the hommes d’église in the council and chancery of Holland and Zeeland under the Burgundians. 43 Concerning the increasing grasp of the Brussels officialdom on the distribution of benefices, see Van Peteghem, “Les rôles des bénéfices ecclésiastiques à la collation princière,” esp. 234–38. Compare the royal feuille des bénéfices in France in McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth Century France. 44 Cf., for instance, the Rolle des benefices de Patronaige envoye dez Madrid par lordinaire en sorty le 24 de juing 1589 pour le Conseil Privé, AGR, Conseil Privé, Régistres, 735. This document should be understood as a waiting list for benefices that would become vacant in the future. 45 Pasture, La réforme des chapitres séculiers. 46 Houssiau, “Contrôleurs ou contrôlés”; on the members of the Collateral Councils in the Netherlands in the period under investigation, see De Schepper, De Kollaterale Raden in de Katholieke Nederlanden. 47 In the period under investigation, the careers of Jean X. Richardot and Charles Maes, who respectively ascended to the episcopal thrones of Arras and Ghent in 1603 and 1610 and who both were related to successive presidents of the Privy Council, are telling examples. Cf. Vanhoutte, “Van robins tot très grands nobles.”
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Presentations of rectors by lay patrons, by contrast, were rare in the archdiocese of Mechlin. Few rectorships (4.8 per cent) in Hovius’ Vineyard came under the regime of the jus patronatus laicale.48 In the course of the 11th and 12th centuries, many parishes had been “restituted” by pious and repenting lay lords to the Church hierarchy, which may partially explain why the Eigenkirchenwesen, the circuit of “private rectorships” attached to feudal property,49 was a relatively marginal phenomenon in early modern Belgium.50 The juridical quality in which Hovius intervened was mentioned in c.45 per cent of the 518 entries in the catalogus collationum, but fewer than 10 per cent of these entries explicitly concerned nominations by patrons rubberstamped by the bishop.51 Surprisingly, these 10 per cent concerned presentations of candidates by clergymen (including, in more than half of the cases, the archbishop himself ) instead of by lay patrons. Clerics or religious communities could be adorned with the prerogatives that came with lay patronage as well, in their quality of individual or institutional inheritors of feudal property.52 In Hovius’ catalogus, however, the line between benefices under lay patronage and those coming under the regular canon law system was blurred. This calls for qualification. Canon law had never unambiguously privileged the bishop, the holder of ordinary jurisdiction, as the only ordinary collator of the benefices in his diocese. Many other ecclesiastics or ecclesiastical institutions—abbots, dignitaries of collegiate or
48
Quaghebeur, De concursus, 47. In the 17th century, only 0.6 per cent or 4 rectorships out of 657 in the archdiocese of Cambrai came under the system of lay patronage. Deregnaucourt, De Fénélon à la revolution, 304. In the diocese of Ghent, figures were comparably low (Vanden Broecke, Recrutering en carrièrepatroon, 127). 49 Cf. Kerff, “Altare und Ecclesia,” 858. 50 In some dioceses, for instance those of Arras and Cambrai, more than half of the parishes changed sides and were entrusted to ecclesiastical institutions. Lagré et al., Histoire des curés, 63. 51 Only a quarter of these involved rectorships. That is, fewer than 1 per cent of the total number of collations of rectorships in the period under investigation (numbers calculated by Quaghebeur) can be identified as the result of a presentation of a candidate by a patron. 52 This seems to have been the case for the few presentationes by third parties in the catalogus. Actually, only two patrons performed as such, i.e., the personae personatus of respectively the collegiate church of Saint Peter’s at Anderlecht and the collegiate church of St.-Pieters-Leeuw. “Personatus” were benefices that “clericalised” some of the prerogatives held by lay patrons in their private churches. Some of these prerogatives were ceremonial, while others involved the recruitment of the church’s personnel.
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cathedral churches, chapters, or even rectors—claimed to make full appointments in their own right.53 A catalogue of the benefices at the bestowal of the archbishop of Mechlin (the catalogus beneficiorum, to be distinguished from the catalogus collationum) is highly revealing in this context: an archbishop, Hovius had only 12 rectorships (or 2.7 per cent of the 439 rectorships in his diocese) and 34 other benefices (mostly altars and sextonships) at his advowson.54 In his home base, c.45 per cent of rectorships came formally under the collation rights of abbeys; chapters of the cathedral and of the collegiate churches were entitled to cater for another 25 per cent.55 If the archbishop eventually could call 50 rectorships (11 per cent) his own out of 439, it was because the abbey of Affligem, including its advowsons, had been incorporated into the newly erected episcopal mensa of the diocese of Mechlin.56 Because Hovius had inherited the portfolio of an abbot, most of these benefices were situated in the countryside. Add 13 rectorships and 23 other benefices in neighbouring dioceses that Hovius could dispose of, and the archbishop was in charge of the human resources for 161 rectorships, altars, and sextonships. These numbers may look low to
53 In fact, 63 abbots, 30 abbesses, 56 chapters, 88 rectors, 22 provosts, 5 deacons, 4 priors/prioresses, and 20-odd other dignitaries of various hue and feathers had full rights of collation over benefices in the Habsburg Netherlands. Index beneficiorum . . . quae nominationis juri sunt subjecta, UAL, Ghent (1958-1959), 24. The interests of bishops (and contemporary historians) in treating the other brokers in the clerical job market as mere patrons may have been many, but in this book they will be labelled as full collators alongside the bishops. I have chosen to stick to the concept of “ordinary collator” as it was defined by the 18th-century canonist Van Espen, Ius Universum Ecclesiasticum, tit. xxi, cap i. I. In beneficial law (as opposed to, for instance, jurisdictional matters), ordinarius did not necessarily apply to bishops. First, we will see that academics treated all ecclesiastical patrons as full collators (for good interests); second, the distinction will prove useful in explaining why some benefices (those of the canonical system) were affected by papal reservations or academic nominations and others (those coming under lay patronage) were not. 54 Catalogus beneficiorum quae jure ordinario spectant ad collationem illustrissimi domini archiepiscopi, in A.A.M., Mechliniensia, 74, 201r. Major niche holders such as the abbot of Saint-Hubert in the Ardennes could boast appointment rights to c.80 parishes and 11 canonships. Index beneficiorum, UAL, Ghent (1958-1959), 24. 55 In fact, 10 per cent of rectorships were at the advowson of other dignitaries such as deacons or provosts. Cf. the situation in the archdiocese of Cambrai, where abbeys and metropolitan or collegiate chapters were the ordinary collators of, respectively, 63.01 per cent and 29.68 per cent of rectorships. Deregnaucourt, De Fénelon à la Révolution, 304. 56 Catalogus Beneficiorum (. . .) A.A.M., Mechliniensia, 74, 203r. It is in this capacity that Hovius was occasionally referred to in the catalogus collationum as an ecclesiastical patron.
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modern eyes, but they are not.57 To the despair of historians attending the classical school, the deeply entrenched lock on the clerical job market, which in earlier centuries had been held by religious communities and institutions and had led to the establishment of a dense network of parishes and chapels in the Low Countries, had not been touched by the Fathers of Trent. And yet the number of entries in Hovius’ administration (c.30 per cent of nominations to rectorships, with respect to c.180, or 40 per cent, of the diocese’s parishes) greatly exceeds the limited collation rights of the archbishop cum abbot. Only 110 to 120 collations involved benefices from his own portfolio.58 A bishop, in his capacity as diocesan overlord, had apparently many more strings to his bow than other collators. The diocesan concursus or comparative exam is one of the best-known instruments provided by the Council of Trent that turned the position of bishop into an obligatory passage point to a career in the (more attractive) parishes. But that would not have been reflected in the catalogus, ordinary collators remaining formally in charge. Besides, the concursus was still a marginal phenomenon in Hovius’ days.59 Nevertheless, half of the entries in Hovius’ catalogus collationum do not belong to either category of entries discussed so far, i.e., deserviturae and benefices out of Hovius’ own portfolio. In 70 per cent of this “ghost category” of c.250 entries, a legal framework for Hovius’ intervention was provided: the vast majority (c.90 per cent) concerned benefices in the diocese (jure devoluto) or in the ecclesiastical province (jure metropolitano), whose advowson had devolved to the archbishop, in his quality of diocesan and provincial supervisor, after the ordinary collator or the patron had failed to come up in a timely fashion (i.e., within six months) with a suitable candidate. In the period under investigation, benefices of this kind must have been
57
The archbishop of Cambrai was the ordinary collator of 5.78 per cent of the 657 parishes in his diocese (Deregnaucourt, De Fénélon à la revolution); in the diocese of Ghent, the bishop had more extended prerogatives as the ordinary collator of 25 per cent of the parishes (Vanden Broecke, “Seculiere geestelijken”). Data on canonships, altars, and other benefices than those charged with the care of souls are lacking. 58 I.e., 30–35 nominations in his quality of archbishop, and c.80 nominations in his capacity as abbot of Affligem. Proportions range from one-quarter (26 per cent) in the period 1601–05 to one-fifth (17–19 per cent) in the other five-year intervals. There are a dozen dubious cases that do not figure on the catalogus beneficiorum but that are mentioned as belonging to the archbishop’s pool of benefices in the catalogus collationum. 59 Compare the numbers in Quaghebeur, De concursus, 169.
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particularly numerous, as many offices, especially rural ones, had been deserted at the nadir of the civil war and had never been occupied again. The c.80 rectorships and just as many altars, sextonships, and other benefices that thus fell in Hovius’ lap60 account for the bulk of his collations. This does not mean, however, that the archbishop had only a temporary lead over other ordinary collators. Collations of rectorships jure devoluto continue to figure, albeit less frequently, in the lists of collations by Hovius’ successor, Archbishop Jacobus Boonen (1621–55), between 1630 and 1649.61 Finding shepherds within six months for poorly endowed parishes remained a burdensome task that easily devolved to the bishop.62 Diocesan seminaries—the one at Mechlin hosted c.80 students in 1620—may have stabilised the bishops’ quantitative lead over other collators as brokers for an increasingly scholarised clerical job market even after the clerical infrastructure had recovered.63 These were reservoirs of aspiring clerics of more modest origins who could not afford to study at the university, could not draw on any old-boys’ network, and could be prodded more easily into accepting less attractive rectorships.64 Hovius’ progress in finding suitable shepherds for “his own” rural parishes was spectacular in comparison with general figures.65 The frequency of Hovius’ interventions in the clerical job market in Fig. 2.2 is difficult to interpret, representing just a fragment of the
60
When extrapollated (48 per cent jure devoluto; 16 per cent jure ordinario, patronatus, or otherwise; and 34 per cent unknown) to the 117 entries without a reference to a legal ground, c.60 benefices have to be added to this list. 61 Their number had fallen 25 per cent with respect to the collations jure devoluto reported as such by Hovius, and even 50 per cent if only devolutions within the diocese are taken into consideration. Interestingly, a larger proportion of rectorships devolved to the archbishop Boonen jure metropolitano. Devolutions constituted c.10 per cent of the total number of appointments to rectorships by then, down from 16 to 17 per cent in Hovius’ days. Cf. the numbers in Quaeghebeur, De concursus, 169. 62 Cloet, Het bisdom Gent, 149. 63 Registrum actorum (. . .) archiepiscopi Mechliniensis, 16 February 1620, A.A.M., Mechliniensia, 10, 137v. 64 The proportion of rectorships (quantified by Quaghebeur, De concursus, 167) that came under the archbishop’s ordinary collation rights, but that nonetheless were granted jure devoluto because they had been vacant for a long time, is much smaller (slightly less than 10 per cent, or 5 out of 54) than the average of 16 to 17 per cent. 65 In the first decade, Hovius appointed c.100 deservitores while c.80 of them figure in the entries for the second decade; with respect to his own rectorships, however, 80 per cent of the 25 deserviturae are to be situated in the first half of the period under investigation.
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45 40 35
Others
30
Canonships
25
Altars
20
Rectorships
15
Deserviturae
10 5
16 19
16 17
16 15
16 13
16 11
16 09
16 07
16 05
16 03
16 01
0
Fig. 2.2. Frequency of Hovius’ interventions on a yearly basis per category 1601–19
activity on this market.66 Moreover, Hovius’ collations involved only specific types of benefices, i.e., rural rectorships, altars, and other small benefices. The deserviturae or the number of benefices granted jure devoluto provide a flawed yardstick for the normalisation of the clerical job market as well. Previous paragraphs have intimated that very different realities could hide behind the same formal acts—which was, after all, the point of setting up a uniform legal system for the management of ecclesiastical offices and property throughout Christianity. But while advowsons of rectorships are more or less equally distributed over the two decades, two-thirds of the steadily growing numbers of predominantly rural altars and sextonships were registered in between 1610 and 1620, with roughly 40 per cent receiving a new occupant in the latter five years. The figures in Hovius’ register confirm the received wisdom that the clerical infrastructure in the countryside was catching up with urban centres. On top of that, the late arrival of altars on the scene suggests that this type of benefices, in particular the segment with which Hovius dealt, was more vulnerable than other benefices.67 First, they tended to be more poorly endowed, and the sources of their income may have been different from those
66 The fluctuations of the advowsons of rectorships in Hovius’ catalogus collationum do not necessarily match the general trend. Compare Quaghebeur, De concursus, 169. 67 They were not institutionally protected by bishops, who had to ensure that all parishes had a shepherd or a deservitor; their potential holders were not members of venerable colleges who could throw their weight around.
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generated by rectorships.68 Second, they may have been “forgotten” more easily by religious institutions and church magnates69 as much as by potential applicants, who may not have been interested in claiming them (and risking endless litigation) until well into the 17th century,70 and/or who just lacked good channels of information about the vacancies that had occurred. Gathering information about vacancies was a matter of concern even in universities, where large numbers of clerical hopefuls accumulated wisdom about the state of the clerical job market in the university’s hinterland. Altars remained, after all, more prone to long vacancies than other benefices, devolving as they continued to do in large numbers to Boonen in between 1630 and 1649.71 Different types of benefices behaved differently in an allegedly normalising clerical job market.72 Enter a few other oddities. Some of the bishop’s appointments to office were just approvals of transactions set up by clerics themselves, even though the formal initiative continued to be attributed to Hovius. 68 Rectors may have coped more easily with difficult times via the casualia, the fees paid by their parishioners for the performance of specific religious tasks and sacraments. The casualia may have constituted in many parishes a large, if not the largest, part of the real income of a benefice charged with the care of souls. Cf. Marinus, De contrareformatie te Antwerpen, 133–37. In the diocese of Ghent, many parish rectors had traded their (volatile) share of the tithes for a portio congrua, a more or less stable salary paid by the local collector of the tithes, a nearby abbey, or a chapter of canons. Cf. Vanden Broecke, “Seculiere geestelijken.” 69 Not filling a vacancy of an altar or a smaller benefice could benefit the collator, who in many cases was also in charge of levying the tithes (or other sources of income) from which the benefice’s income was derived. Such a de facto incorporation of the benefice’s income into the patrimony of, say, a chapter or an abbey could spare it tiresome bureaucratic procedures at the Roman curia, where the formal incorporation of benefices required money, support, and an angelic patience. Many letters illustrating the tiresome travails of the archducal residents to obtain incorporations in Négociations de Rome, 1601–1623. AGR, Audience, 438–459. 70 Several echoes of contestations of such de facto incorporations by clerics rediscovering “lost” benefices in the entries of the Dataria Apostolica, 1590–1644, ASV, Dataria Ap., Per Obitum, 1–42. Cf., for instance, the advowson of an altar that had become vacant “per dismembrationem, quia officialis Mechliniensis declaravit illa indolate unitam cure de Zichem,” 18 November 1617, Catalogus, A.A.M., Hovius, 11, 119r. Among canons, a recruitment stop was a widespread practice in harsh times; cf. Pasture, Les chapitres séculiers. See also p. 255–59. 71 Close to 130 altars were registered as bestowed by the bishop jure devoluto in between 1630 and 1649, c.100 of which were situated within the diocese. 72 Research should establish: 1) whether the provisory observation, that greater numbers of altars re-appearing on “the market” engender an equal or superior number of devolutions, can be ascribed to the law of diminishing marginal returns; 2) whether altars suffered more from devaluation than other benefices; and 3) to what extent they attracted clerical migrants from other dioceses in comparison to other benefices.
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The mere existence of transactions such as resignations in favour of another cleric, or the permutation (mutual resignation) of benefices between two clerics, sheds an interesting light on the multifaceted concerns informing the dynamics of the clerical job market. Many activities relating to the clerical job market were justified with reference to equity, a notion that had been borrowed from the right of ownership in Roman law. Equity could bridge the gap between benefice law and aspects of that right of ownership that were simply too useful to abandon,73 even though lay property law (i.e., the feudal system) continued to function in canon law as a negative benchmark well into the 18th century.74 Holding a benefice legitimately implied not being disturbed in its peaceful possession (possessio pacifica) and in the performance of the religious tasks coming with it by feudal lords; by arbitrary measures of church magnates; or by competitors who had not laid claim to the benefice in question within an interval of one year and one day after the one’s official installation (missio in possessionem) by local church authorities.75 This conceptual and practical hybridism between officeholding and ownership had considerable advantages. On the one hand, benefices that remunerated sacred offices could continue to be different from more sordid, worldly occupations attached to bluntly venal offices. Any transaction involving ecclesiastical offices reeked automatically of simony.76 Transactions could cease to be mere transactions, however, if they were sanctioned (and if additional dispensations for illegitimacy, affinity, youth, belated ordainments, the accumulation of benefices, or other vices had been granted) by fresh appointments formally initiated by the ultimate watchdogs of the Church’s interests, the bishop or the pope.77 Thus it became possible to integrate benefices in 73 The notion of equity had become a strong catalyst for Justification in much of medieval jurisprudence and legislation, including beneficial law. Barraclough, Papal Provisions, 71–90. 74 Van Espen still fulminated against ceremonies of investiture or oaths of allegiance that were branded as harmful residuals from a feudal era, incompatible with the logic of beneficial law. Van Espen, Ius Universum Ecclesiasticum, Pars 2da, tit. xxv, cap. vii. On their origins, read Kerff, “Altare und Ecclesia,” 856. 75 The so-called missio in possessionem or legal installation was, indeed, often carried through by a third party, for instance the archdeacons in the diocese of Liège, or, if a new canon was to be installed, by the chapter in question. The Missio tended to be accompanied by solemnities (for instance, the designation of the new canon’s stall in the choir). 76 Durand de Maillane, Dictionnaire de droit canonique et bénéficial, 5, 214. 77 As a matter of fact, the trade of openly venal offices at the Roman curia, 90 per cent of which were just honorific titles that covered rents sold by the papacy in order
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other collectives, such as the family, clienteles, networks broad and small—78 which in turn would live with, and perpetuate, the rigidities of the benefice system for eight centuries. The most spectacular examples are, of course, the Sekundogenituren caved out of the territorial principalities of the Reichskirche by the Catholic princely dynasties of the Empire, who turned, via coadjutoria with right of succession sanctioned by the pope and otherwise, elective ecclesiastical monarchies into de facto hereditary lands.79 Comparable strategies were deployed by the families of the imperial nobility, which sought to secure canonships in the German Domstifte electing the German prince-bishops.80 Benefices that did not bring about an institutional voice in politics (i.e., the benefices that interest us here) formatted and stabilised power elites as well: due to the permanence of office, they cushioned their holders, who were protected by canon law from deprivation of the benefices accumulated during the heyday of their family’s or faction’s influence, from shocks on the volatile market of political patronage. In Rome, one of the functions of nepotism consisted, from the second part of the 16th century onwards, in preparing the inevitable degradation of the family after the pontiff ’s death, the cardinal-nephew being in charge of the accumulation of benefices that could remain for decades in the family or in the nipote’s
to finance papal bureaucracy, was registered with the help of exactly the same terminology (i.e., per resignationem in favorem) as was used in transactions with respect to benefices. See, for instance, the Vatican list ASV, Dataria Ap., Consensus. On the venality of offices at the curia, read Reinhard, Papstfinanz und Nepotismus. See also Poncet, “Les traces documentaires.” 78 The concept of “broad networks” in which kin and clientèle merge—the dominant form of networks in the higher and later Middle Ages—is often opposed to “small networks” framed by merit, from which kinship ties as legitimate bonds are excluded (the dominant form of networks from the 18th century onwards). “The narrow core of ecclesisastical clientelism seems to have been relatively stable through the centuries.” Lind, “Great Friends and Small Friends,” 128. 79 The cluster of prince-bishoprics and abbeys centred on Cologne and Liège, for instance, remained a Bavarian Sekundogenitur in the northwestern part of the Empire from the late 16th century onwards Cf. Reinhardt, “Kontinuität und Diskontinuïtät,” and a comparative study of Habsburg and the Wittelsbach Sekundogenituren in idem, “Die hochadeligen Dynastien in der Reichskirche.” 80 In this context, ecclesiastical benefices could give them an institutional voice in politics, and that broadened their hold on spiritual and temporal offices in the respective ecclesiastical principalities. Cf. Duhamelle, L’héritage collectif, which explores the world of the “noblesse d’Eglise”—a reference to Bourdieu’s Noblesse d’Etat—in the 17th and 18th centuries. The imperial nobility was immediately subjected to the emperor, and its own territories escaped, as a consequence, the control of the German princes.
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faction in the Sacred College.81 Transactions in the clerical job market (and nepotism, for that matter) were by no means a reserve of the high nobility. In the 17th century, c.90 per cent of the canons of the cathedral of Langres had obtained their benefices through resignation or permutation, often from elderly family members who, in return, were shielded from financial need during old age by pensions or smaller benefices.82 In the case study by Chatellier into the benefice system in early modern Alsace, benefices could become a structuring and/or stabilising factor with broad social and economic ramifications at the level of the Church’s “middle and lower classes” as well: in the world of canons of the collegiate churches, rectors of rural parishes, and chaplains; the world in which Hovius struggled to provide the flock with decent shepherds.83 Regional differences probably were considerable as clerics had to adjust their strategies to “best practice” on the spot. Any assessment should envisage a differentiation of the types of benefices involved as well. In the 17th-century diocese of Ghent, an average of 13 per cent of rectorships changed occupants via resignations or permutations. The number of rectorships handed over via resignation in the diocese of Mechlin in the first two decades (let alone of altars and canonships) has not been calculated.84 The four entries with respect to canonships concerned their resignation by one cleric in favour of another; the creation of a pension on a benefice in favour of a third party; or both. Nearly half of the c.50 entries out of 340 collations (deserviturae excluded) mentioning the circumstances of the benefice’s vacancy concern offices that were resigned by their holder in favour of another cleric or that were being exchanged between them, transactions that
81 See the section on “The Church of Rome” in Lind, “Great Friends, Small Friends,” 125–29, and Visceglia, “Fazioni e lotta politica.” 82 Viard, “Les chanoines de Langres,” 90. The sections Ordinarius and Extraordinarius Galliarum in ASV, Dataria Ap., Expedit., 1–5, which lists the acts processed by the homonymous offices of the Dataria Apostolica, bear testimony to the quantitative importance of this phenomenon in France. 83 In most studies, a proportion of c.30 per cent up to half of the benefices were passed on via permutation or resignation. See, for instance, Bijsterveld, Laverend tussen kerk en wereld, Deregnaucourt, De Fénélon à la Révolution, and Chatellier, “Société et bénéfices ecclésiastiques.” 84 Among 23 entries in Hovius’ catalogus that were explicitly mentioned as a resignation, 11 involve rectorships, while permutations were only observed in the exchange of canonships with other benefices.
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were duly rubber-stamped by the bishop.85 Quaghebeur observes only significant numbers of permutations in which rectorships were involved from the 1620s onwards (5 per cent to 10 per cent), while an upward trend can be observed in the second half of the 17th century.86 It may be significant that in Boonen’s days, permutations involving rectorships—which had been absent in Hovius’ catalogus—outnumbered simple resignations with pensions,87 and that the number of permutations of canonships even quintupled.88 This may agree with the general wisdom shared by historians that gradually more financially viable benefices were held by a larger supply of clerics (and the multiplication of relations between them)89 who were more inclined to cling 85 Part of the c.80 entries with respect to benefices that were neither at Hovius’ bestowal nor explicitly mentioned as granted jure devoluto may have been resignations, but is difficult to extrapolate from such a small amount of data while coping with the lack of accuracy with which Hovius’ collations were often registered and defined. Although other grounds for the vacancy of a benefice granted jure devoluto are mentioned recurrently, the combination of per resignationem and jure devoluto is nonexistent in Hovius’ Catalogus, for obvious reasons: a resignatio in favorem or a permutation implies the presence of a successor. In Boonen’s registers, for instance, a strict administrative division is carried through in the indices between benefices granted jure devoluto et metropolitano, on the one hand, and jure ordinario, on the other, which includes the advowson of the benefices coming under the rights of the archbishop of Mechlin as an ordinary collator, but also the resignations and permutations. 86 Eventually, proportions of permutations would become considerably higher, the average for the entire 17th century being close to 10 per cent of benefices changing hands via a permutation. Calculation based on Quaghebeur, De concursus, 169. 87 In Hovius’ catalogus collationum, 36 rectorships changed hands via a resignation (8) or a permutation (28), while only six resignations of rectorships could be identified. 88 Permutations of canonships quintupled in Boonen’s index, totalling 20 out of 30 advowsons of canonships, but no resignations were registered. Four other canonships in the cathedrals of Bruges and Ypres, as well as in the collegiate church of Diest in the diocese of Mechlin, devolved to Boonen’s advowsons Jure devoluto and jure metropolitano, while five other advowsons with respect to canonships in the metropolitan chapter of Saint Romuald’s at Mechlin were, surprisingly, registered as collations jure ordinario—although the bishop could only dispose of them as a member of the college of graduated canons; cf. Laenen, Histoire de l’église métropolitaine, 251. 89 The rise of resignations and permutations may well have been the result of many factors at work rather than of a single cause that is constituted by the (perception of the) situation of the clerical job market. For instance, the improved supply of clerics multiplied the relations between them, while more frameworks of collective action (family, clientele, friendship) that had been less prominent in the research population in between 1600 and 1620 could culminate in higher proportions of transactions between clerics. This hypothesis needs to be verified, however, as it assumes that the growing number of permutations is representative for a higher number of transactions in general. In the 18th century, parish priests did not engage in such transactions more frequently than did their 17th-century colleagues, despite growing competition.
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to their benefices and therefore tried to keep them more often in their circuits via permutations and resignations (canonships and altars); or who could/did not abandon their benefices at all and built a stable, rather flat career in the parishes (rectorships). This impression is confirmed if one considers Hovius’ appointments to benefices as an ordinary collator (i.e., on par with chapters, abbots, prelates, etc.). These are surprisingly rare for a portfolio of c.160 benefices. Of the 110 to 120 entries concerning benefices from his own portfolio, only c.75 advowsons (of c.65 benefices)90 belong to that category.91 By contrast, his successor Boonen could use his prerogatives as an ordinary collator much more frequently between 1630 and 1649, during which period close to 60 collations (resignations and permutations excluded) were registered for c.50 out of the 63 rectorships at the archbishop’s disposal: proportions of 12 per cent (of appointments to rectorships in the diocese) and 11 per cent (of the total number of rectorships),92 which reflected roughly the archbishop’s institutional niche in the clerical job market. Altars out of the archbishop’s portfolio changed hands more frequently as well, but continued to be underrepresented compared to rectorships among both Hovius’ and Boonen’s appointments as ordinary collators.93 While these numbers seem to confirm a general normalisation of the clerical job market in the countryside, their portfolio being composed by rural benefices, they also 90 Close to 60 per cent (43 entries) of Hovius’ advowsons concern 33 rectorships; alongside c.three dozens of entries with respect to c.30 altars and sextonships (two thirds of which are to be situated in the second decade), and two other benefices (one archidiaconatus and one personatus). Typically, rectorships (which constitute only close to one-third of Hovius’ portfolio of benefices) are overrepresented, especially in the first decade (c.two-thirds of entries), compared to other benefices, while personatus are grossly underrepresented. 91 Deserviturae, collations jure devoluto, or resignations with respect to benefices out of his own portfolio would have been registered elsewhere if Hovius had not been both an ordinary collator ànd a bishop. This estimate may well be too optimistic. Figures may well have been lower—c.55 to 60 advowsons depending on whether or not one adopts an “optimistic” extrapolation (with or without extrapolation of devolutions)—because many records do not mention the circumstances of the vacancy of the benefice nor the legal ground of Hovius’ intervention. Half of the resignations concern liberae resignationes. 92 Hovius, in contrast, effected respectively 8 per cent of the total number of nominations to rectorships in the archdiocese of Mechlin with respect to 7 per cent of the diocese’s parishes. Compare Quaghebeur, De concursus, 169. 93 I.e., 40 collations of c.30 altars. This is an approximate number, as no distinction was made in Boonen’s index of c.70 entries under the heading jure ordinario between full collations in their own right, and resignations/permutations of benefices out of other collators’ benefice pools.
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match well with another (tentative) observation: under Hovius, individual rectorships tended to switch occupants more often than altars, a relationship that apparently was reversed in Boonen’s days.94 The metaphor of the market has proved to be a powerful device to introduce the reader into a vast range of activities rather than into a seemingly inert benefice system. It has its limits however, as this market never functioned smoothly or automatically. Other factors, such as compelling legal concepts, collectives such as family and clienteles, diocesan seminaries, efficient or distorted channels of intelligence that had to cover greater or smaller distances, strong pastoral norms, and religious concerns inevitably bounce back as soon as the historian seeks to reduce the benefice system to the logic of supply and demand. The concept of “normalisation” that is central to this and the next sections is a hybrid of institutional and religious concerns now enriched with economic and social connotations. This caveat applies to a definition of the clerical job market as a market of patronage too. The formal registrations in the catalogus collationum invariably portray Hovius as the initiator of every single appointment to office. Bishops and Roman diplomats indeed agreed that the advowson of benefices was a boost to one’s autorità. Were all the applicants in Hovius’ register, or in the entries in which Hovius performed as an ordinary collator, “the bishops’ men,” then? Bishops, nuncios, and candidates for office often defined and structured their mutual relations in these terms. But historians should abstain from reifying such hierarchical models into a pyramid of patronage. Formal appointments to benefices registered in the catalogus were part of shady negotiations in which many actors could intervene, and whose outcome remained in limbo until the new benefice-holder had beaten or accommodated potential competitors who held other legal claims to the benefice; until he had been safely inducted by the competent Church officials (who could refuse or postpone to do so) and had reached an agreement with tax collectors or with the local collectors of the tithes. Benefice law provided for a grammar for nego-
94 Benefices that had been virtually absent from Hovius’ registers now surface in Boonen’s, with c.50 advowsons of canonships and capitulary dignities in the metropolitan Church of Saint Romuald’s and in the Province’s other cathedral and collegiate chapters. Ten references in Boonen’s Index Collationum refer to personatus granted jure devoluto, benefices that had been absent (except for one single entry) in Hovius’ catalogus collationum.
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tiations in the clerical job market, nothing less, but nothing more. As a consequence, not all clerics mentioned in the catalogus collationum considered themselves unambiguously “the bishop’s men’; nor could Hovius’ support be taken for granted if his candidates’ claims were challenged in tribunal by competitors.95 In the period under investigation, it remains a moot point whether Belgian bishops struggling to find shepherds for lesser parishes could develop grand nomination policies and similar clienteles. The conclusion that Hovius’ stakes in his appointments are anything but evident applies also to other institutional niche holders in the clerical job market in this book who do not come under the category of ordinary collators or diocesan supervisors. One entry in the catalogus collationum shows Hovius conferring a benefice as a commissioner of the Supreme Pontiff. If it is impossible to establish the numbers of presentations by lay lords, resignations, permutations, and dispensations with the help of diocesan registers, it is in part because many laymen (including the Archdukes themselves and many members of their entourage) and clerics appealed directly to the Roman curia to have their beneficial practices sanctioned. It was the papacy and its tribunals that had given major incentives to the development of a universally applicable grammar of negotiation and conflict in the clerical job market in the first place. In order to understand what benefices are, it is therefore necessary to turn to another site where they were managed in incomparably great numbers: the Eternal City.
2.2. “Ce Chieff du monde ou concourrent tous les princes chrestiens”: Papal provisions for ecclesiastical benefices in the early modern period In the previous section, local and regional church magnates came into review. The offices that figure in the catalogus collationum (rectorships, sextonships, altars, and occasionally a canonship) were attached to local churches and were embedded in a local sphere of action:
95 This may explain the inaccuracy that marks many entries in the catalogus collationum. In more than one case, ordinary collators just bided their time and waited for one of the candidates to emerge victorious through either litigation or by means of a settlement that bought off, via a pension or otherwise, competing claims to the benefice in question.
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chapels, parishes, collegiate and cathedral churches. It was, after all, the local realities of the early medieval Church that had been buoyed up by Gregorian reformers against harmful lay intrusions. The notion of “local churches” gained substance, however, in contrast to sites that increasingly performed as political, administrative, and religious centres. The circuits that carved out these centres from a periphery were major stakeholders in the development of universally valid legal concepts and jurisprudential and administrative practices, but they risked being excluded from remuneration of the new legal entities they had crafted, the bulk of economic resources being the reserve of local offices.96 In this context, the rigid notion of benefices being granted to residing clerics exclusively in exchange for the performance of the religious functions perpetually attached to them was not abandoned, but it did become very flexible. It has been hinted before that medieval princes used the benefices that came under their legal patronage to reward the ecclesiastics who manned their chanceries. Officials of busy diocesan tribunals and administrations, for their part, could rely on the canonical benefice system in the High Middle Ages as well as in Hovius’ time, when the bishop’s men assisted him in the management of his diocese.97 The papal system of provisions for ecclesiastical benefices, which provided curialists and others charged with the management of universal Christendom with a niche in the clerical job market alongside local and regional church magnates, has attracted a lot of attention from medievalists. As Gregorian reform merged with the “first Roman centralisation,” papal appointments to benefices all over Christendom became one of the most visible manifestations of the primacy of Peter’s chair. Few research areas have been marred to the same extent by the classical opposition, and the inherent hierarchy, between an intrusive or a progressive centre and an oppressed or retrograde periphery, inscription devices that were already used by medieval and early modern observers with an axe to grind.98 In line with recent insights
96
See Wolter, “The Officium in Medieval Ecclesiastical Law.” Cf. Put, “Al de mannen van de aartsbisschop.” 98 More or less the same, stereotypical complaints (slogans, clichés, highly formalised and therefore legitimate translations of discontent) were heard all over Europe: papal providees were unsuitable clerics because they were ignorant, because they had “purchased” their benefices in Rome, or because they were foreigners and non-nobles. As a consequence, pastoral care in the parishes and the divine cult in the chapters were neglected, the orthodox faith waned, and the rights of the ordinary collators 97
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in the historiography on the relationship between Rome and its Italian periphery,99 the line between centre and periphery was continuously blurred, however. 2.2.1. The fabric of centre and periphery and the rise of papal universalism In fact, Rome could only perform as a centre as long as there was a periphery instrumentalising the curia as such. With respect to higher, elective offices, appeals to a reinvigorated papacy rather than to the immediate superior for confirmation had to canonise the outcome of complicated and conflict-laden election procedures that would have ended up before the Sacra Romana Rota anyway.100 This practice gradually became obligatory after the benefices in question had been subjected to papal reservations in the 14th century.101 It remained so when in many regions elections of bishops and abbots by cathedral chapters or religious communities were, in the course of the later Middle Ages, substituted by princely nominations.102 Papal bureaucracy was increasingly involved in nomination procedures for collative benefices were violated. For an anatomy of the discussions and arguments at the Council of Konstanz, see Stump, The Reforms of the Council of Constance, 177. 19th- and 20thcentury historians have largely recycled this discourse, which matched marvellously with their implicit understandings, and considered papal provisions in the 14th century to be one of the major causes leading inevitably to Protestant reform in the 16th century. A textbook case with respect to the Low Countries can be found in Fierens, “Ons prebendenwezen.” An analogous teleological approach was developed by Barraclough, who adopted an opposite position: he contrasted the “modernity” of papal rule through its “impersonal, bureaucratical procedures” and the “meritocratic spirit” of papal legislation in the Chancery rules with the favouritism rampant in ordinary circuits. Barraclough, Papal Provisions, esp. 50–65 ,as well as the arguments in Lynch, The Medieval Church, 178, and Paravicino Bagliani, “La suprématie pontificale,” 613. 99 Cf. the survey in Ditchfield, “In Search of Local Knowledge.” 100 The confirmation of elections or appointments to so-called “consistorial benefices” was a common practice. In the 13th century, almost every election to an abbey or a bishopric ended in contestation and litigation; by consequence, popes eventually chose most bishops and many abbots and abbesses. Lynch, The Medieval Church, 176. The adjective “consistorial” refers to the body of the pope and the cardinals gathered “in consistorio” to decide, among others, on such matters. In the period under investigation, the Congregation of the Consistory dealt almost exclusively with the processing of files of elected or appointed bishops, abbots, and other dignitaries queuing up for confirmation. 101 Cf. Meyer, “Bischofswahl und päpstliche Provisionen,” 131. 102 As was the case in Spain, France (Bergin, “Pour avoir un évêque à son souhait”), and the Netherlands in the early modern period. With respect to the Low Countries, see Jadin, “Procès d’information,” Dierickx, De oprichting der nieuwe bisdommen, and
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(canonships, rectorships, altars, and the like) as well. Novae provisiones or confirmations sanctioning appointment procedures in local churches also remained a common practice in the 17th century, especially in regions that were marked by a high level of competition and litigation.103 The offices at Rome (or Avignon) did not just rubber-stamp troublesome collations by ordinary collators (or presentations by lay patrons), however. The bishops of Rome had recommended deserving clerics from the 11th century onwards to local Church officials who otherwise might have failed to recognize this wandering talent. With the growth of the number of clerics who turned to Rome in order to secure benefices, the corresponding expansion of the papal curia and of the households of the cardinals, and the articulation of the Plenitudo Potestatis of the Supreme Pontiffs, these recommendations gradually acquired a binding character. From the 13th century onwards, they were accompanied by reservations, some of which were integrated in the Corpus Iuris Canonici, of individual benefices or specific categories of them, for appointment by the Apostolic See.104 Analogous to Hovius’ collations, however, holding a papal provision did not entail automatically being admitted to the possession of a benefice. Medievalists have gone to great lengths to underline how, in accordance with the inflation of papal provisions in the later Middle Ages, a devaluation of their individual efficacy can be observed, with many papal provisions failing to deliver the desired results and with litigation soaring.
Gorissen, “De invoering van het vorstelijk benoemingsrecht.” The situation in Germany is more variable, read Tewes, Die römische Kurie, 114–15. 103 With respect to the medieval dioceses in the Low Countries, see Baix, La Chambre Apostolique, cxxxv. In the five-years periods 1606–10 (1607 missing), 1616–25 (1617–18 missing), 1636–40 (1638 missing) in the pontificates of Paul V, Gregory XV, and Urban VIII, about 10 per cent of 1394 provisions in the provinces of Mechlin and Cambrai and in the diocese of Liège were novae provisiones (70 per cent of which involved benefices in the diocese of Liège) with respect to other papal provisions or ordinary collations, but the bulls Perinde valere or reformationes need to be taken into consideration as well. ASV, Dataria Ap., Per Obitum, 1–42. 104 In the middle of the 13th century, a first general reservation of all benefices whose holders died at the curia was issued in the form of a decree in order to secure this “patrimony.” The reservation Licet Ecclesiarum (27 August 1265) codified an old custom endangered by the increasing presence of procurators of ordinary collators at the curia. Linden, Der Tod des Benefiziaten in Rom, 41–61. On the legal elaboration of general and specific reservations, see Hinschius, System III, 123; Durand de Maillane, Dictionaire VI, 147. See also Schwarz, “Römische Kurie und Pfründenmarkt,” 132–33. Other reservations would follow and were, until the beginning of the 14th century, incorporated into the Corpus Iuris Canonici. Barraclough, Papal provisions, 9–11.
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Like other administrative and legal bodies that went “out of court,”105 the offices of the Apostolic Chancery, the Reverenda Camera Apostolica,106 and, from the 16th century onwards, the Dataria Apostolica took over part of the initiative from the pope and his petitioners, processing as they did on a routine basis the thousands of requests from all over Catholic Christendom. The many officials who intervened in the long journey from a formal supplication submitted by a wintered sollicitator causarum to a papal bull did so by aligning themselves with the administrative framework set out in the papal chancery rules (Regulae Cancellariae). This body of papal decrees addressed general and specific reservations of benefices; the prerogatives for curialists, familiares of the pope or the cardinals, and university graduates; and procedures for the verification, approval, and enactment of petitions.107 Just as curialists did not cut themselves out of Roman court life altogether, however, they participated in regionally and locally operating circuits. Recent research by Tewes into papal provisions in the second half of the 15th century has made it incontestably clear that most providees privileged their own home base to secure benefices for themselves or their circuits in Rome and in the periphery. Local support and intelligence, as well as leverage over collectors of the tithes, provided curialists with as much access to benefices as other clerics had. Few responded to the typical image of the Roman “benefice hunter”108 evoked by Erasmus in his Colloquia Familiaria: individuals obtaining more than one papal provision were rare. This assessment is also valid with respect to the 17th century. 105 Cf. Molas Ribalta, “The Impact of Central Institutions.” Papal administration was exceptional in this sense, that bureaucracy was never formally separated from the Apostolic Palace. Cf. the rolls of the Apostolic Palace under Clement VIII, for the years 1592–97, in BAV, Manoscritti Chigiani, 1794, 109–45, and see Visceglia, “Denominare e classificare,” 159–95. 106 On the gradual erosion of the Chancery as the central administrative body of the Curia Romana, in favour of the Reverenda Camera Apostolica in the 15th century, read Frenz, Die Kanzlei der Päpste. 107 They were adapted and issued in the beginning of each pontificate. An edition of these Chancery rules in Von Ottenthal, Regulae Cancellariae Apostolicae. A contemporary guide to the bureaucratic practice of the Dataria Apostolica in the 17th century in Amydenius, Tractatus de officio et iurisdictione Datarii et de stylo datariae. 108 Tewes, Die römische Kurie, passim. Petitioners, after all, had to produce all the necessary information about the benefices they coveted themselves, had to anticipate local customs or potential legal obstacles to their papal provision, and had to assure that clauses were inserted that would overcome any possible restrcitions set by these local laws. See for instance Frenz, Die Kanzlei der Päpste.
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A sample of c.900 papal providees petitioning the pope and his bureaucracy for c.1,400 provisions with respect to benefices situated in the Catholic Low Countries in between 1605 and 1640 reveals that the typical papal providee was either a diocesan cleric or a native of the region,109 in spite of the persistent complaints aired by critics of the papal system of provisions in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period that the alleged abuses of Rome were committed by greedy foreigners. On the level of the dioceses, diocesan clerics represented anywhere from 38 per cent (1606–10) to 43 per cent (1616–20) to 45 per cent (1636–40) of papal providees in the provinces of Cambrai and Mechlin, and 91 to 96 per cent in the diocese of Liège. Presence in Rome was registered for 21 per cent of providees, two-thirds of whom (12.5 per cent of the overall population) either identified themselves as curialists, students at the Collegium Germanicum, or familiares of cardinals, or reported several years of residence.110 It was not just curialists who made Rome the West’s major centre of patronage. Was Rome all that? Qualifications are in order. Even though it is difficult to calculate the exact number of papal provisions,111 case studies for the Middle Ages reveal that, despite the standardised character of the recriminations against papal intrusions all over Europe, Rome had always performed as the administrative centre of Christianity more for some regions than for others, incentives to seek Roman bulls vary-
109 With respect to benefices in the provinces of Mechlin and Cambrai and the diocese of Liège, only 2 per cent (21 of 906 providees) involve clerics from dioceses outside the Low Countries, among whom were one Italian, a few English Catholics on the run, and two Spaniards who were nominated by the king of Spain to benefices at his presentation as a lay patron. ASV, Dataria Ap., Per Obitum, 1–42. The sample (gaps in the series between brackets) is drawn from the volumes for 1606–10 (1607), 1616–25 (1617–18), and 1636–40 (1638). 110 This is a minimum, because the registrations in the series ASV, Dataria Ap., Per Obitum do not always contain all the information the historian seeks. Alongside the 70 individuals who were identified at least once as “presens in curia” (most of whom were probably temporary visitors sticking around for a while at the occasion of a pilgrimage), 71 others identified themselves as clerics who had stayed at the curia for more than one year (which may also include references to several decades), office-holders (curialists and chaplains of Roman churches: 23 individuals), a dozen familiares, and a negligible number (4) of students (or alumni who may have left the Eternal City in the meantime) at the Roman Collegium Germanicum run by the Jesuits. 111 The Belgian school of criticism has shown that it is impossible to set up exact figures for papal provisions. Baix, “De la valeur historique des actes pontificaux.” According to Barraclough, we should think of papal provisions in the Middle Ages in terms of thousands and ten thousands every year. Cf. Barraclough, Papal Provisions, viii. Curves in Meyer, Arme Kleriker auf Pfründensuche.
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ing greatly in accordance with local circumstances, best practice, and perceptions.112 Seen from this perspective, the trail-blazing studies in the field by Meyer, Schwarz, Hesse, and others in the 1980s and the early 1990s, which portray a disruption of local circuits in Germany by papal providees before and a reprovincialisation of the German ecclesiastical landscape after the Conciliarist crisis, cannot be extrapolated without considering other areas even within the Holy Roman Empire.113 Tewes’ research has revealed sharp contrasts between Italy, the Empire, France, and the Iberian Peninsula—which were host to c.90 per cent of the on-average 2,500 to 5,500 bulls issued by the Cancellaria Apostolica annually under the pontificates of Calixt III (1455–58), Innocent VIII (1484–92), and Leo X (1513–21)—and the rest of Christendom.114 In this Roman backyard, however, significant regional differences also can be observed among these four geographical entities, the relative weight of which shifted significantly over time from one area to another, and also within them.115 The Burgundian sphere of influence alone hauled in c.12 per cent of all chancery bulls under Calixt III, with important regional contrasts between Cambrai or Liège on the one hand and Flanders on the other. These qualifications notwithstanding, however, the received wisdom that the system of papal provisions was in decline in tandem with the demise of papal theocracy after 1400 needs to be revisited: overall
112 In the German cathedral chapters, the few papal provisi for canonships belonged to the same (noble) environment as other applicants. Bishops and abbots in the dioceses of Franken were appointed by the pope, but only after intense negotiations “in the periphery.” Frömming, “Päpstliche Provisionen am Bamberger Domkapittel,” 269–70; Borchardt, “Die römische Kurie und die Pfründenbesetzung”; Barraclough, Papal Provisions, 32, on the situation in the Rhineland; and Fouquet, Das Speyerer Domkapitel, 154–61. 113 Cf. Hesse, “Artisten im Stift,” Meyer, “Spätmittelalterliches Benefizialrecht,” idem, Zurich und Rom, and Schwarz, “Römische Kurie und Pfründenmarkt.” 114 Enter, moreover, the c.1,000–1,100 bulls issued yearly by the Camera (at least under the pontificates of Innocent and Leo), which mainly concern France, Italy, and Spain. Tewes lists 6951 registrations in the registers of the Reverenda Camera Apostolica (ASV, Reg. Vat., 698–715, 991–1010, and 1176–92) in a six-year sample constituted by the two first years of the pontificate of Innocent VIII, and by the first and last biennium of the pontificate of Leo X; access to the registers for the pontificate of Calixt III is not facilitated by Indici, and therefore they were not involved in his analysis. Tewes, Die römische Kurie, 107. 115 E.g., between a Rome-oriented North and a much less eager South in France and in Italy, and between the western and southwestern parts of the Empire and the northeastern parts. Tewes, Die römische Kurie, 78–79. Of the Chancery bulls, about 20 per cent did not concern beneficial affairs.
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figures had more than doubled under Leo X compared to the figures for Calixt III.116 More surprisingly, figures of the later Middle Ages were equalled, and even eclipsed, by the performance of the Dataria Apostolica in the 17th century. 5000 4500 4000 3500 3000 2500 2000 1643
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Fig. 2.3. Papal provisions 1592–1644 (Per Obitum series): Orbis Terrarum
The series Per Obitum in the Vatican Archives (which, in theory, recorded papal provisions of benefices vacant because of the death of their holder) registers an average of 2,500 entries for bulls issued by the Chancery throughout the pontificates of Clement VIII (1592–1605) and of Paul V (1605–21). Figures surpassed the threshold of 3,000 provisions between 1612 and the early 1630s, after which they dropped again to pre-1612 levels.117 In the early modern Per Obitum list, the quantitative dominance of Spanish and Italian dioceses has become overwhelming, with German and French benefices being driven to the margins and the share of the Burgundian heritage (now reduced to the South Netherlands and Franche-Comté) and Liège shrinking to roughly 2 to 5 per cent. But there is more. The few remaining volumes listing all expeditiones of papal letters rubber-stamped in the Apostolic Datary118 suggest that overall figures of papal provisions must have 116 An average of 2,476 bulls issued on a yearly basis were registered under Calixt III, rising to averagely 3,481 bulls under Innocent, which eventually culminated in 5,448 bulls each year under Leo X. 117 ASV, Dataria Ap., Per Obitum, 1–42. Volumes for the years 1588/89, 1598/99, 1602, 1607, 1613, 1617/18, 1632, 1634/35, 1638, and 1642/43 are missing. 118 In the period under investigation, only ASV, Dataria Ap., Expedit., 1–3, have survived (Chancery bulls issued in 1621–24).
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been much higher, the Per Obitum series being the only survivor of five or six lists that were kept by probably as much secretariats and similar officials.119 A sample in these volumes with respect to the South Netherlands and the diocese of Liège suggests that c.60 per cent of all papal provisions were not registered in Per Obitum but were recorded by the secretariats of the Ordinarius and the Extraordinarius Sanctissimi.120 A more detailed scrutiny of these and other papal registers may not alter the conclusion concerning the predominance of Spanish and Italian clerics appealing to the Supreme Pontiff,121 but these samples combined do provide strong proof that papal provisions had anything but disappeared in the early modern period. These figures, in combination with Tewes’ findings, are troubling because they call into question many established beliefs with respect to the history of the papacy that are informed by methods and practices of periodisation commonly applied by historians and by the 17th-century historical actors they investigate. It is widely believed that, after the Western Schism, papal universalism had gravely been affected by the Conciliarist crisis, by the emergence of the dynastic state, and by the Reformation. However, Protestantism barely affected the machinery of universalism at the curia, as there is a strong correlation between regions that had enrolled Rome only to a marginal extent as the centre of Christianity in the late Middle Ages and those that spat on the proverbial Whore of Babylon afterwards.122 With respect to Conciliarism, it is a striking fact that the reform Councils of Konstanz (1414–18) 119 The secretary Per Obitum was the highest ranking official of the Dataria after the datario and the subdatario. Amydenius, Tractatus de officio et iurisdictione Datarii, Caput 5. Judging by the divisions in ASV, Dataria Ap., Expedit., 1–3, these secretaries (or secretariats) were called Commissiones (or the registrars/register of delegation of apostolic jurisdiction to judges in partibus), Ordinarius Sanctissimi, Extraordinarius Sanctissimi (which register alongside dispensations, confirmations of amortisation and the sale of ecclesiastical property, cassations of pensions on benefices and the like, as well as many papal provisions), Ordinarius and Extraordinarius Galliarum. 120 I.e., those with respect to benefices that had become vacant for a variety or reasons bar the death of their holder (resignations, permutations, simony, violence committed by a benefice-holder, irregularities of all kinds). The Per Obitum list, which in our sample (in the peak years 1621–24) contains c.40 per cent of registrations by the Dataria, does include many provisions of this kind, but the Ordinarius and Extraordinarius Sanctissimi seem not to have registered provisions per obitum. 121 The latter surface in great numbers in the other lists of expeditiones as well. 122 Tewes, Die römische Kurie, 356. Another element that should be taken into consideration, but which Tewes does not involve in his analysis, is the density of the clerical infrastructure, which was, in the High and later Middle Ages, much more developed in “Old Europe” than in the “New Europe” beyond the Rhine and the Danube valleys. Moraw, “Uber Typologie, Chronologie und Geographie der Stiftskirche.”
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and Basle (1431–37/49) sought to address ecclesiological conundrums primarily by reshuffling the respective niches of ordinary collators and of the papacy in the clerical job market. Eventually, concordats restored the primacy of Peter’s chair but put restraints on its room for manoeuvre with respect to the advowson of benefices and the taxation coming with it. Assertive princes who had previously sustained their clienteles via papal provisions but who now fashioned themselves as the protectors of national churches against the alleged abuses of Rome, were there to stay in Catholic Europe. But Tewes’ figures for France and Germany are particularly revealing with respect to their impact. The Concordat of Bologna (1516), which substituted the (poorly observed) Pragmatique Sanction de Bourges (1438)123 and normalised the relationship between the Eglise de France and the papacy until the French Revolution, has been situated by historians in a particular, above all diplomatic, context124 and has been generally considered the most restrictive with respect to papal provisions. All papal reservations with respect to collative benefices, bar Licet,125 were abolished. Hence, ordinary collators could only be burdened once (if they had more than ten benefices at their disposal) or twice (if they had more than 50 in gift) by papal provisions during a pontificate, while the pope could continue to wield his “right of prevention”; the right to fill offices if news about their vacancy had reached Rome first.126 Habitual recommendations by the king of aspiring bishops, abbots, and first dignitaries of metropolitan and cathedral churches were tuned into 123 This text, issued by Charles VII with the support of the “Gallican party,” ratified the conclusions of the Council of Basel, restored free elections, and nullified all papal provisions and taxes. Subsequent monarchs would use the text as the big stick in their negotiations with Rome while avoiding, at the same time, an open rupture that could put serious restraints on dynastic interests in Italy, French kings relying on the papacy to have their candidates nominated to episcopal sees. Clerics continued to consider papal provisions as a trustworthy road to benefices. Gazzaniga, “Charles VII et Eugène IV,” 68–69; Thomson, Popes and Princes, 160–61. As for the “Kurialismus des landesherrlichen Kirchenpolitik,” see, in a European context, Hashagen, Staat und Kirche, 75–80. A juridical approach in Gérardin, Etude sur les bénéfices ecclésiastiques, 137–43. 124 That is, the Italian wars, the antagonism between Louis XII and a militant Jules II, and, probably, the rising influence of the Spanish monarchy in Rome, which was likely to disturb communication lines between the Valois and the papacy. Cf. Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 16–33. 125 I.e., the first general reservation with respect to benefices because of the death of their holder apud sedem apostolicam. 126 “Le pape, grand perdant du nouveau système, conserve malgré tout un rôle plus important qu’il n’y paraît. ” Desportes, “Les chanoines de la cathédrale de Reims,” 254–55.
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a legally sanctioned right of nomination, while many royal prerogatives with respect to collative benefices were introduced later in the 16th century.127 Servitia and annatae that had to be paid in exchange for papal provisions to respectively consistorial and collative benefices were abolished. By contrast, the Concordat of Vienna of 1448, between the papacy and the German nation,128 confirmed the validity of the apostolic reservation Licet as well as its elaborations in later constitutions.129 It restored the free canonical election of bishops by cathedral and metropolitan chapters but mandated that they all be confirmed by the pope, while all first dignities after the bishop in cathedral and collegiate chapters were the Apostolic See’s to bestow.130 With respect to collative benefices, the alternativa mensium allowed the pope, within the interval of three months after the death or the departure of their incumbent, to fill offices that had become vacant in the six, uneven, apostolic months, while the benefices that became vacant in the other months were to be the reserve of ordinary collators.131 The German
127 I.e., the brevets de joyeux avènement and d’entrée, by which the king could provide, once in his reign, a cleric with a canonship in every cathedral or collegiate chapter in France; through their serment de fidélité, newly appointed bishops were obliged to provide one royal candidate with a benefice. More in Gérardin, Etude sur les bénéfices ecclésiastiques, and Olivier-Martin, Le régime des cultes en France, together with the articles of Naz and Mollat, respectively, in the Dictionnaire de droit canonique and the Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastique. 128 Meyer, “Das Wiener Konkordat.” In analogy with the Pragmatique in France, the Mainzer Akzeptation of 1439 ratified the Council of Basel’s radical decrees (see Hürten, “Die Mainzer Akzeptation”) and was consequently used as a crowbar in the negotiations between the princes, the Imperial Church, and Pope Eugenius IV over papal primacy in the Empire, which led to the Concordat of Vienna. See Toews, “Pope Eugenius IV and the Concordat of Vienna.” 129 I.e., the reservation Licet, the only reservation in Corpore Juris Canonici Clausa and therefore part of common law. Thus far, there is no difference from the Concordat of Bologna of 1516. But Licet had been elaborated in Execrabilis and Ex Debito, the so-called Extravagantes that were incorporated, together with the other reservations, into the Regulae Cancellariae. These had the force of law in the Empire after 1448, but not in France after 1516. Legal subtleties in Feine, Kirchliche Rechtsgeschichte, 292, and Hinschius, System III, 130–32. 130 Before, only the episcopal sees subjected “immediately” to the Holy See had to go through this procedure; the other bishops were, theoretically, free to appeal to Rome in order to get more legal certainty, or not. “Diese Rechtsvereinheitlichung ist das entscheidende, von der Forschung bislang aber übersehene neue Moment des Wiener Konkordats. Als eine selbstverständlich wilkommene Nebenwirkung garantiertie die Wahlprüfung der Kurie den bisherigen Geldzufluss in gewohnten Ausmass.” Meyer, “Bischofswahl,” 133. 131 The alternativa was already a familiar concept by then, having been introduced in France during the last years of the Schism and at the Council of Konstanz. Details in Sznuro, “Les origines du droit d’alternative.”
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princes and (prince-)bishops were accommodated with nomination indults for bishoprics and/or collative benefices,132 the most extensive ones being the primariae preces granted to the emperor.133 It will not come as a surprise that late medieval and early modern critics of the papacy in the Empire strongly disapproved this much more permissive settlement and longed for a more restrictive Concordat of a Gallican bent; just as much as 18th-century regalists in Belgium, including the canonist Zegerus Bernardus Van Espen (1646– 1728), would mirror their projected Eglise belgique and its liberties in an idealised Gallican Church freed from the “abuses of Rome.”134 Appropriations of this type become highly problematic when they are reified into a state of affairs by contemporary historians, however. If the number of papal provisions soared in the late 15th century and during the pontificate of Leo X, it is because members of the proud Gallican Church intensified their ties with the curia.135 Enter, for the 17th century, the hundreds of papal provisions registered yearly by the Ordinarius and Extraordinarius Galliarum.136 Not only are they likely to nuance the dominance of the Italo-Iberian world (which in the absence of a concordatory regime continued to live with the Regulae Cancellariae)137 in the Per Obitum list but also they suggest that the
132 Concerning the Principality of Liège, see Dessart, “Les indults accordés aux évêques de Liège.” With respect to the nomination of bishops, see Schmidt, Das Kollegium Germanicum in Rom, 111. 133 I.e., the German variant of the brevets de joyeux avènement and d’entrée in France, allowing, as they did, the emperor to burden every ordinary collator in the Empire with one nomination at the beginning of his reign. 134 See Roegiers, “Nény en de Belgische kerk,” 171–88. See also Van Espen, Ius Universum Ecclesiasticum, tit. xxiii, cap. i art. xii. 135 An analysis in Tewes, Die römische Kurie, 257–94. Figures for Germany remained stable, but their relative numbers declined (21 per cent to 8 per cent), while the French clergy increased its share of appeals to Rome from c.20 per cent under Calixt III to c.one-third of all papal provisions under Leo X. Figures varied greatly from region to region. Compared to the northern dioceses, the western and the southern parts of the Empire seem to have intensified their contacts with the Roman curia. Interesting perspectives based on the regests of the Repertorium Germanicum in Meuthen, “Struktur des Deutschen Klerus,” here 293. 136 I.e., the secretariats in the Dataria Apostolica charged with the processing of petitions from France listed in the few remaining volumes of the series ASV, Dataria Ap., Expedit. 137 For Italy, see Prosperi, “Dominus Beneficiorum,” and the various contributions in Chittolini, Gli Sforza, la Chiesa Lombarda, la corte di Roma. On the benefice system in Spain, the only European country outside Italy where no concordatory regime was installed until 1753, see Nieto Soria, Iglesia y genesis del estado moderno, 343–80 (Castile) and Hermann, L’Eglise d’Espagne, 17–87. An interesting context in Dandelet, Spanish Rome, which has triggered lively discussions in European historiography. See, for instance, Visceglia, “Vi è stata una Roma Spagnola?”
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relationship between the Eglise de France and the Apostolic See were much more layered than concordats suggest. This conclusion, combined with the insights of research into Italy and Spain, calls for some serious rethinking of the history of the mutual integration (or the lack of it) between Rome and its periphery in the early modern period. Recurrent incidences of a “nationalistic” reaction against the abus de Rome need to be explained in the specific configurations in which they materialise instead of being reified into underlying political and ecclesiological constellations opposing centre and periphery. All this may seem commonsensical, but historians of the papacy have often stumbled into this pitfall nonetheless, using, as they did, concordats as descriptions of reality rather than as legal tools. As a consequence, the consensus among historians is that, in contrast to the heyday of papal theocracy in the Middle Ages, relationships between Rome and its periphery largely became a matter of diplomacy between the emerging modern states and the Supreme Pontiff, who pursued an analogously absolutist policy in Central Italy.138 This periodisation is informed, first, by the commonsensical but counterproductive concept of power as an asset that can be capitalised, which favours a history of winners (monarchs) accumulating power at the expense of losers (the papacy). Tewes’ research with respect to the later Middle Ages reveals that the growth of state power and the articulation of national churches by no means ruled out intensifying administrative ties with the Eternal City.139 Second, this opposition between direct administration in the Middle Ages and the primacy of diplomacy in the early modern period may be, to an extent, a product of the sources used. Much research with respect to the early modern papacy draws heavily on the dispatches of the nunciatures, while the tiresome travails of medievalists in the records of papal administration could attract few, if any, enthusiasts among students of the post-Tridentine period. In the next section, the Catholic Low Countries will provide an excellent case in point.
138
That is, in Paolo Prodi’s influential book Il sovrano pontefice. “Joannes Haller sah wie so vieles auch jenes Prinzip der entwickelten Staatlichkeit als Faktor für die Kurienbeziehungen richtich. Doch er und manch anderer glaubte, das Frankreich und Spanien auf dem Wege zum englischem Status ausgebauter Staatlichkeit gleich dem Land jenseits des Ärmelkanals einen ‘kirchlichen Absolutismus,’ eine ‘landesherrlichen Kirchenregierung’ installierten, dass sie sich auf diese Weise wie England dem Zugriff des Papstes auf den zentralen Konfliktfeldern der Besetzung kirchlicher Stellen, der finanziellen Abgaben und der Jurisdiktion erfolgreich entzogen. Aufs grosse Ganze gesehen ist das Gegenteil richtich.” Tewes, Die römische Kurie, 360. 139
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2.2.2. Towards a Belgian Church? Papal provisions on the fringes of Catholicism In the early 1700s, Van Espen sourly pointed out that the alternativa mensium and other provisions in the Concordat of 1448 were not observed in Belgium.140 A guide for academic nominees written in the 1630s by Guilielmus Vande Velde, a Law professor at Louvain and a “hands-on” expert on the area’s beneficial conundrums,141 delves deeply into the region’s multiple beneficial regimes.142 First, the duchy of Brabant, the counties of Flanders and Hainault, and the stewardships of Walloon Flanders remained vague terrain in terms of concordats throughout the early modern period. Benefices in the South’s core area were, just as those in Italy and in the Iberian Peninsula, immediately subject to the Regulae Cancellariae and, more specifically, to the papal reservation quattuor mensium.143 This can easily be explained by the entente cordiale with the papacy forged by the dukes of Burgundy, whose lands had, after all, been grossly over-represented in papal registers in the second half of the 15th century. In this context, the duke had admitted neither Concordat in his lands, with lasting institutional effects.144 Contrary to the (formerly French) county of Flanders, however, the county of Artois, as well as Tournaisis, came under the Concordat 140 Van Espen, Ius Ecclesiasticum Universum, pars 2da, tit. xxiii, c. i, art. xxxvii– xxxviii. 141 Vande Velde himself had to endure prolonged litigation, in the 1620s, in order to realise his claims to a canonship in the Cathedral of Cambrai by virtue of an academic nomination (see below). 142 Guilielmus Vande Velde, De nominationibus Lovaniensium, c.1630, KBR, Manuscrits, 22192. 143 This reservation stipulated that all benefices vacating during eight (as opposed to the alternativa’s six) apostolic months (January, February, April, May, July, August, October, November; Van Espen, Ius Ecclesiasticum Universum, pars 2da, tit. xxiii, cap. V, § iii–iv) were eligible for bestowal by the curia within three months. After the alternativa introduced provisorily by the Concordat of Konstanz (1418) had expired, Pope Martin V integrated the Reservatio quatuor mensium into the Chancery rules in order to safeguard the rights of the local churches for benefices vacating during four “ordinary” months. Stump, The Reforms of the Council of Constance. 144 In return, the dukes themselves had their family members and clients appointed by the pope to important benefices, including the (prince-)bishoprics in and surrounding their lands. The rotuli (or lists) of candidates for benefices recommended by the duke that were to be rubber-stamped collectively by the pope were endless. Cf. Jongkees, “Philippe le Bon et la pragmatique sanction.” The concordat of 1441 between Philip the Good and the pope for his German principalities probably should be understood in the context of the Mainzer Akzeptation of 1439, the German equivalent of the Pragmatique. “Sans doute le concordat de 1441 . . . restreignit-il fortement les interventions pontificales dans les églises des Pays-Bas. Mais Philippe le Bon épargna à Rome l’humiliation d’une pragmatique sanction bourguignonne.” De Moreau, Histoire de l’Eglise en Belgique, 4, 52. More in Tewes, Die römische Kurie, 143–45.
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of Bologna (1516) instead of under the Chancery rules, remaining as they did under French obedience until the Peace of Cambrai of 1526. By then, the Concordat of Bologna had been accepted for at least a decade, and the area was placed under the sovereignty of a prince whose relations with the Holy See were notably more strained than under his Burgundian predecessors.145 In analogy, the concordat of Vienna (1448) remained valid in those principalities of the Empire which were absorbed in the Burgundian or Habsburg Netherlands after Vienna (i.e., the duchy of Luxemburg in 1451 and the princebishopric of Cambrésis by the end of the 16th century).146 But it remained valid as well in the entire county of Namur and in the towns of Nivelles (in the duchy of Brabant) and Kerpen (a Brabant enclave on the Rhine), which had been Burgundian for decades. This may confuse historians whose etatist, top-down approach is likely to crumble under the weight of such incoherencies, but it is a comforting thought that contemporaries were (when convenient) dazzled as well. In the period under investigation, academic nominees and their opponents at least twice picked a good fight over which concordat was to be applied to which benefices.147 The situation in the Principality of Liège may 145 As a matter of fact, it had been the clergies of Artois and Tournaisis who had foisted the Concordat of Bologna on their prince, urging him to counter the proverbial flood of papal providees after they had returned under his obedience. OPB, 2, 509–511. 146 Or in cases of shared sovereignty, as was the case of Maastricht, a BrabantLiège condominium. “Ubi vigent concordata Germaniae (nempe in patria Luxemburgensi, Namurcensi, Cameracensi, civitate Traiectensi, Nivellensi et in oppido Cerpensi) . . . Queritur hic primo quinam collatores habeant omnes menses conformiter ad concordata Gallie. Responditur concordata gallie (que ordinariis concedunt 8 menses liberos et 4 affectos nominatis universitatum Gallie qui hic non recipiuntur) obtinere per totam Arthesiam atque etiam in ecclesia S Amati Duaci ut pote eo translata ex arthesia loco qui Broijlus dicitur prope Mertingium ad lisium fluvium. In aliis territoriis ordinarii tantum habent 4 menses iuxta regul. Cancell reservatoriam 8 Mensium preterquam ubi vigent concordata Germanie.” Vande Velde, De nominationibus Lovaniensium, c.1630, KBR, Manuscrits, 22192. 147 Cf. the following fragment from the faculty minutes: “ut curet examinari an in praxi obtineat, quod collatores Cameraci residentes [i.e., in Cambrésis, which came under the Concordat of Vienna] conferant alternis mensibus omnia beneficia etiam per Hannoniam [where the regulae cancellariae were valid] . . . iuxta concordata nationis Germanice, et si inveniat non conferre alternis mensibus, sed solum quatuor mensibus, sicuti collatores in Hannonia residentes curet litem pendentem statim decidi.” Acta Facultatis Artium, 12 August 1621, RAL, OUL, 715, 394. The other case, which equally offers a snapshot of the complexity of such debates, involved the bishop of Ypres in the 1620s, who claimed that his cathedral came under the Concordat of Bologna. “L’istesso canonicato havendo parimente conferito Monsignor Vescovo d’Ipri . . ., questo hora cerca d’impedire tanto la detta nominatione [of the university], quanto la provisione apostolica, pretendendo, che in esso non entrino le Regole della Cancellaria, ma le Concordate di Francia, per essere stato eretto dalla Prepositura
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look surprisingly normal. An independent ecclesiastical enclave surrounded by Habsburg lands, this principality lived with the Concordat of Vienna.148
HOLLAND
North Sea
UTRECHT
ZEELAND
Arendonk
Bruges
Antwerp Mechlin Brussels
Ronse
Lille
Tournai
Aire 2
Séclin
Antoing
Valenciennes 3
1 2 3 4
Stewardships of Lille, Douai and Orchies Tournaisis Cambrésis Lordship of Mechlin
Louvain
Diest
Nivelles
Mons Thuin Maubeuge
Jauche
Liège
Namur Sclayn Fosses
Huy
Kerpen
Maastricht
St.-Truiden Tongeren Visé
Cambrai
Borders of the 17 Provinces Demarcation Line of 1609 Provincial Borders
COLOGNE
Bilzen
Halle Ath
HAINAULT
Douai 1 Arras
Maaseik
4
Aalst
Oudenaarde
Cassel
Roermond Thorn
Ghent
FLANDERS Ypres
ARTOIS
CLEVES UPPER GUELDERS
BRABANT
Ostend
St.-Omer
MÜNSTER
Den Bosch
STATES BRABANT
Furnes
GUELDERS
UNITED PROVINCES
Aachen
LIMBURG
JULICH
LIÈGE Stavelot
NAMUR
Ciney Dinant
Bouillon (Liège)
Beneficial Regimes:
LUXEMBURG
Chancery Rules C. of Vienna C. of Bologna
FRANCE
Mixed, diverging Douai or disputed
Map 2. The Archducal Netherlands in 1609: beneficial regimes
Regolare di San Martino dell’ordine di San Agostino, che era già della diocesi Murinense in Francia, nella quale si osservavano le dette concordate. A questa pretensione risponde il provisto apostolico, ch’essendo stata unita la detta prepositura alla chiesa Iprense sia già quella estinta, e che habbia perso tutte le sue qualità, e ricevuto la natura, e qualità della chiesa alla quale è stata unita; . . . cosi debbano haver luogo nel detto canonicato le Regole sodette solamente.” Sanseverino, nuncio of Flanders, to Borghese, Secretary of State, 9 May 1620, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 109, 73r–74r. 148 The beneficial regime of Upper Guelders, a region that was barely visited by papal provisions (cf. below), could not be established with absolute certainty.
TRIER
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Concordats could not be appropriated by Van Espen as the unifying factor for a projected Belgian Church of a Gallican bent. They were aided by other institutional tools that, for the champions of national churches, could do the job. It has already been mentioned that, under the reign of Charles V and Philip II, informal recommendations to prelacies and bishoprics were gradually transformed into a full-blown real patronato of a Spanish (or a French) bent via the indult Fervor Purae devotionis (1515) and, later in the 16th century, via diocesan reform.149 The incorporation of abbeys into the new bishoprics not only brought along the advowson of benefices but also gave several bishops, who were already well connected with the nobility of state, a seat in the provincial States, thus adding to the hybrid character of these representative institutions in the early modern period.150 In return, the high clergy collectively became a stakeholder in the affairs of state because of its contributions to the Aids (extraordinary budgets granted on an annual basis to the prince), Burgundian dukes and Habsburgs having put serious restraints on the First Order’s fiscal immunities.151 But the Eglise Belgique identified also with specific legal practices, customs, and constitutions. In beneficial affairs, litigation over benefices under lay patronage had of old been a competence of secular tribunals. Notions borrowed from lay patronage concerning the temporal aspects of benefices152 were successfully mobilised to extend princely jurisdiction to other, “canonical,” benefices. Secular tribunals, whose procedures were less complicated and elaborate than those in
149 On the Spanish “Patronato Real,” “patronage de grâce” as opposed to the “patronage de droit” discussed in the previous sections, see Hermann, L’Eglise d’Espagne, 40–44. On the negotiations over the interpretation and introduction of the “nomination indult” (which was originally nothing more than the right to be consulted by the pope during nomination procedures) of Charles V with respect to abbacies and the first dignities in collegiate and cathedral churches, see Gorissen, “De invoering van het vorstelijk benoemingsrecht.” The similarities to the prerogatives conceded to François I in the contemporary Concordat of Bologna suggest that the pope was obliged to treat both rivals equally. 150 Bulst, “Rulers, Representative Institutions and their Members as Power Elites.” 151 Similar strategies were applied by the urban elites trying to limit the accumulation of lands exempted from taxes and subjected to the main morte. See, for instance, Prevenier, “De verhouding van de clerus tot de locale en regionale overheid,” and Van Uytven, “Wereldlijke overheid en reguliere geestelijkheid.” 152 Kerff, “Altare und Ecclesia,” 849–70.
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ecclesiastical courts, became a venue for litigation over benefices.153 In reverse, the constitution Eximiae Devotionis Affectus, granted by Leo X to Charles V on the same day as Fervor, stipulated that the prince’s subjects could not be summoned in first instance by ecclesiastical judges residing outside the Netherlands (most diocesan officials, before the reform of the 1550s). As this text was also mobilised against interferences of Roman tribunals, including the Sacra Romana Rota, it was an amenable tool to devise an opposition between a Belgian church and the capital of the world. The princely placet was the cherry on the pie of the Belgian Church, to be exalted by 18th-century regalists such as Nény and Van Espen as the ultimate remedy against the dreadful abuses of Rome.154 From the end of the 15th century onwards, when less cordiality was allegedly lost between the Habsburg successors to the dukes of Burgundy and the occupants of Peter’s chair, all Roman administrative, fiscal, and jurisdictional acts, including papal provisions, were to be examined by the Privy Council or provincial councils and were to be sanctioned in a formal placet. Envisaged as it was to counter the proverbial tide of foreigners distorting the clerical job market,155 the placet could have become an effective instrument to establish the prince’s control over all movement to and from Rome. It did not, however, for two reasons. First, the hybridism of elites and institutions that facilitated consensus-building in the Netherlands seems to have marked the relationship between power elites and the Eternal City to the same extent. In their instructions, archducal residents to the Corte di Roma were urged not to prevent papal provisions but to get acquainted with the procedures of the Dataria and the Apostolic Chancery, for the greater
153 Cf. De Brouwer, De kerkelijke rechtspraak. On the recursus ad principem, which shielded clerics in general and benefice-holders in particular from arbitrary measures of superiors, read Wauters, Recht als religie. 154 The princely placet was an accaparation of the episcopal placet granted by the papacy during the Schism. It seems to have had precedents in the duchy of Brabant afterwards as well. In a European perspective, see Hashagen, Staat und Kirche, 249–51, and Hinschius, System III, 749–63. With respect to the legislation on the placet, read Willaert, “Le placet royal”; an exquisite study of the placet in Wauters, Recht als religie, 143–212. 155 In this respect, the placet shows some remarkable similarities with the naturaleza required to obtain benefices in Spain. Hermann, L’Eglise d’Espagne.
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benefit of the prince;156 conversely, successive nuncios were instructed to indulge the ministers of the prince with benefices for their relatives and other favours in order to engender piety towards the Apostolic See of Rome. In this context, one loses track of who was controlling whom (To Whom It May Concern, that is), and it is hardly surprising that the granting of the placet by the central councils, analogous to the naturaleza required for applicants for benefices in Spain, was a formality in Roman eyes.157 Philip Maes, the princely agent in Rome (1610–18), complained in 1614 that the pope provided anyone with benefices in the Netherlands without consulting the prince (or his diplomatic representative) about the merits and qualities of the applicants. Yet, he did not suggest using the tools offered by the princely placet to ensure that only the prince’s men obtained apostolic favours.158 Moreover, only a fraction of papal provisions was indeed supported by diplomatic channels of communication. Seen from this perspective, Tewes and other historians may have overstated the effect of diplomatic relations on the administrative sway of Rome over its periphery. The sample of papal provisions in the Habsburg Netherlands (i.e., the provinces of Mechlin and Cambrai), based on the Per Obitum series in Fig. 2.5, indicates that an increasing number of clerics relied on papal provisions after 1620 and particularly in the 1630s, when diplomatic relations between Brussels and Rome were more frequently drawn into a format of conflict.
156
“Lune des principales causes qui nous a meu de vous donner ceste charge est enfin quaijez moyen de vous habiliter en la practicque beneficielle de Rome, et qua vostre retour soyez tant plus qualifie a nous servier en telles matieres, et aurons a plaisir que vous vous y employer diligemment, pour supplir a la faulte que scavez avoir icij en ce regard, chose que ne pourra sinon estre a nostre service et a vostre advantage et honneur.” Instruction secrete en particulier daulcuns poincts for Jean Richardot, Jr., first archducal resident in Rome, Négociations de Rome, 16 June 1600, AGR, Audience, 438, 135r–140r. 157 “Ne la materia istessa beneficiale s’è introdotto anco il placet, ma perchè non impedisce l’esecutione de le lettere apostoliche, non essendo questo capo molto pregiudiciale, sarà bene per adesso non ne trattare, ma riservarlo a miglior tempo.” Instruttione per Monsignor Guido Bentivoglio (. . .), 5 June 1607, ed. Cauchie and Maere, Recueil des instructions générales, 109–17. 158 Poincts et articles de ce que le chevalier maes at aprins en Cour de Rome …, in Négociations de Rome, 20 August 1614, AGR, Audience, 194r–111r. His predecessor until 1600, Laurens Dublioul, was even listed as a Referendarius Utriusque Signaturae in 1600; Weber, Die Päpstlichen Referendare, 1, 184.
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90 80 70 60 50
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Fig. 2.4. Papal provisions 1592–1644 (Per Obitum Series): Habsburg Netherlands and Liège
This suggests that other elements must be involved in the analysis. In this context, the metaphor of the market may be of use again: not political constellations, diplomatic postures, concordats, and Regulae Cancellariae but the growing pressure in the clerical job market that came with its normalisation from the Truce onwards induced clerics to turn more frequently to the Supreme Pontiff as the formal initiator of their appointment to office. Several arguments confirm this hypothesis. To be sure, papal bureaucracy did not produce provisions for two-thirds, or half, of the collative benefices that became vacant in Habsburg Netherlands, as it was entitled to do in line with Chancery rules and concordats respectively. Putting one’s eggs in a Roman basket entailed investing in contacts at the curia, paying fees to professional sollicitatores acquainted with local and regional customs which the bull-to-be had to anticipate in its clauses and derogations, and footing for the bill of the bureaucratic procedures themselves. And all this did not warrant a successful outcome, papal providees being disadvantaged by distance when it came to capturing possession of a benefice before their competitors.159 This is reflected in the geographical spread of papal provisions and the categories of benefices they concerned. Only c.380 localities in the Low Countries were visited
159 On the central role of the petitioner (or his agent in Rome), see for instance Frenz, Die Kanzlei der Päpste.
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by c.1400 papal provisions issued in the 16-year sample,160 c.60 per cent of which concerned benefices in the top 27 cities and towns that hosted 10 provisions or more.161 Large swathes of territory remained unaffected, Hovius’ disorderly Vineyard in the countryside being one of them. But the benefices coveted by papal providees were also very different from those figuring in Hovius’ registers.162 631
494 Prel. & dign. Canonships Altars Rectorships 168 63
Fig. 2.5. Papal provisions (sample): type of benefices
In Fig. 2.6, prelacies and dignities are, by definition, rare. Rectorships and vicarages (vicariae perpetuae), by contrast, are strikingly underrepresented.163 The benefices privileged by papal providees included, above all, canonships (35 per cent); next altars or other small benefices
160
Cf. p. 90 n. 109. These are (in order of performance): Liège, Cambrai, Bruges, Huy, Maastricht, Maubeuge, Brussels, Lille, Ghent, Aachen, Douai, Ronse, Ypres, Ciney, Visé, Tongeren, Furnes, Munsterbilzen, Séclin, Fosses, Sint-Truiden, Nivelles, Dinant, Cassel, Leuze, Tournai, and Namur. Interestingly, only half of the cathedral cities situated in the Low Countries figure in this “top 27.” Liège is lonely at the top, with c.230 entries (or onesixth of all provisions in the sample), while the highest concentration is to be found in the city of Bruges, which attracted 75 per cent of all provisions in its diocese. 162 The category “altars” includes: altare, capellania, beneficium simplex, beneficium, matricularia, sacristia, preceptoria, portio, cantoria, argentaria, custodia, and simplex servitiorum, all of which are benefices without the care of souls that were not dignities, and all of whose holders were not members of colleges of canons. The category “Prelacies and Dignities” encompasses: abbatia, abbatia secularis, decanatus, prepositura, personatus, commenda, archidiaconatus, prioratus, and Scholastria. The category “Rectorships” includes also other pastoral offices: archipresbiteratus and vicaria perpetua. 163 This may explain why the phenomenon of papal provisions has remained largely out of sight, the number of papal providees among the pastoral clergy being negligible. Compare Quaghebeur, De concursus, 169. 161
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(45 per cent), nearly 60 per cent of which were situated in the direct environment of high concentrations of ecclesiastics and similar career options, viz., the collegiate and cathedral churches and/or cities and towns that made it into the top 27. Compared with Tewes’ calculations, figures for the Habsburg Netherlands had dropped significantly.164 But whether this seriously affected the visibility of the Supreme Pontiff in the clerical job market remains a moot point. In the archdiocese of Mechlin, ranked third after Cambrai with c.100 provisions sampled in 16 years in Per Obitum alone, the pope must have been still second to the archbishop alone as a niche holder and administrator of the (canonical) clerical job market,165 while their respective spheres of action barely overlapped.166 In the smaller dioceses of Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres, similar results can be expected. In the absence of an indepth investigation into fluctuations on the job markets for canons and chaplains, it is relatively safe to conclude that seizing a canonship, or even an altar at Saint Donatian’s at Bruges or Saint Martin’s at Ypres, without a papal provision of sorts must have been a risky enterprise. By contrast, Rome was an absentee landlord in Antwerp, Den Bosch, and Roermond, the northeastern dioceses in Fig. 2.7 that took only 2 per cent of provisions in the sample.
164 Even if one takes into account the fact that Per Obitum registers only part of the Chancery bulls, that it does not list cameral bulls, that 17th-century dioceses in the Low Countries were much smaller than their medieval predecessors, and that specific provisions such as expectativae had been abolished, dioceses such as Cambrai (including part of the dioceses of Mechlin and of Antwerp) and Tournai (including the dioceses of Bruges and Ghent) must have struggled to approach in 16 years the 449 and 359 provisions, respectively, under Leo X (8–9 years; cf. Tewes, Die römische Kurie, 385). Habsburg Burgundy (Franche-Comté), which was frequently visited by papal provisions, was not included in the sample. 165 Papal bureaucracy did not hold a niche in the clerical job market that came under the patronage system, its benefices being exempted from papal reservations; it did function as an administrator of them, of course, as many lay patrons appealed to the papacy to rubber-stamp their appointments and as all statutory or material adjustments with respect to such benefices needed to be sanctioned by ecclesiastical authorities as much as their canonical counterparts. 166 This may account for the fact that papal provisions did not enter the picture drawn in contemporary historiography, which is preoccupied with careers in the parishes. Cf. Quaghebeur, De concursus, 167.
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Cambrai: 152; 11% Arras: 52; 4%
Namur: 33; 2% Saint-Omer: 11; 1% Tournai: 71; 5%
Bruges: 60; 4% Ghent: 44; 3% Liège: 766; 57%
Mechlin: 99; 7% N-E dioc.: 28; 2% Ypres: 52; 4%
Fig. 2.6. Papal provisions (sample): geographical distribution
These regional differences are overshadowed by the striking dominance of Liège. The diocese of Liège has always troubled medievalists as the most ultramontanist diocese avant-la-lettre of Christianity in this respect; and continues to figure among Tewes’ top five dioceses despite a (comparably) more restrictive concordatory regime and an impressive body of privileges shielding the proud Liège Church from papal intrusions. Liège, with 57 per cent of all provisions in the sample, turns upside down many of the tentative conclusions for Mechlin (20 per cent) and Cambrai (23 per cent). First, within the diocese, papal provisions were distributed more equally over the diocese’s territory.167 Second, when the different types of benefices are taken into consideration, papal bureaucracy proves to have been a much more regular passage point for a career in the Liège’s parishes as well,168 canonships being relatively underrepresented (30 per cent against 43 per cent in Mechlin and Cambrai) and the share of provisions with respect to altars outside large benefice pools (39 per cent) inviting comparison with the figures for the Habsburg Netherlands (43 per cent)—
167 I.e., c.220 localities for c.760 provisions, comparable to Hovius’ catalogus collationum if one excludes the exorbitant numbers for the city of Liège itself from the sample: c.220 locations (minus one) for c.530 provisions. 168 A full 90 per cent of the rectorships and vicarages in the sample were situated in the diocese of Liège, or 148 benefices in a vast diocese of c.1100 parishes (Tihon, Dictionnaire des paroisses). While the sample’s share of rectorships and vicarages is negligible in the other two geographical circumscriptions, they constitute c.20 per cent of provisions in the diocese of Liège.
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all this in spite of the greater density of collegiate churches and its resulting overrepresentation in the top 27 locations targeted by papal providees.169 Third, a differentiation with respect to the type of provisions is highly instructive as well, provisions of benefices that had become vacant because of the death of their holder (and therefore potentially coming under papal reservations) being less frequent in the diocese of Liège (55 per cent against 75 per cent in Per Obitum). Liège clerics seem to have appealed to the papacy more often for other purposes than gaining access to offices reserved by the pope; i.e., in order to prevent competitors from seizing the benefices they coveted; to seize benefices from others; to gain approval for transactions such as resignations and permutations; or in order to do all that simultaneously.170 This suggests that, after concordats, Church-State relations, and diplomatic contacts, the market metaphor eventually proves to be deficient as a reason for the ups and downs of the Dataria’s performance on the outskirts of Catholic Christianity. Applying it to the Liège case would imply that mortality rates among the Liège clergy were much higher than elsewhere; that competition was much fiercer, or both. While there is no evidence supporting the first argument, the second assessment calls for qualification as well, and puts into perspective the conclusions with respect to the provinces of Mechlin and Cambrai. The Principality of Liège, a crossroads of both rebel and royal troops, in spite of its neutrality had been gravely afflicted by the civil war in the Netherlands too; many properties of the Liège Church were situated beyond the ecclesiastical enclave’s borders; and much of its clerical infrastructure must therefore have been in tatters in the early 1600s. Papal universalism, Church-State relations, or competition were constituted in practice rather than the other way around: what was considered “best practice” in the perceived circumstances made clerics appeal to Rome. The more men aspiring to a clerical career did so, the more others were inclined to follow their example in order to increase their chances with the help of intimidating derogations and
169 Half of the 27 locations that attracted 10 or more provisions are situated in the diocese of Liège. 170 There is not necessarily a contradiction between the privatio of one cleric of his benefice in favour of another, and a transaction between them, as the first legal tool could be a construction to circumvent the formal requirements for resignations and permutations. Examples of such loopholes in Tewes, Die römische Kurie.
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clauses that were the reserve of papal bulls. At face value, this seems to have meant that keeping one’s benefice at Liège called for much more work (and that its possession was less secure) than in the Habsburg Netherlands. In the period under investigation, all this work was facilitated by multiple lines of communication and intelligence to the Eternal City, where Liège clerics were active in exactly those administrations which mattered: the Dataria Apostolica and the Cancellaria.171 Because these curialists were likely to rely more frequently than others on papal provisions (which does not exclude that they walked regionally embedded paths to office as well), they were prone to identification as a specific group (i.e., the so-called foreigners) by their competitors. There will be many occasions to revisit their activities and circuits in the following chapters, as they will turn out to be the major competitors of, among others, academics seeking office in the diocese of Liège. We can therefore turn safely to an association that needs to be explored more deeply for the purposes of this book: the ecology of academics and benefices.
2.3. The ways of academia. Universities and benefices Academics have crossed our path at various points in the previous paragraphs. Scholarship has paid due attention to the progressive scholarisation of the medieval and the early modern clergy. In universalist worlds that had to be managed by lawyers and theologians, university degrees became a convincing argument to use with ecclesiastical employers.172 Nonetheless, such criteria remained firmly embedded
171 Further research should establish whether the increase in petitions from the South Netherlands, with spectacular peaks in the 1620s and 1630s, was correlated with the existence in Rome of cardinals’ households that were familiar with the Low Countries, such as the ones of the cardinals of Bentivoglio (a former nuncio to Flanders) and De La Cueva (a Spanish politician based in the Low Countries until the late 1620s). 172 The proportion of c.30 per cent of the parish clergy (c.50 per cent in North Brabant) being formed at universities was not exceptional. Bijsterveld, “Du cliché à un image plus nuancé.” With respect to the canons of the cathedrals of Tournai (76 per cent graduates) and Utrecht (97 per cent) and of the collegiate churches of Bruges (64.5 per cent) and Brussels (a hub of princely administrators: 86.6 per cent) in the later Middle Ages, read, respectively, Pycke, “Les chanoines de Tournai aux études,” 601, Van den Hoven van Genderen, De heren van de Kerk, 248, De Keyser, “Chanoines
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in the context of a candidate’s family, friendship, and patronage,173 just as education itself was a protected privilege, often facilitated by patronage or benefice-holding.174 In the following sections, however, academics and graduates will emphatically not be featured as individual clerics seeking office but, rather, will be regarded as a collective that claimed, with explicit reference to its scholarly status, access to a niche in the clerical job market. It is not surprising that the largely clerical populations studying and teaching at the early studia generalia had taken a genuine interest in beneficial affairs from the High Middle Ages onwards. Like other circuits identifying with universalist spheres of action, however, their daily occupations did not match the job descriptions of the benefice system that their law teachers and alumni had helped to configure and transmit.175 And because canon law entrenched realities that had emerged in the previous centuries, learned corporations had materialised too late to become ordinary collators in their own right. As a consequence, academics were among those who would benefit the most from arrangements that allowed benefices to finance functions other than those to which they were perpetually attached. As a consequence, they sought to draw local benefices—through patronage rights, privileges, and incorporation—into their orbit. But medieval and early modern academics tried to control the beneficial market also on a more regional, national, or even universal level.
séculiers et universités,” 588, and Van Hofstraeten, Beloond voor bewezen diensten, 119. A very useful table comparing 15 chapters (12 cathedrals, 3 collegiate churches) in the Netherlands to the other parts of the Empire, France, England, and Scandinavia between 1245 and 1580 in Bijsterveld, Laverend tussen kerk en wereld, 206–07. 173 “Die gültigen traditionalen Regeln, die sich jeder Personengemeinschaft in Kirchen, Städten, Höfen oder Ämtern bemächtigten, sparten Universitäten und Gelehrte nicht aus. Ausschlaggebend waren oft die sozialen Beziehungsnetze, die Bindungen an Herren und Familien, an Verwandschaften, Freundschaften und Landmanschaften, an Haus- und Tischgenossenschaften.” Schwinges, “Karrieremuster,” 19. 174 Cf. the evaluation made by Bijsterveld, “Les jeux d’influence,” 361–63, Hesse, “Artisten im Stift,” and Miethke, “Karrierechancen.” In the early modern period, diocesan seminaries as well as Jesuit colleges would function as devises of loyalty as well, producing as they did clerics without a name who had been dragged out of the gutter and who could be expected to define their allegiances accordingly. See, for instance, Chatellier, “Société et bénéfices ecclésiastiques,” 75–98. An amusing case with respect to the young (Saint) Jan Berchmans in Put and Harline, A Bishop’s Tale. 175 In Southern France, specific benefices for scholars, so-called scolanie, came into existence in the 13th century (Verger, “Besoins et ressources financières,” 19), but the foundation of such benefices was anything but a widespread practice.
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2.3.1. The domestic interests of academia The organised flexibility of the benefice system made it possible to reconfigure benefices, temporarily or definitively, as primarily economic units, small rents that, being derived from inalienable Church property and/or from ecclesiastical taxes, could be used as highly secure ways to finance new institutions. In the later Middle Ages as well as in the early modern period, incorporation into universities, faculties, colleges, and chairs introduced benefices into the heart of the corporate nucleus176 of academic finances. Incorporation could assume three forms. First, benefices could be detached completely from their offices, which disappeared from the clerical job market and were consequently incorporated in an institution for its collective financing. Second, like the incorporation of the abbey of Affligem into Hovius’ episcopal see, they could be fused into single academic functions as well, whose holder automatically became, if he was a cleric, a Church official, just as Hovius remained responsible for sturdy monks resenting the degradation of their venerable abbey. Third, ecclesiastical institutions such as chapters could be subjected to academic jurisdiction, a legal construct that can be compared to the incorporation of monasteries or colleges of the religious orders into universities. A textbook case of the first type is offered by the University of Alcalà near Madrid, founded at the beginning of the 16th century. While older universities such as Salamanca and Valladolid continued to be financed in the early modern period through tithes and royal subsidies, the core of the dotation of Alcalà, the Spanish prototype of the early modern university college for secular clerics, was initially constituted by 60 benefices in the collegiate church of San Yusto y Pastor next to 143 pensions on other benefices scattered around in the archdiocese of Toledo.177 The Louvain Faculty of Theology possessed, from the late 16th century onwards, the personatus of the parish of Schyndel in North Brabant, the personatus of Hamont near Liège in its role of provisor (trustee) of the College of the Holy Spirit, as well as the priory of Bierbeek near Louvain. In this capacity, the faculty collected the
176 This “corporate nucleus” was introduced in the various contributions to Schwinges, Finanzierung, as the inalienable financial rights and privileges upon which academic communities could rely, distinct from increasing state financing and, therefore, intervention. 177 Rodríguez-San Pedro, “Structures économiques et financement,” 276.
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tithes in several parishes, which income sustained pious foundations and colleges or ended up in the pockets of the eight Faculty Regents.178 These tithes constituted a considerable part of the faculty’s income. In the 18th century, they outweighed salaries attached to chairs as a source of income for faculty regents.179 This type of financing was not at all limited to the institutions founded by, and for, the secular clergy, nor was it restricted to academic institutions of higher learning. Regulars also used their contingent alliances with popes, princes, and the diocesan clergy financing their institutions through benefices. The Jesuits in the Empire, for instance, who could (and would) not fall back on landed property that was the reserve of older orders, tried to acquire economic resources derived from rents and pensions on the property of other orders or from incorporated benefices to finance their colleges on a stable basis.180 In the Netherlands and Burgundy, the Jesuits of Dole and Douai as well as of the numerous colleges for the humanities relied, in the early 17th century, on the diplomatic representatives of the Archdukes in Rome to implement several incorporations of priories and other benefices. Bishops followed their example.181 Incorporation, however, did not necessarily imply the abolition of the offices linked to the incorporated benefices. The financing of universities in the Ancien Régime was primarily focused on the remuneration of individual staff members rather than on academic institutions,182 especially in universities where colleges only played, at least initially, a minor role. The Universitätsstifte (“university chapters”) that financed the late medieval universities of the Empire, whose founders were
178 The regents of the Faculty of Theology functioned alongside the doctors in Theology residing in Louvain. They often occupied a public chair, but this was by no means a prerequisite. More details in the context of the 1680 conflict over the appointment of faculty regents in Vatican, “Entre Madrid et Bruxelles: les nonces et le jansénisme,” 45–90. 179 See the previous note. This part of an academic don’s income could only be surpassed by the total number of benefices he may have collected through, among other ways, the academic privileges of nomination. Cf. Roegiers, De Leuvense theologen, 53 and 136–42. 180 General outlines on the financing of Jesuit colleges in the Empire in Müller, “Zur Finanzierung der Kollegien und Hochschulen.” 181 A list of 14 altars incorporated in the diocesan seminary of Ghent in Roegiers, De oprichting en de beginjaren, 162–64. 182 Cf. Hammerstein, “Epilog.”
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princes and/or cities, are a classic example.183 There, chairs were often simply connected with respective canonships remunerating them, and the appointment to a chair was consequently linked to the advowson of a single prebend by its patron or ordinary collator, the prince(-bishop) or town in question. University professors were charged not only with teaching but also with the divine cult and with religious offices aiming at the salvation of the university founder’s soul in the choir of their church:184 “German universities initially were little more than collegial chapters where teaching came first and religious services second; whereas in the average collegiate church, cult was the canons’ core business and teaching, although never completely absent, an occupation of the second rank.”185 The composition of these Universitätsstifte was, from the 15th century onwards, different from other collegiate churches, as it reflected academic views on merit. Their canonships were nearly exclusively affected by chairs in the higher faculties, especially those in Law and Theology. Members of the Arts faculties could better take their chances in other chapters, provided they could fall back on sufficient protection outside the university.186 When necessary, the clerical infrastructure in the immediate surroundings of the university was expanded. The situation in Louvain, a rather typical exponent of the so-called “second foundation wave” in the Empire, offers a telling example. The foundation bull Sapientie Immarcessibilis (1425) stipulated that the city, a major stakeholder in the project,187 had to provide for the financial and material framework
183 See Moraw, “Uber Typologie, Chronologie und Geographie,” 9–37, and idem, “Stiftspfründen,” 270–92; see also Schubert, “Zusammenfassung,” 238–40. 184 This was not always the case. In Tübingen, for instance, Pope Sixtus IV “recapitalised” the prebends of the collegiate church in favour of the university and thus abolished the chapter, a measure foreboding the destiny of the Universitätsstifte (and most other chapters) in Protestant areas later on. Meuthen, Kölner Universitätsgeschichte, 1, 32–34. 185 Paulsen, “Die Gründung der deutschen Universitäten im Mittelalter,” 283. The degree of integration between the university and these collegiate churches was highly variable. In Vienna, Erfurt, Rostock, and Basel, several prebends in one or more collegiates or cathedrals had to provide the professors with the necessary finances. In Prague, Heidelberg, Tübingen, Greifswald, Ingolstadt, and Wittenberg, entire collegiate churches formed the old core of university financing. Wagner, Universitätsstift und Kollegium, 16–17; See also Rexroth, Deutsche Universitätsstiftungen, 45–52. 186 Hesse, “Artisten im Stift,” 110–12; nonetheless, benefices were often used as a way to constitute a common dotation out of which individual salaries were paid; idem, “Pfründen, Herrschaften und Gebühren.” 187 Cf. Nelissen, De stichtingsbul, 58–66.
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of the new studium. In 1429, the salaries paid by the city to the professors were partially replaced by eight prebends in collegiate churches belonging to the lay patronate of the duke of Brabant, and seven canonships situated in Saint-Peter’s in Louvain itself. Fifteen years later, a second chapter with ten prebends was founded exclusively for the sustenance of the academic staff, while three more prebends out of 18 in the first foundation of Saint Peter’s were affected to university men as well, totalling 29 canonships that had to alleviate the financial needs of the teachers from 1444 onwards. These were at the advowson of the city magistrate of Louvain, which appointed all ordinary and a few extraordinary professors of the higher faculties as well as the two public chairs of Rhetoric and Ethics in the Arts.188 This financial model was applied to the four royal chairs in Theology and the office of university censor of books introduced by Charles V and Philip II. These would be remunerated by canonships in the first chapter of Saint Peter’s that came under the legal patronage of the prince in his position as duke of Brabant,189 and they likewise remained at the advowson of the prince and the Privy Council. Meanwhile, the Louvain “pool of benefices” had been enriched in the 1450s by the transfer of the collegiate chapter of Incourt to the parish of Saint James in Louvain, which in turn hosted 12 canonships.190 The difference between direct financing through the tithes (Salamanca and Valladolid) and the incorporation of benefices may seem subtle, at first sight. The main source of income of the university chapters, the priory of Bierbeek, and the two personates also consisted in the levying of tithes.191 Yet, the incorporation of benefices had its advantages. Analogous to the impact of the incorporation of the abbey
188 Paquet, Salaires et prébendes, 16–23. This central position of the city magistrate was not uncommon in the Empire. See De Maesschalck, “The Relationship between the University and the City of Louvain,” 50. When chairs in Law endowed by canonships in Saint Peter’s were assigned to laymen, the tie between benefice and chair was loosened, and other clerics joined the college of canons. For the period under investigation (for instance, the appointment in 1597 of Cornelius Bosmans, a Louvain patrician, as professor Decretorum), see Vingeroedt, Chanoines de Saint-Pierre, 92. 189 Technicalities on the balance of power in the Louvain chapters in Pasture, Les chapitres séculiers, 48. See also J.L. Bax, Historia Universitatis Lovaniensis, 1, KBR, Manuscrits, 22172, 79. 190 Pasture, Les chapitres séculiers, 47. The chapter of Saint James was incorporated in its entirety; its canonships not being attached to specific chairs. 191 The lions’ share of a chapter’s income was constituted by the tithes its canons levied in the parishes.
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of Affligem on Hovius’ collation rights, benefices, in contrast to tithes, could bring along the advowson of other benefices. As such, the theological faculty had been, since the 16th century, the ordinary collator of the parishes of Neervelp, Opvelp, Schyndel, and a few smaller benefices.192 By means of their preponderance in the chapters of Saint Peter’s, teacher-canons could simultaneously manipulate the local benefice market in favour of their clients. A fair portion of the unaffected canonships was occupied by academics as well. Many pastors of the city’s parishes, whose appointment belonged to the chapter of the first foundation, were members of academic councils at various levels. The pleban of Saint Peter’s was ex officio professor in theology and, just like the chapter’s dean, provisor of many scholarships in several colleges. It is hardly surprising that the deans, in their quality of managers of academic patronage, were regents of the Faculty of Theology as well. The chaplains of Saint Peter’s seem to have counted many up-and-coming men of the Academy among the chaplains, as did the clergy in Louvain’s wider environment.193 This merger of Louvain academic circles and the local church calls for further investigation, but must have been particularly dense because of the key positions that leading academics occupied in the Louvain churches. Seen from this perspective, this niche in the local beneficial market, in contrast to financing via tithes or otherwise, did more than merely finance universities. Benefices were devices not only of ecclesiastical hierarchies and similar clienteles but also of academic hierarchies, introducing as they did a clear-cut distinction between staff members who were local church magnates, who held (local) benefices, and who were in charge of the recruitment of other offices; and students, who did none of these things and were, increasingly, excluded from teaching.194 Other legal instruments—such as rights of patronage, papal nomination indults, or local agreements—could also be mobilised in order to obtain a similar position in the local clerical job market.
192 Roegiers, De Leuvense theologen, 1, 53. Thus, the new orders could acquire rights of appointment to ecclesiastical benefices as well. It is in its quality of persona that the Jesuit college of Halle was the ordinary collator of a few other benefices; cf. registers of the university and the Faculty of Arts, RAL, OUL, 4783. 193 In the surrounding rural deaneries of Tienen, Zoutleeuw, and Geldenaken, members of the university occupied more than 100 benefices by the end of the 15th century, which merits further research with respect to the early modern period as well. De Maesschalck, “The Relationship,” 50. 194 Cf. p 23.
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The University of Alcalà, for instance, benefited from a very complex regime regulating the advowson of the dignities and canonships in the collegiate church of San Yusto y Pastor, set up by the crown and the archbishop of Toledo in 1534. Hence, the rector of the university had the right to bestow the prebends vacating in the uneven months of the year to masters in Arts and Theology of Alcalà; in the even months, the archbishop could nominate doctors in Theology from Alcalà, Paris, Salamanca, and Valladolid, or doctors and licentiates in utroque from the same universities bar Paris, which had to clear the field for Bologna. The king, the lay patron of the Church, consequently presented their respective nominees to the archbishop, who provided the candidates with the canonical institution.195 When academics could not simply take over the local churches, they had to enter negotiations with other circuits. At Cologne, university men appealed to the papacy and were granted a first privilege in 1398, which enabled the rector and the city provisors to present university professors for one prebend respectively in the cathedral and in the ten collegiate chapters of the metropolitan city. In the course of the 15th century, more benefices in the cathedral were reserved for academics and a second, rather inefficient, Pfründengnade followed in the context of the conciliarist crisis. In the middle of the 16th century, however, popes and bishops joined to launch the University of Cologne as an outpost of the Catholic offensive in Germany. In this context, academics successfully translated, after long negotiations in Rome, the threat of heresy into additional prerogatives for academics. The third Pfründengnade granted the rector, the faculty deans, and the city’s provisors of the university the right to bestow all canonships as well as the sacerdotal benefices in the cathedral and in the collegiate church of Saint Gereon vacating in three of the six months reserved by the papacy in the Concordat of Vienna (1448). This prerogative was not permanent and had to be renewed every three, five, or seven years. Rights of patronage were acquired at a very early stage in the history of universities. In Paris, a very rewarding system was developed to punish local authorities and citizens for manslaughter and violence committed against university members. Offenders were forced to found a chapel for the benefit of the souls of the deceased, which was of course to be occupied by a university man presented by the
195
Hermann, L’Eglise d’Espagne, 65.
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rector. For the same reasons, existing benefices were transferred to the university. In the beginning of the 15th century, the rector of the university thus wielded rights of patronage over c.20 chapels and parishes.196 The total number of benefices thus integrated into Parisian academic circuits, whether these were linked to colleges, faculties, or the university, must have been much higher.197 Legal patronage was a typical asset (but not a monopoly) of the collegiate university, whose colleges often were endowed with landed property that brought along private churches. A broad niche in the clerical job market in England was occupied by the major Oxbridge colleges, where the incorporation of advowsons of benefices was considered, well into the 20th century, an adequate way to endow colleges and to ensure the future of their graduates.198 Incorporated benefices, legal tools to manipulate the local beneficial market, and benefices falling under academic rights of patronage fit into the definition of the “corporate nucleus” of university financing. This is the definition as it was introduced in the colloquium in Bern in 2001 in order to distinguish this system of financing from direct state intervention through subsidies. The latter financial resource would have been the Trojan horse of absolutism, as its share of overall university financing increased together with the “encroachment of the absolutistic state” on the university system. Whether this distinction is really helpful to evaluate the relationship between “university” and “the state” or not, however, is highly questionable. First, these concepts are informed by a flawed definition of the problem, capitalising, as they do, on a top-down, etatist approach to university history. In the case of the Universitätsstifte, university men were, by entering into chapters endowed by the prince or the city, integrated into
196
Kibre, Scholarly Privileges, 241–60. Kibre refers the reader to a 17th-century treatise: C.E. Du Boulay, Mémoires historiques sur les bénéfices, qui sont à la présentation et la collation de l’université de Paris. Paris 1675. 198 In the late medieval diocese of Lincoln, about 9 per cent of presentations to parishes were made by a few Oxford colleges. These continued to purchase advowsons after the Reformation as well, and preferred c.half of them to fellows. Porter, “University and Society,” 97. Colleges (e.g., Balliol College) continued to purchase advowson rights well into the 20th century. The Jagellon University of Cracow, where patronage over c.300 benefices scattered around in Poland constituted the core of university or faculty financing, is an example of similar niches held by learned institutions other than colleges. Cf. Michalewiczowa, “Le bénéfice en tant qu’élément de la structure d’organisation de l’Université Jagellone.” 197
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local, regional, or territorial circuits, which made it unlikely that they would appeal, as their medieval predecessors had done, to a cessio lectionum or to an emigration of the university.199 Second, even worn rights were claims that had to be realised time and again in day-today practice. Incorporation of benefices or, for that matter, the levying of (mostly temporary) pensions on abbeys, demanded, at least in the cases of Dole, Douai, and Louvain, princely protection in Rome, in the 15th as well as in the beginning of the 17th century.200 Once obtained, the absence of both legal and social protection, resulting in resistance from taxpayers or from tax collectors, could seriously jeopardise the collection of the tithes,201 while challenges in court to the legality of this or that operation could never be excluded. Third, the Cologne example shows how academics became dependent upon protection on a perpetual basis in order to preserve this “corporate nucleus.” The need to renew the Pfründengnaden and contingent competition from other quarters gave the Roman pontiffs ample occasion to reconsider their generosity towards the university.202 As such, the Cologne Pfründengnaden show some similarities with the Louvain privileges of nomination. These were, as we will see, in a strict juridical sense not limited in time. However, preserving them called time and again for a strengthening of the ties with power elites in the Netherlands and beyond the Alps. 2.3.2. The universalist vocation of academia The Louvain privileges of nomination had a much larger geographical impact than the Cologne Pfründengnaden. The attempt to control the benefice market in a wider area was as old as the universities themselves: it was, after all, largely universities that had engineered, with the help of law and theology, the universalist sphere of action
199 In addition, such a measure would result in a loss of their benefices because “university canons” were now bound by canonical residence. Wagner, Universitätsstift und Kollegium, 361. 200 There are c.600 (!) letters that contain information of the history of the universities of Louvain, Douai, and Dole in the Négociations de Rome (the correspondence between the Secretaries of State at the court, or the Archdukes themselves, and their resident in Rome) for the years 1600–25 (AGR, Audience, 437–61). More than half of these 600 letters concern (among others) the financing of academic institutions. 201 Cf. Chatellier, “Société et bénéfices ecclésiastiques,” 88. 202 Meuthen, Kölner Universitätsgeschichte, 64.
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underpinning the benefice system and vice versa. Integration of the academic elite into the local environment in which these international schools were embedded was not feasible in the High Middle Ages. An “academic elite” comparable to the highly visible teaching and administrative staffs of the early modern period, distinct from the masses of other scholars and students, and recognisable as such for outsiders, had barely crystallised.203 The first universities had grown organically, which means that academics initially had not been embedded in the local structures of Universitätsstifte. Consequently, they did not necessarily limit their scope to the local benefice market and turned to the papacy, another self-styled protagonist in the fabric of universal Christendom. Popes, strong supporters of the early studia that trained professionals for the emerging Church administrations, granted, in the 14th century, the first privileges de fructibus percipiendis in absentia dispensing scholars in Paris from canonical residence in their benefices during their stay at the university and/or installing a moratorium on the obligation to take the sacred orders.204 Privileges of this type became more or less common to medieval and early modern universities, to the extent that the Louvain version was issued together with the bull of foundation itself.205 With the help of these texts, scholars could use the benefices they held elsewhere as a grant or as a supplement to their emoluments as teachers. As such, they were deeply entangled with the interests of Academia in the benefice system outside the walls of the university town; interests that they increasingly realised through the impressive bureaucratic apparatus of the Avignon papacy.206 The growth of the papal system of provisions was partially triggered by the reliance of university members on papal support in their pursuit of benefices. Many of the earliest papal initiatives in the field were legitimised by papal charity in favour of poor clerics. Poverty became a benchmark for members of universities seeking office, while the Rules of the papal chancery privileged university men in general and graduates in particular. At the beginning of a new pontificate, university men and graduates sent collective rolls of petition, after the example of the lists of candidates recommended by princes to the Eternal City,
203 204 205 206
Vandermeersch, “Teachers,” 244–55. Kibre, Scholarly Privileges, 234–35. Reusens, Documents relatifs, 1, 10–13 and 15–17. Verger, “La politique universitaire,” 25–26.
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in order to be rubber-stamped by the Vicar of Christ207 and be processed into papal provisions in forma communi pauperum.208 In line with general studies on the papal system of provisions, the efficacy of these provisions has been called into question,209 but it remains a fact that universities all over Europe time and again fell back on rotuli beneficiandorum in order to fetch benefices for their members until the Conciliarist crisis. The 15th century was characterised by the frenetic search on the part of academics for new legal tools to safeguard, through benefices, funding for themselves and for their students during their stay at the university, as well as interesting career prospects afterwards. The assertiveness of academics at the reform councils of Konstanz and Basel cannot be understood without considering the imminent threat that academics felt about their losing access to the benefice system.210 Their success in translating their fears into new institutional niches in the benefice system was highly variable, however.211 The Concordat of Vienna (1448) sanctioned the victory of German nobility over university graduates, who were left virtually emptyhanded.212 Whether academics had ever been able to challenge the claims of the nobility is a moot point, however, especially in the cathedral chapters where papal provisions had not been, and would never be, successful without the support of the nobility.213 In the aristocratic Church of the Empire “only appointees with sufficient feudal clout could protect the rights and possessions of many German churches against
207 The most apt moment at which to send a roll of petition was apparently the election of a new pope, but universities were very flexible in determining other occasions at which to send rolls of petition. See Watt, “University Clerks.” 208 These were destined for “poor clerics,” that is, those who did not yet possess a benefice and could therefore appeal to papal charity at the beginning of every pontificate. An extensive treatment of expectative graces in forma communi pauperum in Meyer, Arme Kleriker auf Pfründensuche. An evaluation of the efficiency of this form of papal provisions in McDonald, “Poor Clerks’ Provisions,” 339–49. 209 Schmutz, “Erfolg oder Misserfolg?” His evaluation of the effectiveness of the academic rolls of petitions is negative. Because of the variable impact of papal provisions, the results for Heidelberg and Cologne cannot be extrapollated without circumspection. 210 See, next to the already cited work of Stump, Sznuro, “Les origines du droit d’alternative bénéficiale,” 1–25. 211 Swanson, “Universities, Graduates and Benefices,” 58. 212 Cf. p. 251–68. 213 Barraclough, Papal Provisions, 60. On the German nobility and the Church in the early modern Empire, see Duhamelle, L’héritage collectif.
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the predatory rapaciousness of their fellow nobles.”214 Interestingly, the re-provincialisation of churches in Germany observed by historians in the aftermath of the Concordat of Vienna, which turned upside down academic ranking orders in the Chancery rules,215 is associated (in Hesse’s study with respect to Swiss collegiate churches) with the withdrawal of jurists and theologians to their last refuges, Universitätsstifte or collegiate chapters that of old had been the reserve of princely or episcopal administrators. This then is contrasted with the success of artists elsewhere, who in the 15th and 16th centuries could aspire to prebends in collegiate churches that had previously been beyond their reach.216 The cathedral chapters remained, as they had always been, bulwarks of the nobility, which, in the later Middle Ages, increasingly abhorred the taking of academic degrees in order to distinguish themselves from non-nobles. In this context, academic claims to one-sixth of the canonships in cathedral churches were not likely to be honoured in a Concordat that had been negotiated directly between the German princes and the pope.217 The advantages of identifying with a scholarly status—except for the teaching staff itself218—were limited in this area, higher Church offices (and, therefore, the richest benefices) being a prerogative of the nobility or of the urban patriciate. As a consequence, many clerics’ career patterns shifted, which resulted in a relative decline in attendance in the higher faculties in general and the theological schools in particular.219 Enter the Reformation and
214 Stump, The Reforms, 93. The provisory stipulations in the Concordat of Konstanz (1417), that one-sixth of all capitular benefices and all parishes with more than 3,000 inhabitants were to be reserved for graduates, were abandoned in Vienna. Mercati, Raccolta di concordati, 177–85. 215 Meyer, “Das Wiener Konkordat,” 150. 216 Of course, most artists still had to content themselves with a chapel or a vicary, the number of canonships being limited. Hesse, “Artisten im Stift,” 110–12. 217 For the international context, see Toews, “Pope Eugenius IV and the Concordat of Vienna,” 178–95. 218 Owing, partially, to the endowment of the new universities with the help of canonships, the loss of papal patronage had not affected teaching staffs immediately. Secular clerics even managed to strengthen their position to the disadvantage of the mendicants. The proliferation of universities made it easier to attract the attention of local or regional patrons with benefices in gift. Meyer, “Das Wiener Konkordat,” 112. See also Dickerhoff, “Die katholische Gelehrtenschule,” 360. 219 “Allein die stark in Gewicht fallende Vermehrung der Studentenzahlen im spätmittelalterlichen Deutschland hätte rein rechnerisch eine quantitativ weit stärkere
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the Catholic offensive. Medieval universities did survive, but failed to realise their ambitions in the clerical job market. The University of Cologne had to back down, in the context (or in exchange) of an overall reform of academic institutions, from imitating Louvain’s successes in Rome in the 1570s (see below) and obtaining its own nomination privilege in the ecclesiastical province of Cologne.220 In the context of Catholic mobilisation against heresy, university founders—bishops rather than princes—did not fall back on the model of the “classical” university centred on a group of canons charged with lecturing to meet the new demand for trained theologians and apt parish priests, nor did they establish diocesan seminaries after the Tridentine model. The educational field in the early modern Empire was dominated by the Society of Jesus and its colleges, some of which evolved into semior full universities.221 Most of the remaining Catholic universities in the Empire were infiltrated, or taken over, by the Society as well. The prestige of the Jesuit Order as the hammer of heresy was immense; Jesuits managed to translate learned culture into the needs of the nobility which ensured them of the support of the cathedral chapters; and their numerous teachers in the humanities, in philosophy, and in theology did not make tedious claims to a higher beneficial career. That did not keep the Jesuits from trying to acquire institutional niches in the clerical job market, however, either via papal provisions or otherwise, or from trying to use their informal channels of communication with princes, bishops, and nobles to advance the careers of promising hangers-on who had not been born as bishops or canons of the Domstifte.222 In
Erhöhung der Pfründen für gelehrte Theologen nötig gemacht, wenn die Theologen ihren Anteil an versorgten Graduierten hätten ‘halten’ wollen. Davon aber kann keineswegs die Rede sein: In ihrem prozentualen Anteil an der Gesamtstudentenschaft sanken die Theologen sichtlich und erheblich ab, was aber letsten Endes auch die Erfahrung war, die die anderen ‘Höheren’ Fakultäten machen mussten.” Miethke, “Karrierechancen eines Theologiestudium im späteren Mittelalter,” 209. 220 “Proinde de qua reformatio istius Academiae facienda est, ea necessario a Sanctitate Vestra petenda erit, speramusque non minora largituram SV universitati suae, quam concesserunt predecessores vestri Academiae Lovaniensi, Coloniensis filiae. Cui tamen prospicere poterant duces Brabantiae, et Hispaniarum reges.” Status et modus reformationis academiae Coloniensis ad Sanctissimum Dominum Nostrum Gregorium XIII Summum Pontificem, 6 June 1577, ASV, Arm. LXIV, 10, 42r–49r. 221 Cf. Müller, “The ‘Jesuitensystem’,” 95–108. 222 They were the authors of the last, vain attempt of the reform papacy to restore its protection over scholars (and to “reform,” thus, the cathedral chapters in Germany) by reserving the concordatory apostolic months to alumni of the newly founded Col-
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general, there seems to have been little interest in the Empire in creating large, non-noble elites of graduated clerics who identified explicitly with their scholarly status, in the absence of open access to the higher levels of Church hierarchy.223 In the core of the French kingdom, by contrast, academics and students had impressive legal tools at their disposal. Already in the Pragmatique of 1438, one-third of the benefices of the Eglise de France had been reserved for nominations by the universities, after the model of the papal expectatives. The Concordat of Bologna extended this right to all graduates, with or without letters of nomination, and reserved all benefices of the Church of France that became vacant during four months of the year. In order to obtain benefices, graduates224 had to “insinuate” to a specific ordinary collator their letters of graduation issued by a famous university225 and submit testimonies that they had fulfilled the quinquiennium, the minimum of five years of study (Arts included) necessary to qualify for the privilège des gradués in the Concordat.226 The Concordat repeated academic ranking principles— i.e., the hierarchy of academic degrees combined with the seniority of degrees—to be applied when competition arose between different competitors. However, graduates could only claim benefices vacant by the death of their last holder (which excluded benefices involved in
legium Germanicum in Rome. Germaniker would indeed occupy, in the first half of the 17th century, up to one-third of the canonships in German cathedrals, but this is to be ascribed to the “aristocratisation” of the Germanicum. Schmidt, Das Collegium Germanicum in Rom, 45 and 109. Compare the Jesuits’ success at Pont-à-Mousson in attaching nomination rights to all benefices under ducal patronage vacating during one specific month yearly. Gérardin, Etude sur les bénéfices ecclésiastiques, 118. On the contacts with the (Jesuit) confessors of the French kings, who managed the latter’s feuille des bénéfices, read Chatellier, “Société et bénéfices ecclésiastiques,” 87–88. 223 Cf. Reinhard, “Kirche als Mobilitätskanal,” 333–51. 224 I.e., magistri artium having fulfilled the quinquiennium and the graduates of the higher faculties of Theology, Law and Medicine. 225 Orléans and Montpellier, for instance, were not qualified as “famous universities.” Gérardin, Etude sur les bénéfices ecclésiastiques, 115. The universities “réputées étrangères” (Pont-à-Mousson, Strasbourg, Douai, Nantes, Perpignan, Aix-en-Provence, Orange, and Besançon) in the newly conquered territories (which continued to live with their own beneficial regimes as well), constituting more than one-third of the French universities by the end of the 17th century, were excluded from the privilège des gradués. Julia and Revel, “Les étudiants et leurs études dans la France moderne,” 205. 226 His rights were restricted, however, in January and July, the so-called mois de rigueur during which he had to grant precedence to those disposing of letters of nomination issued by the “famous universities.” Technical details in Gérardin, Etude sur les bénéfices ecclésiastiques, and Olivier-Martin, Le régime des cultes en France.
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transactions between clerics) and the pool of eligible benefices gradually narrowed.227 “La notification des grades, si largement développée, n’est en rien la voie royale pour accéder à un bénéfice.”228 It is difficult to evaluate the efficiency of the privilège des gradués in absolute terms,229 but the concordatory prerogatives for academics played only a minor role in the recruitment of the diocesan clergy, compared to the 33 per cent of all benefices promised by the Concordat.230 Only 20 per cent of the graduates notifying every year their degrees to ordinary collators in the diocese of Lisieux, for instance, were newcomers; the others were “recidivists,” 33 per cent and 21 per cent of whom had not been successful after, respectively, one and two decades.231 As such, the expectative des gradués shows some striking similarities with papal provisions in the Middle Ages: first, a graduate had to be patient, had to make financial investments (insinuations or nomination letters of the universities were not free), was dependent upon local support, and, in numerous cases, had to suffer endless litigation in order to obtain a benefice; second, the number of insinuations largely exceeded the supply of benefices. “Le seul intérêt de l’insinuation est de permettre à un ecclésiastique de se faire connaître du collateur ou d’un éventuel résignant ou permutant.”232 The profile of the graduates themselves was in keeping with the efficiency of their prerogatives.233 With or without 227 Benefices under the regime of lay patronage remained unaffected; dignities in collegiate or cathedral chapters and benefices charged with the care of souls were excluded from 1606 and 1745 onwards. 228 Loupès, Chapitres & chanoines de Guyenne, 253. 229 The statistical material assembled by Julia and Revel measures the correlation between successful notifications of degrees and the totality of benefices granted in a specific range of time instead of comparing the number of successful insinuations with the unsuccessful ones. 230 In the dioceses of Reims, Le Mans, and Lisieux (an otherwise highly scholarised diocese), the rate of benefices vacating in the “graduate months” and filled-in via the privilege des gradués did not exceed, respectively, 11, 12.5, and 11.3 per cent. Julia and Revel, “Les étudiants et leurs études,” 212, 217–20. 231 That is, in the insinuation registers of the diocese of Lisieux. Julia and Revel, “Les étudiants et leurs études,” 213. The figures of Loupès, Chapitres et chanoines, are different. 232 Loupès, Chapitres et chanoines, 253. 233 Graduates from Paris engaged in more prolonged studies, including degrees in Theology and Law after the magisterium. They considered their insinuation as a shortterm investment, being able to draw on impressive old-boys’ networks anyway. For teachers and college presidents, acquiring a benefice via the privilège was a long-term investment, as their (poorly remunerated) chairs or administrations failed to shield
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the privilège, the close link between benefices and university studies affected the educational field in France in two ways. First, it enhanced the provincial character of the French faculties of Theology, integration into local or regional circuits being the most convenient path to office. Second, it may explain why the figures of attendance in France, with a general rise of theologians and canonists in the second half of the 17th century, do not match with the model of the “Revolution of Education” perceived by Laurence Stone elsewhere in Europe, which expired due to a saturation of the fabric of states and confessions combined with the closure of power elites.234
2.4. Pulling things together: Benefices, grants, and the fabric of academia The previous sections represent, in a nutshell, the state of the art on the relationship between benefices and universities in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Much of it has been informed by the work of medievalists. The relevant scholarship draws heavily on concordats and other such bodies, leaving, as a consequence, plenty of room for qualification. Much more research is needed, but a few interesting lines of approach in Robert Swanson’s challenging essay on graduates and benefices (in the Middle Ages) deserve to be extrapolated, albeit hypothetically, to the relationship among studying, benefice-holding, and ecclesiastical career patterns on the early modern Continent. Universities in later medieval England, in a response to what they perceived as a crisis of patronage, sought to exchange their insecure patronage relationships for an institutional niche in the clerical job market. Swanson does not underestimate the significance of the
them from need during their old age. The vast majority of graduates who contented themselves with the quinquiennium and the title of magister artium made up the third type. Like most medieval papal providees, they usually had already acquired a benefice (which explains why they could keep notifying their degrees en masse to ordinary collators for decades after their stay at the university) but sought to improve their situation by applying for other offices via letters of insinuation. Julia and Revel, “Les étudiants et leurs études,” 216. 234 Julia and Revel, “Les étudiants et leurs études,” 355; Stone, “The Educational Revolution.”
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conciliarist crisis, the unpredictability of the clerical job market, and the loss of papal patronage in the construction of this crisis. Unlike much German scholarship in the field, however, the author also pays attention to the general economic conjuncture that affected the benefice system between 1380 and 1430 and profoundly influenced the relationship between benefices and university membership. In the context of the economic crisis in the 14th century, the number of benefices available for the sustenance of clerics studying at English universities and elsewhere decreased significantly due to cumulation and/or mergers of benefices and appropriations by religious houses and chapters. Bishops lacking personnel in parishes depopulated by the Black Death were reluctant to grant dispensations of canonical residence to students. Nor had career prospects improved in the course of the 14th and 15th centuries for graduates after their stay at the university. This economic and demographical context coincided with the contestation of the papal system of provisions, which added to the sense of insecurity, while bishops, lay lords, and religious houses already had trouble enough managing their own circuits of patronage without being forced by legislation to reserve benefices for graduates. Non-graduate spiritual or temporal administrations increasingly occupied canonships in collegiate and cathedral chapters, at the expense of university alumni. These elements combined to fuel the English universities’ perception of their situation as dramatic: a decline of benefices available for students was likely to cause a decline of attendance and, consequently, in the income of teachers already facing harsh competition in the clerical job market.235 It is above all Swanson’s tentative answer to the question as to how this “crisis of patronage” was eventually resolved that deserves particular notice. He adopts, up to a certain extent, the interpretation developed by Lytle, who pointed out that the emergence of colleges with rectorships under their patronage compensated for the uncertainty in the clerical job market. But Swanson also points out that the collegiate university was likely to have met the needs of more students than the benefice system had ever done,236 while colleges never had enough benefices at their advowson to remedy the crisis of patronage
235
Swanson, “Universities, Graduates and Benefices in Later Medieval England.” Lytle, “Patronage Patterns.” This paper has provoked a vivid debate. Literature in Swanson, “Universities, Graduates and Benefices,” 28 n.3. 236
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their fellows allegedly faced. According to Swanson, it was changes in career strategies, as well as the circuits deploying them, that solved the problem.237 By the end of the 15th century, licences for absenteeism were more easily granted again, and laicisation in non-graduate as well as in graduate bureaucracies reopened perspectives for university men seeking to enter cathedral and collegiate chapters. In the meantime, however, academic aspirations had gone through a profound process of transformation as well. Benefice-holding was, out of sheer necessity, postponed to a later stage in a cleric’s career; simultaneously, college life made it possible to defer ordainment and benefice-holding, with the help of grants or short-term academic employment or other forms of patronage that were not necessarily dominated by ecclesiastical circuits. The laicisation of student populations in the later Middle Ages was both the result of and the solution to the crisis of patronage in the clerical job market that was so dreaded by academics, mitigating, as it did, competition between the remaining clerics. I have gone thoroughly into Swanson’s analysis of the crisis of patronage in later medieval England for several reasons. Swanson privileges the metaphor of the market, however deficient, over that of an inert benefice system. But above all, his insights on the link between benefices and collegiate life reveal an interesting analogy with later evolutions in early modern Catholic Europe. In the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, the number of benefices that could be used as scholarships must have decreased dramatically once more, not because of the plague but in the context of Catholic mobilisation in the war against heresy. Absenteeism, especially with respect to benefices charged with the care of souls, had been stigmatised by the reformers as the most reprehensible abuse ever. This implied that, in the South Netherlands and the Principality of Liège, approximately 3,000 or 4,000 rectorships (compared to approximately 2,000 canonships) were at one stroke beyond the reach of clerics looking for a means to finance their studies. The vast reservoir of altars, which did not require strict canonical residence, was, indeed, still available and continued to be an important source of income for students and teachers;238 but the boom of such foundations having occurred in the later Middle Ages, 237
Academics kept complaining, however, until well into the 16th century. Swanson, “Universities, Graduates and Benefices,” 59–60. 238 Between 1609 and 1712, the numbers of ordinands holding a benefice as titulus gradually declined. See Vanden Broecke, Rekrutering en carrièrepatroon, 85–86.
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their number was in decline. If they were not incorporated or unified with other benefices in order to make the “tridentine” shepherds less dependent upon their flock, chapels were increasingly used for the sustenance of vice-pastors, a new type of cleric trained to supplement the parish clergy. The so-called “Tridentine spirit” consequently affected university life in more than one way. The foundation of many colleges within or outside the walls of the “classical” university gained new significance in the light of Tridentine decrees calling for a proper education of the parish clergy. However, it may have had to compensate simultaneously for shocks on the beneficial market that came with the very same Tridentine Spirit academics gave substance to by fashioning themselves as its avant-garde. In the universities of the Netherlands, the vast majority of the Church Militant’s future soldiers were thoroughly crammed behind the closed doors of colleges. Not surprisingly, Louvain witnessed a real boom in college foundations at the end of the 16th century and in the first decades of the 17th.239 As such, the highly desired distinction between a disciplined, culturally more homogeneous clergy and the laity materialised already within the walls of Academia, as most of the lay students in the faculties of Law and Medicine at Louvain lived in private rooms.240 All this piety and zeal was supported by grants: in 1500, c.200 scholarships had to relieve approximately one-seventh of the student population in Louvain; by the end of the Ancien Régime, more than 1,000 of them had been accumulated throughout the ages, 90 per cent of which were attached to the c.40 resident colleges.241
239 Under the Archdukes (1598–1633), 14 new colleges were founded, six of which were destined for the regular clergy. Roegiers and Vandermeersch, “Les archiducs et l’université de Louvain,” 290, n. 21. 240 Lawyers and physicians would have been recruited from the higher strata of society as well. Cf. the hypothesis put forward by Roegiers and Lamberts, Louvain University, 46. 241 See De Maesschalck, “Beurzen en colleges te Leuven in de 15de en 16de eeuw,” 556–63. The social history of student populations in Louvain, as well as the place of scholarships in it, still awaits a decent study. A list of the colleges in Louvain in Reusens, Documents relatifs, vols. 3–5. Cf. Trio, “Financing of Universities.”
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Plate 2.1. Pedagogy of the Pig The courtyard of the Pedagogy of the Pig. Limited access to benefices for faculty members who had to compete with Divines, Lawyers, and Physicians fuelled the concentration of the (mostly younger) students in Philosophy and the Humanities in four pedagogies in the course of the 15th Century. The ad hoc arrangement of the buildings recalls the organic growth of many college foundations at Louvain. Drawings in the course notes in Aristotelian Logic of the student Joannes Wouters from Mechlin, 1648–50. [Municipal Museum, Louvain]
Plate 2.2. Van Dale College Van Dale or Antwerp College, founded by the Antwerp canon Van Dale, for students in Law, Theology and Philosophy (1569), one of the few Louvain colleges that have preserved their original appearances until present day. Mark the hermetic, almost monastic, arrangement of the college buildings. Engraving in Gramaye, Joannes Baptista, Antiquitates illustrissimi ducatus Brabantiae (. . .). Brussels: Joannes Momartius, 1610. [Catholic University of Louvain, Central Library]
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Not only were the students of the Arts faculty and a growing proportion of their comilitones in Divinity housed in colleges in the period under investigation; so too was the overwhelming majority of academics themselves. At least three-quarters of a population of the c.240 individuals in Fig. 2.8 who occupied teaching positions, had a seat in academic councils, or were involved in the administration of the university and/or its constituents (or who, in most cases, combined these tasks) between 1598 and 1621242 had lived at some stage, if not during their entire career, in colleges. Boards Higher Faculties & Others: 23; 10% College Teaching: 4; 2%
Presidency + Theol.: 20; 8% Theology: 3; 1%
Law: 13; 6% Medicine: 4; 2%
Presidency: 47; 20% Presidency + Law/Med.: 17; 7% Arts: 105; 44%
Fig. 2.7. The collegiate university: Louvain staff members 1598–1621
This applied to the vast majority of those staff members who never made an academic career outside the Arts faculty (44 per cent of the overall population) and who, except for a few individuals active in local town or church administration, lived in the faculty’s four pedagogies. These had become impressive institutions already in the 15th century, precisely to compensate for the proportionally small number of benefices reserved for its teachers or regents. Others became either presidents (20 per cent) of one of the dozens of resident colleges243 at Louvain (many of which provided some tutoring or teaching as
242 The first attested date of birth is 1525 (Cornelius Reyneri Goudanus, deacon of Saint-Peter’s, + 1609), while the last registered death (Antonio Perez) occurred in 1672. 243 Our lists encompass 32 colleges. The Scottish college moved to Douai, and the College of Saint Augustine founded by Michael Baius had ceased to exist in the period under investigation.
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well),244 or joined the higher faculties of Theology, Canon and Civil Law, or Medicine (which, combined, hosted a third of the population). A solid majority among the 57 chair-holders in the higher faculties passing the review in between 1598 and 1621 combined teaching with presiding over colleges, the most famous of which were the Pope’s College, King’s College, and the Great and Small Colleges of the Holy Spirit. The share of theologians combining their chair with a presidency is overwhelming. Exactly half of the chair-holders of the other higher faculties did so too. Many other members of the faculty boards in the Arts faculty or in the higher faculties lived in colleges too, as private tutors or as administrative staff. The collegiate university may have contributed to the laicisation of students in English universities, but not with respect to the Louvain staff. The proportion of academics residing in colleges more or less corresponds with the number of clergymen at Louvain. The Brabant university, with even half of the professors in Law and Medicine being clerics, remained a clerical bastion, despite diverging trends elsewhere. Grants did more than merely support the academic enterprise financially, being intertwined as they were with academic life in all its aspects. The concentration of human and economic capital in colleges simultaneously gave rise to an academic elite that, in addition to occupying highly visible local church and teaching positions, could perform as administrators of colleges, as spiritual and intellectual mentors of the students put under their care, as scouts of talent, as the “natural” spokesmen and the saniores of the academic community, and as the centre of channels of intelligence and communication covering the university’s entire recruitment area; in other words, as brokers who, via their letters of recommendation and their networks, provided access to the world beyond the (supposedly) impenetrable gates of the colleges. Pious foundations had probably become, at least numerically, more important in the exchange of favours between students and teachers than benefices had ever been (or may have been); moreover, the rising dons probably had a greater impact on the distribution of scholarships than they ever had had on the advowson of 244 This was the case for the Collegium Trilingue, founded by Erasmus, with chairs in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek; and in Ghent College (also Collegium Vaulxianum), which hosted a Latin school. It is only by the second half of the 17th century that the Arts faculty would pull together all teaching in the humanities in Trinity’s College. Most residential colleges also provided private courses; compare references in Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, passim.
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benefices. Consequently, relations within the clerical circuits at the university were configured in a highly hierarchical manner. Both students and presidents or chair-holders were likely to define their relationships with each other in terms of respectful gratitude in exchange for favours, loyalty, mutual affection, and similar obligations between unequal partners; in other words, in terms of academic patronage. It is not surprising that, first, Louvain university dons tended to make a lifelong career at the university, in contrast to lower degrees of professionalisation elsewhere,245 and that, second, they considered their alumni their spiritual clones who were responsible for the remarkable successes of Catholicism in Belgium.246 Whether or not this periodisation can be lived with, and to which extent students had indeed relied on benefices before the existence of colleges, is debatable. What matters here, however, is the juxtaposition of two alternative types of financing and of devising academic communities. Benefices and grants correspond with respectively open, loosely organised conglomerates of benefice-holders; and closed, quasi-monastic blocs crumbling under the weight of their own hierarchy. In the following chapters, it will become clear that between these two abstract models, a practical hybridism will prevail at Louvain. University men never made a clear-cut choice between the two corresponding financial techniques but instead benefitted from combining them, just as much as academic hierarchies could be devised or circumvented as the situation demanded it.
245
Roegiers, “Professorencarrières,” 239. This is not to say that students were indoctrinated by their mentors, or that they depended completely on the latters’ for protection—but the omnipresence of clientelist language in correspondence between scholars suggests that both parties saw it fit to organise their relations in an asymmetrical manner. Illuminating insights questioning the commonsensical notion of “indoctrination” in the second chapter “Cultures populaires” in De Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, 1, 31 sqq. 246
CHAPTER THREE
THE JEWELS AMONG ACADEMIC PRIVILEGES. THE LOUVAIN PRIVILEGES OF NOMINATION TO ECCLESIASTICAL BENEFICES
Sulpice vous a rescrit comme, la veille de l’ascension, on luy offrit un certain benefice de grand revenu si on en pouvoit jouir, et qu’il l’a accepté, attendant si on le luy conferera en Hollande. Cependant 4 jours après, sa nomination qu’il avoit pendante à Lille est escheue par la mort d’un chanoine, et Boèce a accepté la chanoinie et elle luy a esté conférée. On prend possession pour luy. Je verray si quelque Satan Romaniste ne luy fera pas guerre, comme ils font souvent. Mais Boèce a mis tant d’empechemens, qu’il croit que les Romanistes perdront leur peine. Voilà comme Dieu en un moment accomode les affaires de Sulpice et Celias, et contre tout ordre et opinion. Car Sulpice n’était que le deuxiesme en nomination. Et cependant Dieu en fait mourir deux chanoines, l’un 24 heures après l’autre. Il a envie de la changer en simples benefices. On luy en offre desja 600 florins en un bénéfice, mais il requiert la residence en un lieu privilégié. Le temps esclorra les occasions.1
In the early 1620s, the pious and learned correspondence between Cornelius Jansenius and his French partner in crime Saint-Cyran suddenly took a prosaic turn when the Louvain academic discussed his recent fortunes in the clerical job market. Only a few years before, in 1617, the fresh president of the new Holland College had balked at engaging in the scramble for benefices, assuring his correspondent that he would only accept one if it fell into his lap.2 But Jansenius did not object to giving the wheel of Fortune a nudge in the right direction. One year later, in 1618, he had obtained a nomination letter from
1 Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, 2 June 1623, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 217. Sulpice and Boèce are code names for the author of the letter, Celias is an alias for the abbé de Saint-Cyran, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne (1581–1643; henceforth referred to as Saint-Cyran), with whom Jansenius had studied at Louvain and Paris and whom he had joined in his home diocese at Bayonne until his return to Louvain in 1617. 2 “Quand à moy, je suis encore sans benefice, non pas toutesfois sans esperance d’en obtenir avec le temps, si je voulois espérer. Mais je suis, peu s’en faut, sur le point de me resoudre à n’en chercher jamais de ma vie, s’il ne s’offre de soy mesme. Jay ma vie et ce qui me faut, pas une maille davantage.” Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, 18 May 1617, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 11.
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the university for benefices in “famous churches.”3 Five years later, God unexpectedly closed a door (for the two canons He had chosen to call) and opened a window of opportunity for the young academic from Holland. The collegiate church of Saint Peter’s at Lille figured prominently among the top 10 benefice pools in the region targeted by “Satans from Rome,” its canonships being among the most coveted benefices in the Habsburg Netherlands. This is not to say that Jansenius was impatient to broaden his horizon beyond the walls of the Ivory Tower: he obviously wished to continue his stay at the university by the grace of the university’s privileges de fructibus percipiendis in absentia. The appropriately poor and erudite Jansenius, who described himself as a cleric without “une maille d’avantage,” owed a lot to his re-found Alma Mater, whose privileges had enabled him to lay hands on this canonship and to use it as a source of income for his scholarly activities. Poverty and learning had been the hallmarks of university men in Louvain’s privileges. In 1483, in the bull Urget Nos, Pope Sixtus IV had granted the Louvain rector the right to appoint, under specific conditions, poor clerics of the university to (lower) ecclesiastical benefices in the Burgundian Low Countries. According to the bull’s preambles, appropriately called the Narratio in Diplomatics, the pontiff wished to safeguard the competitiveness of university men in a clerical job market reportedly dominated by powerful magnates outside the university, and to save them from misery during their old age.4 Thirty years later, in 1513, Pope Leo X endowed the dean of the Arts faculty, in the bull Admonet Nos, with a similar privilege in favour of those clerics who had obtained the degree of Magister Artium.5 The circumstances 3 Jansenius’ nomination by the university in 1618 was registered in Registre aux nominations, RAL, OUL, 4784, 35r. 4 Privilegia, 85–90. 5 Privilegia, 92–103. Already in 1512 and 1513, faculty members perceived their future privilege as an extensio, an extension, of the rectoral prerogatives granted to the university back in the 1480s. Indices, 1512 and 1513, RAL, OUL, 729, 3 and 9; Acta Facultatis Artium, 17 and 27 April 1510, RAL, OUL, 712, 295v, and 296v. Elaborate fragments of Urget Nos had been resumed in the narrative parts of the faculty’s privilege of nomination. The university’s bull was a necessary item of evidence in lawsuits against faculty nominees, Acta Universitatis, 9 December 1533, RAL, OUL, 54, 128v. Legal tradition could, if necessary, be invoked to argue that if by accident lacunae were found in the extension, the gaps could be filled with the help of its genetrix, Urget Nos; opponents, in return, claimed that this applied to the restrictions in the university’s bull as well; cf. “Dum collatores gravant, qui non habent plusquam 6 beneficia” Quaestio 2, Puncta Aliquot.
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in which these privileges were granted remain obscure. By obtaining them, however, Louvain adopted the generally observed policy of academic authorities throughout Europe to secure access to benefices for their peers and alumni. We are better informed about their reception by other stakeholders. Especially the much more extended privilege of the Arts faculty, which had been the object of academic lobbying in the heart of Christendom for several years, became a bone of contention both in Rome, where the pope’s fiat of 1513 only would be converted into a papal bull two years later,6 and in the Low Countries, where the faculty’s first nominations from 1515 onwards met with fierce, sometimes brutal, opposition from duped ordinary collators.7 The following two decades were marked by legal experiments fine-tuning the faculty’s privilege: after a first confirmation by Leo X, in 1517,8 the bull Rationi Congruit was officially rubber-stamped, although not without troubles, by Clement VII in 1523.9 It would only leave curial offices in 1525 after vehement litigation, but the bull’s incipit indicates that it had been granted by Clement’s predecessor Hadrian VI, the former Louvain divine who had briefly occupied Peter’s throne in 1522 and 1523 and who had died before the faculty’s letter of supplication could be converted, amidst curial intrigues, into a papal bull.10 While some of the attainments in this bull, including the extension of academic rights to the entire 6 It was the day on which the papal fiat ut petitur was written on a letter of supplication (which was later registered in the Registri supplicationum) that figured as the official date of the bull. Nonetheless, it could take months, if not years, to turn a supplication rubber-stamped by the pope or by curial officials into a bull that had force of law. Duped parties could challenge drafts of legislation before tribunals such as the Chancery’s tribunal litterarum contradictarum. The bulls (the privilege of nomination itself and an execution bull ) only arrived in 1515, when the first session of the faculty’s nomination board was registered in the libri nominationum. 7 On this episode, read Boute, “ ‘Regnum,’ ‘Sacerdotium’ en ‘Studium’.” 8 The bull Dignum Censemus, which had to exempt the Louvain privileges of nomination from recent annullments of provisions by the pope in March 1516, and the resulting insertion of these constitutions in the regulae cancellariae. UAL, OUL, no registration number. 9 26 November 1523; UAL, OUL, no registration number; Privilegia, 105–24. Legislation that had been initiated but that had been aborted by the pontiff ’s death could be resumed in the numerous Rationi Congruit bulls that were routinely issued by his successor and that were officially dated on the day after his inthronisation. More details in Frenz, Die Kanzlei der Päpste. 10 Boute, “Humanists in the Corridors of Power.” The letter of supplication, which allegedly was falsified by malevolent curialists who had already played an ambiguous role in the negotiations leading to the faculty’s oldest bull Admonet Nos, has been registered in ASV, Dataria Ap., Reg. Suppl., 1793.
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diocese of Utrecht, had evaporated in the period under investigation, it continued to be a point of reference with respect to the jurisdictional problems that inevitably came with controversial privileges. Another confirmation bull left the Eternal City under Pope Paul III,11 but legal innovations were only introduced in the bull In Praecelsa (1573) of Gregory XIII (1572–85),12 who also monitored the confirmation of the Louvain jurisdictional claims in the papal brief In Supremo of 1578.13 Both legislative texts had to make the privileges consistent with the decrees of Trent, amid claims from opponents that the council fathers had abolished them. The last significant alterations to the Louvain privileges of nomination were introduced in the bull Regimini of 1616. Regimini was amended in the 1670s but remained valid, alongside the other bulls, until the French revolution.14 Only the plenitudo potestatis of the vicars of Christ could authorise such wide-ranging privileges. Nonetheless, the sources of law concerning the privileges of nomination were not restricted to papal legislation. Because the learned corporations at Louvain enjoyed the full libertas statuendi (which, alongside the right to draft home-made rules, included the right to grant dispensations on them in specific cases), academic statutes elaborating on papal legislation furnish the second category of normative documents with respect to the jus nominandi. Third, the Habsburg princes of the Low Countries too acted as regulators. In the preamble to each bull, subsequent pontiffs claimed to honour not only the humble requests submitted by the academics but also those from pious and obedient princes figuring as protectors of their fille bien amez, the University of Louvain. This did not exempt the academics from submitting Roman bulls to the Privy Council or to the Council of Brabant in order to obtain the required placet letters, however. Most of these lettres de placet limited themselves to the obligatory clause that the privileges of nomination could not be invoked against the prince’s own nomination indults, collations, droicts de régale, his other beneficial rights whatsoever, or against the legal patronage exerted by the prince’s vassals.15 The placet granted in 1531 to the bull Rationi Congruit of 1523, by contrast, referred to as the 11
Bull Ex Debito, 2 March 1535, UAL, OUL, 71. Bull In Praecelsa, 1 March 1573, UAL, OUL, 74a; printed in Privilegia, 130–46. 13 Preserved in UAL, OUL, 51. 14 Bull Regimini Universalis Ecclesiae, 1 December 1616, UAL, OUL, 76; printed in Privilegia, 154–79. 15 Placet on Urget Nos of Maximilian I, 25 October 1484, UAL, OUL, 59—Privilegia, 91–92; Placet on Admonet Nos of Charles V, 15 October 1515, UAL, OUL, 62a–b; Placet on In Praecelsa of Philip II, 22 September 1573, UAL, OUL, 75b—Privilegia, 12
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Plate 3.1. Bull Gregory XIII In Praecelsa The papal bull In Praecelsa, in which Pope Gregory XIII confirmed the Louvain privileges of nomination and assured that decrees of the Council of Trent could not be invoked against them. Because these bulls also contain a synopsis of the previous legislative acts they confirmed, amended, or amplified, the text has become so long that the charter was issued in the form of a quire. [Catholic University of Louvain, University Archives]
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Concordatum Carolinum between Emperor Charles V and the Arts faculty, contained substantial bits of legislation.16 In this quality, it appealed to the regalist tastes of Van Espen, who staged the charter as a textbook case of the prince’s right to amend papal legislation.17 Under the cover of a Concordat, the emperor could flex his muscles in order to soothe local church magnates (especially in Artois and Tournaisis), while leaving the essence of academic attainments untarnished.18 Beyond the rhetoric concerning the lord’s authority in his realm in the preambles, the restrictions in the Concordat were probably the result of negotiations monitored, but not monopolised, by the prince’s advisors. This applies to papal legislation as well. Much of the daily business of governing, whether a state or Christendom, consisted in pondering, pruning, and rejecting or approving supplications submitted by petitioners and translated by professional procurators in the stylus curiae, the “curialese” of the Court of Rome. These supplications contained the outlines of the measures to be taken, as well as the derogatory clauses that had to beef up the bull-to-be with respect to local constitutions and practices, before the pontifical fiat turned them into papal decrees. In the next sections, it will become clear that the Louvain privileges of nomination were remarkably fit to meet the legal and practical difficulties nominees could expect in the Low Countries. Papal bulls furnished the legal basis, while academic statutes and princely legislation elaborated on them and were considered crucial in avoiding the abuses that inevitably came with the practice of privilege. This is not to say that we should join the choir of classical Church historians, regalists, or Church reformers denouncing the abuses of Rome or, in this case, committed by Louvain “benefice-hunters.” Privileges inevitably generate abuses, not because of the frailty of human nature but because the battle-cry of “abuse” was one of the few ways for opponents or competitors to translate their claims into a legitimate discourse and call for an annulment of the privileges in question. In legal doctrine, abuse was the dialectical twin brother of privilege.19 Many of the practices described in the following sec146–48; Placet on Regimini of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, 20 November 1619, UAL, OUL, 78—Privilegia, 179–81. 16 Placet on Rationi Congruit of Charles V, 12 May 1531, UAL, OUL, 67—Privilegia, 125–30. 17 Van Espen, Ius Ecclesiasticum Universum, Pars Secunda, Tit. xxiv, cap. vi. 18 Boute, “ ‘Regnum,’ ‘Sacerdotium’ en ‘Studium’,” 172. Details in idem, “Humanists in the Corridors of Power.” 19 Legal history has dedicated much attention to privileges. “Die Definitionsgeschichte des Privilegs ist Ausdruck seiner Definitionsschwäche.” Monhaupt, “Erteilung
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tions were widespread among clerics. Translating them into abuses requires a lot of interpretive work that needs to be analysed rather than repeated. Instead of adopting a normative approach and describing the gap between the real content of the privileges and academic practice, we will focus in the next paragraphs on how academics used them. This is not to say that institutions do not matter. They do, as the comparison between the Louvain privileges and the French privilège des gradués will reveal.
3.1. “Pas une maille davantage”? Scholars in the pursuit of poverty The target group of the Louvain privileges of nominations differed substantially from the pool of beneficiaries of the privilège des gradués in France. Graduates in France could only appeal to concordatory rights granted to university members after having completed the quinquiennium at one of the famous universities in the heart of the kingdom, which included obtaining the degree of Master of Arts. In this respect, the Louvain privileges appear much less demanding: a five years’ stay at the university was not a prerequisite. Clerics without academic degrees whatsoever were excluded from the faculty’s privilege of nomination, but they could still make use of the university’s privilege. In practice, however, nearly all university nominees were graduates: at least 70 per cent of applicants figuring in university records also applied for a nomination of the Arts faculty, which produced the bulk of nomination letters in the period under investigation.20 In the preamble to the faculty’s privilege, the Veneranda Facultas Artium—which in line with other universities in northwestern Europe hosted far more students than any other faculty—had presented itself as the very foundation of the university, the source from which all the other faculties rose.21 In the beginning of the 16th century, the philosophers had been trying to conquer, or to consolidate, their proclaimed niche on higher education as a gateway to studies in the higher faculties. The Leonina of 1513 was
und Widerruf,” 93. See also Potz, “Zur kanonistischen Privilegientheorie,” Van Hove, “De la notion du privilège,” Gaudemet, “De l’ambiguité du privilège,” and Roelker, Principles of Privilege. 20 Cf. Fig. 3.4, p. 158. 21 “Ex qua sicut ex fonte caeterae scaturiunt, ac ipsa Theologia, per quam hereses confunduntur . . . allicerentque plures ad ipsam facultatem, in illa, quae principium est omnium aliarum facultatum, studendum” Privilegia, 96.
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designed to do just that, stipulating as it did that only those members of the university who had graduated as magistri artium—which was obligatory for students aspiring degrees in Theology and Medicine but not for lawyers—could aspire to a faculty nomination. This had provoked fierce reactions against the faculty’s aspirations, notably from the Law faculties.22 In the period under investigation, its prerogatives would become the object of the “War of the Faculties” as well, but their fundamentals were no longer challenged. By holding out the prospect of a benefice, the faculty and the university hoped to boost their attractiveness to future graduates. One should not exaggerate the importance of the privileges as a carrot for aspiring students, however. The laymen studying at the university were excluded from the use of the privileges anyway. Clerics, for their part, did not present themselves as a united front before the nomination boards. Roughly one-quarter of the licenciates in Philosophy bothered to obtain the magisterial hat in the Arts,23 but it is the promotion lists of the Arts faculty that provide the most generic source to quantify the proportions of students that figured in the nomination registers of the university or the faculty before 1640 (see Fig. 3.1).24 If the figures for the early 1620s, of 40 to 50 graduations to the magisterium in the Arts (birettationes) yearly, are representative, one-third of the magistri artium or c.12 per cent of licenciates in Philosophy applied for an academic nomination. During the Truce, the proportion of nominees graduating in the higher faculties increased spectacularly. Viewed through the matrix of the benefice system as a job market, as it was perceived by young clerics, this evolution must have been fuelled by the recovery of the South and the related foundation boom at Louvain.
22 The granting of Admonet Nos should be situated also in the contemporary attempts of the Arts faculty to make the magisterium obligatory for students aspiring Law degrees. See Fierens, “À propos du jus nominandi,” and idem, “Les ambitions de la faculté des arts.” In the period under investigation, the only candidate who, in 1613, presented himself before the nomination board without having obtained his magisterium was refuted by the faculty board without wasting words. Acta Facultatis Artium, RAL, OUL, 714, 531r. 23 Based on the first half of the 1620s, when c.50 new magistri artium paid graduation fees to the university’s receptor on a more or less yearly basis. Liber computuum receptorum universitatis, 1621–1637, RAL, OUL, 275. The administrative documents of the Arts faculty are incomplete. 24 In the course of the 1590s, Jesuits estimated that in between 700 and 800 students lived in the pedagogia of the Arts faculty, while graduation registers for 1597 register 100 licentiati having completed the two-years’ cycle of Physics and Logic—a number that would double in the course of the first decades of the 17th century (cf. Fig. 1.1, p. 31). This suggests that close to 1,000 students were attending the faculty’s
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Fig. 3.1. Share of Licentiati Artium (1598–1621) figuring in the libri nominationum
At the same time, Fig. 3.2 reveals that their numbers did not keep up with the rise in overall numbers of graduations. They were increasingly outnumbered by the many secular clerics at Louvain who did not seek access to office via the academic job agencies. In line with figures for the population of 439 individuals registered as academic nominees in the archducal period,25 their numbers remained fairly stable after 1600, constituting one-quarter or one-third among graduates or would-be graduates in Theology (i.e., probably half of the studiosi visiting the Sacred Faculty’s auditories)26 in the period under investigation.27 schools by then, among whom were students of the humanities and a fair proportion of students who did not bother to graduate in the Arts faculty while preparing themselves for studies in Law or Theology (provided they were not interested in taking degrees in Divinity either). The high figures for matriculation (400–600 new arrivals yearly, with peaks of 800–1,000 matriculations in the 1620s and 1630s; cf. Schillings, Matricule de l’université de Louvain 1616–1651) indicate that many students left the university within the first year after their arrival. The sixth volume of the immatriculation registers (1568–1616) is lost. 25 I.e., the 439 individuals who were registered as applicants for a nomination between 1598 and 1621. Between 1598 and 1609, 228 did so, with 252 individuals (some of whom were already registered as nominees in the previous decade) figuring in the 1610–21 list. 26 Jesuits estimated in the 1620s, in another row over their right to teach (cf. p. 455–58), that c.400 students in Divinity attended the public schools of the Sacra Facultas. Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus, 259. In the second decade of the 17th century, an average of 30 to 50 students graduated as baccaularei formati after having completed the quinquiennium; this suggests that future graduates constituted half of the entire population of students in Divinity. 27 Numbers in Fig. 3.2 are based on the Catalogus Baccalaureorum (. . .), 1585– 1619, RAL, OUL, 505. Note: the statistics in the graph refer not to individuals but to
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80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10
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Fig. 3.2. Share of Graduates in Divinity (STB) figuring in the libri nominationum
If the soaring numbers of clerics seeking benefices via academic nominations in the 1630s28 is to be related to the normalisation of the clerical job market,29 to the competition resulting from it, and to the corresponding attractiveness of the prerogatives that came with academic nominations, then the figures suggest that similar phenomena (high levels of graduations in Theology until the 1650s) may correspond to different realities in the clerical job market. That is, in the period of the Truce, coming divines may still have felt they could postpone their entry into the Vineyard of the Lord without jeopardising their chances in a market that was short of trained clergymen anyway. Seen from their perspective, the first decades of the 17th century may have been an era of golden opportunity. In more competitive times, the correlation between a prolonged stay at the university financed by grants or subordinate administrative duties in the colleges; rising graduation
graduations to baccalaureus biblicus, sententiarius, or formatus, the three stages that a full bachelor in Theology (i.e., a formatus) had to go through. In the long term, (i.e., 1599–1618), the proportion between individuals and graduations is to be estimated at roughly 40 per cent. 28 In the time interval 1631–40, about 290 (of the 432 individuals applying for a nomination in between 1622–40) individual nominees were registered in the Libri nominationum of the university and the Arts faculty; as opposed to the 220–50-odd individuals that applied for nominations in the previous decades. 29 For the hybrid notion of normalisation, see p. 84.
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numbers; and a longer and bumpier path to office can be expected to have grown stronger, resulting in more graduates applying for nominations. The major difference with the privilège des gradués resided in the stipulation that only resident members of the university were eligible for academic nominations.30 Contrary to French graduates who reiterated their insinuations during decades, nominees who left the university forfeited their rights to claim a benefice by virtue of academic privileges within the statutory term of four months. Their moves were monitored not just by ordinary collators with a grudge against academics burdening their collations but, above all, by comilitones preying on nominations of fellow university members who left the university without a dispensation or a leave of absence. The combination of residence and the obligation of acquiring academic degrees of sorts implied that individuals applying for nominations had already sojourned for three years or more at the university. Judging from the 17th century legislation, the Faculty of Arts had, moreover, only Louvain masters in mind, a point of view that was, in practice, shared by university administrators.31 Students and teachers who had already sojourned at other universities before coming to Louvain constituted c.8 per cent of a research population of 439 individuals registered as university or faculty nominees in 1598–1621.32 They were statutorily obliged to go through the (corporatist) ritual of the birettatio again at Louvain in order to continue their studies in Theology or Medicine; to teach in the Louvain schools; or to benefit from the faculty’s privileges.33 In this context, it is not surprising that faculty legislation was also more specific on residence itself, which for Louvain graduates was defined as one year of residence immediately before the
30
Cf. Guilielmus Vande Velde, De nominationibus Lovaniensium, c.1630, KBR, Manuscrits, 22191, 27v. 31 The nomination fees registered in the Libri Receptorum, 1621–1637, RAL, OUL, 275, record a post “alibi promoti.” 32 More than 70 per cent of foreign students and scholars had studied at Douai. German universities (Cologne, Mainz, and Trier) followed with 20 per cent of foreign graduates. A few individuals had sojourned at Bologna, Padua, Paris (Jansenius), and Leiden. The educational pedigree of about 6 per cent of the research population is unknown. 33 “Magistri aliarum universitatum non admittantur . . ., nisi ante promiserint se in hac nostra facultate non usuros privilegio gradus magisterii in artibus alibi suscepti.” Statuta Facultatis Artium, 1602, RAL, OUL, 707, 54r.
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nomination.34 With respect to alibi promoti, the faculty took measures in 1584 to stop “the flow of men who came to the university out of greed instead of love for knowledge,” requiring, as the contemporary statutes did, that they reside for three years (two years for staff members)35 before being eligible for faculty nominations. This statute was scaled down a few years later to 18 months, while regular Louvainists were eligible after one year’s residence. Our exemplary nominee, Jansenius, only applied approximately 12 months after his return to Louvain in March 1617.36 The hurdle of residence could be taken by Lovanienses as much as by graduates from Douai or elsewhere via dispensations on residence de annali or de sequiennali/biennali residentia, respectively, granted by the faculty’s congregation or its deputies charged with current affairs. This practice had been widespread in the decades (1573–97), immediately preceding the period under investigation (68 requests, 59 granted), suggesting that dispensations can be seen as a barometer of academic life. In the late 1570s, a tide of requests for dispensations, in tandem with complaints about a high turnover among students and staff and calls for more rigidity in order to avoid abuse of the university’s privileges, indicate that things were going in the wrong direction.37 After the disastrous first half of the 1580s, a prudent revival went hand in hand with a growing number of requests, especially from forces recruited 34 Cf Statuta Facultatis Artium, 1602, RAL, OUL, 707, 48r–v. In the period under investigation, the five university nominees holding an academic degree from or having sojourned for some time at another university were either staff members (such as Jansenius), or had already obtained a nomination from the Arts faculty. 35 “Ad occurendum hominum quorundam discurrentium fraudibus, ac venantium cupiditati, qui non studiorum sed beneficia acquirendi causa, ad hanc universitatem se conferunt.” Acta Facultatis Artium, 1 February 1585, RAL, OUL, 713, 222v. See also Acta Facultatis Artium, 22 December 1587, ibidem, 257v–258v. 36 I.e., after a prolonged absence for a decade in France. Cf. the first letter of Jansenius to Saint-Cyran from Louvain, 9 March 1617, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 4–5; his first nomination (by the Faculty of Arts) was rubber-stamped in March 1618. 37 “propter quotidianas istiasmodi supplicationes et rarepentes abusus . . . cum nemine imposterum super residentia dispensandum esse nisi primum ad tempus alquo residentiam suam inchoaverit ac super ea re formulam aliquam per decanum concipiendum esse que ordinationibus facultatis ascribatur. Deinde decreverunt domini procedendum esse adversus illos qui residentiam se continuaturos promiserant et nihilominus manent absentes adeoque omnes illos nominationibus suis esse privandos.” Acta Facultatis Artium, 4 December 1578, RAL, OUL, 713, 150r. The insistence on residence during the following years is particularly telling. Cf., for instance, the high turnover of teachers in Louvain in the second half of the 16th century, in Roegiers, “Professorencarrières,” as an indication of “difficult times.”
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elsewhere, in the 1590s. By then, the regents of the four pedagogies of the Arts faculty sought to keep up with rising student numbers via the recruitment of staff from Douai and from Cologne.38 The more rigid statutes drafted in 1602, then, which obliged licentiates from Douai or elsewhere to sit out the statutory time of two years and two months (i.e., the term in which an indigenous student could become a licenciate in Philosophy),39 mark a closure for restless Louvainists as well as for hopefuls from Douai. Statutory rigidity—which did not result in more requests being turned down, however—corresponds to the stabilisation of academic life during the archducal period—but in the same interval, the number of requests for, and approvals of, dispensations had halved anyway,40 down to the levels of the early 1570s.41 The familiar topos of foreigners roaming the beneficial stock of national churches had already surfaced in the Concordatum Carolinum of 1531 between Charles V and the Arts faculty. Ordinary collators, especially those in the southwestern provinces of the Low Countries, where shifting boundaries had fuelled uncertainties over the benefice regimes in force, had failed to distinguish, in the first decades after Admonet Nos, between the alleged tide of faculty nominees and the proverbial greed of papal providees. In order to soothe them, it was stipulated in the Caroline Concordat that foreign students or academics had to respect a moratorium of ten years of residence at Louvain before being eligible for faculty nominations.42 A Dutchman, and therefore technically a subject of the prince, Jansenius was not 38 Of the 19 requests submitted by alibi promoti (out of a total of 68) between 1573 and 1597, 12 were registered between 1591 and 1597; in these seven years, the dispensations for alibi promoti outnumbered dispensations (6) for indigenous Lovanienses. Acta Facultatis Artium, 1573–1597, RAL, OUL, 713. 39 Cf. Acta Facultatis Artium, 25 August 1602, RAL, OUL, 714, 112r–v; “ad licentiam promovendi perseverent continuo in universitate hac vel alia et in dicta facultate ut minimum per tres hymes et duas estates.” Statuta Facultatis Artium, 1602, RAL, OUL, 707, 31r. 40 There were 32 requests, 29 of which were granted. Acta Facultatis Artium, 1598– 1621, RAL, OUL, 714 and 1715. Seven requests came from alibi promoti. 41 A proposal in 1613 to exclude alibi promoti from the actus birettationis was, after consultation with the lawyers of the higher faculties, rebuffed. Acta Facultatis Artium, 27 February 1613, RAL, OUL, 714, 531v. Cf. the new statutes of 1615, Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII., 60, 216r–219v. 42 “Premiers, que nul ne pourra recepvoir ne avoir nomination en vertu des Indultz accordez à ladicte Faculté des Ars, d’aulcun benefice gisant en nosdict Pays de pardeça, s’il n’en est natif, ou s’il est estrangier, qu’il ne ayt residé esdicts Pays de pardeça, & vaqué aux estudes l’espace de dix ans, ou qu’il ayt obtenu de nous lettres patentes de consentement en forme due.” Privilegia, 126.
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frustrated in his ambitions, applying as he did for nominations both by the faculty and by the university one year after his return from France. The aspirations of other groups were more closely monitored, however, both within and outside the university, by competitors, by the authorities or, in most cases, by their combined action.43 When two members from their own cadre applied for the same nomination, the Congregation of the Arts faculty abstained from granting dispensations on the residentia decennalis and rigidly adhered to norms that provided the ultimate locus to settle disputes with a high potential for escalation.44 Clerics from the Principality of Liège figure prominently among academic nominees in the archducal period and were outperformed only by their comilitones from Brabant and Hainault in the nomination registers.45 However, except for those who joined the academic staff, not one of them claimed a benefice in the ecclesiastical provinces of Mechlin and Cambrai with the help of a faculty nomination. In an epoch struggling with uncertainty, the notion of the foreigner remained a versatile device in the negotiations in the clerical job market. In 1600, the archducal resident in Rome and his correspondents in the Secretariat of State in Brussels fretted over the oltremarini—English and Irish exiles—who acquired, with the help of diligent curialists, key ecclesiastical positions in Cambrésis, at the expense of their own pro43 Gisbertus Conventinus, a professor in Philosophy, decided to cede in 1613 to an assertive student (a so-called junior, cf. below) who competed with him for the same nomination, and who claimed that Conventinus, being a Leodiensis, did not qualify for a nomination to the collations of the provost of Mons. Nevertheless, Conventinus’ peers were prepared to grant him a dispensation for the three months he had still to go in order to complete his residentia decennalis. Acta Facultatis Artium, 15 May 1613, RAL, OUL, 714, 536r–v. 44 Cf. the competition between Henricus Rampen, a professor of Philosophy from Huy in the Principality of Liège, and his colleague Joannes Schinckelius. In order to avoid similar problems, Rampen applied for a placet with the Privy Council. Acta Facultatis Artium, 26 December 1606 and 5 January 1607, RAL, OUL, 714, 346; request to, and placet issued by, the Privy Council, 9 January and 8 February 1607, respectively, Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281. 45 Of the 367 individuals (of 439 registered as academic nominees between 1598 and 1621) whose geographical origin could be reconstructed, 22 per cent or 83 were natives of the Principality of Liège. They constitute the third largest group, after nominees from the Duchy of Brabant (101 or 27.5 per cent) and Hainault (88 or 24 per cent). Brabant, the Principality of Liège, and Hainault combined provided for c.threequarters of all nominees. Flanders (the Stewardships included) and the small county of Namur lag behind with respectively 30 (8 per cent) and 20 (5 per cent) nominees. The United Provinces (14 individuals, including one nominee from States Brabant), Artois (10), Luxemburg and Limburg (8), the Lordship of Mechlin (9), Tournaisis (3), and Savoye (1) figure more sporadically in the nomination registers.
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tégés—despite the strategic situation of this recently conquered area and the resulting need for an adequate management of patronage. The papal candidate for the provostship of Cambrai who had caused all this distress was Peter Lombard, the Irishman who had acquired, after a decade’s residence, several benefices via academic nominations before heading, in 1598, for Rome as the university’s representative.46 Conversely, Roman circuits (and above all the Liège curialists) were scandalised by the vicious strategies of power elites in Brussels using their clout with aspiring abbots and other magnates to bar the road to ecclesiastical office in the Habsburg Netherlands for Liège nationals.47 In 1625, they even considered retaliation via the exclusion of Fiamminghi from the rich beneficial stock of the Principality.48 Despite recurrent irritations, Liège clerics had several legal instruments at their disposal to gain access to the clerical job market of the Habsburg Netherlands, either by virtue of papal provisions or, theoretically, via university nominations.49 The Arts faculty, for its part, conformed to 46 “A yier recevi una de V.A. para su Sanctidad escritta en favor del Hermano del Conde d’essenghien, paraque se le confiera la prepositura de Cambraij, los cortisanos de Roma son mas diligentes, q’esso por q’ha mas d’un mes, que esta dada al Doctor Lombart, que reside a qui por la universidad de Lovanio a un negocio particular.” Laurens Dublioul to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 16 April 1600, AGR, Audience, 438, 96r. “Sopra di che persevera Sua Altezza nell’opinion già scritta, che Sua Beatitudine sia per farne nuova provisione, a fine che non tutte le dignità ecclesiastici di questi stati siano date a stranieri oltramarini.” Frangipani to Aldobrandini, 7 October 1600, ASV, Fondo Borghese, III, 98c.1, 216; a few days later, the archduke resigned, but sighed nonetheless, “Que nous n’ouvrons volontiers cette porte qui peult estre de grand preiudice a nostre ostel, signamment en une place telle quest Cambraij dont depend le bien ou le ruyne de noz pais.” Archduke Albert to Richardot, Négociations de Rome, 13 October 1600, AGR, Audience, 438, 182r–183r. 47 Cf. the indignation of the papal nuncio in 1614: “Non può esser, che gli abbati, et altri ecclesiastici del Brabante, sian fatti giurare di non conferire i beneficii di loro collatione ai Liegesi, perche è notissimo, ch’essi Liegesi possono haver beneficii per tutti questi paesi di Fiandra, come all’incontro i Fiamminghi sono capaci dei beneficii dentro il dominio di Liege in virtù degli accordi antichi, seguiti fra quei vescovi, et i prencipi di queste provincie.” Bentivoglio to Borghese, 8 March 1614, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 136, 21r–22r. 48 “Acciò che desista dall’impresa, e co’la serenissima Infanta, e col Consiglio, che non voglino far questo pregiuditio alla Sede Apostolica, e necessitar Sua Beatitudine ad inhabilitar i sudditi di Sua Altezza alli beneficii del Paese di Liegi, che ne abonda più di qualsivoglia altra diocese di cotesti parti.” Barberini, Secretary of State, to Guidi di Bagno, nuncio of Flanders, 19 April 1625, ASV, Segr. di Stato, Fiandra, 138, 110r–111r. 49 From an institutional point of view, the university’s privilege of nomination (which was not subject to the restrictions in the Carolina) could have been a vehicle for clerical migration from the Principality of Liège to the Habsburg Netherlands. In practice, only five Leodienses (of 52 university nominees whose geographic origin could be reconstructed) who did not join the academic staff had done so in the period under investigation.
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Caroline legislation to such an extent that academics did not balk at using normative texts as solid proof of good practice.50 Alongside residence and graduation, a third condition had to be met. Jansenius and his fellow nominees had to be, above all, poor clerics.51 Defining poverty was quite another matter, however. Nominations by virtue of both the university’s Sixtina and the faculty’s privilege were, to an extent, the equivalents of papal provisions in forma communi pauperum. From the High Middle Ages onwards, these had been granted in the beginning of each pontificate, when poor clerics (here defined as clerics destitute of benefices) could turn to Rome (or Avignon) in order to benefit from the proverbial liberality of recently elected pontiffs.52 In Urget Nos, Admonet Nos, and all later confirmations, poverty was defined in a slightly different manner, however. Holders of benefices, just like other clerics, were eligible for nominations by the rector or the dean, as long as their income did not exceed a certain threshold, the so-called taxa patrimonialis, which had been fixed at 40 Rhine florins in Urget Nos (1483). By 1574 at the latest, university nominees were required by statutory law to take an oath that their income did not exceed this taxa patrimonialis.53 Similar restrictions popped up in the Sixtine bull’s twin, the faculty’s Admonet Nos. The Caroline Concordat of 1531 granted by Emperor Charles V had already imposed a similar oath on faculty nominees, which was to be registered by a notary, in order to woo belligerent collators who had opposed the academics’ claims in the previous decades. The placet of
50 Consider, for example, a conflict between the faculty and the bishop of Tournai, who complained that his collations had been burdened too often by nominations. The faculty answered that one of the providees, Gerardus Corselius from the Principality of Liège, could never have been a faculty nominee, because he had not resided at Louvain for ten years yet. Another academic provided by the bishop, Kintius, was a Liégois as well, but had been a professor for many years. Correspondence and discussions in Acta Facultatis Artium, 20 March–20 April 1591, RAL, OUL, 713, 313r–316r; Acta Universitatis, 26 March–31 July 1591, RAL, OUL, 60, 320v. 51 “Et plerique ex eis paupertate maxime gravati” Privilegia, 96. The theme of poverty in the 16th century has been elaborated on in the unpublished dissertation of De Maesschalck, Kollegestichtingen. 52 The more current type of papal provisions (in forma speciali) was issued throughout each pontificate On the sometimes considerable numbers of clerics visiting the Avignon Court in the 14th century, see Meyer, Arme Kleriker auf Pfründensuche. These provisions were often considered by historians anything but efficient; cf. Tihon, “Les expectatives in forma pauperum.” A revision in McDonald, “Poor Clerk’s Provisions.” 53 Similar oaths were routinely registered in the Libri nominationum of the Arts faculty; the highly formalised minutes of sessions of the faculty’s nomination board.
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1531 also introduced other restrictions: in contrast with the university’s privilege, the taxa patrimonialis henceforth had to be respected by all applicants, not just by those applying for the first time. Whether or not the taxa indeed put restraints on the use of the Louvain privileges of nomination remains a moot point for the historian deprived of sources—but it was an unsettling question for contemporaries as well. A ruling of the Sacra Romana Rota in 1589, that the onus of proof in the field fell on nominees when their claims were contested,54 struck so much terror onto the academics that reversing it became one of their main preoccupations during the next three decades. By saddling their adversaries (not to mention historians trying to reconstruct the composition of academic incomes) with the task of furnishing proof that was difficult to obtain, academics hoped to make restrictions on their income more flexible. As a matter of fact, poverty (i.e., the possession of benefices) was not an important criterion of selection when students or academics competed for a nomination. It may have been an unwieldy one, though, as it was the challenger who had to produce positive proof in order to overrule other, academic, ranking principles. In 1573, Gregory XIII had raised the taxa patrimonialis considerably in order to compensate for devaluation in previous decades. Paul V would take similar measures in 1616 in order to address the inflation of the “Long Sixteenth Century.”55 In the period under investigation, legal disputes about the taxa would above all involve men of weight governing the university, not students. Roughly 4 per cent of the licentiati of the Arts faculty graduating between 1597 and 1608 eventually made an academic career of sorts and had a seat in an academic council, administered a college, and/or occupied a public chair in one of the five faculties in the archducal period.56 In light of the highly clerical character of the Louvain teaching staff and the mere fact that academics tended to spend many years at the university, it will not come as a surprise to learn that staff members were grossly over-represented in the nomination registers. Academics comprised 26 per cent of all individuals passing the review 54
Cf. p. 258–59. Respectively, 60 Ducatus de Camera (120–80 florins) and 100 Ducatus de Camera (200–300 florins). The average yearly income of a craftsman in Louvain amounted to c.200 florins c.1600; see Van Uytven, Stadsfinanciën. 56 I.e., the criteria for inclusion in this research population. Among faculty, the proportion of foreign graduates was higher than among students (13 per cent). It is known that 2 per cent assumed academic functions at other universities. 55
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in the nomination registers in between 1598 and 1621; but they did so much more regularly, obtaining 42 per cent of all nominations. Within their own cadre of c.240 individuals, 70 to 80 per cent (depending on whether the clerical contingent or the entire population is considered) applied for a nomination during their stay at the university. Like the figures for France, only a few dons among the 23 teachers of the Sacra Facultas Theologiae in this research population bothered to descend from higher spheres to queue up for nomination letters. Clerics holding chairs in Law or Medicine were more eager: half of them (i.e., 20–25 per cent of the 34 chair-holders in those faculties) continued to figure in the nomination registers after joining the higher faculties. But half of the theologians, and one-third of all chair-holders in Law and Medicine, had done so at an earlier stage of their career; nearly all (88 per cent) public teachers in Divinity and 44 per cent of the others were recruited from among the staff of the Arts faculty. Nine out of ten academics (including college presidents) figuring in the nomination registers, and 70 per cent of the entire population, had lived at some stage in the fold of “our mother, the Faculty of Arts.” Teachers and college presidents may have faced more difficulty staying within the limits of poverty set by the papal bulls, because they had their emoluments, the canonships attached to their chairs, additional subsidies, as well as a wide range of other means at their disposal.57 Leading academics suggested, during the visitation of the university in 1607, that their income derived from academic obligations should not
57 A reconstruction of the income of professional groups in Brabant in 1631, based on tax levels, is highly instructive: after a first category (archbishops, bishops, a few prelates, ambassadors, the highest nobility, and the presidents of the Collateral Councils) and a second class (high nobility, members of the Collateral Councils, and court officers) that had to pay respectively 100 florins and 60–75 florins, the university’s rector surfaced in the third class of taxpayers (50 florins), along with other court officials and members of provincial councils of justice. The chancellor of the university (i.e., the provost of Saint Peter’s) and the conservator (the abbot of Saint-Gertrudis) popped up in the fourth class (just as often as other members of the high clergy); while university professors surface in the fifth class of taxpayers (alongside urban parish priests, lords of baronial origin, village lords, aldermen, and treasurers in the chief-towns) paying 18–25 florins yearly. A second group of university teachers (presumably those of the Arts faculty) was to be found in the sixth class of taxpayers (12–15 florins), ahead of canons of small chapters and country parish priests, barristers, magistrates of smaller towns in a seventh class of taxpayers (6–10 florins), and the farmers, craftsmen, chaplains, middle-class merchants, and local officials in class 8–10. Paupers were, of course, not taxed. Van Uytven, “Vers un autre colloque,” 16.
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be considered when calculating the taxa patrimonialis.58 Academics were poor because they were academics, not because of some annoying scale that measured their income. This had been one of the main incentives, judging by the wordy considerations aired in the preamble to Admonet Nos, why the Arts faculty had solicited a privilege of its own. Its members were not only more numerous and, allegedly, more easily overlooked by the grandees in the higher faculties dominating the university’s nomination board. Its teachers and college regents indeed had reasons to see themselves as “poorer” than the others, in the sense of “deprived of benefices” and dependent on a fluctuating income from fees for teaching and lodging. In line with other Kollegiatstifte in the Empire, teachers in philosophy and the humanities could not fall back on canonships in the Louvain chapters, which were mostly the reserve of chair-holders in the higher faculties.59 The congregation of the Arts faculty shared the university’s detached and rather pragmatic attitude towards poverty when it came to deciding between academics competing for a nomination.60 Nonetheless, one of the key novelties introduced in the Leonina involved the taxa patrimonialis. Those who could only produce their magisterium in the arts—the juniores, to use the terminology of the Leonina—had to be “poor” within the Sixtine boundaries of 40 florins.61 But alongside the nominations minoris taxae after Urget Nos there were those majoris taxae corresponding with another category of nominees, the seniores,
58 “Ad primum videri sibi quod onus professionis in nominationibus possit deduci, quia minuit fructus.” Van Waefelghem, “La visite,” 285. 59 The teachers of the faculty were remunerated by emoluments derived from student fees. Van Belle, De fakulteit van de Artes, 180–84. The faculty’s two public chairs of eloquentia and ethica, the holders of which were appointed by the city, disposed of a canonship of the first foundation of Saint Peter’s; three other teachers who had performed their function for more than three years were allowed to compete with the baccalaureates and licentiates of the higher faculties for canonships of the second foundation of Saint Peter’s—but not with doctors. Paquet, Salaires et prébendes, 17–19. 60 It was used as a criterion at two occasions (out of c.30 cases discussed in the faculty’s congregation or deputatio; see below). Cases in 1618 and 1620, Acta Facultatis Artium, 23 October 1618 and 11 April 1620, RAL, OUL, 715, 230, and 325. The faculty itself did not engage systematically in investigations into the financial situation of its members; no candidate was ever refused because his patrimony exceeded the taxa. The burden of proof, according to the academics, lay with their competitors within or without the university. 61 Privilegia, 101.
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whose yearly income could not exceed 80 ducatus de Camera.62 “Seniority” reflected the general composition of the faculty board of the Arts, a large assembly of, in theory, 48 members, distributed over four nations and constituted by the eight regents and sub-regents of the four paedagogia; by the 16 professors in philosophy teaching there; and by 24 neutrales, who often were presidents of other colleges,63 licentiates of the higher faculties or, occasionally, professors in the humanities teaching at the faculty’s pedagogies. In Admonet Nos, seniors were those who had once been admitted to the faculty board, regardless of the fact whether they still had a seat there or whether they had moved on to the councils of the higher faculties.64 Membership of, say, college presidents and coming dons of the higher faculties could help in using the social capital of the Venerable Faculty of Arts to promote itself as a “Mother” of all other faculties. Conversely, access to benefices was at least one of the motivations for joining. But not all seniors were equal. The explication of different institutional positions in Admonet Nos was read by the artists as a system of precedence to be used when several faculty members competed for the same nomination, a reading which was, as we will see, canonised and elaborated in the faculty’s statutes.65 Among the senior members 62 The bull suggests that this stipulation was valid only for those that did not apply for a nomination for the first time. Maybe the letter of the law could have been interpreted thus, that those whose income exceeded the taxa could indeed apply for one nomination. In the period under investigation, however, no example of such a reading could be found. “& qui pro hac prima vice dumtaxat etiam ultra octuaginta florenos auri de camera similes annuatim habeat, alias vero de cetero ultra dictos octuaginta florenos auri de camera similes non habeat.” Privilegia, 100. The oaths in the Libri nominationum do not distinguish between those who were nominated for the first time and those who were not. 63 At least 28 (60 per cent) of the 47 college presidents without recorded affiliations with the higher faculties were members of the Arts faculty’s congregation. 64 “Quod decanus . . . unum ex magistris in Artibus, qui inibi in facultate predicta sex annis legerit, seu rexerit, vel ob doctrinae eminentiam ad docendum logicam aut physicam admissus, seu in illa novem annis promotus fuerit, & de illius consilio sit, vel aliquando constiterit.” Privilegia, 101. Admission to the Faculty of Arts required a seniority of six years after the birettatio, the formal act of graduation to Master in the Arts, except if the candidate had, in the meantime, been admitted to the regency of one of the four pedagogies or to a professorship in Philosophy. Statuta Facultatis Artium, 1602, RAL, OUL, 707, 3r–4v. 65 These had been drafted, in the course of the 16th century and in the beginning of the 17th, largely on the rhythm of papal and princely legislation; but in between the “great legislative moments,” specific issues were dealt with as well. The first traces of legislative action by specialised commissions of the faculty go back to 1515, when
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of the faculty, the bull listed teachers (legentes) and regents who had taught, or had been teaching, the youth or who had administrated the colleges during six years; those who had been allowed to teach logic or Aristotelian physics (that is, the teachers in philosophy who had not reached the status of legens sexennalis yet);66 and, finally, the neutrales in the faculty’s congregatio who had been graduated for nine years. The 1602 statutes pointed out that the subregents of the pedagogies could claim the same prerogatives as the regents, provided their number remained limited to one for every pedagogy. This limited the possibility that regents would expand their clientele at their whim by appointing subregents yearning for benefices. After all, not only the interests of the neutrales (among whom many college presidents) were at stake; the prerogatives of teachers in philosophy, even the sexennales among them, were not untouchable as regents (and hence subregents) could claim precedence by virtue of faculty legislation over legentes if their regency had lasted two years longer than the teaching of competing professors.67 Teachers in the humanities figured as the underdogs
the first nomination bulls arrived in Louvain; in 1515, 1525, and 1531, comprehensive alterationes were introduced. Liber primus nominationum, RAL, OUL, 4751, 3r–10v and 233r–234v; Indices, RAL, OUL, 729, 23. Other revisions took place in 1541 and 1571 (Indices, RAL, OUL, 729, 40–41, 44–45, and 98). The revision of the faculty’s statutes in the 1560s left legislation on the nomination procedures unchanged. The context of the statutes of 1615 will be elaborated below. Cf. p. 522–29. 66 A few “admissi” never taught but, nonetheless, could claim the same prerogatives as long as no actu legens (who, all things and the number of the years of service being equal, could claim precedence over ex-teachers and the rare “honorific” teachers) appeared on the horizon. This was the case of Ludovicus Medardus, an indigenous Louvainist and a canon of Saint Peter’s. No student ever graduated under his protection, and he never performed as examiner. Yet, his alleged position of admissus ad docendum was accepted by the faculty in 1621, which enabled him to claim precedence over his two competitors (one of whom was a neutralis) for a nomination with respect to the collations of the bishop of Ghent. The faculty was reluctant to use this tool of wielding patronage over those who did not belong to the staff of the paedagogia, as it was inclined to take into consideration the length of residence rather than the status Medardus claimed. Acta Facultatis Artium, 26 August–28 November 1621, RAL, OUL, 715, 394–99. Franciscus Paludanus, the regent of the Pedagogy of the Castle, claimed in 1598 to have been admissus ad docendum in 1596; he obtained precedence over another professor who had joined the staff sometime in 1597 because he was, at the time of his nomination, an actu docens replacing a teacher who had left the university. Acta Facultatis Artium, 19 May 1598, RAL, OUL, 714, 18r. 67 “Dubium fuit, an per regentes intelligantur subregentes, res est affirmata modo tamen unus constituatur in singulis pedagogiis.” Acta Facultatis Artium, RAL, OUL, 714, 112v. “Ad tollendam regentium multiplicationem.” Statuta Facultatis Artium, 1602, RAL, OUL, 707, 61r–v.
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of the professorial corps. Literarii were explicitly excluded from the status of legens sexennalis, though they were granted precedence over the other neutrales. The successive actions undertaken by the professors in the humanities (one of whom was the famous rhetorician Nicolaus Vernulaeus) to breach into the position of the philosophers in 1615 and in 1622–24 were unsuccessful.68 The settlements which the faculty put forward as compromises all stemmed from the arrangement of 1602. In the university’s statutes, the keywords were academic degrees, recommendation by the faculties, and the prerogatives stipulated in the papal regulae cancellariae. Faculty legislation, in contrast, privileged those who could produce an impressive record of service in the Arts faculty. After the model of Admonet Nos itself, of which faculty legislation was a very sophisticated translation that built in more checks and balances among the privileged themselves, these statutes were drafted by and for the faculty’s staff: the last obstacle for members of the higher faculties was the stipulation that, all other criteria being equal, those who were actu docentes or regentes had precedence over all others. Academic degrees, length of residence, benefice-holding, the applicants’ financial situation, or ordinations were taken into consideration only when the candidates qualified equally for the above-mentioned criteria.69 With respect to the rights of university nominees, the sting was in the tail. Jansenius’ fortunes went against all odds because he 68 Lots of material on this affair in the Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII., 60; Raisons qu’on fait valoir (. . .) pour recouvrer la prérogative de nomination dont les professeurs de lettres ont été privés en 1602 par décret de la faculté des Arts, in SAL, Oud Archief, 3993; in Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281, and in faculty minutes. 69 “Si inter pares in conditionibus supra positis contentio oriatur, preferantur magis graduati. Censeatur autem in Theologia licentiatus qui absolverit septennium in facultate Theologica in facultatibus iuris qui quinquennium in medicini qui quadriennium et in theologia baccalaureus qui triennium in facultatibus iuris et medicine qui biennium expleverit. Inter pares autem . . . preferatur is qui diutius continue et immediate ante resederit atque inter pares in his omnibus non beneficiatus beneficiato, et ubi sunt plura curata beneficia preferatur sacerdos non sacerdoti. Et inter non beneficiatos pauperior et ceteris paribus preferatur is qui primo indicavit decano.” Ordinationes facultatis artium (. . .), 8 and 9 April 1615, in Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII., 60, 216r–219v and 225r–v. The peculiar definition of magis graduatus stemmed from the statutes of 25 August 1602; in the second half of the 16th century, actual academic degrees were probably decisive. Statuta Facultatis Artium, 1602, RAL, OUL, 707, 47v–48r and 60v–61r.
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was “deuxiesme en nomination.” University nominees, whether or not they were members of the Arts faculty—Jansenius was, at this stage of his career—were required, by virtue of Admonet Nos and later confirmations, to grant precedence to those holding nomination letters issued by the Arts faculty. These formal prerogatives turned upside down academic ranking principles in the Regulae Cancellariae, which regulated precedence for papal provisions and, in the 17th century, regulations of the university. An overwhelming majority of secular clerics could produce an impressive record in the service of the Arts faculty. It was therefore procedures and informal practices, not the prerogatives of faculty nominees or professors, that caused, in the period under investigation, discontent among members of the higher faculties. In 1615, Joannes Drusius, abbot of Park and apostolic visitator of the university, was confronted with complaints from the higher faculties that the philosophers excluded them from the usufruct of the faculty’s privilege. From their point of view, the secrecy of the procedures in the faculty’s nomination committee, and especially the resignations of nominations the philosophers made in favour of their friends and clients, made it impossible for the members of the higher faculties to compete, while the deputation of the university (in which the deans of the four higher faculties constituted the majority) had established, after a thorough scrutiny of the faculty’s nomination bulls, that its privilege of nomination had been granted to the magistri of the other faculties as well. As a consequence, it is necessary to unveil the secrecy and to discuss the procedures behind the hundreds of nominations registered in the libri nominationum.
3.2. “Le temps esclorra les occasions.” Poor scholars and nomination procedures During the reign of the Archdukes, at least 779 letters of nomination were issued by the respective nomination boards of the university and of the Venerable Faculty of Arts. In this time interval, their performance was much more impressive than in the anni horribiles of the 1580s. In the 1620s and the 1630s, the number of both nominations and individuals applying for them soared compared to the first two decades of
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the 17th century (c.330 nominations each decade), despite the abolition in the Principality of Liège of traditional nomination privileges, and their substitution by the Concordatum Paulinum of 1616. The average frequency with which individuals went through the procedure, by contrast, did not change much over time, two nominees corresponding more or less with three registrations in the nomination books in between 1580 and 1640.70 Faculty and university statutes stipulated that nobody could hold two nomination letters at the same time; candidates were obliged to wait until their previous nomination had had its effect or to resign their nomination to the respective boards. Dispensations were, in principle, granted only to those university men whose previous nominations had resulted in litigation. Because two nomination boards operated independently from each other, however, it was possible to combine a university nomination with one issued by the faculty—a strategy adopted by Jansenius, for instance.71 In the long run, the number of nominations and individuals seeking them increased. This may have corresponded with the rise in attendance observed in the graduation registers; but it also correlated with a changing perception of applicants’ chances in an increasingly normalised clerical job market. It remains unclear why nominations peaked in 1595–97, 1629–30, and 1637. Particular events or upheavals in the clerical job market possibly had triggered an increased demand for special legal instruments provided by the powerful clauses in papal provisions or in academic nomination letters: in 1596 and 1637, soaring numbers at Louvain coincided with spectacular numbers of papal provisions for the region. But the cyclical character of the other peaks, which occurred every third year in each decade, is difficult to ignore. The rector of the university or the dean of the Arts faculty could not issue nomination letters on a whim, unlike at universities in France. In the Louvain brand,
70 I.e., 1.67 nominations for each individual in 1580–97; 1.64 in the period under investigation; and 1.65 in 1622–40. Staff members performed above average, typically with three to four registrations. 71 Back in 1618, Jansenius had also applied for a faculty nomination burdening the collations of the provost of Saint Peter’s in Cassel, but this application did not produce the desirable effects. Liber secundus nominationum, 2 March 1618, RAL, OUL, 4752, 418r.
100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0
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1581 1583 1585 1587 1589 1591 1593 1595 1597 1599 1601 1603 1605 1607 1609 1611 1613 1615 1617 1619 1621 1623 1625 1627 1629 1631 1633 1635 1637 1639
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nominations
advowsons
Fig. 3.3. Yearly registrations of nominations (1580–1640)72
specific time intervals with respect to the collators who were being “burdened” by academic nominations (instead of benefices that had become vacant in specific months) needed to be observed by academic authorities (instead of by individual gradués insinuating their letters at their discretion). The rector and the dean could issue nomination letters once and twice, respectively, during the prelacy of individual collators.73 Or they could do so every 20 years (the university’s vicennium) and every decade (the faculty’s decennium) if the benefice pool in question was managed by “immortal” collectives. This accounts for the rushes,
72 The advowsons listed in Fig. 3.3 and Fig. 3.4 replaced, by virtue of the bull Regimini Universalis, nominations for benefices in the Principality of Liège; cf. infra. 73 Whether nominations were valid after the death of the collator or the appointment of his successor was a point of discussion. In 1610, the fresh bishop of Arras, Herman d’Ortembergh, formerly an auditor of the Sacra Romana Rota and archducal resident in Rome, had to intimidate a nominee before his return to the Netherlands in the interests of his own protégé: “et m’è parso di lasciare per adesso il lovanista racommandatomi da diversi et in particolare da VS perche a me non mette a conto con gratificare quanto soggetto mettere in compromisso le ragioni della Chiesa et introdurre cattivo esempio et mala conseguenza contro il tenore dell’indulto istesso, . . . Pero sara ben ch’il detto signor Sucquet abbracci la presente occasione et pegili quanto prima il possesso, assicurandomi che il Lovanista facilmente sacquietera et saccomodera alla ragione.” d’Ortembergh to Prats (?), Secretary of State, Négociations de Rome, 4 December 1610, AGR, Audience, 445, 283r–v.
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in 1593, 1603, 1613, 1623, and 1633, for nomination letters burdening the collations of big, corporate employers such as collegiate and cathedral chapters; decennia and vicennia being scheduled by academic administrations after the years in which the original bulls of Sixtus IV and Leo X, in 1483 and 1513 respectively, had officially been granted.74 The dean’s right to wield the jus nominandi more frequently than the rector is another explanation for the dominance of the faculty’s nomination board, alongside the precedence of its nominees over those of the university and, to a very limited extent, the scope of the respective sources.75
702 634
313
95
83 46
74
12
1580–1597
1598–1621
university faculty advowsons
1622–1640
Fig. 3.4. Faculty nominations vs. university nominations76
74 Respectively in April and September, months recorded under the title “Incipit decennium” in nomination books. 75 University registers only recorded nominations that had resulted in an actual claim to a benefice (cf. below), while faculty sources also listed procedures that had been aborted. 76 A specific form of nominations in the records of the Arts faculty, the so-called “renominations” (cf. p. 174), were not included in Fig. 3.4.
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In spite of these impressive numbers, the range of Louvain’s privileges of nomination was much smaller than the 33 per cent of benefices reserved, in theory, for French graduates by the Concordat of Bologna. Even in the surrounding archdiocese of Mechlin, the threshold of 10 per cent of rectorships being seized via academic nominations was only sporadically reached, and then only in the second half of the highly competitive 18th century. The proportion of academic nominees among aspiring rectors in the 17th-century diocese of Ghent is negligible.77 Because it had been stipulated in the Sixtine bull that only collators with more than six benefices at their disposal could be charged by the rector of the university to provide a cleric with a small benefice, the university’s nomination board “owned” a niche, in the best of worlds, equal to one-sixth of all benefices. Enter the nominees of the Arts faculty (which notably claimed to be not bound by the Sixtine restriction of six benefices),78 and academic nominations may have accounted for half of the recruitment of the Church’s personnel in the South Netherlands. But this calculation rests on the assumption that the clerical job market was segmented into small benefice pools, failing to include big employers such as Hovius. Another variable is the turn-
77 Quaghebeur, De concursus, 124; in the 17th-century diocese of Ghent, they constituted a meagre 2 per cent of all new rectors. Vanden Broecke, “Seculiere geestelijken,” 200. 78 This restriction had not been incorporated explicitly in Admonet Nos, as it had in the university’s Urget Nos of 1483. Between 1580 and 1640, 6 per cent or 129 nominations burdened the collations of pastors or personae of parochial churches; all except five had been issued by the nomination board of the Arts faculty. Cf. Registre aux nominations, RAL, OUL, 4784, under the heading “rectors.” The last case dated back to 1578, when the student Johan Noteleers got into trouble due to his acceptation of one of the two benefices at the advowson of the pastor of Gutsenhoven (the collations of whom were burdened in the period under investigation as well ); interestingly, the rule de plusquam 6 was not invoked by the pastor himself but by an apostolic providee. Such affairs became grist to the mill of the opponents of the faculty’s privileges in the later 17th century (Puncta Aliquot, 28–29), who translated the rights of the ordinary collators into Rome’s interests: after all, the papal providee’s chances were already limited when small collators were burdened by papal provisions, let alone when Louvain nominees with ample clauses of precedence could intervene. Acta Facultatis Artium, 4 January 1578, RAL, OUL, 713, 128r–v. In 1622, French prelates having benefices in gift in the Netherlands were warned by the faculty that they should not try to invoke this restriction on the university’s privilege of nomination in order to oppose faculty nominations. Cf. Acta Facultatis Artium, 9 April 1622, RAL, OUL, 714, 443–44, at the occasion of the trial before the stadholder of Lille between Nicolaus de Watsinges, nominated by the Faculty of Arts, and the abbot of Saint Eloy.
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over of ordinary collators: short prelacies did not favour academics, nor did those lasting for more than a decade or two. And it rests on another assumption: that all opportunities to issue nomination letters were seized—which was definitely not the case. The c.175 nomination letters addressing collegiate or cathedral chapters, for instance, were unequally distributed. Some colleges of canons were honoured with a dozen or more nominations during a quarter of a century; others were hardly disturbed at all. Hovius, for his part, received not three but (at least) seven letters of nomination in his two decades in office.
Plate 3.2. Nomination Letter Nomination letter of 15 April 1602 granted to Franciscus Sinclaer, Magister Artium and cleric of the diocese of Mechlin, by Guilielmus Mercerus, Vice-Dean of the Arts Faculty, directed to the archbishop of Mechlin. Besides a short description of the bishop’s obligations by virtue of the Faculty’s nomination privilege, the document also bears the names of the witnesses and the signature of the notary of the university, Conrardus Sylvius. [Archdiocesan Archives, Mechlin]
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This calls for qualification. Just as much as Matthias Hovius or papal bureaucracy, neither nomination board at Louvain can be considered the author of grand nomination policies that could make the most of their privileges, even though both academics and their opponents recurrently claimed to be precisely that, when discussing, respectively, beneficial effects and abuses. The reasons are threefold. First, rectors (who also presided over the rectoral tribunal and the academic senate and its deputation)79 and deans were elected for, respectively, six months and one term, which made it impossible to devise lasting circuits of academic power via elective offices. The composition of the boards assisting them reflected the layered morphology of learned corporations: the university’s nomination board was manned by the five deans of the faculties;80 the faculty’s nomination board was constituted by the proctors of the four nations (Brabantia, Flandria, Hollandia, and Gallia), who functioned as electoral and polling constituencies in the faculty’s congregation,81 plus the receptor.82 In the course of the 16th century, the four regents of the pedagogies had imposed themselves as ex officio members of the faculty’s nomination board.83 Except for the receptor (who remained in charge for a one-year term), deans
79 On rectoral prerogatives in general and jurisdiction in particular, see Vandenghoer, De rectorale rechtbank. 80 “Neque nominatos inidoneos futuros ex eo etiam presumi debet quod non leviter ad nominationes admittantur, sed in Universitate quidem ex iudicio dominorum rectoris et decanorum quinque facultatum.” Memorandum of the university and the Faculty of Arts, Acta Universitatis, 15 July 1609, RAL, OUL, 63, 30r–v. 81 After the Parisian model, these “nations” initially had to correspond to the geographical origins of their members: Brabantia was constituted by all faculty members from the Duchy and from other territories that were not covered by other nations; Gallia recruited above all in the Principality of Liège and Cambrésis. Flandria hosted all faculty members from the homonymous county, from the counties of Hainault and Namur, and from the Lordship of Mechlin. The Holland Nation was the constituence of academics from the United Provinces, the British Isles, and Scandinavia. In practice, academic authorities sought to distribute academics over constituencies in more or less equal numbers, which meant that origins often did not overlap with nations. It was the nations that nominated, alternately, the dean and the receptor. Dumoulin and Duchene, “Europeanisme,” 227. 82 Privilegia, 105. 83 “In facultate autem artium ex iudicio decani eiusdem facultatis quatuor regentium receptoris et procuratorum quatuor nationum.” Memorandum registered in Acta Universitatis, 15 July 1609, RAL, OUL, 63, 30r–v. Cf. p. 215 and 618. On 17 September 1612, it was stipulated that subregents could not act on behalf of the regents in the nomination committee unless they had been commissioned in writing, a regulation that apparently already existed for teachers representing “their” regent. Acta Facultatis Artium, 17 September 1612, RAL, OUL, 714, 521v.
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of faculties and the representatives of the subdivisions of the Arts faculty were elected every term, in the latter case among the 48 members of the faculty’s Congregatio.84 This body was statutorily constituted by the 16 official teachers in Philosophy and the eight regents and subregents of the pedagogies. Formally, the other members, the so-called neutrales, could foster reasonable hopes to be elected for office (and therefore for a seat in the nomination board) in the 16th and 17th centuries, in contrast to more restrictive 18th-century statutes on the matter. In practice, however, at least 75 per cent of faculty offices were occupied by teachers or regents of the pedagogies, who also attended the Congregation’s meetings more frequently. Among the neutrales elected for office, presidents or local benefice-holders who had formerly been active in the pedagogies were prominent.85 Second, polling a majority of the members of either board was a formal prerequisite for a nomination. In the course of the 16th century, the Congregation of the Arts faculty had even established a procedure that meticulously pointed out the order in which each member was entitled to vote.86 And in 1613—when a new decennium was about to kick off—the numerical dominance of associates of the pedagogy of the Lily in the faculty’s nomination board was frowned upon by their
84 Statuta Facultatis Artium, 1602, RAL, OUL, 707, 8v and 10r. The new proctors were elected together with the dean; cf. the elections on the first of February, June, and September registered in faculty minutes. 85 Statuta Facultatis Artium and their modifications up to 1602, RAL, OUL, 707, 4r. Between 1598 and 1621, c.576 proctors and their substituti—24 for every year—were elected, 416 of whom are recorded in the faculty minutes (Acta Facultatis Artium, RAL, OUL, 714–15). At the time of their election, 302 proctors (72.9 per cent) were ordinary teachers in Philosophy or (sub)regents. Among the 109 proctors who could be identified as neutrales, college presidents were prominent (44 or 45; c.40 per cent), after a group of 58 or 59 neutrales who did not occupy an administration or a chair in the humanities; several among them could be identified as local Church officials. The 37 neutrales who were proctors (34 per cent) had previously served in the four paedagogia. The faculty dean and receptor were elected immediately after, and before, they had performed as proctor of their respective nations. Statutes from the 18th century that limited access to office (and to seats in the nomination board) to (former) teachers or administrators of the pedagogia merely sanctioned existing practices. 86 The dean or the vice-dean only intervened, according to the statutes, after the voting procedure. The receptor voted first, followed by the proctors according to the seniority of their graduation as magister. Statuta Facultatis Artium, 1602, RAL, OUL, 707, 46v; draft of the new statutes, Ordinationes facultatis artium (. . .) c.4 August 1615, Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII., 60, 216r–219v; and Ordinationes, after 1616, RAL, OUL, 4747, 1st bundle, 1r. No word was breathed on the role of the regents in the procedure.
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other colleagues.87 These concerns notwithstanding, however, nomination boards, while seemingly conducting a lot of policy by churning out hundreds of nomination letters, were not the arena of politics. It was aspiring nominees who had to appear personally for the respective committees and apply for a nomination burdening the collations of a specific collator. Voting must have been, in practice, a formality, if it occurred at all. Decisions were reached on a consensual basis, after a bureaucratic scrutiny (including oaths taken by the applicant) had established the eligibility of the candidate. On the record, applications were refused only on technical grounds: because there was some uncertainty about whether or not the nomination in question was indeed vacant (which was the applicant’s responsibility to verify in the respective nomination registers held by notaries), or when the cleric in question could not produce the required licences or dispensations. The composition of nomination boards did not aim to assure political representation for all groups in an important field of academic politics; rather, it had to enact the institutional checks and balances that had proved their validity in other loci of decision-making. Even competition between two academics for the same nomination was strictly regulated. The detailed profiles of aspiring nominees in papal bulls or university and faculty statutes were not guidelines for a nomination policy to be conducted by the faculty or the university but had to provide for an unambiguous ranking order that could settle potentially disruptive conflicts between applicants. It is difficult to assess to what extent they indeed fulfilled this function in the case of the university’s privilege of nomination. The 17th-century statutes stress that, in the event of competition, doctors of the higher faculties seated in the academic senate had precedence over others; to be followed by those recommended by one of the faculties; by other graduates admitted to the academic senate; and by teachers and administrators. All things being equal, the cognitive hierarchy (Theology-LawMedicine-Philosophy) established in the Regulae Cancellariae of the papal chancery had to be invoked; if this failed to make the difference,
87
“An si hoc decennio contigerit unum dd. ped. Lilii concurrere cum aliquo alio de facultate, placeat difficultatem, si qua orta fuerit, referre ad facultatem maxime cum in illo pedagogio Lilii [r . . . es] sint, qui habent suffragium decisivum.” Acta Facultatis Artium, 19 September 1613, RAL, OUL, 714, 548v–549r.
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seniority eventually did.88 The fragmentary evidence at our disposal for the university board’s proceedings concern two cases in which these rules failed to deliver as pacification tools. As a matter of fact, it was disputed that they were being applied correctly,89 which in one case led to open litigation before academic tribunals.90 Much more information is available with respect to the Arts faculty. Open competition between two or, in five cases, three candidates in front of the nomination committees remained, however, limited, both at the beginning of and during the decennia. Only 30 cases (for c.700 faculty nominations) were recorded in the years between 1598 and 1621. In almost half of these cases, the faculty’s congregation was appealed to in order to settle disputes. The nomination board had to conform to a set of regulations that was much more elaborate than the university’s. Only on two occasions other than strictly legal considerations were invoked in the selection procedure. In 1610, the nomination board was prepared to defer the decision to the congregation of the faculty because a client of the influential professor in Law, Gerardus Corselius, was involved. In 1614, the Doctor in Divinity Schinckelius, a former professor in Philosophy who would be co-opted, in the same year, among the eight regents of the Sacra Facultas Theologiae, was even excluded from competition in order to safeguard the chances of Joannes Massen, regent of the pedagogy of the Falcon, with respect to the collations of the provost of Saint-Servais in Maastricht ratione qualitatum eius. In both cases, however, it is not certain that the nomi-
88 The university’s legislation prior to 1616 is lost. Only separate statutes surface in the Acta, that is, when they were passed by the Congregatio or prepared by the deputatio or ad-hoc commissions. The Ordinationes Almae Universitatis Lovaniensis pro bono usu nominationum (RAL, OUL, 4746) were certainly posterior to the Concordatum Paulinum, or to 1633, as it addresses the papal representative in Brussels as a pronuntius. Read Wauters, “Een labiel evenwicht.” 89 The doctor in Law Petrus Vermeij had applied for a nomination to the bishop of Saint-Omer, whose predecessor’s death he had been informed about by letters from his friends. He was rebuffed in favour of Thomas Fienus, a doctor in Medicine. With reference to jurists of reknown such as Rebuffus, Juan de Selva, the Pragmatique, “and other texts,” he claimed that his rights had been violated. Graduates in Law, according to the Regulae Cancellariae, as well as in common law had to be granted precedence over graduates in Medicine in the hunt for benefices. After the faculties deliberated, the congregation declared that, for the sake of peace, Vermeij’s complaint would be considered the next time the plaintiff applied for a nomination. Acta Universitatis, 14 January 1599, RAL, 61, OUL, 304v–305v. 90 Unfortunately the tribunals reaching the verdicts alluded to were not specified. See Acta Universitatis, 19 August 1621, RAL, OUL, 64, 297v–298r.
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nation board was willing to infringe on papal legislation or on its own statutes.91 This preoccupation with abstract norms may look surprisingly modern for academics engaged in overlapping patronage networks but was, in fact, based on sound pragmatism. The faculty’s statutes on precedence were, after all, drafted for the sake of its members in the first place, pondering as they did one’s merits towards this body. Except for one or two cases, all cases of concurrentia registered in the faculty minutes involved one, mostly two, or occasionally three faculty members.92 The brave junior who challenged, in 1620, a senior’s right of precedence for nominations to benefices that were statutorily reserved for juniores93 was fobbed off with the reply that the statute in question was obsolete.94 Potential disputes over nominations among the c.300 juniores in the research population never made it to the records. It is not unlikely that they were, at least proportionally, less frequent (cf. below), but the deafening silence on competition between juniores in the minutes over several decades suggests that any disputes were settled by other, informal, channels of mediation, in which negotiations between the respective academic patrons (or sheer intimidation) probably played their part. Such informal practices must have played a role in competition between faculty members too: staff from the same pedagogy, for instance, never competed with one another in the dozens of cases
91 In the first case, the faculty was to persuade the other competitor, a professor in Philosophy, not to apply, which was the only way in which the nomination board could proceed to the nomination of Corselius’ client. As Corselius did not want to be engaged, it never came to that. See, respectively, Acta Facultatis Artium, 10 May 1610 and 15 March 1613, RAL, OUL, 714 and 715, 454–455, and 10r. Strangely enough, in the second case Schinckelius had already left the faculty, and hence his professorship, several years prior. As a consequence, the statutes would have provided ample arguments to favour Massen, an actu regens, anyway. 92 Fifty-four of 65 concurrentes registered in the Acta, in 30 cases (against c.200 faculty nominations in favour of teachers in the period under investigation). 93 The so-called benefices minoris taxae (as opposed to those majoris taxae), which shall be discussed in the next section. The smallest benefices remained, at least statutorily, the reserve of juniores who were poor in the Sixtine sense (cf. p. 148). 94 Nevertheless, the statute in question surfaces in the regulae of 1602 as well in those of 1615: “Ut magistri juniores . . . non excludantur a nominationibus, debebunt domini deputati . . . etiam habere rationem collationum ad quas nominandum erit, ita quod juniores preferantur in collationibus habentibus plerumque beneficia minoris taxe.” Statuta Venerandae Facultatis Artium, 1602, RAL, OUL, 707, 48r; 1615, Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII., 60, 216r–219r. In 1620, the faculty admitted the existence of the rule but rejected its application. Acta Facultatis Artium, 30 May 1620, RAL, OUL, 715, 332.
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processed in the Acta. This may explain why things went according to the book as soon as disputes over nominations were submitted to the congregation of the faculty or to its nomination board. Statutory rigidity may have been the ultimate resolve in situations where other, informal means of mediation had failed, the more so since faculty members were engaged in multiple, hybrid networks and clienteles within the university and probably could not be prodded (or bullied) into resignation as easily as (most) graduates. It should be noted, moreover, that the faculty’s final decision in such occasions was challenged only once in the period under investigation. Obviously, the faculty had several tools at its disposal to keep spiteful university men in check. The only miscreant who had dared, in 1613, to cite the dean before the tribunal of the rector after being proved wrong in a dispute over a nomination, had some explaining to do when reappearing for the faculty’s nomination board one year later. It was his patron Gerardus Corselius, a university don of the first rank, who was allowed to recommend him out of this embarrassing situation.95 If nominations were the object of politics, these unfolded not within formal decision-making structures and public records but in the corridors of Louvain colleges and auditories. The third reason why neither the university nor the faculty could develop grand strategies in the clerical job market is rooted in the procedures after the nomination. Nominations targeted the benefice pools or the respective collators, not benefices as such. In the above-mentioned example, Cornelius Jansenius’ nomination burdening the collations of the provost of Lille had been “pending” for five years before the president of Holland College actually claimed a canonship of his choice. Other benefices at the advowsons of the provost may have become vacant in the previous years,96 but the ascetic college president had chosen to wait for something better to come along. Enter the papal provisions in forma communi pauperum, after which Louvain
95
Acta Facultatis Artium, 12 June 1614, RAL, OUL, 715, 16v. The immediate cause was a dispute between Oliverius Du Puis and Anthonius Carthon over the validity of a nomination, in which the latter was proved right by the faculty. Du Puys consequently took drastic measures and cited the dean before the rector. 2 November and 16 December 1613, ibidem, 6r–v and 2v–3r. 96 Another canonship at Lille belonging to the provost’s benefice pool had been claimed in 1620 by Jacobus Daulmerie, who held a letter of nomination of the Arts faculty granted to him only a few months earlier (Liber secundus nominationum, 6 February 1620, RAL, OUL, 4753, 431r). A faculty nominee, Daulmerie could shoot past Jansenius, whose nomination had already been pending for two years.
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nominations were modelled. Issued in the beginning of each pontificate from the High Middle Ages onwards, such provisions provided their holders with the right to claim a benefice that would become vacant in the future, either in a specific ecclesiastic circumscription or in the benefice pool managed by one or more collators. Such provisions were aptly named gratiae expectativae, the notorious expectative graces97 that would become the sitting target for Church reformers and classical Church historians alike. These had been extremely popular: by creating, in effect, “waiting lists” of papal providees, they discouraged local church magnates from capitalising on the distance between Rome and the periphery by speedily installing a candidate of their own.98 But while expectative graces remained the most efficient legal instruments in the local clerical job market in the later Middle Ages,99 their success had turned against them as these waiting lists lengthened and the outcome of tiresome and costly bureaucratic procedures in Rome became highly insecure: pontiffs had the tedious habit of dying before many providees had seized a benefice, or of annulling previous provisions if they lived long enough. The resulting volatility of the clerical job market triggered a rush for stronger clauses in the nonobstantiae, derogative clauses that came with every papal bull (including the Louvain privileges of nomination), and for “better” (i.e., anterior) dates circumventing the principle of prior in dato, potior in jure against competitors who had obtained their provisions before them.100
97 The practice of reserving benefices for specific persons, or the drafting of “waiting lists” (cf. the Rolls of Benefices in the Brussels’ administration) has also been observed in local circuits, being a highly useful way to prevent benefices from remaining vacant too long after the death of their holder and to offer both employers and employees some certainties. The practice disappeared in the 14th century, however, under the pressure of papal expectative graces that, via their juridical clauses, rendered other expectativae void. 98 Legal subtleties in Bégou-Davia, L’interventionnisme bénéficial. 99 A case study by Meyer on the influence of papal provisions on the recruitment of clerics in the collegiate churches in Zürich is particularly revealing in this respect: during the Avignonese papacy and the Schism, all canonships were obtained via expectativae; however, only 26 per cent of all claims on Zürich canonships with the help of an expectative grace eventually led to the possession of a prebend. Meyer, Zürich und Rom, 86–87. In the archdiocese of Salzburg, 24 of the c.210 expectativae issued during the pontificate of Martin V (1417–31) could be classified as successful. Weiss, “Päpstliche Expektanzen,” 151. They were highly coveted among German clerics as late as the first half of the 16th century; cf. Tewes, Die römische Kurie. 100 Via artificial, anterior dates (which were defined in the Regulae Cancellariae), curialists, university graduates, princes, nobles, and their protégés could claim a wide range of prerogatives over other providees. Schwarz, “Römische Kurie und Pfründenmarkt,” 135–36.
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It is amid criticisms that the Whore of Babylon was turning the Vineyard of the Lord into a stock exchange that reform councils at Basle and Konstanz had sought to instil some certainty and predictability in the clerical job market. At the Council of Trent, expectative graces had been abolished altogether in Sess. XXIV Can. 19, both as legal instruments (but informal recommendations subsisted) and as mental frameworks.101 The university’s representatives at the Council, who had good reasons to perceive this as a direct attack on the university’s privileges, had tried to put things right in the Council’s last session in 1564 (Sess. XXV Cap. 9 De Reform).102 Louvain academics, the selfacclaimed champions of Trent in the Low Countries, found it was difficult to prevent pernicious readings of the Tridentine decrees. Under the pontificate of Pius V Ghislieri, a competitor of a Louvain nominee for a canonship in Bruges had managed to get the Council on his side in the brief Romanum Pontificem (12 May 1569), which stated that the Louvain privileges of nomination were subjected to Sess. XXIV can. 19 and that university and faculty nominees could henceforward claim only benefices cum effectu vacante (benefices that had already become vacant before their nomination).103 Academics decided to mobilise all their resources in Rome as well as in Brussels in order to effect a full restoration of their privileges, or at least to curtail the free collations of the ordinary collators within one month after the vacancy of the benefice.104 It was not until the dawn of the pontificate of Gregory XIII
101 Concilium Tridentinum, 9, 987. The abolition of “planning” in the clerical job market (and on the market of patronage and clientelism) was not put into practice, because prolonged vacancies were to be avoided. It is not unthinkable, however that the disappearance of a formalised system of expectative graces in local circuits may have had a hand in the bishops’ sway over many rectorships devolving to them because ordinary collators did not find suitable pastors in a timely manner. 102 “Reliqui patronatus omnes in beneficiis . . . seu facultates et privilegia concessa, . . . alio quocumque jure, nominandi, eligendi, praesentandi ad ea cum vacant . . . et exceptis aliis quae ad imperatorem et reges seu regna possidentes aliosque sublimes ac supremos principes, . . . pertinent, et quae in favorum studiorum generalium concessa sunt. . . .” Concilium Tridentinum, 9, 1090. See De Ram, Mémoire, 72–76. On the academics’ attitude towards the publication of the council’s decrees, see Acta Universitatis, 1565–1566, RAL, OUL, 58 and 59, respectively, 115r–117r and 217r; Indices, RAL, OUL, 729, 81. Cf. Willocx, L’introduction, 234–35. 103 ASV, Brevi Lateranensi, 80, 637–41. 104 The loss of the jus preventionis, to “prevent” ordinary collations via nominations, probably made it much more difficult for an academic in Louvain to seize a benefice, because assertive collators and locally operating clerics could easily make moves before Louvain candidates had even gotten wind of the vacancy. Indices, RAL, OUL,
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Buoncompagni, formerly a teacher in canon law himself at Bologna (and Philip II’s candidate for the job), that academics could align the public interest with their reading of Trent and could obtain a confirmation of their privileges in the bull In Praecelsa (1573), the nonobstantiae of which stipulated explicitly that the Council’s decrees could not be invoked against the Louvain privileges. All this implies that academic nominations—just as much as the French privilège des gradués—were still modelled, in the 17th and 18th centuries, after the medieval expectative graces granted in large quantities by the papacy until Trent. Papal and princely legislation stipulated that fresh nominees had to notify their nomination to the collator in question via a formal insinuatio within one month after the nomination in order not to irritate “their” magnates unnecessarily.105 The formal claim to a benefice—the acceptatio sanctioned by a notary that was to be published formally on the site of the benefice and registered in the Libri Nominationum, could, in theory, occur many years later. Academic authorities barely intervened in the selection of benefices that were accepted, despite statutory regulations that nominees, and notably those accepting rectorships, had to ask their permission. In practice, nominees were only prodded into accepting benefices if they had postponed their acceptation indefinitely and had barred the road for others;106 in order to avoid harmful precedents (for instance
729, 51v–73r and 91–98; editions of relevant correspondence in Claeys-Bouuaert, L’Ancienne Université de Louvain, 297–98; and Pou y Marti, “La universidad de Lovaina,” 437 and 439. 105 I.e., the papal brief Nuper Cum of 1574 (university and faculty) and the Caroline Concordat of 1531 (with respect to the faculty’s privilege of nomination). Nomination letters were accompanied by notarial acts, or carried notarial notes in the margins or on the back of the document with respect to this formal insinuatio. Cf. the nomination letters in A.A.M., OUL, 1–10. Negligence could have serious consequences and was often the incentive behind “renominationes” which, in analogy to papal novae provisiones, had to compensate for disregard of the formalities. Several examples in the Acta Facultatis Artium, RAL, OUL, 714, 361, 537r–v, and 715, 18r, 88r–v, 443. Peter Lombard got in trouble in 1595 when his competitor for a Séclin canonship stated that his nomination had not been insinuated properly; the Faculty of Arts sent a memorandum in his support to the Privy Council in which it claimed that this allegation was false, as nominandi had to take a statutory oath that they would insinuate their nomination. Acta Facultatis Artium, 16 September 1595, RAL, OUL, 713, 428r–v. 106 In the beginning of the 1620s, some leading academics felt that nominees should be forced by statutory law to accept the first benefice that became vacant after their nomination in “their” benefice pool. The immediate cause was the exasperating
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university nominees accepting benefices before faculty nominees did); or when litigious benefices were abandoned and new candidates had to be found to pursue lawsuits that were considered vital by academic authorities. In this context, the supervision by the Arts faculty of legal agreements and other transactions between nominees and their opponents should be considered a prohibitive measure aiming at keeping the privileges intact.107 Benefices with care of souls may have formed an exception to this rule: the first conflict over whether or not nominees had to participate to the concursus surfaced only in 1620.108 A statute stipulating that nominees had to take an oath not to accept benefices charged with care of souls before having been examined by the deputation had already been drafted five years earlier.109 This suggests that academics, drawing on their experience as local Church officials and administrators, considered benefices of this type a distinct category that called for special treatment; nonetheless, “examinations” mostly consisted of the reading of recommendation letters from college presidents and by no means equalled, at least in the minutes, the number of rectorships claimed by virtue of the faculty’s nomination privilege within the same period.110
patience of Van Eertwijck. That he had “spoiled” another prelacy (another change of regime in Bruges had just occurred) apparently was a spanner in the works of other scholars: the last nomination to the bishop of Bruges by the university had taken place in 1602, after the appointment of De Rodoan (1602–16) to the episcopal chair. This nominee had accepted a canonship sometime in 1604, but the concerned prelacy lasted for 12 more years, which inhibited the university from using its prerogatives once more. Consequently, the nomination of Van Eertwijck by the university must have taken place after the ascession of Triest as the fifth bishop of Bruges in 1617. Strubbe and Voet, Chronologie, 254. 107 Except for the relevant oath to be taken according to university statutes, no cases have been attested in the Acta Universitatis. 108 Cf. the conflict with the bishop of Namur over the acceptation of a rectorship by Joannes Meurant, Acta Facultatis Artium, 23 June 1620, AGR, OUL, 715, 337; recommendations were issued. The outcome of the affair is not known. 109 “Quicumque deinceps nominabitur ad collationes sub quibus comprehenduntur beneficia curam animarum habentia iurabit antequam nominetur se non acceptaturum ullum tale beneficium, nisi prius exhibito deputatis ordinariis sufficienti ex eorum iudicio morum et doctrine testimonio sub pena nullitatis.” Ordinationes Facultatis Artium (. . .), in Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII, 60, 225r–v. 110 The first case occurred in 1617; only four other cases were attested in between April 1615 (the drafting of the statutes) and December 1621, against 19 acceptations of benefices with the care of souls in the same period.
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Plate 3.3. Act of Insinuation Insinuation to the diocesan administration by Joannes De Cuyper, Licenciate in Theology, of his nomination by the rector of the university of 27 December 1668 burdening the collations of the archbishop of Mechlin. The insinuation was duly certified by a royal and apostolic notary within the prescribed term of one month on 3 January 1669, in the presence of two witnesses. In this case, it was registered in the right angle at the bottom of the nomination letter itself, which often also bears the registration of the eventual acceptation. [Archdiocesan Archives, Mechlin]
Despite the legal format that was adopted, however, the time interval between nomination and acceptation tended to be short. Holders of nomination letters were, typically, eager to turn their rights into a possession of a specific benefice. In some cases, the difference from regular appointments to vacant offices was academic, as university members did not hesitate to accept benefices that were already vacant before their nomination. Almost 13 per cent of the 1007 acceptations (for c.2050 nominations in between 1580 and 1640) recorded in the Libri Nominationum mention the date of the vacancy of the benefice in question. A significant proportion of these involve nominations to vacant benefices (cum effectu vacante), whose acceptation was recorded on the same day. In the 1580s and 1590s, c.half of the positions claimed by virtue of academic nominations had become vacant before the date of the nomination. The archducal period occupies a middle position, with more than one-third of nominations taking place cum effectu vacante. Data for the 1620s and 1630s are scarce. If representative, however, the low proportions may well reflect the normalisation of
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the clerical job market. As the number of eligible clergymen caught up with economically viable benefices, there must have been fewer opportunities for nominees to make an easy catch without being challenged in court by competitors, this being a practice that remained heavily contested until the end of the 18th century. In the 1580s as well as in the 1610s and in the 1630s, more than half to approximately 70 per cent of the nominees who formally accepted a benefice did so within the first year, or even in the first quarter, after the nomination. Cornelius Jansenius belonged to a minority, mostly staff members111 who had the “maille d’avantage” of biding their time for three or more years until an honourable position became available. In these three time periods, a large proportion of nominations was followed by an acceptation within one month, which suggests that many nominees already had their eyes on a specific benefice before investing in nomination letters (which were not for free either) and wished to redeem their nomination quickly. Yet, figures vary from more than 40 per cent in the 1580s to 28 per cent in the 1610s and 31 per cent in the 1630s. If one takes into consideration the first year after the nomination, the 1580s once more take the lead with 68 per cent, now followed by the 1610s (63 per cent), with the 1630s lagging behind with slightly more than half of the nominations. Significantly, in the 1580s, only 10 per cent of nominees were still hesitating three years after their nomination, against slightly more than 20 per cent in the 1630s; the 1610s taking the middle position again with 4 per cent. These numbers, combined with the figures for nominations cum effectu vacante, suggest that in the 1580s and 1630s, it was job security that prevailed as a central preoccupation, albeit in very different circumstances: respectively, the shortage of financially viable benefices at the nadir of the civil war combined with the fact that many clerics had fled or died; or increasing competition in a (from the point of view of ecclesiastical authorities) normalising clerical job market. The gap between the 1610s, an era of opportunity in which clerics could take more risks without jeopardising their chances; and the eventful 1580s
111 In the 1610s, at least 12 out of 14 nominees who waited for more than three years before accepting a benefice were staff members.
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becomes more clearly articulated when only figures for staff members are considered. Nearly all acceptations by staff members in the 1580s occurred in the aftermath of the reconciliation of Antwerp with the Monarchy by Farnese in 1585. A real scramble for financially viable benefices, among teachers and presidents who had been on the rocks for years, can be read into the two-thirds of nominations leading to an acceptation within the first month (76.5 per cent in the first quarter) after the nomination, against, respectively, 18 per cent and 23 per cent in the 1610s and in the 1630s.112 In the period of the Truce, slightly more than 40 per cent of staff members holding nomination letters had not yet made up their mind two years later, compared to 8 per cent in the 1580s. Not every nomination led to the acceptation of a benefice. Nominees may have applied for a renominatio that, like papal novae provisiones, had to remove unforeseen difficulties. These could arise from nominees muddling the formalities—notably the insinuatio—towards “their” ordinary collator, from the latter’s death, or from the expiration of a decennium before the nominee in question had accepted a benefice of his choice. In addition, a number of resignations, not of benefices but of nominations, were registered in the Libri Nominationum as well. With respect to the 779 nominations recorded in the archducal period, 334 acceptations (256 or 37 per cent of the close to 700 faculty nominations) were registered. While university registers from the 18th century only kept nominations that had resulted in acceptations, the 16th- and 17th-century Libri Nominationum of the Arts faculty register re-nominations and resignations in c.23 per cent of all entries. The outcome of 37 per cent of nominations (41 per cent of faculty nominations) remains obscure. Therefore, it is difficult to assess the exact numbers of nominations abandoned because their beneficiaries had left the university.113 However, relative figures seem to confirm the normalisation of the clerical job market, which went hand in hand with increased competition.
112 The figures for the 1580s concern only those staff members who were still performing as such after 1598. 113 Only 27 entries between 1598 and 1621, or 3 per cent of all entries in the libri nominationum of the Arts faculty, refer explicitly to the departure of the beneficiary from the university, or his death, before a benefice had actually been claimed.
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266 287 99 59
98 60
105 52 25
452 334
207
1580−1597 Acceptations
1598−1621 Renominations
Resignations
1622−1640 Unknown/Exit
Fig. 3.5. Faculty and university nominations: outcomes
The larger proportion of nominations that led to an acceptation of a benefice in the period 1580–97 (53 per cent), on the one hand, and in the 1620s (48 per cent) or the 1630s (54 per cent), on the other hand, in combination with the proportionally smaller numbers of resignations and re-nominations in the third time interval suggest that in the archducal period, more clergymen left the university without putting their nominations to use. This may have implied prolonging their stay at Louvain and forfeiting other job opportunities that, for graduated clerics, must have been relatively abundant by then. Roughly 200 benefices were claimed, most within the first months after their nomination, by the c.320 students among the nominees of 1598–1621. In comparison, more than 80 per cent of staff members (or 130 out of c.160 individuals) who applied for nominations during their stay at the university eventually ended up accepting more than 250 benefices, which amounted to 140 benefices accepted by staff members in the archducal period alone. To be sure, academics did not turn their claims into reality more consistently than students: because they dwelled longer at Louvain, they simply applied more frequently for nominations. At the same time, they accounted for nearly all renominations and for two-thirds of resignations that were registered for nominations between 1598 and 1621. Via resignations, academics may have frequently privatised the authority of the respective nomination boards, just as much as clerics elsewhere did with the help of
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permutations and other transactions: by resigning their nominations formally (but with discretion), they could pass them on in practice to friends or protégés, allowing them to apply for the now-vacant nomination during the same session of the board before competitors could show up.114 It is these hidden activities that had triggered fierce reactions from the higher faculties in 1615.
3.3. “Il a envie de la changer en simples bénéfices.” Poor scholars, miserly benefices? Let us now turn to the benefice Jansenius had claimed: a canonship in the collegiate church of Saint Peter’s at Lille, one of the most lucrative prebends to be found in the South Netherlands. As a matter of fact, he was considering a permutation for two other benefices, the combined value of which would furnish him with a yearly income of 600 florins (or the threefold of an “academic” canonship in Saint Peter’s at Louvain). Jansenius’ example seems to contradict academic rhetoric, that the poor scholars at Louvain could only claim the most humble benefices in specific areas, their privileges being the object of various restrictions, financial and otherwise, imposed on them by prudent popes and wise princes. Only benefices situated in the Low Countries could be seized by virtue of the university’s nomination bull Urget Nos of Sixtus IV or the faculty’s equivalent Admonet Nos of Leo X. The use of the location of the benefice as a criterion was particularly well adapted to the organisation of the Church in the Low Countries in the later Middle Ages, when many collators—including most bishops and cathedral chapters—resided outside the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands. Under the reign of the Archdukes, only 3 per cent of nomination letters were addressed to collators residing in northeastern France (Laon, Noyon, Reims, and Verdun) or in the Empire (Cologne and Trier). Next, there were the dozens of collators in the Principality of Liège with benefices in gift in Habsburg Luxemburg, Brabant, Namur, Hainault, Guelders, or in Limburg, territories that until the diocesan reform of
114 A sample of 125 resignations (or one out of two resignations that were registered in between 1580 and 1640) suggests that slightly more than 40 per cent of nominations that were returned officially “in manibus facultatis” were claimed on the very same day by other university members, which probably allowed for many liaisons.
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the 1560s had been part of the diocese of Liège. In addition, a large number of benefices in the homonymous prince-bishopric were seized as well. It is also in this respect that the faculty’s privilege was more extended than the university’s. Geographical circumscriptions in the faculty’s Leonina being worded in terms of (medieval ) dioceses, faculty nominations could also be used to seize benefices in areas situated outside princely territories: the city of Tournai and the ancient prince-bishopric of Tournaisis,115 which would become part of the Habsburg Netherlands shortly afterwards; Cambrai and the county of Cambrésis, which were annexed by the end of the 16th century;116 the episcopal city of Utrecht; and, from Hadrian VI’s 1523 confirmation bull onwards, the homonymous diocese. Unsurprisingly, few acceptations of benefices in the rebel provinces were registered after the 1580s. The faculty’s privilege of nomination was much more extended because it included the Principality of Liège. Just like the figures provided by the Vatican Per Obitum series, the beneficial stock in this last area exerted a particular, albeit less pronounced, attraction on academic nominees. Between 1580 and 1640, the diocese of Liège hosted, according to Figs. 3.6–8, one-fifth to onethird of all claims to benefices (against 57 per cent of papal provisions) made by academics with reference to their combined nomination privileges in the diocese of Liège (Liège 1 in the graphs below) or via the new legal instruments provided by the Concordatum Paulinum of 1616 in the homonymous prince-bishopric (Liège 2).117 There are other 115 University nominees apparently did not balk at accepting benefices in Tournaisis as well: three out of eight claims to benefices made in the diocese of Tournai by university nominees between 1580 and 1640 were situated in the small province of Tournaisis or in Tournai. Registre aux nominations, RAL, OUL, 4784, 73 and 207. 116 Vande Velde explicitly ruled out these regions when he enumerated the provinces in which the university’s nominees could claim benefices. “Sunt Brabantia sub qua est Antverpia eiusque districtus quia ad marchionatum Sancti Imperii spectat et infra quam Mechlinia eiusque territorium provincia alioquin separata, Limburgum et relique ditiones transmosane, Luxemburgium et Cimacensis comitatus, Geldria, item Flandria (non tamen Tornacum utpote prius acquisitum anno 1521) Arthesia (non tamen civitas Atrebatensis aut Morinensis utpote de temporali dominio suorum episcoporum), Namurcum, Hannonia, Hollandia et Zelandia cum Frisia. Relique due provincie ex 17 Belgicis Ultrajectensis et Transisulana postmodum accesserunt . . . circa annum 1528.” Guilielmus Vande Velde, De Nominationibus Lovaniensium, c.1630, KBR, Manuscrits, 22191, 13r. 117 This new privilege, to which we will turn in the next chapters, was valid only in the Principality of Liège. Other regions situated both in the Habsburg Netherlands and in the diocese of Liège continued to be visited by academic nominees by virtue of the Sixtina and the Leonina.
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Other: 2; 1% Arras: 11; 6%
Liège 2: 0; 0% Liège 1: 61; 32%
Cambrai: 30; 15%
Namur: 13; 7%
Saint-Omer: 5; 3% Ypres: 5; 3% Mechlin: 25; 13%
Tournai: 17; 9%
Ghent: 5; 3% Bruges: 3; 2%
Antwerp: 5; 3%
Den Bosch: 5; 3%
Fig. 3.6. Acceptations: geographical distribution (dioceses) 1580–97 Other: 3; 1% Arras: 26; 8%
Liège 2: 12; 4% Liège 1: 66; 21%
Cambrai: 59; 19%
Namur: 32; 10% Ypres: 18; 6%
Saint-Omer: 3; 1%
Mechlin: 34; 11%
Tournai: 26; 8%
Ghent: 9; 3%
Bruges: 4; 1% Antwerp: 9; 3%
Den Bosch: 11; 4%
Fig. 3.7. Acceptations: geographical distribution (dioceses) 1598–1621 Other: 7; 2% Liège 2: 74; 16%
Arras: 23; 5%
Liège 1: 17; 14%
Cambrai: 68; 15%
Ypres: 14; 3% Namur: 73; 16%
Mechlin: 67; 15%
Saint-Omer: 13; 3%
Ghent: 9; 4%
Tournai: 30; 7% Bruges: 22; 5% Antwerp: 13; 3%
Den Bosch: 11; 2%
Fig. 3.8. Acceptations: geographical distribution (dioceses) 1622–40
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similarities with the Per Obitum list as well: the dioceses of Cambrai and Mechlin came second and third; the ecclesiastical province of Cambrai in its entirety proved to be more much more attractive for academic nominees than the one of Mechlin. An in-depth investigation may reveal to what extent these inequities are to be attributed to the unequal distribution of (financially viable vs. “nominal”) benefices over the respective circumscriptions. A diachronic approach informed by the model of a revitalised clerical job market after the Civil War is highly instructive in this respect.118 It is not only the number of acceptations that increased dramatically in the three intervals that are involved in the analysis, from 207 (1580–97) to more than c.350 (1598–1621) to more than 500 formal claims (1622–40).119 Their distribution over various geographical circumscriptions shifts as well. The share taken by the diocese of Liège was continuously shrinking, from 32 per cent to 25 per cent to 21 per cent of all claims to benefices by academics via formal acceptations or otherwise, a trajectory that could also be observed in Vatican registers between 1606 and 1640. The attractiveness of the ecclesiastical job market in the ecclesiastical province of Mechlin remained feeble in the archducal period (from 27 per cent to 28 per cent) and only started to gain ground (32 per cent)—despite the loss of Den Bosch in 1629 to the heretics—in the third time interval: notably in the dioceses of Mechlin, Ghent, and Bruges. In the 1620s and 1630s, the share of acceptations taken by the province of Cambrai remained stable at more or less 46 per cent. This must be ascribed to the spectacular rise, in relative and absolute numbers, of claims to benefices in the diocese of Namur. This diocese failed to attract many papal provisions but came second to Liège only in the 1620s and the 1630s as a venue for academic nominations. To an extent, the unequal distribution of acceptations can be accounted for by the geographical origin of nominees themselves: in the archducal period, the dioceses of Liège, Cambrai, Mechlin and Namur, which hosted 55 per cent of all acceptations, are indeed the
118 In c.9 per cent of registrations in the three time intervals involved in the analysis, the diocese and/or the location of the benefice that was the object of an acceptation could not be identified. 119 Advowsons by virtue of the Concordatum Paulinum, which were not taken into consideration in Fig. 3.5 because they cannot be considered acceptations, are also included in Fig. 6–8. (Liège 2).
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ecclesiastical circumscriptions that furnished 77 per cent of the individuals who were registered as acceptors in the university’s or the faculty’s nomination books.120 This suggests that many clerics from “the big four” used their nomination letters to gain access to the job markets of the other dioceses. The picture is more complex, however. Diocesan clerics claimed 45 per cent of all benefices.121 As a consequence, the behaviour of Louvain nominees in the clerical job market seem not to have differed significantly from papal providees (roughly 40 per cent of whom were diocesan clerics)122 or even from the individuals surfacing in Hovius’ collation registers, 53 per cent of whom turned out to be clerics of the archdiocese itself—numbers that outstrip the data for the 17th-century diocese of Ghent, where only 35 per cent of rectors, vice-rectors, and vicars in the first half of the 17th century were harvested from the diocese itself.123 The proportion of benefices accepted by diocesan nominees was, admittedly, on or above average in the “big four” (and in the diocese of Den Bosch).124 In absolute numbers, by contrast, the number of benefices in these dioceses claimed by extra-diocesan graduates equalled those in the other dioceses, where diocesan clerics tended to be grossly underrepresented in comparison with general figures.125 Seen from this perspective, clerical migration in relative and in absolute numbers cannot be considered a one-way traffic from regions bursting with clerics to clerical deserts, although it should be noted that this analysis does not take into account the directions of intra-diocesan migration.126 As soon as one starts to distinguish staff members among the nominees from graduates, the average of c.45 per cent of benefices accepted by diocesan clerics proves to be highly artificial, however. Although 120 Of the c.340 acceptations that followed a nomination issued between 1598 and 1621, 19 per cent were linked to individuals whose diocesan allegiance remains unknown. 121 Enough data were available for 249 acceptations, or 74 per cent of all acceptations following nominations rubber-stamped by faculty or university boards between 1598 and 1621. 122 Based on the samples for 1606–10 and 1616–20. Proportions even jump to 76 per cent if one includes the diocese of Liège, where 91–96 per cent of supplicants identified themselves as diocesan clerics. 123 This figure contrasts sharply with the proportion of diocesan clerics in the diocese’s ordination lists, more than 90 per cent of whom were natives of the diocese of Ghent. Vanden Broecke, “Seculiere geestelijken,” 203. 124 Figures vary from 45–50 per cent in the archdiocese of Mechlin and in Namur, to over 64–69 per cent in Liège and Cambrai, to 77 per cent in the diocese of Den Bosch. 125 I.e., the 45 per cent yardstick, which turns out to be the result of high figures for Mechlin, Cambrai, and Liège. 126 Compare, in this respect, Vanden Broecke, “Seculiere Geestelijken.”
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half of the acceptors among the members of the academic staff did use their nomination letters to seize benefices in their diocese of origin, they often claimed benefices in other areas as well. The 34 per cent of benefices accepted by diocesan clerics in this group, whose regional origins more or less reflect those of the entire population of staff members,127 contrasts sharply with the 62 per cent of “diocesan” acceptations completed by university members who never joined the academic staff, a proportion that outstrips the few data we dispose of with respect to general patterns of clerical migration via ordinary circuits in the archducal period.128 Graduates who chose to seek office outside the university did not just use their nominations as a gateway to other clerical job markets that were increasingly crammed into diocesan structures; they also may have tried to outperform, with the help of the prerogatives that came with academic nominations, potential competitors for specific benefices in their own diocese or even on their own home base.129 Because students became more frequent applicants in the 1620s and the 1630s, both in absolute and in relative numbers, it can be expected that the share of diocesan acceptations also rose in this time interval, especially in a scenario of increasing competition in the clerical job market together with its gradual normalisation. This hypothesis may well be supported by the evidence furnished by the Vatican Per Obitum series, where similar trends in the numbers of “diocesan” papal provisions can be detected in the first half of the 17th century.130 127 Again, it is Brabant and Mechlin that furnished the largest contingent of teachers (c.32 per cent or 79 individuals out of c.240 staff members), with the university town being the birthplace of slightly over 10 per cent of all academics. Flanders and the Stewardships, by contrast, furnished only 7 per cent of the teaching staff (16 individuals) and were, within the Habsburg Netherlands, surpassed by Hainault (13 per cent or 32 individuals). Artois and Tournaisis on the one hand, and the Southeastern provinces of Namur, Luxemburg, and Limburg on the other (regions that were situated on the Southwestern and the Southeastern fringes of the Habsburg Netherlands), provided 7 per cent of the teaching staff. Foreigners constituted the second largest group in the overall population (28 per cent): the Principality of Liège was second to the Brabant contingent only with 15 per cent, while one out of ten academics was recruited from among Catholic exiles from the United Provinces. Seven individuals had their roots elsewhere, i.e., in the Iberian peninsula, in the Holy Roman Empire, or in the British Isles. 128 The average of 62 per cent is, again, superseded by the dioceses of Liège, Cambrai, Namur, and Den Bosch, while Mechlin lagged behind with only one out of two acceptations being completed by a diocesan cleric. Students are underrepresented because fewer data are available on their geographical origins (i.e., c.140 observations for c.200 acceptors who did not join the academic staff ). 129 I.e., in 24 acceptations (c.15 per cent) by students out of 159 registrations that provide enough information on both the benefice and the acceptor. 130 It is less pronounced, however. In the ecclesiastical provinces of Mechlin and
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Enter the categories of benefices that were accepted by academics. A substantial number of benefices remained outside the grasp of Louvain claimants. The privileges of nomination (just as much as papal reservations of benefices, for that matter) only affected benefices of the canon law system whose advowson fell to clerics in their capacity as members of ecclesiastical hierarchy, not those who came under the system of lay patronage. These restrictions were explicitly repeated in the royal placet letters, which also ruled out claims to benefices whose appointment belonged to the prince by virtue of various nomination indults. In practice, this implied that prelacies in the Habsburg Netherlands, including the first dignities of collegiate and cathedral chapters (provostships, deanships, or secular abbacies) were untouchable. Last but not least, already in the 1540s, academic statutes had stipulated that acceptors of rectorships or other benefices charged with the care of souls had to observe canonical residence, provided that peaceful possession had been secured, within one year after the acceptation. Whether university men lived up to these ideals in the 16th century remains a moot point, but they did so at least from 1573 onwards, when the restriction was canonised by Gregory XIII’s confirmation bull, In Praecelsa. Seen from this perspective, the nomination books kept by the university and by the Arts faculty seem to be the local, academic variants of Roman registers of the Dataria Apostolica rather than copies of the lists of appointments produced by Hovius and his diocesan administration. Between 1580 and 1640, altars and other simple benefices were numerically the most prominent category of benefices claimed by academic nominees (421 registrations), followed by canonships (358 entries), with rectorships occupying the third position (267 registrations).131 Delving deeper into these data, however, one is under the impression that nomination books rather occupied a middle ground somewhere between Vatican registers and diocesan lists. First, rectorships were, at least in relative numbers, much more popular with academic nominees than with their papal counterparts. Second, they constituted the fastest growing segment in the Louvain registers, Cambrai, proportions of diocesan papal provisions rose from 38 per cent in the 1606– 10 sample, to more than 43 per cent in 1616–20, to 45 per cent in the 1636–40 sample based on Per Obitum, while absolute numbers more or less doubled from c.100 (1606–10) to more than 200 papal provisions (1636–40). 131 Again, the results for the Principality of Liège, which technically were not touched any more by the privileges of nomination from 1616 onwards, are included in these statistics.
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despite the spectacular rise of altars accepted in the 1620s and 1630s. The share of rectorships of the total number of benefices accepted by academic nominees had nearly quadrupled in 1622–40, from a miserly 9 per cent in the last decades of the 16th century to more than 23 per cent in the archducal period to 32 per cent in the 1620s and 1630s. 209 167 134 88 91
Canonships
136 121
Altars Rectorships
81
19
1580–1597
Not Specified
13
11
9 1598–1621
1622–1640
Fig. 3.9. Acceptations: types of benefices (entire population)
Moreover, claims to rectorships were, compared to papal provisions, no longer limited to one single diocese (Liège) but were gradually extended to 9 out of 12 dioceses in 1598–1621 and affected all of them in the third and fourth decades of the 17th century. This linear trend overlaps with another one: the gradual spread of acceptations over an increasing number of localities within the dioceses themselves. In the 1580s and 1590s, the top 27 locations in the Louvain nomination books took 56 per cent of all claims. This rate comes close to the highly unequal distribution of papal provisions, nearly 60 per cent of which involved benefices in locations abundant with clerics and similar career opportunities. In the archducal period, however, the top 27 locations that hosted three or more claims by virtue of academic privileges only took 48 per cent of all acceptations, and they lost even more ground in the third time interval (34 per cent).132 This linear trend matches well with the observation that, alongside the relatively
132 In the entire time period, the top 27 locations (Liège, Cambrai, Douai, Bruges, Nivelles, Ghent, Lille, Arras, Namur, Mons, Harelbeke, Ypres, Louvain, Saint-Omer,
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stable number of benefices that were accepted in, or in the immediate environment of, big hubs of clerical employment such as collegiate and cathedral churches, (rural ) parish churches, chapels, and hospital churches gradually entered the horizon of Louvain acceptors as well in the first decades of the 17th century. Louvain’s educational programme obviously started to bear fruits. This explanation might have appealed to the academics themselves, the model of the “pastoral graduate” who had been spiritually and intellectually prepared in the Louvain colleges being central to the image university men sought to convey about their role in society. However, the figures drawn from the nomination books cannot entirely be ascribed to the patient instillation of a specific pastoral habitus of a Tridentine bent, the activities of nominees in the clerical job market being much more diverse than general figures suggest. First, we have seen that the triumph of the Tridentine pastor was a hybrid product of high-minded ideals but also of the ups and downs of the clerical job market. Louvain nominees, for their part, did not diversify their targets in an unequivocal manner. Acceptations may have become less concentrated in specific locations in the diocese of Liège as well as in the ecclesiastical provinces of Mechlin and Cambrai in the first decades of the 17th century, but it is obvious that the suffragan dioceses of Mechlin lagged behind general figures both with respect to the different categories of benefices that were accepted and to the number of locations that were visited by academic nominees.133 The diocese of Liège furnished 13 out of 19 rectorships that were accepted
Cassel, Tournai, Maastricht, Mechlin, Ronse, Séclin, Aire, Hilvarenbeek, Den Bosch, Turnhout, Valenciennes, Antoing, Brussels) with more than eight acceptations over 60 years (i.e., locations with two or more hits in 1580–97; and three acceptations or more in the two following time intervals) attracted more or less 40 per cent of the 935 acceptations whose location could be identified, which is well below the 60 per cent of papal provisions in the top-27 localities with ten “hits” or more registered in the 16-year sample based on the Per Obitum list, more than half of which also figure in the Louvain top-27. 133 In the archducal period, Antwerp and Bruges were never visited by acceptors coveting rectorships. None of the other dioceses reached the average of rectorships constituting 23 per cent of all benefices that were accepted by academic nominees, Ghent and Den Bosch coming close with respectively 22 per cent and 18 per cent, but absolute numbers remain negligible (two rectorships in both cases). Mechlin and Ypres lagged behind with respectively 9 per cent and 6 per cent. The share of rectorships increased in the 1620s and the 1630s (with Mechlin approaching 22 per cent), but only topped the interval’s average of 32 per cent in Ghent (37 per cent). The decline in the relative numbers of rectorships accepted in the diocese of Den Bosch
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by academics in the last decades of the 16th century, but it already had to cede its lead to the diocese of Cambrai in the archducal period (rectorships constituting 41 per cent of all benefices accepted by academics in that diocese) and in the 1620s and 1630s (56 per cent). Most other dioceses of the homonymous ecclesiastical province performed well above average too, in both time intervals.134 Again, an in-depth investigation into the clerical infrastructure of the Low Countries and its economic hinterland may provide for some of the answers. The rural rectorships in Hainault (Cambrai) and South Brabant (Namur) were home to rich, large-scale corn growers who were more likely to yield high tithes, as opposed to the populous parishes of crofters who struggled to make ends meet on the industrialised and highly urbanised Flemish countryside.135 But other factors that cannot be reduced to the logic of the market may have played, in return, their own role in triggering a demand for nomination letters boosting the competitiveness of their holders. There may have been recruitment channels against which Louvain nominees found it difficult to compete, without their academic prerogatives. It remains to be investigated to what extent these channels may have passed through the University of Douai, located in the same French-Flemish town that hosted the provincial seminary established by the archbishop and his suffragans, and the colleges of religious orders whose abbots were responsible, alongside the bishops, for the recruitment of the rural parish clergy. The numerous canonships and other benefices that were accepted by Louvain nominees in the collegiate churches at Douai may offer a telling example in this respect. Moreover, draft proposals in the 1570s for a projected privilege of nomination of the University of Douai sought to enrol the archbishop of Cambrai as the apostolic executor who had to see to the privilege’s observation, and the army of
should probably be ascribed to the renewed hostilities from 1620 onwards, and to the loss of that territory to the rebels in 1629. 134 In 1598–1621 as well as in 1622–40, the ecclesiastical province of Cambrai furnished slightly more than half of the acceptations of rectorships. Within the province, only the diocese of Arras lagged behind with only 26 per cent of acceptations in the last time interval involving rectorships. By then, the diocese of Liège, which had still performed above average in the archducal period, with rectorships constituting 29 per cent of the benefices that were the object of an acceptation by virtue of academic nomination letters, struggled to reach the general average of 32 per cent. 135 A survey on (among others) rural economy in the Low Countries in Aerts, “Economische interventie”; see also Thoen, “The Rural History.”
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diocesan parish priests as potential beneficiaries.136 In 1609, the archbishop even submitted, via the status dioecesis he had to send to Rome every five years, a suggestive request to the Roman Congregation of the Council that would allow him to outmanoeuvre Louvain nominees by submitting them to the diocesan concursus.137 All this suggests that the Duacenses disposed of established, even institutionalised, lines of contact with big employers in their own hinterland that the Louvain nominees lacked. Competitive clerical job markets fuelled the emergence of the “Tridentine pastor,” but markets themselves became more “Tridentine” as well. Seen from this perspective, it is surprising that the number of urban rectorships that were accepted by Louvain nominees is negligible. Such occupations were, of course, more demanding, but much more prestige and financial gain was attached to them, via the casualia or otherwise. The South’s towns and cities must have been thrilling places for young and ambitious clerics who were keen on participating in the great enterprise of Catholic reform in the early 17th century. This apparent lack of interest should be ascribed partially to two factors: first, the advowson of urban rectorships was in many cases the reserve of the prestigious chapters of canons, which conversely managed relatively few rural rectorships compared to bishops and abbots. Second, nominees were not a homogeneous group. The Louvain job agencies took
136 As a consequence, the Douai proposal may have been shouldered by the archbishop of Cambrai as well (contrary to the Louvain privileges, which had been obtained without the support of bishops). Copia libelli supplicis universitatis Duacensis Rome SS exhibende, submitted to the Privy Council before 24 January 1574, UAL, OUL, 307. The bishop of Tournai, a friend of academics at Louvain and at Douai, was believed to promote Douai’s interests in the field in the late 1580s. Godefridus Chineij to his academic patron Wamesius, professor in Law, 2 December 1589, Acta Universitatis, 4 January 1590, RAL, OUL, 60, 85r–86v. 137 “Cumque concurrant ad vacationes huiusmodi alumni seminarii provinciae Cameracensis ex universitate oppidi Duacensis Atrebatensis dioec et alii presbiteri ex collegiis et seminariis aliis, plerique baccalaurei aut licentiati in Theologia, ac alias in casibus conscientiae et iis quae pertinent ad functiones pastorales bene versati; Adveniant etiam sepius nominati ex universitati Lovaniensi qui vigore indulti apostolici volunt preferri aliis licet saepius et doctrina et qualitatibus requisitis inferiores et impares reperiantur; dignabitur Sanctitas Vestra declarare, quomodo archiepiscopus in hoc casu sese gerere debeat; an sit habenda ratio illius qui inter omnes examinatos maxime idoneus fuerit iudicatus, an vero Nominatus Lovaniensis inferioris idoneitatis praeferri debeat, . . . enim iuxta cap 18 Sessio 24 concilii Tridentini ordinarium debere approbato et reperto magis idoneo beneficium curatum conferre, non obstantibus privilegiis universitatibus concessis.” Cameracensis Relatio 6ti quadriennii exhibita die 10 februarii 1609 per procuratorem, ASV, Congreg. Concilio, Relat. Dioec., 175, 36v.
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care of both students and staff members, the latter having precedence over the former. This may explain (alongside the cyclical devastation of the South’s countryside by marauding rebels) why acceptations of rectorships were rare in the 1580s and 1590s: a relatively large proportion of acceptors in these days must have been staff members who had not left the university in its darkest hours and who did not wish to abort their academic career when the old Alma Mater started to show some signs of life again by assuming pastoral charges that would force them to leave the university. Their interests in the beneficial stock of the South Netherlands continued to diverge from those of the entire population in the next intervals as well, although these would gradually be overshadowed somewhat in general figures because of increasing numbers of students applying for nominations. 83
Canonships
49
Altars Rectorships
35 28 16 17
Not Specified
12 1
1
2
3
2
Fig. 3.10. Acceptations: types of benefices (staff members)
The preferences of staff members bring those of papal providees into memory, canonships and altars constituting the near totality of benefices that were claimed by them.138 Nearly 70 per cent of the benefices they claimed in the archducal period were attached to collegiate (42 per cent) or cathedral churches (28 per cent). Cathedral or metropolitan
138 This graph reproduces the different categories of benefices that were claimed, either via the classical nomination privileges or via the Concordatum Paulinum in the Principality of Liège from 1617 onwards, by individuals who joined the academic staff between 1598 and 1621. As a consequence, figures for the first and the last time periods do not represent the total number of benefices accepted by staff members.
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churches were therefore particularly privileged by staff members.139 In the period under investigation, their aspirations would provoke a major row with the chapters of the new cathedrals, which claimed that the exclusion of university nominees (as opposed to those of the Arts faculty) from benefices in cathedral churches in the Sixtine bull of 1483 (which exempted the medieval cathedrals) applied also to them.140 All this implies that their strategies were, from a geographical point of view as well as with respect to the categories of benefices that were accepted, much more focused than those of the population in its entirety. This accounts, at least partially, for the overrepresentation of staff members competing with one another for the same nominations in faculty minutes. The distribution of acceptations of benefices over the different dioceses did not differ substantially from general figures.141 Inside the dioceses, however, a very different picture emerges. Only 23 out of 66 locations (for 130 to 140 acceptations by staff members following nominations registered in between 1598 and 1621) took more than one acceptation, but they hosted more or less 70 per cent of the total number of benefices accepted by staff members.142
139 Even if we take into account the (generally larger) number of benefices that were attached to them, they remain slightly overrepresented. It is obvious that academics were more keen on targeting cathedral churches, where they had to compete not only with other clerics but also with other graduated clerics, a substantial number of canonships in cathedrals being reserved for licenciates or doctors in Law or Theology. It is impossible to make definitive statements with respect to altars, except by referring to the probability that many a cathedral will have hosted more altars than the “average” collegiate church. 140 The wording of the bull offers a telling example of curialist gibberish, because an exclusion (according to the Louvainists’ opponents) was formulated in a positive way: Urgent Nos stipulated that university nominees could seize all benefices, “etiamsi canonicatus et prebenda, administratio, vel officium in collegiata, aut scholastria, matricularia seu custodia in parochiali ecclesiis vel capella fuerit.” Privilegia, 87. This was also read in a restrictive way by Guilielmus Vande Velde, De Nominationibus Lovaniensium, c.1630, KBR, Manuscrits, 22191, 37v; at least with respect to the medieval cathedrals: “Interim comprehendentur hic istarum cathedralium que tunc erant collegiate ut ecclesia Antverpiensis, Brugensis, Audomarensis etc. uti hoc iam pridem de Antverpiensi decidit Rota 26 junii 1602.” Ibidem, 38r. Nonetheless, at least three altars were accepted in the (medieval ) cathedral of Arras by virtue of a nomination letter issued by the university. Registre aux nominations, RAL, OUL, 4784. See p. 358–47. 141 Of the acceptations by staff members in between 1598 and 1621, the ecclesiastical province of Cambrai took 52 per cent of all acceptations (compared to 46 per cent in the general figures); Liège was less prominent with 20 per cent, and the dioceses of Mechlin hosted 28 per cent of acceptations completed by staff members. 142 Cambrai, Liège, Cassel, Douai, Harelbeke, Arras, Ghent, Mons, Bruges, Tournai, Ypres, Nivelles, Antoing, Leuze, Mechlin, Ronse, Séclin, and Tienen. The figures for
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Because a large majority of canonships registered in the nomination books were claimed by staff members burdening the collations of collegiate or cathedral churches, the margins of other graduates who wished to haul in an urban rectory at the advowson of the same institutions must have been narrow, at least in theory. In practice, however, junior university men were by no means excluded from nominations burdening the collations of cathedral or collegiate chapters.143 Only a small minority of these nominations resulted in the acceptation of rural or urban rectorships. Despite the legal prerogatives of staff members, graduates were left ample room for manoeuvre to compete with seniors for the same canonships in the same churches. This rules out the possibility that only the leftovers in poorly endowed collegiate churches fell into their lap.144 Graduates accepting canonships were willing (and could afford) to wait substantially longer before turning their nomination into a formal acceptation of a canonship than their peers who went after rectorships and altars. And nearly 60 per cent of them did so in other dioceses, which suggests that they could mobilise channels of support or of information in the university’s projected hinterland that were not restricted to their place or diocese of origin.145 Seen from this perspective, it may come as a surprise that staff members did not emerge more frequently as concurrentes of juniors before the faculty’s congregation. In a number of cases, juniors may just have been fortunate. The taxa patrimonialis as well as peer pressure and academic legislation inhibited staff members from heaping up benefices indefinitely, just as much as the accumulation of papal provisions by some Roman curialists is not the equivalent of the endless accumulation of benefices—a distinction that competitors of academic nominees or of the “Satans Romanistes” failed to make. In addition, many students may have disposed of excellent channels of information concerning local job opportunities in the periphery: lines of contact they probably multiplied by socialising with their peers in the Louvain Vatican registers were already surpassed by the 18 locations in the nomination books that hosted three acceptations or more, and that took 62 per cent of all acceptations. 143 Approximately one-quarter of all acceptations completed by juniors burdened the collations of chapters. 144 Approximately 50 canonships, including six in cathedral or metropolitan churches, were snagged by (advanced) students. 145 Only 42 per cent of acceptations of canonships by graduates were “diocesan” acceptations, as opposed to the 62 per cent average for this population. Moreover, nearly half of them accepted their canonship only several years after their nomination, while altars and rectorships were claimed, in 70 per cent of all cases, within one year.
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colleges and that were not necessarily dominated by the academic elite. Graduates may have capitalised on resignations of nominations by their academic patrons, friends, or protégés among the teaching staff. And it is not unthinkable that well-connected graduates (the illegitimate son of the Chancellor of Brabant, for instance) could muster, via informal means, enough support to cajole potential competitors into restraint. Hierarchical ranking principles may have provided for a tested grammar to organise the hybrid fabric of Academia, but they could be manipulated or be put in brackets if the situation demanded it. Needless to say, such loopholes do not surface in administrative documents that were designed to do exactly the opposite: instilling an unqualified order into academic affairs. Examples of graduates claiming canonships in cathedral churches trigger other questions. Were university men not supposed, in their quality of poor and disinterested scholars whose income was below the taxa patrimonialis, to accept only humble benefices that narrowly saved them from starvation? Both privileges had introduced, back in 1483 and 1513, a taxa beneficialis on the yearly revenues of benefices that determined whether or not a benefice could be accepted by a nominee. In the university’s privilege of nomination of 1483, it was stipulated that only benefices that yielded a yearly income smaller than 30 golden Rhine florins—the monetary unit in the Duchy of Brabant and in several other provinces of the Habsburg Netherlands—could be claimed by its nominees. This was already a modest sum by 1483, but the Sixtine taxa must have been reduced to sheer symbolism in the course of the 16th century, when under the pressure of inflation the nominal income of craftsmen would quadruple or even quintuple.146 Already in 1521, and again in 1561, attempts had been made to obtain a raise of the taxa beneficialis; a programme that often went hand in hand with requests to raise, with one move, the taxa patrimonialis as well.147 The bull In Praecelsa of 1573 eventually raised the university’s patrimonial and beneficial thresholds to the level of the taxa Leonina in the bull granted to the Arts faculty back in 1513. There, a differentiated taxa beneficialis corresponded with the two categories of clerics who could apply for nominations: while juniors had to regulate
146
As far as the real value is concerned, see Van Uytven, Stadsfinanciën. See, respectively, transcriptions of the university’s minutes in Puncta Aliquot, 110 (the originals are lost in the flames of Louvain of 1914), and Acta Universitatis, 3 November 1560, in RAL, OUL, 58, 79r. 147
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themselves to the Sixtine taxa of 30 ducatus (instead of florins), seniors were allowed to accept benefices that yielded 60 ducatus de Camera, the monetary unit of the Apostolic Chamber that equalled, in the period under investigation, 2 to 3 florins.148 The upgrading of the taxa patrimonialis in the Pauline Concordat of 1616 was matched by a similar raise of the taxa beneficialis to c.100 ducats of the Apostolic Chamber. By contrast, the taxa Sixtina, which still applied to juniors (and which was expressed in terms of ducatus de Camera in early 17th-century legal documents), was never revised. The taxa beneficialis is, as a consequence, as ambiguous as its twin, the taxa patrimonialis, and therefore is not likely to have restricted substantially the pool of benefices into which academic nominees could dip. If the taxa were taken literally, the university’s privilege of nomination would already have become obsolete in the course of the 16th century. The claims of graduates who did not join the academic staff would have been forfeited, as the Leonine taxa and its later adaptations only applied to seniors. Even from the perspective of the taxa Paolina, the number of benefices that could be accepted by virtue of the nomination privileges would have gradually been reduced to the most destitute offices: the papal bull Regimini of 1616 contained the last legislative measure to adapt the taxa to inflation until the end of the 18th century. Yet, university men accepted more, not fewer, benefices in the next decades of the 17th century. A few examples may suffice. In the period under investigation, a strict reading of the taxa in the nomination bulls would have excluded the acceptations of the vast majority of rectorships in the diocese of Ghent. A 1623 census of the
148 The exchange rates of the Roman ducatus de Camera with monetary units in the periphery was subject to fluctuations, fluctuating again with respect to tenders that were used in everyday life. “Ita enim Hieron. Parc. In sua Practica Cancellaria apostolica in fine de monetar. Valore expresse docet florenum Brabantinum valere medium ducatum, et similiter florenum Carolensem, item librum monete Flandrie valere ducatus tres. Si vero ut nomen speciei olim valebat duobus florenis aut circiter hodie quatuor et ultra.” Guilielmus Vande Velde, De nominationibus Lovaniensium, c.1630, KBR, Manuscrits, 22192, 45r. In 1573, the Faculty of Arts considered the 150 ducati to be sent to Rome for the fabric of the Gregoriana as the equivalent of 300 Rhine florins. Acta Facultatis Artium, 1573, RAL, OUL, 713, 5r. In the Négociations de Rome of 1605–23 (AGR, Audience, 440–459), the pension of 6,000 florins for King’s College in Louvain, to be levied on rich abbeys in the Netherlands, still was translated, in the correspondence of the papal nunciature, as the equivalent of 3,000 scudi (which more or less corresponds to 3,000 ducatus de Camera). Jadin, “Procès d’information,” sticks to an exchange rate of one to three. Exchange rates between Roman and other European currencies in Hermann, L’Eglise d’Espagne, 77–78.
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diocese’s parishes reveals that by then, most shepherds had an income that equalled or surpassed the minimum income of 35 to 50 pounds (or 105 to 150 ducati de Camera, or 210 to 300 florins)149 that had been agreed at the Council of Mechlin in 1607.150 The fact that nominees seized almost one out of ten rectorships for which a concursus was organised in the 18th-century diocese of Mechlin suggests that they did not limit themselves to the most miserly parishes, the concursus being in practice organised for the better endowed ones. Judging from the benefices university men did accept, the taxa as a technical criterion seems to have become all but obsolete in Jansenius’ days. According to an academic memorandum drafted during the negotiations leading to the Pauline Concordat, not one single prebend of the Belgian church yielded more than 60 ducati (120 to 180 florins in the period under investigation)—that is, if only the grossi fructus of the prebend, that part which could be received by absentees residing in privileged places such as universities, were taken into consideration.151 Nonetheless, Cornelius Jansenius himself casually mentioned in his letter of 1623 that he had accepted a canonship whose value was estimated by candidates for a permutation to be double or triple the Pauline taxa of 1616. But what was the point then in pushing for an adaptation of the taxa in 1616? And why did it become a bone of contention in the struggle with the bishop of Ypres, who opposed the ratification of Regimini by the Privy Council?152 The academics’ answer, that the Pauline bull merely sought to adapt the taxa to inflation, only adds to the confusion, contradicting as it does their
149 That is, according to the exchange rates proposed by Guilielmus Vande Velde, De nominationibus Lovaniensium, c.1630, KBR, Manuscrits, 22192, 45r. 150 The data for the diocese of Ghent indicate that even in the 17th century alone the nominal value of benefices increased considerably. Vanden Broecke, Rekrutering en carrièrepatroon, 161. Again, it is not certain whether or not the fluctuating casualia were included in this sum. 151 “Ut constat ex eo quod taxa beneficiorum acceptabilium per seniores magistri sit 60 ducatorum auri de Camera ex grossis fructibus qui in loco privilegiato recipi possint distributionibus exceptis deductisque oneribus omnibus prout ipsemet Gregorius explicat pag. 101 quam summam nulla prebenda Belgii attingit.” Memorandum of the Arts faculty, c.1616, in BAV, Barberini Latini, 2852, 117–22. 152 “Que luniversite de Louvain et la faculte des arts auroient impetre de sa sainctete augmentation du privilege de nomination . . . quelles . . . sont de grand interest et preiudice au remonstrant et aultres collateurs des benefices de son diocese voire aussij aux aultres evesques . . ., entre aultre au regard de laugmentation de la taxe beneficiale.” Request from the bishop of Ypres to the Privy Council, to postpone the delivering of the lettres de placet, 16 July 1617, Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281. Cf. p. 193, 213, 586–87.
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earlier statements concerning the taxa.153 On top of all that, the taxa failed to determine unambiguously which part of the revenues was implicated. Academics referred to the grossi fructus that were paid regardless of the performance of specific religious tasks; but this did not keep them from claiming, in 1620, that additional revenues (such as attendance fees for canons, which could amount to one-third of the benefice’s yearly income) had to be remitted to absentee academics as well.154 All this did not add to the transparency of the taxa beneficialis, either in the eyes of contemporaries or those of present day historians. As a matter of fact, it remains difficult to assess the value of one single benefice (let alone of the more than 300 benefices that figure in the nomination books between 1598 and 1621), as it is far from clear which part, and proportion, of revenues were registered in, say, revenues declared by the holders themselves for fiscal purposes to diocesan and/or Roman administrations. An elucidating approach representing the Louvain point of view was developed by our legal advisor, Guilielmus Vande Velde. He agreed with the privileges’ opponents that the taxa indeed was not a fraud. Simultaneously, however, he construed a fitting theory in order to demonstrate that the taxa put no, or very few, restraints on Louvainist ambitions in practice. Vande Velde admitted that a few benefices whose revenues were not split up in a gros and additional revenues for resident benefice-holders that amounted to 2,000 (!) florins—the thesauraria of the cathedral church of Cambrai, the personatus of Bethel and Halle, to name a few—were exempt from academic claims. In his view, the taxa at the moment of the granting of the privilege should be taken into consideration, not the value of the benefice at the moment of the nominations or acceptations themselves. Once affected by the privileges of nomination, a benefice would remain forever susceptible to
153 “Sans aulcuns changement ou alteration pour le reguard des beneficies situez es paijs et seigneuries de sadicte alteze, saulf qu’en consideration . . . que la tauxe beneficiale de 60 ducatz a raison de lestimation des biens tousiours croissante lon eut peu prendre occasion de leur faire difficulte et nouvelles troubles a leurs estudes Sa Sainctete leur at octroije augmentation desdictes tauxes.” Request from the university and the Faculty of Arts to the Privy Council, 20 November 1619, Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281. 154 I.e., in a trial between the Louvain divine Joannes Schinckelius, who had accepted a canonship in Saint Hermes at Ronse, and the chapter before the Council of Flanders. Acta Universitatis, 18 March 1620, RAL, OUL, 64, 154r–v. See also the matters discussed on 16 June 1622, ibidem, 338v–339r.
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being claimed by virtue of academic privileges, even if its income had undergone substantial changes.155 And since time immemorial, Vande Velde concluded, almost all Belgian benefices had been automatically valued at 24 or 30 ducatus de Camera by the Apostolic Chamber in Rome.156 This custom probably dated from the Burgundian period. It might have muted calls for concordatory arrangements in the core of the Belgian Church, exempting as it did papal providees (who happened to be locals as well, in most cases) from paying the annates and servitia levied by the curia on benefices with higher revenues. Conversely, Vande Velde anticipated objections arguing that the raises of the taxa by Leo X, Gregory XIII and Paul V would have been superfluous. These adaptations did not add greatly to the efficiency of the Louvain privileges of nomination, but neither did they do any harm. The taxa’s use may have resided elsewhere. Its mere existence allowed academics, whom we have already recurrently caught in the action of turning normative texts into descriptions of reality, to affirm that only humble benefices fell into their laps, which matched well with their self-image of poor and disinterested clerics. And the taxa was of use for internal purposes as well, i.e., settling disputes between juniors and seniors (in favour of the latter).157 Conversely, an abolition of the taxa would have provoked reactions from ordinary collators, who probably would not have let go another legal argument they could add to their memoranda in clashes between their own favourites and nominees from the university. The opposition of the bishop of Ypres was set in a much wider conflict that would drag on well into the
155 “Itaque sicut beneficium semel taxatum semper manet taxatum, non tantum generaliter in ordine ad solvendum decimam Clem. Fin. De decimis prout hoc docet Rebuff. De decimis § 2 n 6 . . . quod beneficium semel taxe nostre seu nominationi obnixium semper manet obnixium quantumvis valor iste extrinsecus augeatur.” Guilielmus Vande Velde, De nominationibus Lovaniensium, c.1630, KBR, Manuscrits, 22192, 43v. 156 The bulk of benefices in the Low Countries and in the Principality of Liège that were registered in the Per Obitum list indeed yielded officially 24 or 30 ducatus if the papal provision in question gave access to a benefice that had become vacant Per Obitum. But the same benefices could be charged with a pension of 100, 200, or more ducatus if a permutation or a resignation was registered. 157 Cf. the arguments of Bax, a junior who applied for the nomination to the archbishop of Mechlin, which he said was subjected to the taxa minor in order to counter the competition of Ghiffene, professor triennalis. The congregation of the faculty decided that Bax qualified as a senior as well, and hence could not invoke junior prerogatives. Acta Facultatis Artium, 30 May 1620, RAL, OUL, 715, 332–35.
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1620s, and during which Vande Velde learnt his beneficial law the hard way.158 Vande Velde shrewdly developed another, analogous argument in order to demonstrate that benefices that had been eligible for acceptations in the days of the granting of the nomination bulls remained under the spell of the academic jus nominandi forever. Just as the taxa of 1483 and 1513 should be put into its historical perspective, the Bull Eximiae of 1515, which exempted the subjects of Charles V from summons before Roman tribunals, still applied to their 17th-century descendants as well and had become a cornerstone of the Belgian Church.159 By translating Louvain interests in the clerical job market into the jurisdictional interests of princely tribunals, Vande Velde probably hoped to kill two birds with one stone: safeguarding academic interests on the one hand, and, on the other, merging them with those of the power elites of the Low Countries, which were supposed to function as watchdogs of the region’s constitutions and privileges. That this already was a tested strategy in the period under investigation can be deduced from the following chapters. As a consequence, a few jurisdictional questions need to be tackled before trailing the fabric of academic interests and Catholic confessionalisation at Louvain in the archducal period.
3.4. “Boèce a mis tant d’empeschemens.” Poor scholars and legal violence Jansenius wrote, in his 1623 letter to Saint-Cyran, that he had accepted a benefice, and that “on prend possession pour luy.” So far, procedures remained largely an academic affair. However, the ordinary collator (in his case, the provost of Lille) was still in charge of providing the canonical institution of the benefice, if needed after a formal
158 Alleged transgressions of the taxa continued to look good on the lists of “abuses” committed by Louvain nominees. Cf. Quaestio V, “Dum taxam regulatam excedunt,” in Puncta Aliquot. 159 “Non tantum generaliter in ordine ad solvendum decimam Clem fin de decimis prout hoc docet Rebuff de decimis § 2 n 6 sed etiam specialiter in his provinciis tam in ordine ad impetrari in curia sub taxa 24 ducatorum citra solutionem quam in ordine ad non evocari extra patriam in prima instantia iuxta privilegium concessum Carolo 5° per Leonem 10 3° nonas julii anno 1515.” Guilielmus Vande Velde, De nominationibus Lovaniensium, c.1630, KBR, Manuscrits, 22192, 43v.
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examination of the candidate, while a formal missio in possessionem, the last stage of the whole procedure, often was the reserve of third parties: archdeacons, for instance, or colleges of canons who had to install their new members solemnly on their stallum in the choir. Guilielmus Vande Velde, Louvain’s hands-on expert, wrote with reference to decisions of the Rota on the matter, that an acceptation gave no right to a benefice (ius in re) but only gave its holder the right to claim one (ius ad rem).160 Caroline legislation and the faculty’s statutes stipulated that nominations burdening the collations of the same collator were to be issued successively, with the second nomination becoming vacant only after the first one had resulted in the acceptation of a benefice. This measure had to meet the concerns of ordinary collators in the beginning of the 16th century, but also prevented them from playing out nominees against each other, as they did in France with the dozens of graduates submitting their insinuations at their own discretion. Jansenius was “deuxiesme en nomination” only because he held a nomination letter of the university, not of the Arts faculty. Outsiders could raise obstacles, however. In the Louvain brand, nominees could, in theory, seize any available benefice regardless of the reason or the moment of its vacation. In practice, they barely intervened in the discreet negotiations between permutants or in the dynastic designs of uncles and nephews. Academic nominees limited themselves to accepting, in 96 per cent of all cases, offices that had become vacant because of the death of their holder. Considerable numbers of benefices did not just escape the ordinary collators’ control but also, apparently, were beyond the academics’ reach.161 Similar qualifications apply to the stipulations in both privileges, that benefices could be claimed by virtue of letters of nominations regardless of the month in which they had become vacant, and that university nominees had precedence over all other claimants, either holders of papal provisions or candidates of ordinary collators. Explicit derogations to the Concordat of Vienna, to the extensive privileges granted to the
160 “Dico 2do per nominationem acquiritur non ius in re sed ad rem Rota decis. 29 de renuntiatione in antiquis Rebuff de nominatione.” Vande Velde, De nominationibus Lovaniensium, c.1630, KBR, Manuscrits, 22191, 4v. 161 Seen from this perspective, it is surprising that Vande Velde highlights this difference with the nominations issued by French universities, resignations and permutations putting, in accordance with conjunctures in the clerical job market, more restraints on academic claims than suggested in the 1483 bull. Cf. Guilielmus Vande Velde, De nominationibus Lovaniensium, c.1630, KBR, Manuscrits, 22191, 37v.
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collators of the Principality of Liège, and to the customs and statutes of local churches had to discourage possible competitors.162 In addition, both privileges of nomination derogated to all general and specific apostolic reservations in the regulae cancellariae (including the reservatio octo mensium in favour of the ordinary collators) that had not been incorporated in canon law. Impressive though they may seem, however, these clauses by no means shielded nominees from competition, especially from the “Satans Romanistes” in Jansenius’ letter. In theory, the latter could easily overrule the nonobstantiae in the century-old bulls granted to the academics by fresh clauses. Additional measures on behalf of the academics might therefore be necessary, and the oblique reference in Jansenius’ letter to the “empeschemens” he had put in place, suggests that in his day, individual nominees themselves were responsible for monitoring the moves of potential competitors, or anticipating them. A tested strategy consisted in appealing to the Privy Council in order to have additional clauses de non prejudicandis privilegiis nominationum universitatis Lovaniensis inserted in the placet letters on potentially dangerous papal provisions, provided that the nominee in question disposed of the necessary channels of information.163 Similar tactics were suggested by the university’s agent at the curia in 1619–20 against holders of the primariae preces.164 162 According to Vande Velde, the latters’ rights to a benefice were only secure after the month in which nominees could legitimately lay a claim to a benefice, had expired. “Dico 4° nominatione ita afficitur beneficium nominato ut collatio alteri facta intra mensem nominato dato ad acceptandum sit nulla etiamsi nominatus interim non acceptet. Stapileus De Litt Gratie et iustitie tit. De vi et effectu clausul. § successive in 1° quem sequitur Wamesius cons. 252 n. 4.” Guilielmus Vande Velde, De nominationibus Lovaniensium, c.1630, KBR, Manuscrits, 22191, 37v. 163 In the middle of the 16th century, adding clauses de non prejudicando privilegiis nominationum in placet letters on papal provisions had been (according to the academics themselves) a matter of routine. It is not clear whether or not attempts to breathe new life into such generalised bureaucratic procedures from 1576 onwards had been successful. In 1581, only a timely intervention of the university’s deputy to the Privy Council could stall the granting of a placet to an apostolic provisus competing with a teacher in philosophy. Acta Facultatis Artium, 13 August 1581, RAL, OUL, 713, 188v–190r. 164 Cf. p. 585–86. Acta Facultatis Artium, 1619–1620, RAL, OUL, 715, 290, 311, 337. Frictions with precistae were more likely when the emperor himself ruled the Netherlands; cf. the materials described in De Vocht, Inventaire, 425–26. In the 1520s, nominees of the Arts had to clear the field for the imperial precistae. Cf. Acta Universitatis, January 1527, RAL, OUL, 54, 67r. From 1525 onwards, faculty statutes stipulated that “nullus nominatorum nec nominandorum acceptabit aliquod beneficium ubi erunt primariae preces nisi postquam constiterit quod illas habens eis uti nollet quoad illud
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With respect to candidates operating via local circuits, university men apparently balked at claiming benefices that had become vacant in ordinary months in the Principality of Liège.165 Back in 1554, the Liège clergy, in its quality of a “national Church,” had obtained a declaration from Pope Jules III that the Louvain privileges of nomination were subject to the Concordat of Vienna and that nominees could accept only benefices whose vacancy had occurred in apostolic months.166 In the period under investigation, university men obviously were not willing to put to the test the willingness of the Liège clergy to have a good fight over benefices. Their scruples to do so probably were well founded, Liège clerics being the instigators of the Roman offensive against the university’s privileges that will be reviewed in the next chapters. In the Habsburg Netherlands, it was princely legislation, and more specifically the Caroline concordat of 1531, that restricted the room for manoeuvre of (faculty) nominees. That the clauses regarding the exemption from lay patrons—the prince himself and his vassals—should be considered a restriction is improbable: only benefices of the canonical system had been affected by papal reservations of benefices, which means that benefices coming under legal patronage would have remained out of the academics’ reach anyway. But they did introduce stipulations with respect to the number of benefices that could be accepted in ordinary months, and/or with respect to time intervals that had to be observed in between two acceptations burdening the same collator.167 beneficium.” Cf. the Regulae Nominationum, in Liber primus nominationum, RAL, OUL, 4751, 8v and 10r. This statute was replaced in 1536 by a comprehensive statute enabling the faculty to monitor the acceptations of its nominees. 165 Of the c.30 registrations of acceptations of benefices in the diocese of Liège (out of 144 in between 1580 and 1640) that are recorded in the faculty’s nomination books, and that mention the month in which the benefices in question became available, only one benefice in the Principality of Liège had become vacant in an ordinary month; the four other cases involved benefices in Habsburg lands. 166 This was the case when Joannes Roberti, from Marches, tried to obtain a canonship in Thuin via his nomination by the Faculty of Arts (Acta Facultatis Artium, 2 November 1595, RAL, OUL, 713, 435v); and in 1602, when a nominee of the university had tried to obtain a benefice situated in the Patria Leodiensis. Acta Universitatis, 3 March 1602, RAL, OUL, 62, 84v–86v. 167 The concordat resumed Hadrian’s stipulation that ordinary collators who had to share their advowsons with the Holy See via the alternativa or the regulae cancellariae could only be forced to bestow one “ordinary” benefice per decade. If the second nominee longed for another benefice within the same decennium, he could only accept an “apostolic” benefice. Collators operating under the Gallican regime could only be obliged to bestow another benefice upon a faculty nominee after one
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Amid all these qualifications, many strategies remained available to make life difficult for nominees. If preventive measures failed, however, other, repressive legal tools had to be considered. During the heyday of papal theocracy, apostolic providees had learned the hard way that local Church officials were willing to use their competences to block them. When papal provisions got an obligatory character, they were consequently accompanied by executorial letters endowing third parties with more or less extended powers to assist the providee and to bring his provision to a satisfying end.168 Louvain academics did not need to rush to the periphery to make sure that they were installed properly on their benefice and to secure possession. Jansenius’ case is revealing in this respect, as it is obvious that others were monitoring his affairs at Lille. Successive papal bulls and briefs had provided the possibility of delegating this task to an executor or subexecutor with ample executive powers, analogous to those of papal providees. The notion of the executor apostolicus had been resumed in the Louvain bull of 1483 as well. The abbots of Park and Saint Gertrudis near and in Louvain, as well as the dean of Saint Gudula in Brussels, were appointed in Urget Nos to intervene, if need be, individually or collectively on behalf of the university’s nominees. That there were three of them must have ensured that at least one would take action. Moreover, it enabled the university to play them off against each other. The faculty’s bull Admonet Nos had been accompanied by a bulla executoria with far-reaching delegations of power to executors. These were extended to the university’s nominees in the papal brief Nuper Cum (1574) of Gregory XIII, which introduced more detailed procedures.169 From that time forward, university and faculty nominees could seize the possession of benefices via their executors even before they had
decennium, regardless of the month in which it had become vacant. Nominations that had not been effective before the death or the promotion of the prelate were automatically considered as the first nomination burdening the collations of his successor. 168 Barraclough, Papal Provisions, 137–52; Bégou-Davia, L’interventionisme bénéficial. After having obtained his provision, the papal providee himself had to contact the executor; he had to present in the presence of a notary and witnesses the litterae executoriae to the latter and ask him to issue a formal notificatio; both documents, executoriae as well as the notificatio, were consequently handed over by the provisus to the ordinary collator. After the formal acceptatio of a benefice, the providee turned to his executor, or a designated subexecutor of the latter, who had to provide him, auctoritate apostolica, with the benefice and introduce him into its actual possession. Ordinary collators who caused trouble risked excommunication, suspension, and interdict. Weiss, “Päpstliche Expektanzen,” 146–48. 169 UAL, OUL, 75 a; Privilegia, 152–53.
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informed the ordinary collator in question about their acceptation, and before the latter could raise objections.170 Because of the reluctance of canon law to chase clerics from their benefices once they had obtained them,171 possession gave university men a lead over their competitors and allowed them to cash in the revenues if a dispute was brought to court. It is in this context that Jansenius talked about people taking possession for him without bothering to mention the ordinary collator, the provost of Saint Peter’s at Lille. The executors mentioned in Urget Nos or of the faculty’s privilege of nomination had to make sure that the privileges of nomination themselves were observed as well. Papal bulls required solemn promulgation—the so-called fulminatio172—in the periphery in order to gain force of law. The apostolic executors mentioned in Urget Nos, as well as the other Church officials joining them in their function in later bulls, were apparently the most suitable persons to cater these
170 Previously, only faculty nominees could circumvent the ordinary collators when seizing possession, although several cases before 1574 suggest that university nominees did not flinch from imitating them. Cf. Acta Universitatis, 2 May 1530, RAL, OUL, 59, 62r. These practices were raked up by enraged prelates in front of the Privy Council (and disaffirmed by the university’s lawyers): “exposuerunt querelam dominorum prelatorum factam occasione abusuum per nominatos universitatis in acceptatione beneficiorum, qui secrete ut asseruerunt acceptant beneficia . . . ad que [respondit] dominus sindicus quod numquam comparet nominatos universitatis secrete acceptasse, cum hoc facere non possent, immo eorum nominationem collatoribus insinuare tenentur . . . et in causam denegationis sineet per sanctam sedem apostolicam executores deputati qui nominatis beneficia . . . acceptata conferre tenentur.” Acta Universitatis, 1 October 1529, RAL, OUL, 54, 83v. 171 “Secundo imponi onus gravissimum nominatis, qui cum priores sint in possessione ac proinde deberent essere rei favorabiliorem inter litigantes personam sustinere constituuntur per pretactam oblationem actores, et ad probationem duarum negativarum (quod est difficillimum si non impossibile) astringuntur.” Informatio Responsoria, in Négociations de Rome, before 1 September and after 23 July 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 185r–188v, cf. p. 550–51. See also Van Espen, Ius Ecclesiasticum Universum, II, tit. xxvi. 172 This official act eventually resulted in a notarial instrument, which was printed in the hundreds and attached to the nomination letters. The act of fulmination was initiated by the indultary himself, who asked the executor to promulgate the concerned bull; within a fixed term, the executor called the indultary or his procurator before his tribunal in the presence of notaries and witnesses and personally inspected the content as well as the physical appearance of the bull. Thereafter, the notaries were charged with the redaction of the new text in publicam transsumpti formam; all interested parties were invited to appear on a fixed date and to make their comments on the bull if they felt like it, or to assist the solemn reading of the text. The report of the procedures on that day were recorded in the fulminatio, which was signed by two notaries and consequently sealed by the executor. From then on, the new papal decision had the force of law. Durand de Maillane, Dictionnaire de Droit Canonique, 3, 298; 16th-century copies in UAL, OUL, 304 and 305.
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services.173 Fulminations did not just take place when another new papal bull arrived in Louvain; academics turned to their executors more than once to go through an official act of promulgation. Between 1573/74 (the promulgation of the bull In Praecelsa of Gregory XIII [1573])—and 1620 (when the concordatum paulinum of 1616 finally could be put into practice), they did so on seven occasions, but we can only speculate as to why. Maybe these reasons were just practical, for instance, when the supply of authenticated copies and of nomination letters (to be completed with the name of the nominee, of the collator, the date, and so on and so forth) ran out.174 The number of executors, as well as of Church officials designated to act in this quality, varied according to the subsequent apostolic bulls that confirmed or extended the Louvain privileges of nomination in the 16th century. One executor seems to have been particularly popular, however, as he appeared in nearly every bull.175 The abbot of Saint Gertrudis, a monastery of regular canons of Saint Augustine at Louvain, was mentioned time and again. This is not because he was better at assisting nominees while they were seizing their benefices. The executores mentioned in the Louvain bulls never figured as executores of individual nominations. In the course of the 16th century, academics had fought (and won) recurrent battles with subsequent conservators of the privileges over the clausula ceterum that was to be inserted in the bulls’ fulminations and that delegated executorial responsibilities to third parties commissioned at the discretion of the nominees themselves.176 The abbots of Saint-Gertrudis had other duties to attend to, alongside sporadic Acts of Fulmination: as official conservators of the university’s privileges, they presided as judges over one of the two most
173 The 1483 bull had not been accompanied by a bulla executoria, a litterae sub filo canapis. Cf. Frenz, Die Kanzlei der Päpste, 61–62. The executoria charged one or more executors with the execution of the main bull, but it was not exceptional that the latter were appointed in the main bull itself. See, for instance, Gorissen, “De invoering van het vorstelijk benoemingsrecht,” 194–95. 174 There is no regularity in the intervals between the procedures. The Arts faculty ordered fulminations in 1573, 1577, 1578, 1597, 1613, and 1620. Acta Facultatis Artium, RAL, OUL, 713, 30r, 119r, 148r; 714, 5v–6r, 547r; and 715, 337. Promulgations on behalf of the university have been recorded in 1574, 1592, 1598, and 1613; attestation in the Acta Facultatis Artium, 20 April 1574, RAL, OUL, 713, 48v–49r, and Acta Universitatis, RAL, OUL, 60, 173r–v; 61, 285v–286v; and 63, 112v–113r. 175 Except for the bull Ex Debito, issued by Paul III in 1537. UAL, OUL, 71. 176 The identities of these subexecutors may open interesting perspectives on the microstoria of clerical careers and their related networks. The few attestations in the dozen of files concerning the privileges of nomination in the archives of the curia conservatorialis involve family members or high-ranking Church officials. Cf., for instance, the files in Dossiers des procès, RAL, OUL, 5831, 1st and 2nd bundle.
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Plate 3.4. Act of Acceptation and Procuration Provision by virtue of the Clausula Ceterum (cf. p. 200), 20 May 1692, of the rectorship of Wieze, archdiocese of Mechlin, accepted by Lambertus Gysens, Sacre Theologie Baccalaureus Formatus, by Landelinus Tordoir, a bachelor in Theology and canon of Saint James at Louvain. The ordinary collator (in casu the archbishop of Mechlin) is charged with the missio in possessionem (see p. 79). [Archdiocesan Archives, Mechlin]
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important (and controversial ) academic tribunals. Not surprisingly, discussions over the content of that academic jurisdiction were, as we will see, central to discussions over the Louvain privileges of nomination. The university’s jurisdictional autonomy dated back to the time of the foundation of the Studium itself by Pope Martin V. The bull Sapientie Immarcessibilis (1425) provided the tools for it, suggesting that the city of Louvain, as well as the duke of Brabant, were obliged to hand over their jurisdiction, in criminal as well as in civil or in ecclesiastical cases, to the rector of the new university. The installation of special tribunals with jurisdiction over university members, separate from the ordinary civil and ecclesiastical legal apparatus, was a common feature in the history of universities, but the extent to which this jurisdiction remained firmly embedded in Louvain academic circuits from 1425 onwards was less common. Until the end of the Ancien Régime, disputes among students or academics, and complaints of extranei against university men were often brought before the curia rectorialis. But while the rector’s jurisdiction may have been respected within the walls of Academia, he lacked the legal tools to foist his rulings on non-university members. Meanwhile, academics claimed that all litigation involving a suppositus was “different,” including lawsuits in which university men performed as plaintiffs. In order to realise this claim, a curia conservatorialis emerged that was presided over by a powerful prelate and that, consequently, could bully outsiders into compliance with its rulings with the help of different types of ecclesiastical censures. The notion of a conservator privilegiorum, a “warden of privileges” appointed by the pope, was, again, not new. In the High Middle Ages, thousands of conservators had been appointed by the bishops of Rome, to defend the interests of the privileged when the ordinary circuits were not able, or disinclined, to do so. Universities were definitely not the only ones who appealed to the papacy in order to obtain a conservator for their privileges, but they were indeed avid users of papal litterae conservatoriales.177 Widespread as it was, however, the institution of the conservator apostolicus in classical canon law was highly fluid. Their legal toolkit and competence must be situated somewhere in between the tools at the disposal of apostolic executors and those
177 A comparative, but elementary, treatment of universities and conservators in May, “Konservatoren,” 119–30.
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wielded by designated apostolic judges. In most cases, it is difficult to distinguish them from apostolic executors.178 In contrast to ordinary judges, they could act only on the request of their protégés (in casu suppositi of the University of Louvain); moreover, some legal traditions in classical canon law suggested that they could undertake only those legal actions which did not belong explicitly to the competences of the ordinary tribunals; and they could do so only when the violation of their protégés’ privileges was “notorious” or “manifest.”179 In dubious cases, they were expected not to interfere in order to allow the regular procedures of the law to have their course. Only a few of them managed to approach somehow the appearance of judices apostolici delegati by presiding over a tribunal in the strict sense of the word. Late medieval reform councils were ambiguous in their appreciation of the institution of the apostolic conservators, in spite of general criticisms on its dispenser, the papacy. The fathers of the Council of Trent, being much more a council of, by, and for diocesan ordinarii who translated Church reform into a revamped episcopal authority, were less reserved on the matter. They defined the practice of the conservators as “generally abusive,” charging that conservators tended to undermine—contrary to the intentions of the Holy See, of course—ordinary jurisdiction. However, the restrictions that were introduced to remedy these abuses were not to be applied to the conservators of universities, colleges, institutions of the religious orders, and hospitals. In the Netherlands, all conservatories had already been abolished by Philip the Fair in 1500. The young Habsburg archduke thus resumed the policy of his great-grandfather, Philip the Good, who had forbidden his subjects to obey the orders of ecclesiastical judges without his permission. On both occasions, however, the conservatory of the Brabant university had a lucky escape, and it would survive as the only institution of its kind in the South Netherlands until the Revolution.180 The conservator of the university would indeed become the president
178 The notion of a conservator may have been associated more with the defense of a privilege; hence the conservator’s mandate was often limited in time instead of in its tasks. May, “Konservatoren.” Executors may have been appointed ad hoc, with respect to the execution of one specific apostolic grace (for instance, a papal provision); but the Louvain example shows how relative these distinctions are. 179 May, “Konservatoren,” 102. 180 Contrary to the curia rectorialis, the tribunal of the conservator apostolicus of the University of Louvain still awaits a decent study. Features in Vandenghoer, De rectorale rechtbank, 202–07.
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of an academic tribunal that occupied a central place in the university’s judicial apparatus alongside the already mentioned curia rectorialis and its court of appeal (the quinque judices appellationum),181 the disciplinary committees of the Arts faculty, the diocesan court of first instance, and the apostolic court of appeals.182 This had not always been the case. The competence of the conservator installed by Martin V in 1425, in a third bull accompanying the foundation bull and the bull de fructibus percipiendis in absentia, had initially been restricted to safekeeping the interests of absentee benefice holders.183 One year later, his conservatorial powers were extended to the other academic privileges as well, in order to shield the suppositi of the new university from infringements by the diocesan ordinarius, by then the bishops of Liège.184 As such, between 1588 and 1625, subsequent conservators would issue many litterae monitoriales and other legal acts to prevent extranei from seizing goods and rents of scholars studying in Louvain, from arresting the income of their benefices, or from a wide range of incursions against the special privileges of university men coming under the denominator in actione mere personalis.185 It is not clear to what extent the conservator of the privileges managed to extend his jurisdiction in the first decades after the foundation of the university in order to perform as a cognitor of causes, i.e., as a judge who could pursue the legal procedures to the end and who could, in that quality, pass sentences.186 When, by the end of the 16th century and in the beginning of the 17th, academics tried to legitimise the activities of the Louvain conservatory as an ecclesiastical tribunal endowed with apostolic authority, they referred to the bull Attente Considerationis issued by Paul II in 1469. In this text, the
181 These judges were selected by the respective faculties; the tribunal as such was presided over by the delegated judge of the theological faculty. They were appointed simultaneously with the rector and are recorded likewise in the Acta Universitatis, 1588–1616, RAL, OUL, 60–63. 182 Vandenghoer, de rectorale rechtbank, 197–209. 183 Ed. Reusens, Documents relatifs, 1. 184 Bruwier, “Les conflits jurisdictionnels,” 569–82; Van Hove, Etude sur les conflits de jurisdiction. 185 Because the university’s deputies had to give their consent to suppositi in trouble before they could appeal to the conservator, their requests are recorded in the Acta Universitatis, RAL, OUL, 60–64. The fees paid by university men in need of litterae primariae are registered in the Libri receptorum of the university, 1621–1637, RAL, OUL, 275. 186 The first archival materials in the archives of the University of Louvain concerning the judicial activity of the conservator date from the 1550s. Cf. De Vocht, Inventaire, 486.
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pope not only had sanctioned the academics’ claims to be sentenced by their own judges but also had promised that they could draw their opponents before the academic tribunals in Louvain as well. Thus, the bull turned upside down in favour of the academics the principle of actor sequitur forum rei, forcing plaintiffs to bring their cases before the court of the defence.187 In the 16th century, it was established that suppositi had the choice of bringing their cases before the rector or before the conservator, but the latter proved to be the most suitable person to appeal to when Louvainists performed as plaintiffs. This ius tractus would prove to be even more problematic than the ius de non evocando granted to the university’s members by Martin V back in 1425. Disputes with other tribunals in the Netherlands and in the Principality of Liège were frequent and often could be solved only by separate agreements or by princely legislation explicating and delimiting the theoretically unlimited competence of the conservator. Until 1797, however, the academics in Louvain could maintain their contention that the conservator was competent in litigation over benefices. From their point of view (although many, as we will see, begged to differ), there was no reason to doubt that the jurisdiction of the conservator covered litigation involving Louvain nominees too; and that their opponents, consequently, could be forced to sue them on their terms. In Urget Nos as well as in Admonet Nos, there was no explicit regulation of the jurisdictional dimension of the Louvain privileges of nominations; it was only after the turbulent period in the second decade of the 16th century, coinciding with the first nominations of the Arts faculty by virtue of its new privilege, that Clement VII would affirm their claims explicitly in the bull Rationi Congruit (1523).188 This text would remain the legal ground for the contention that the conservator of the university’s privileges was competent in disputes involving nominees until the end of the 18th century. Meanwhile, the brief In Supremo Militantis of 1578, which followed a ruling of the Roman Congregation of the Council, stipulated explicitly that the Louvain conservators of the privileges were competent in all disputes involving academics, not just those concerning benefices.189 187
Reusens, Documents relatifs, 1, 220–23. “& quod dicti omnes . . . super beneficiis per eos acceptatis . . . extra dictam universitatem ad judicium trahi non possent; ipsi tamen nominati hujusmodi, suos in dictis beneficiis quoscumque adversarios coram aliquo ex conservatoribus privilegiorum ejusdem universitatis Lovaniensis trahere.” Privilegia, 120–21. 189 “Quaeritur pro parte rectoris et universitatis studii generalis oppidi Lovaniensis an privilegia per diversos romanos pontifices concessa universitatis suae, ne quis 188
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The importance of this tool in the hands of the Louvain nominees cannot be underestimated. The canonical notion that a conservator could not be subjected to the jurisdiction of the privileged he was expected to protect190 did not deter academics from ensuring the conservator’s loyalty by other means. First, the personnel of the conservatory, its notaries and procurators, had to be admitted by the ordinary congregation of the university on a yearly basis; the key figures of the conservatory, the signator primarum litterarum who had to render conservatorial letters efficient by his signature and by the rectoral seal, as well as the assessor, a jurist who “assisted” the conservator in his tasks, were always prominent members of the law faculties, despite being formally appointed by the conservator.191 Second, the conservator himself was, in fact, designated by the university. Several potential conservators had been mentioned in 1425, in 1469, and in 1562,192 endowing the academics in Louvain with the tools to accelerate the progress of their litigious affairs considerably. Instead, they stuck to one single conservator—often the abbot of Saint Gertrudis193—in order to keep the income and the prestige of the conservatory attractive enough for its holders, while their right to chose whomever they wanted among the five conservators mentioned in the conservatorial bulls increased their control over their institutional protector as well.194 In 1593, it was academics who wrote up a job description (including studiosorum seu suppositorum eorum in prima instantia sive in possessorio sive petitorio agatur etiam in quacunque causa possit trahi seu revocari ad judicium extra muros dicti oppidi, sint revocata per decretum xx sess 24 stante quod in eodemque concilio trid ut c v sess xiiii et c vi sess xxv reserventur”; followed by a series of notes and the final decree of the Congregation of the Council, 6 July 1576, ASV, Congr. Concilio, Positiones, 21, 255–57. Interestingly, the Congregation referred to earlier rulings in 1572 on the Louvain privileges, suggesting that it was involved in negotiations leading to In Praecelsa. 190 May, “Konservatoren.” Nevertheless, the deacons of Saint Peter’s in Louvain, titular conservators of the university’s privileges, were members of the Faculty of Theology. 191 In the period under investigation: Gregorius Wytfliet, (1558–1594); Petrus Gudelinus (1594–1619); Cornelius Sylvius (1619–1620); Jacobus Van Haacht (1620–1621). Reusens Documents relatifs, 1, 547–548. 192 Reusens, Documents relatifs, 1. 193 Between 1589 and 1625, three abbots of Saint-Gertrudis succeeded each other as conservators; they had been preceeded by a deacon of Saint Peter’s—Michael Baius— and would be replaced, in the second quarter of the 17th century, by deacons and provosts of Saint Peter’s as well. Cf. Reusens, Documents relatifs, 1, 522–24. 194 For instance in the 1540s, at the occasion of a quarrel between the university and its abbot, who refused to accept nominees himself. Acta DD Deputatorum, 8 August 1543, RAL, OUL, 57, 22v.
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detailed guidelines on how the privileges were to be interpreted) when appointing the 9th abbot of Saint Gertrudis, Arnoldus Ab Eynthouts, as their conservator.195 While the university thus disposed of a powerful prelate of its choice in order to protect its interests, the abbots of Saint-Gertrudis could acquire for itself the prestigious function of conservator apostolicus of the Louvain privileges.196 That Eynthouts (1593–1607) and Ludovicus ab Eynatten (1607–26) presented themselves in their epitaphs to posterity in their roles, first, of abbots of Saint Gertrudis and, second, of apostolic conservators of the university’s privileges,197 illustrates the prestige that came with the function in the beginning of the 17th century.198 Academics, in return, were free to switch conservators if the present holder of the office did not act according to their wishes; a possibility that was, in the course of the 16th century, considered more than once. Their room for manoeuvre to do so, however, was in fact limited. In 1615, a few members of the Faculty of Arts suggested that the abbot of the Premonstratensian abbey of Park near Louvain, by then the university’s protector at court,199 should be involved in his quality of titular conservator of the university in the defence of the faculty’s privileges. It was concluded that this could be done only with the consent of the abbot of Saint Gertrudis; after which no further initiatives were taken in order not to offend the latter200 and not to alienate a powerful prelate who had, just as much as the abbot of Park, a seat as a representative of the First Order in the States of Brabant. Academic claims must have seemed particularly odious to those confronted with them. Legal traditions held that apostolic conservators could only proceed when the violations of the privileges they had
195 The contract contained instructions on how to interpret the university’s privileges and admonitions to ignore counterarguments specified in the contract. Acta Universitatis, 31 May 1593; RAL, OUL, 60, 319v. 196 The promotion of the priors of Saint-Gertrudis to abbots had to add to the lustre of the conservatory. Cf. the bull Romanus Pontifex of 2 March 1450, issued by Nicolas V on the request of Philip of Burgundy, in Reusens, Documents relatifs, 1, 442–44. 197 Reusens, Documents relatifs, 1, 522–23. 198 It is not known to what extent the income from fees and honoraria may have added to the attractiveness of the function, as no decent study of the curia conservatorialis, including its economic aspects, exists. 199 The abbot had been appointed by the archduke and the pope as visitator of the university in 1607, and became the university’s princely superintendant in 1617. Cf. p. 431–86. 200 Acta Facultatis Artium, 16 August 1615, RAL, OUL, 715, 43v.
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to protect were notorious; that in other cases, ordinary jurisdiction had to run its course. The university’s conservator nurtured a rather ample interpretation of this “notoriety,” just as much as the academics themselves.201 Thus any contestation of a nominee’s claims became a blatant violation of academic privileges. And last but not least, academics claimed that the only ordinary jurisdiction in cases involving university men was the academic one—that is, if it suited them, since many members of the university sought justice elsewhere as well. Again, the notion of poverty would prove to be central to their argumentation in the beginning of the 17th century. The privileges of nomination had been granted to academics because they were poor; consequently, if the latter had to bear the costs of procedures before other tribunals, or even in Rome, their poverty would inhibit them from gaining access, because they could not afford adequate representation; last but not least, they could not be evoked outside the walls of the city of Louvain because of the importance of their tasks. It is, consequently, hardly surprising that contestation of nominations was often inextricably linked with the contestation of academic jurisdiction. The jurisdictional bull Rationi Congruit of 1523 had been ratified in 1531 by the Caroline Concordat. This princely charter introduced significant restrictions to the conservator’s jurisdiction over faculty nominations involving benefices in Habsburg lands.202 The latter could only rule in cases in which a suppositus of the university was involved; if the latter had already left the university, his case was to be brought before ordinary ecclesiastical tribunals for procedures in petitorio (i.e., over the validity of competing legal titles), and before the princely councils in the provinces in possessorio, i.e., in procedures that provisionally assigned the possession of a benefice to one of the parties. “Real and corporal” possession and the usufruct of a benefice were, after Roman law, considered distinct from legal titles granted by ecclesiasti-
201 The notion “contra notoria universitatis privilegia” is repeated, indeed, time and again, for instance in the closing speeches of the university’s advocatus fiscalis at the curia conservatorialis, trial of Gerardus Reijneri against Adamus Harlebecanus, Dossiers des procès, 1596, RAL, OUL, 5831. 202 “Queret aliquis utrum restrictiones seu modificationes privilegii Leonini iniecte perdicta concordata etiam hodie observari debeant in privilegio Sixtino responditur negative tum quod Sixtinum sit longe anterius et non ita preiudicet collatoribus ordinariis, tum maxime quod concordata ista tantum agant de privilegio Leonino, et tanquam restrictiva seu alias modificativa sint stricte accipienda, et ita nuper decidit concilium privatum contra capitulum Sancti Amati Duaci.” Vande Velde, De nominationibus Lovaniensium, c.1630, KBR, Manuscrits, 22191, 2r–v.
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cal authorities. For higher appeals en court de Rome, litigants could only turn to apostolic judges in partibus, usually local Church dignitaries—the deacon of Saint Peter’s or the abbot of Saint Gertrudis, to name a few—who were commissioned by the nuncio to settle specific disputes over benefices and other issues and who were assisted by an assessor appointed by the university.203 While the apostolic court of appeal at Louvain allowed academics to conduct Roman lawsuits without having to leave the university town, it was less permanent an institution than the tribunals of the rector and the conservator. The state of its archives is in keeping with this ad hoc character of the institution.204 Files with respect to lawsuits over benefices obtained via the privileges of nomination are lacking for the period under investigation. The deafening silence on this institution in the sources suggests that they did not play a primary role in dispensing academic justice.205 In his widely read textbook for nominees, Vande Velde stated dryly that only a minority among nominees bothered appealing to the conservator for procedures that went beyond the sending of litterae inhibitoriales to collators or apostolic executors promoting the interests of competing candidates in the beginning of a legal conflict. Academics, including university nominees, did not flinch from appealing more frequently to the prince’s tribunal than to that of the conservator in order to secure possession of their benefice, provided the benefice in question was situated in Habsburg Lands. University men, just as much as other clerics, preferred the instruments of coercion that princely councils had at their disposal against their competitors. Lawsuits before ecclesiastical courts (including the curia conservatorialis), by contrast, were notorious for their endless and tiresome procedures in petitorio.206
203 The papal nuncio, as legatus a latere of the Holy See, was endowed with the institutional tools to claim this function for himself; in practice, the nuncios had to avoid offending local and national constitutions. Wauters, “De speelruimte.” Commissiones of this type constituted the sixth series of expeditions of the Dataria Apostolica. Cfr. ASV, Dataria Ap., Expedit., 1–5. 204 That is, in the archives of the university’s apostolic court of appeal. Only eight files are preserved in Dossiers des procès et appels soumis au juge synodal délégué par l’autorité apostolique, RAL, OUL, 6218–6220, respectively, for 1577–90; 1608–15, and 1620–22. 205 The apostolic court of appeal may have been active more frequently in the second half of the 17th century. Cf. De Vocht, Inventaire, 501, n. 1. See also Vandenghoer, De rectorale rechtbank. 206 “Duplex est iudicium beneficiale petitorium et possessorium, licet autem liberum sit preterire possessorium et immediate intentare petitorium, vix tamen ullus hoc
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Roman circuits holding a grudge against lay interference in benefice affairs suggested that this distinction between different procedures was academic; arguments concerning the legal title to a benefice inevitably popped up in procedures in possessorio as well. This association would make the Brabant academics vulnerable at the court of Rome, where ecclesiastical jurisdiction had become, under the banner of the Tridentine decrees, a central preoccupation of what has appropriately been called “la seconde centralisation romaine.”207 When Frangipani moved from Cologne to Brussels in 1596 to become the first nuncio of Fiandra, he got no new instructions, since he was familiar with the “huomori e negotii” in the region, but in his correspondence, the nipote added that the papal representative at the archducal court had to defend ecclesiastical jurisdiction at all occasions.208 His successors were instructed to be vigilant towards infringements on ecclesiastical jurisdiction by the councils, even if their Roman patrons felt, “for the time being,” impotent to adapt jurisdictional practices in the Netherlands to their views. Conversely, archducal ambassadors were instructed to assure the pope during the first audience that no novelties had been introduced in the field, and never would be under the reign of his obedient son; when problems arose, the Holy Father should not lend an ear to “hommes indiscrètes et inconsidérés” but should await the explanation of the prince, who was the most respectful among Catholic princes towards the Holy See and the jurisdiction of the Church.209 It is in this context that Louvain academics struggled, during three decades, to have their privileges of nomination and jurisdiction confirmed against their competitors in the Principality of Liège.
fecerit tum quia possessorium facilius enervatur, tum quia eo preterito pars gaudebit interea possessione nisi utrimque aliter conveniatur . . . tum quia praxis ista sic ordinatur et minus obnoxia cavillationibus, incidentibus et appellationibus moratoriis, tum quia ut summum tantum potest bis in totum a iudice regio appellari, ita ut saltem 2da provocatione veniatur ad curiam supremam. Ubi a conservatore una et eadem pars potest appellare donec 3° conformiter fuerit condemnatus.” Guilielmus Vande Velde, De nominationibus Lovaniensium, c.1630, KBR, Manuscrits, 22192, 48r and 49r. 207 See Lefèbvre and Pacaut, L’Epoque Moderne. 208 “Sarà bene che ella s’informi delle cose di giurisditione, che intendo patiscono asssai in quelle parti, et avvisarme di ciò et d’ogni altra cosa minutamente che passi, tanto di Stato come di altra materia.” Aldobrandini to Frangipani, 27 April 1596, ed. Cauchie and Maere, Recueil des instructions générales, 3; a second admonition followed on 9 November 1596, ibidem, 7. 209 E.g., in the first instruction to Richardot, first archducal legate in Rome, Négociations de Rome, 15 June 1600, AGR, Audience, 438, 135r–140r.
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3.5. The litmus test of the market: Efficiency and necessity of the Louvain privileges of nomination Between 1598 and 1621, the nomination boards of the university and the Arts faculty issued c.800 nomination letters, at least 330 of which led to the formal acceptation of a benefice. The Louvain privileges of nomination provided their beneficiaries with a niche that, from a quantitative point of view, resembled the one occupied by an archbishop such as Matthias Hovius within the boundaries of his diocese or that occupied by a handful of big employers among other ordinary collators such as abbots or chapters. Unlike to ordinary collators, nomination boards could claim to be the managers of a far more differentiated number of benefices, their niche in the clerical job market not being limited to a fixed benefice pool. This allowed university men to put their nominations to use in line with their perception of the situation in the clerical job market. The number of benefices claimed under the authority of the university and of the Arts faculty was impressive, even when compared with the (much larger) number of papal provisions in the ecclesiastical provinces of Cambrai and Mechlin or in Liège. What do these numbers actually represent? Scholarship has made it incontestably clear that not all Roman bulls eventually resulted in the possession of a benefice in the later Middle Ages, an assessment that is probably valid for papal provisions in the early modern period as well. Nor can it be taken for granted that all individuals in Hovius’ collation registers eventually ended up as holders of the benefices the archbishop had bestowed on them. The right man on the right place tends to emerge only at the end of the negotiations today as well as in the 17th century, and appointments by legitimate authorities did not necessarily mark the end of the procedures. In the absence of a clear-cut consensus about who was to be recruited by whom for which position, and because of the organisation of the Church into communicating local and universal entities, candidates for office and lords of benefices had to realise their claims in a highly formalised way—if not in courts of law. All this applies to Louvain nominees as well. Many a nominee may have witnessed his claims being declared unfounded. Between 1588 and 1625, 60 to 70 references to lawsuits or to requests for legal assistance surfaced in university and faculty minutes. And a substantial proportion may have preferred to strike a deal with a competitor in exchange for a pension or another benefice—an outcome that was envisaged in academic statutes on the number of benefices that each
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individual was allowed to hold by virtue of academic nominations. Only an in-depth investigation into the number of nominations resulting in the possession of a benefice, and into the share of benefices garnered by nomination letters compared to other legal instruments, may reveal whether or not nominations and the acceptations resulting from them were indeed the cause of many a graduated cleric’s fortunes. But this is a book about academics pondering their chances in the clerical job market. Let us therefore focus on how they themselves assessed the efficiency and the necessity of the Louvain privileges of nomination. The first question has received many answers from a wide range of observers. Scholarship has revealed that even in the 18th century, the participation of nominees in the diocesan concursus for rectorships in the archdiocese of Mechlin was a mere formality, ending up as they did anyway on the positions of their choice.210 In the early 17th century, the bishop of Antwerp had proposed to impose restrictions on the acceptations of canonships in order to induce graduates to join the decimated army of the Church in the parishes—a measure that only made sense if collators did not consider nomination letters as mere “letters of application.” In 1600, Frangipani, the first nuncio to Flanders, warned the Secretariat of State in Rome that his room for manoeuvre in a row between a papal providee and a nominee over a canonship in Ghent was limited: the nomination indults granted to the academics were “si manifesti, et in uso” that the ministers of the prince in the councils of justice intervened in their favour.211 In 1613, academics would balk at substituting other legal instruments for their privileges when they had the chance to do so in the context of the “Roman Question,” nor would they seize the occasion of previous confirmations to introduce substantial innovations.212 It should be noted that just two or three individuals were registered as petitioners in Rome for novae provisiones of benefices they had accepted
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Quaghebeur, “Le concours diocésain,” 879. “L’altra è che l’indulti dell’università di Lovanio sono qui si manifesti, et in uso, ch’il provisto da quella anteriore nel tempo dell’altro provisto da Nostro Signore, et ottiene il possesso, difficilmente può privarsene, quando viene difeso da detti ss ministri . . . per la giurisdittion ch’hanno in ogni sorte di causa possessoria ecclesiastica.” Frangipani to San Giorgio, 2 December 1600, ASV, Fondo Borghese, III, 98c.1, 237r–v. Verdicts in benefice affairs constitute half of the Privilegia printed in 1728. 212 Memorandum of the university, Négociations de Rome, 20 September 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 235r–v. 211
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via academic privileges in between 1598 and 1621.213 Douai, in one of its vain attempts to acquire its own privilege of nomination in the course of the 1570s, drafted a letter of supplication to the pope with a proposal for an institutional framework that was modelled after the Louvain privileges.214 All this suggests that university men had reasons to be satisfied with their privileges. Keeping nominations the single cause of graduated cleric’s fortunes required a lot of work, however, the efficiency of academic nominations being crafted by their procedures. Jansenius’ trivial reference to his being “deuxiesme en nomination” reveals that no competition could arise between different nominees (who were also much less numerous than their French equivalents); further, the room for manoeuvre of the ordinary collator to pick a nominee of his choice was correspondingly limited, being fobbed off, as he was, with one single candidate between the legally (or statutorily) prescribed intervals. Academic statutes went to great lengths to ensure that ordinary collators had no say whatsoever. Connivances with ordinary collators who tried to have their own cronies nominated by academic boards were strictly forbidden.215 At first sight, such a stipulation could only have been obsolete. Nominees 213 Aegidius Baius, a member of the clan of the Baianides who will play a prominent role in the next chapters, combined a provision with a nomination for an altar dedicated to Saint Catherine in the collegiate church of Saint-Hermes in Ronse. Dossiers des procès, 1603–1608, RAL, OUL, 5832; Henricus Paridanus, for a canonship in the cathedral of Ypres, for instance in Borghese to Sanseverino, 24 August 1619, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 105, 356v. Adrianus de Proost, a professor in Law, was recommended via the dispatches of the nunciature as well in order to obtain a benefice, but he does not figure among the Louvain nominees. Bentivoglio to Borghese, 16 February 1615, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 110, 110r. About two dozens nominees in the population figure in the Per Obitum series, but only one-quarter of them were university men at the time. 214 The proposal enumerated the circumstances in which the rector or the vicerector, assisted by members of the Congregatio, could burden the collations of ecclesiastical persons or institutions. Procedures were roughly the same, although not surprisingly, the regulations de preferentia differed substantially. The draft proposed different taxae for distinct groups of beneficiaries. The University of Douai’s plans differred in this from those of the Louvain privileges, that they also sought to reach specific groups of graduates holding teaching positions in schools for the humanities, in collegiate or cathedral churches, or who were involved in pastoral care. This suggests that the Douai proposal was shouldered by the archbishop of Cambrai, who was also projected as the university’s apostolic executor alongside the abbots of SaintVaast and Anchin. Louvain had obtained its privileges without the bishops’ intervention. Copia libelli supplicis universitatis Duacensis Rome SS exhibende, submitted to the Privy Council before 24 January 1574, UAL, OUL, 307. 215 “Item bona fide asseris quod non habes mutuum intellectum cum isto collatore ad cuius collationem petis nominari ad occupandum scilicet hanc nominationem in
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needed local channels of support, relying as they did on relatives or friends to act as informants or as apostolic executors on their behalf. Preliminary contacts with local Church magnates may have been the rule rather than the exception, and more than one letter of nomination was probably accompanied by letters of recommendation from the beneficiary’s college president; from other academic patrons, or even from the university itself to the collator in question. Academic authorities did not seek to eradicate such practices: a (rare) attestation in the minutes of a nominee who claimed to have been provided with the same benefice both by the ordinary collator and via his letter of nomination was not severely reprimanded.216 By definition, such practices rarely, if ever, ended up in official academic records. That was probably the point of prohibitive academic statutes of this type: they had to guarantee that no collator could formally claim any right of consent, any initiative on his or her behalf being explicitly ruled out by the interrogation procedures aspiring nominees had to go through when presenting themselves before academic nomination boards. And precisely because such practices had been rendered sufficiently inexistent in academic statutes and minutes, ample room could be left for informal agreements with Church magnates. This formalistic stance was adopted in other situations that threatened to reduce the efficiency of academic privileges. Once a nomination had been awarded and/or a benefice accepted, the nominee’s rights were sacrosanct. Academic authorities were recurrently approached by the nuncio, by members of the nobility of state, or by nobles with substantial clout at court to “use their authority” over nominees who were competing with their own clients for specific benefices. Although university men generously offered mediation in such cases and indeed boosted pressure on the nominee in question to be “reasonable,” they denied any suggestion that they could wield authority over an acceptor who was in suo jure, and never forced acceptors to abandon their claims.
gratiam collatoris ne ab alio forsitan nominando gravetur.” Statuta Facultatis Artium, 1602, RAL, OUL, 707, 53r. 216 I.e., the case of Viglius Breijdel, who was asked by the university to cede his right to a providee of the papal nuncio. Breijdel did not yield to peer pressure, with explicit reference to his obligations towards the ordinary collator who had provided him with the same benefice as well. Acta Universitatis, 17 November 1600, RAL, OUL, 62, 14v.
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Two examples may suffice. In July 1609, the Archdukes sent a request to the academic senate at Louvain urging its members to abstain from nominations with respect to one single benefice: the rectorship of the basilica dedicated to the Miraculous Virgin of Scherpenheuvel, a sanctuary that was destined to become the national shrine of the Catholic South. This newly endowed benefice was to remain at the bestowal of the archbishop of Mechlin. Four months earlier, Matthias Hovius had already tried, in vain, to convince the Louvainists by mobilising his friend, Jacobus Jansonius, an influential college president and Regius Professor of Scripture, for his cause.217 Because only one benefice was involved, academics could have obliged the bishop, the don, and their natural princes, but they refused to comply: making allowances to the archbishop was, after all, likely to trigger similar demands of other ordinary collators, to the detriment of the university’s poor scholars.218 The vicissitudes of Andreas Mantels, a professor in Philosophy who had accepted a canonship in the collegiate church of Saint Servais at Maastricht in 1621, offer a telling example as well. His competitor was Charles Lonson Van Eelen, the son of the Grand Dispensor of the archducal court219 and the candidate of both the Infanta Isabella— who had personally recommended him to the cardinal-protector of Fiandra, Scipione Borghese—and the papal curia, which had procured the papal provision.220 It is interesting to learn, first, that no efforts 217 The Archdukes to the university, Conseil d’Etat, Missives, Universités, 3 July 1609, AGR, Audience, 1948; Hovius to Jansonius, 26 February 1609, in Acta Universitatis, 1 April 1609, RAL, OUL, 63, 13r–14r. Hovius’ request was eventually rebuffed in Acta Facultatis Artium, 9 April 1609, RAL, OUL, 714, 428. 218 “Quod hic exemplum permovere poterit ceteros archiepiscopos et ordinarios collatores, maxime gallicarum partium et Leodiensium, ad idem tentandum vel obtinendum, et presertim, quod ordinarius loci (qui privilegia studiosorum tueri merito deberet) non nisi propter abusum gravem tale aliquid petiturum fuisse, arbitrabuntur Ubi tamen nullus verum abusum hactenus fuisse demonstravit, unde neque simile aliquod hactenus ab ullo prelato petitum fuit.” Memorandum submitted to the Archdukes by a university delegation to Brussels on 21 July 1609, Acta Universitatis, 15 July 1609, RAL, OUL, 63, 30r–v. 219 “A un hecho suyo estudiante de una prebenda que avia vacado en Mastrique, la qual la universidad de Lovayna en vertud de los privilegios que tienen de los sumos pontifices han denominado a otro, que ya tiene tomada la possession de manere que esta nuestra non tiene effecto, y hallandose cargado de tantos Hechos.” Supplication of Christobal Lonson van Eelen, dispensero mayor, to the Infanta, Négociations de Rome, before 29 August 1621, AGR, Audience, 458, 92r. 220 “Que su santitad por intercession del cardenal Borghese y la buena mana de VS havia conferido a su hijo Carolos Van Eelen.” Della Faille or De Fritema, secretary of State, to Vives, archducal resident in Rome, Négociations de Rome, 9 April 1622, AGR, Audience, 458, 92r.
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were made to chase the Louvainist from his benefice in favour of van Eelen; instead, the archducal resident in Rome was instructed to procure another expectative grace for the collegiate churches of Aachen and Maastricht.221 Second, academics felt confident enough to rebuff a request from the Infanta herself to hold their nominees in check and not to thwart Van Eelen’s chances a second time.222 Renewed lobbying in Rome by diplomatic channels on behalf of Van Eelen were matched by appeals from the academics to the States of Brabant, the warden of the land’s privileges, and by the mobilisation of their friends at court. In the course of the next chapters, it will become clear that the academics’ command of the constitutional discourse typical for the Low Countries was impressive. For now, it is obvious that this legalist attitude was not just the reflection of a political culture of sorts. It was also a device that allowed academics to hide behind the inviolable rights of nominees, to keep the door shut for all kinds of requests or for pressure from magnates, and to preserve nominations issued by academic authorities as the single cause of successful acceptations by virtue of academic privileges, independent from the support the nominee in question possibly had been able to foster from protectors outside the university. Enter necessity. The previous sections have revealed that the privileges of nomination were of use, allowing as they did their beneficiaries to respond flexibly to the opportunities they perceived on a highly differentiated, segmented, and floating clerical job market. Impressive numbers of graduates, teachers, and college presidents surface in the university’s and the faculty’s nomination books. But contrary to the academics’ (and many a historian’s) intuition that there should be a logic behind their beneficial strategies, this does not make them necessary. The work that went into keeping nomination letters the single cause of their holders’ possible success indicates that graduates who did
221 “Se sirviesse de procurarle de Su Santidad un Mandatum de providendo al nuntio que reside aqui para la primera prebenda que vacara en las yglesias de Aquisgrano y Maestricht.” De Fritema or Della Faille to Vives, Négociations de Rome, 9 April 1622, AGR, Audience, 458, 92r. 222 “Placuit responderi domino Lintermans quinque vel sex esse personas in facultate que per hoc magnum paterentur preiudicium, et facultatem nihil pose concludere nisi illae personae prius condescendant in petitionem domini Lintermans.” Acta Facultatis Artium, 23 October 1621, RAL, OUL, 715, 409.
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appeal to academic privileges could have tapped other social resources to get access to benefices. The majority of graduates in Theology did not even bother applying for them. The staunch attachment of academics to their privileges in an area that was home to one of the most open clerical job markets on the continent for graduates is impressive. Academics at Douai can serve as a control-group in this respect: despite lacking nomination privileges, the Flemish university was a big university, and France’s second biggest in the second half of the 17th century. On top of all that, the figures in the previous sections, when related to the normalisation of the clerical job market, indicate that the period of the Armistice and of the Truce (1607/09–20) was an era of golden opportunities. All this suggests that university men may have been better off without these privileges. A lot of energy was lost on their defence; their preservation made them both dependent on protectors outside the Ivory Tower and vulnerable to accusations of abuse; and their necessity was ambiguous from a market perspective. In addition, market-related arguments may convince (or fail to do so, in this case) contemporary historians when assessing the necessity of the Louvain privileges of nomination, but they barely surfaced in academic rhetoric, where the intimidating graphs figuring in the previous sections and chapters were notable for their absence. There, it was the omnipresence of heretics in the region, the poor scholars’ vital contribution to the Catholic offensive in the Low Countries as the storm troopers of orthodoxy, and (towards the authorities in Brussels) the semi-constitutional character of their privileges that did the job. Qualifications are in order. Academic nominations may have been considered useful, or even vital, by clerics trying to acquire the benefice of their choice in specific circumstances. Yet, it remains a moot point how these at-firstsight trivial matters became matters of concern for the entire academic community, the realm, and Catholic Christendom in northwestern Europe. How, in other words, their cause became a public cause that could enrol not only high-minded university dons looking after the interests of their protégés but also a wide range of earthly and heavenly protectors. It would take almost 30 years, in the Roman Question, for the public interest to dictate a confirmation of the Louvain privileges of nomination. Just as much as the efficiency of privileges was a product of a wide range of practices at Louvain, turning them into necessities for the realm and for Christendom apparently called for a lot of work, as the following chapters will reveal.
PART TWO
Assembling Academia
Titlepage 3. Reading, interpreting, and writing: fragment of a portrait of Jacobus Jansonius (1547–1625), Professor Regius of Scripture, beginning of the 17th Century, anonymous, oil on panel. For the full painting, see p. 466. [Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht]
CHAPTER FOUR
FLASHBACKS: PERFORMANCES OF ACADEMIA 1588–98
Some time in the late summer of 1598, a man in middle age left the university town on the shores of the Dyle and headed south. He may have been in a melancholic mood when turning his back on the old Brabant capital, having spent half of his lifetime in Louvain’s schools patiently trying to impart the principles and subtleties of Aristotelian philosophy to the youth. As a reward, he had been nominated by a grateful faculty to prebends in the collegiate churches of Douai and Séclin.1 Four years ago, our deserving canon had been welcomed on the highest peaks of the Louvain Parnassos, when he was solemnly proclaimed Doctor in Theology together with two other promising divines. He had more reason to be obliged towards his Alma Mater because he was an Irishman, one of the first among the hundreds of clerics who would find a safe harbour at Louvain during the next two centuries, far from the persecution in their unfortunate fatherland. His name was Peter Lombard, and he was heading for the capital of the world.2 His interests may have been many, for the call of Rome reached the inhabitants of God’s City in various ways. But at least one mission he had. His bags were filled with wordy recommendation letters accredited by the university’s seal of Saint Peter’s, authentic copies of solemn papal bulls, and cautiously worded juridical memoranda advocating a confirmation of the university’s privileges of nomination. Lombard would carry his precious burden through Liège, Trier, Milan, and Ferrara. In Ferrara, which had become briefly the theatre of papal power after its devolution from the Este to the States of the Church, he humbly implored the support of Archduke Albert, who
1 Reusens, Documents relatifs, 4; Liber secundus nominationum, 18 March 1584 and 18 August 1590, RAL, OUL, 4752, 201v and 222v. 2 Lombard was an Old-English, i.e., Anglo-Irish Catholic born (c.1554) into a longestablished merchant family in Waterford, where he had studied the classics at Peter White’s school. He arrived in the Spanish Netherlands before 1575, when he graduated as primus in the promotion of that year. Acta Facultatis Artium, 10 February 1575, RAL, OUL, 713, 64v. The basics in Clavin, “Lombard, Peter.”
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was on his way to his dubious heritage in the Netherlands.3 Both travellers, heading in opposite directions—Albert had just returned his cardinal’s hat and had married, by procuration, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia—were to become the focal points of Academia’s hopes and ambitions during the next two decades. The archduke awaited the noble task of elevating Infelix Belgium, torn by civil war and religious strife, to the flower of Christian nations again. The Irishman was sent to Rome with a mission that was considered vital to the South’s resurrection as well by his colleagues at Louvain. For ten years now, the renaissance of the old university had been hampered by the intrigues of clerics blinded by ambition and greed who harassed poor scholars who tried to obtain a small benefice as a shelter from need during old age. On Lombard’s shoulders rested the heavy burden of bringing these machinations to an end by throwing himself at the feet of the Supreme Pontiff. This chapter will delve into the decade preceding our Irishman’s travel to the Eternal City. This enables us to field several stakes, protagonists, and the networks supporting them before turning to the analysis of academic policy and interests in the archducal period (1598–1621). It deploys two “axes of identification” that informed many of the Louvain schemes in the following decades. And it broadens the scope somewhat, as other affairs—more precisely, the row with the Jesuits in the 1590s over the order’s rights to teach philosophy and theology—effectively stalled academic lobbying in Brussels and in Rome for confirmation of the university’s privileges until 1598. This episode allows us to tackle a few central questions. Even after marketrelated incentives have been proved in the previous chapters to have been a highly unsatisfactory explanation for why academics stuck to their privileges, several interpretive schemes remain on offer. These have to be put to the test in this and in the next chapters.
4.1. The pontiff, his cardinals, and the academics, 1588–98 Lombard was not the first Louvain academic, let alone the first doctor in Divinity, who travelled to the Eternal City—nor would he be the
3 Lombard to the rector and the deputy of the university, 28 November 1598, Acta Universitatis, 24 December 1598, RAL, OUL, 61, 301r.
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last, for that matter, as theologians would prove to be the university’s favourite export product across the Alps throughout the 17th century. Only eight years before, at the beginning of 1590, another learned man had been chosen by his fellow academics at Louvain to complete a mission that also would prove to be entangled with many other issues. Henricus Gravius was the son of the university’s book printer who, under the high protection of Charles V, had issued the Louvain Bible in the vernacular. Books would remain Gravius’ core business during his entire lifetime: in the Brabant university, where he would become one of the university’s leading theologians, but also in the heart of Christendom. In contrast to Lombard, Gravius had been called to Rome by the Vicar of Christ himself, in order to help the pontiff burn those books that posed a great threat to the soul and the spirit of Christians. 4.1.1. Pedanti a Roma, or the geopolitics of orthodoxy Gravius’ trip to Rome is anything but trivial to our story. He had been selected by his colleagues4 to act as a censor in a projected printing office that was to operate as a section of the Vatican Library.5 Pope Sixtus V (1585–90) had asked the university to provide him with an exquisite scholar, versed in theology as well as in law and in the classical languages. Louvain was obviously in the good books of Sixtus V’s Rome.6 In August 1589, Montalto, the cardinal-nephew, wrote to the university that the pope himself had ordered that one of the eight censors of the new Typographia Vaticana be recruited from the University of Louvain.7 Six months later, in early 1590, the famous jurist 4 This “appointment committee” consisted of two theologians and two jurists: Cuyckius, Goudanus, Wamesius, and Zuerius. Cf. the report of the commission to the university, Acta Universitatis, 2 April 1590, RAL, OUL, 60, 94r. 5 On Sixtus’ projects with respect to the Vatican Library, see Bignami Odier, La Bibliothèque Vaticane, 70–75. The committee of censors indeed was one of the 15 congregations established by the curial reform of Sixtus V, which is considered a milestone in the history of the curia. Outlines in Del Re, La Curia Romana. 6 Cf., for instance, the same letter from Montalto to the nuncio of Cologne: “Specialmente s’è scritto a l’università di Lovanio, ne la quale sappiamo esser molti theologi non solo d’insigne dottrina, ma di molto zelo verso il servitio di Dio e de la religion cattolica” Montalto to Frangipani, 1 August 1587, ed. Ehses, Nuntius Ottavio Mirto Frangipani, 3. 7 “Eiusmodi librorum emendationi restitutionique octo viros preficere constituit [= Sixtus V], quos ex Germania, ex Hispania, ex Gallia atque ex Italia deligendos curat linguarum, et ecclesiastice historie cognitione, Sacre etiam Theologie vel juris canonici
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Wamesius, professor in Law and the dictator of the university’s official letters, had received promising news from Rome: the pope had declared personally to his correspondent that he was willing to reward deserving members of this international committee of censors with the cardinalate. In addition, His Holiness had referred explicitly to the future representative of Louvain, as it was his wish that the university have a protector of its own at the curia.8 Despite the university’s dire state, academic hopes must have been running high when they selected Gravius for a position whose job description might have been written just for him. The Louvain edition of Saint Augustine’s Opera Omnia, published in 1577, had scored many successes among the Eternal City’s erudites and reportedly was still a topic of conversation in Roman palaces in 1588,9 a reputation that may have been upheld by the Roman collaborators of the Louvainists, including the late cardinal Sirleto (1514–85), the former custodian of the Vatican Library.10 In the second episode of the Baianist affair (1579–80), Louvain divines had proved themselves capable of smoking out the snake of heresy in their midst while vigourously defending the Doctor of Grace’s legacy against abusive interpretations. The relationship with the papal envoy sent for the occasion, Father Francisco de Toledo, SJ,11 had been cordial, and Pope Gregory XIII (1572–85), for his part, had not hesitated to display his concern for the war-afflicted daughter of Rome through a substantial donation. It was at the request of the papal nuncio at Cologne, Giovanni eruditione prestantes, unum ex iis petit Sanctitas Sua ab universitate vestra, quem maxime idoneum iudicaveritis” Montalto to the university, 5 August 1589, in Acta Universitatis, 13 September 1589, RAL, OUL, 60, 74v–75r. 8 “Dum de mea causa apud suam Sanctitatem agerem, dixit michi sua sanctitas quod hic Rome instituisset collegium octo doctorum . . . et reliqui duo Germani et in Germania elegisset Universitatem Lovaniensem . . . addebat quod suo tempore promoveret ad amplissimos honores etiam cardinalatus si promereatur, et quod nihil magis optaret quam quod universitas hic perpetuo haberet aliquem cardinalem qui esset protector universitatis.” Godefridus Chineij to Wamesius, 2 December 1589, in Acta Universitatis, 5 January 1590, RAL, OUL, 60, 85r–86v. Three months earlier, the pope had already referred to a doctor-protector of the Belgian provinces in general. Chineij to the university, 4 September 1589, in Acta Universitatis, 8 October 1589, ibidem, 77r. 9 Ceyssens, “Le ‘Saint Augustin’ du 17e siècle,” 118. 10 On the collaboration of Sirleto, who sent copies of 24 unedited letters of Augustine to Louvain, see Petitmengin, “A propos des éditions patristiques,” 203. On Sirleto as a pivotal figure of the recently founded Congregation of the Index during the pontificate of Gregory XIII, read Godman, The Saint as Censor, 32. 11 Cf. Grisar, “Die Universität Löwen zur Zeit der Gesandtschaft des P. Franciscus Toletus.”
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Francesco Bonomi (1584–87), that prominent divines drew up the socalled Corpus Doctrinae of Louvain, a document that confirmed the faculty’s Augustinianist position but that did not omit referring to the condemnations of Baianism by Pius V and Gregory XIII.12 The doctors’ interests in complying with the nuncio’s request (if they had not come up with the idea themselves) may have been many. Louvain divines, just as much as their colleagues at Douai, Paris, Salamanca, Alcalà, Coimbra, and several German institutions of higher learning,13 claimed a full magisterium in doctrinal affairs; a corporate authority that was wielded by a timeless body theologic that was legitimised by a heroic past in the defence of Catholicism and that was deemed (from the academic point of view) much more obliging than the authority or the professional qualifications of individuals. The Censura Lovaniensis that was drafted in 1587 on the teachings of the Louvain Jesuit Lessius on Grace and Free Will reflected, seen from this perspective, the faculty’s ambition to play a high game on the international theological scene. The most decisive element in the Louvain image-building in Rome may have been the fact that the Brabant University was the only centre of learning to answer an earlier call from Rome to the universities of Louvain, Paris, Salamanca, Coimbra, and Alcalà, back in 1587, to apply their expertise and prestige to the pope’s project:14 a former inquisitor and one of the first members of the young Index Congregation, His Holiness had decided that the Roman-Tridentine Index of prohibited books of 1565 (which was largely inspired by the Louvain Index) needed an update, as heretic authors and printers had not remained still during the last decades.15 In return, academics had sought to convince the pope that all Belgian printing offices (and by consequence book censorship) should be concentrated at Douai and Louvain.16
12
Cf. Roegiers, “Leuven en Rome.” Neveu, “Censures romaines,” 422. 14 Frajese, “La revoca dell’Index sistino,” 21. “Universitatum Parisiensis, Bononiensis, Salamantin[ae], Lovaniensis, aliarumque probatarum studia ad librorum expurgationem, et correctionem excitent, earumque diligentem operam et industriam requirant.” Congr. 28 January 1588, ACDF, Index, Diarii, 1571–1596, 30v. 15 Martinez De Bujanda et al., Index de Rome, 273. On Louvain’s involvement, see for instance Henricus Cuyckius, dean of the faculty, to the pope, 18 August 1588, in ACDF, Index, Protolli, IIa–B. 16 Henricus Cuyckius, faculty dean, in the name of the Faculty of Theology, to Sixtus V, 18 August 1588, ACDF, Index, Protocolli, IIa–2B, 579r–v. 13
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Plate 4.1. Frontispiece of Augustine’s Opera Omnia Frontispiece of the Opera Omnia, the authoritative text edition of Saint Augustine until deep into the 17th Century. The edition, which was prepared by a team of Louvain professors and their students, represented one of the university’s most prestigious enterprises of the 16th Century. [Catholic University of Louvain, Maurits Sabbe Library]
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In all these issues linking Louvain with Rome, Gravius, one of the university’s prominent philologists, had played his part, which had gained him correspondents in the Eternal City and something of a name,17 and which must have convinced the university’s appointment commission that he was fit for the job of censor—editor under a pontiff who was particularly concerned with the restoration of Christianity’s textual sources to their ancient splendour.18 However, there was probably more at stake than the prospect of spending the rest of his life in the true scholar’s most promising biotope in 17th-century Europe. And the pontiff’s benevolence had probably not been inspired merely by Louvain’s reputation. A letter from an irritated Montalto to the academics back in 1589, in which the cardinal-nephew had insisted on the modesty and the reverence to be displayed towards the Holy See, suggests that both academics and curialists wished to settle other issues as well.19 The theological disputes with the Jesuits at Louvain over Grace and Free Will had quickly escalated. A private, fraternal admonition by the faculty dons had become a public document that was sanctioned by their colleagues at Douai and that was endorsed by several high ranking Church officials in Belgium; riots were reported among students of both parties; a scandalized flock witnessed mutual recriminations of heresy launched from the pulpit as much as from the professor’s chair.20 In the name of unity among Catholics, Ottavio Mirto Frangipani, Bonomi’s successor as nuncio of Cologne, had been sent to Louvain to reduce the bickering scholars to silence and prod them into leaving the affair to the Holy See. Frangipani would soon discover that additional sticks and carrots were required, for the Louvain divines balked at submitting their views to scrutiny by the Holy Office. Interestingly, they had only decided at the peak of the conflict with the Jesuits to shoulder Sixtus’ project of
17 Cf. the remark of Ehses, Nuntius Ottavio Mirto Frangipani, 333, n. 2: “Die Wahl fiel auf den Professor Heinrich Gravius, dessen Name bereits mehrfach in dem Löwener Theologenstreit genannt worden ist.” See also Ceyssens, “Hendrik van Grave.” 18 Motta, Bellarmino, passim. 19 “Vestrum erit, quod estis polliciti litteris idibus decembris scriptis, re ipsa praestare, ut temperetis vobis in loquendo et quibuscunque rebus ostendatis modestiam vestram.” Montalto to the Faculty of Theology, 1 February 1589, ed. Ehses, Nuntius Ottavio Mirto Frangipani, 232. 20 On the role of “the people” in clerical discourse (in casu in the dispatches of the nuntiature), read Boute, “Que ceulx de Flandre se disoijent tant Catholicques.”
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drawing up a new Roman Index.21 Montalto’s answering letter of 13 September 1589 to the faculty’s eventual submission did not only laud the academics’ proverbial modesty,22 but sealed a bargain, launching the invitation for an expert from their gremium to become a member of the international committee of censors envisaged by his pontifical uncle. Having a watchdog, if not a vindicator, of the Louvain doctrinal claims in the heart of Christendom must have made dogmatic quibblers in Belgium go misty-eyed. Roman bureaucrats of the Faith, for their part, probably hoped to contain potentially embarrassing outbursts of dogmatic zeal in Belgium by drawing the Louvain doctors into their orbit, specifically the doctor who was noticed in Rome as the university’s lobbyist towards the Belgian episcopate in the Lessius controversy.23 Lessius, for his part, still tried to mobilise the Society’s expert in Rome, Bellarmino, for his cause as late as 1591.24 Other events may have fostered a sense of urgency for Louvainists, Jesuits, and curialists alike. By 1588, a dispute on similar lines had escalated into a tug of war at Salamanca between the Society and the Dominicans over the Portuguese Jesuit Luis de Molina’s Concordia gratiae et liberi arbitrii. In this episode, Cardinal-Archduke Albert of Austria (Viceroy and Inquisitor of Portugal until 1593) would become acquainted with the explosive potential of dogmatic debates, with wide political ramifications.25 When Gravius arrived in Rome in the late Autumn of 1590, he wandered into unknown territory, after the death of Sixtus V26 and the 21 When Frangipani arrived in Louvain in the second half of 1588, the Faculty of Theology had not yet answered the call from Rome to co-operate with the Sixtine Index project. “Non mi parve conveniente presentar a detta Facoltà lo breve destinatogli da N. Signore, non tanto per rispetto della causa istessa [controversy with the Jesuits], quanto per l’altro della Santità Sua, poi che havendogli Sua Beatitudine scritto altre volte su la materia dell’indice nuovo d’i libri prohibiti, non gli ha dato risposta anchora come doveva.” Frangipani to Santori, cardinal of the Holy Office, 4 July 1588, ed. Ehses, Nuntius Ottavio Mirto Frangipani, 164. Bonomi, Frangipani’s predecessor at Cologne, had already expressed his surprise about the unwillingness of the academics to react to the pontiff’s earlier brief; cf. Bonomi to Montalto (?), 22 October 1587, ACDF, Index, Protocolli, IIa–2B, 596r. 22 “Litttere vestre pridie kal. maij pergrate fuerunt Sanctissimo Domino nostro tanquam testes modestie vestre et erga Sanctitatem Suam studii ac observantie.” Montalto to the university, 13 September 1589, ed. Ehses, Nuntius Ottavio Mirto Frangipani, 332. 23 Van Eijl, “La controverse Louvaniste,” 233. 24 Motta, Bellarmino, 535. 25 Cf. p. 375–90. 26 Rumours of the pontiff ’s death reached Gravius upon his arrival in Liège. Gravius to the university, 9 September 1590, Acta Universitatis, 10 September 1590, RAL,
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ephemeral pontificate of his successor Urban VII.27 But recommendations from the university to the new pontiff, Gregory XIV,28 the latter’s determination to implement Sixtus’ plans, and a letter from the new nipote Sfondrati to the university in January 1591 kept the bargain between Rome and Louvain intact.29 The circuits in which Gravius was introduced, as a consultor of the Index Congregation and/or an expert in the service of the Magister of the Sacred Palace,30 were familiar to the academics. His first patron was Cardinal Carafa, the cardinal-protector of the Vatican Library and a member of the congregation of the Holy Office who had acted as a go-between in the Lessius affair.31 It was Carafa—presumably a stakeholder himself in having Sixtus’ plans implemented—who had helped the Belgian secure his job as a censor of the Holy See.32 Other members of the Sacred College were linked to Gravius as well: the scholar-friendly cardinals Borromeo, Colonna OUL, 60, 116v. Gravius decided to pursue his travel, despite orders from the academic senate to return to Louvain if the news proved accurate. 27 Gravius’ information on Sixtus’ death had been confirmed in Lucerne, on his way to Milan. In Milan he heard to his great despair that Urban VII, whose pontificate had only lasted 12 days, had died as well. Gravius to the university, 3 October 1590, Acta Universitatis, 16 November 1590, RAL, OUL, 60, 130v. 28 “Ceterum ut primum istic constiterit quisnam surrogatus sit pontifex, mox ad illum universitatis nomine gratulatorie scribentur littere, simulque commendabitur universitas nostra, ut quem honorem Sixtus ipsi detulerit ac in primis evocando isthinc bibliothece, noveque Typographie prefecto, eodem prosequi ipsam velit, et quem iam dudum e suo gremio in Urbem transmisit libenter suscipere.” Gravius to the university, 3 October 1590, Acta Universitatis, 16 November 1590, RAL, OUL, 60, 130v. 29 Sfondrati had given Gravius the opportunity to throw himself personally at the feet of the pontiff. Sfondrati to the university, 8 January 1591, in Acta Universitatis, 27 February 1591, RAL, OUL, 60, 163v. 30 The Master of the Sacred Palace, an office that came into existence in the 13th century and that was always entrusted to a Blackfriar, had been the first official of the curia charged, in the beginning of the 16th century, with the censorship, licensing, and prohibition of books in Rome and in the States of the Church. The “Pope’s Theologian” became an ex officio member of the Holy Office and the Index Congregation. Witcombe, Copyright in the Renaissance, 69. “Et fuit generalis Cong.o et interfuerunt Card.lis de Verona, de Ruvere, Sarnanus, Alanus et Borromaeus, et ex Consultoribus Mag.r Sacri Palatii electus Ep.us Hieracensis, Abbas Adrianus, Robertus Belarminius, Ant.s Agellius, Mag.r Angelus Rocca, Laelius Suessanus, Bartolomaeus Valverdius et Petrus Morinus cum iam obiisset Henricus Gravius Doctor Lovaniensis.” Congr. 23 March 1591, ACDF, Index, Diarii, 1573–1591, 43v. 31 Cruciani Troncarelli, “Carafa, Antonio,” 485. On Carafa as Louvain’s man of confidence in the Holy Office, read Van Eijl, “La controverse Louvaniste,” 263. 32 Further instructions from Rome, sent by Gravius and Carafa, arrived in Louvain in February. The minutes mention letters from Gravius dated on 5 January 1591 as well as from Carafa with suggestions concerning “people to write to,” but no copies of these letters were inserted in the minutes. Acta Universitatis, 7 February 1591, RAL, OUL, 60, 161r.
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(both of the Index Congregation), Cusani, and “many others” were deeply impressed by his learning, his exemplary life, and his piety.33 All this was posthumous praise, however, for Gravius’ sojourn in Rome proved to be short-lived. Only a few months after his arrival, death deprived the university both of Carafa’s protection34 and of its own representative. Gravius’ presence in the Eternal City has been eternalised by his modest epitaph in the Santa Maria dell’Anima, the national church of the Empire in Rome.35 If we are informed about the doctor’s reception among the Eternal City’s erudites, it is because of the affection “after the manner of David and Jonathan” between him and another lover of books, Cesare Baronio,36 who authored both Gravius’ epitaph and the letter to the university announcing the scholar’s death.37 An admirer of San Filippo Neri (and his confessor from 1593 onwards), Baronio was, together with cardinal Cusani, a member of the Oratorio, a spiritual congregation of secular priests in which the Sfondrati pope displayed a vivid interest. The librarian of the Vallicella, the Roman base of the Oratorians, and the acclaimed father of Catholic Church historians, he was the author of the monumental Annales Ecclesiastici, a comprehensive work of ecclesiastical history that would make history as the Catholic response to the Magdeburg Centuriae.38 Baronio’s travails in the history of the apostolic Church,
33 “Nam degustaverant egregiam ipsius eruditionem et sinceram morum probitatem, in pluribus comitiis de nonnullis ecclesiasticis controversiis summe peritie specimen edidit . . . Coluit eum inter illustrissimos ac reverendissimos cardinales vite, moribus et eruditione preclarus cardinalis Borromeus, Columna, etiam Cusanus et alii compluros cum omni officio prosecuti sunt.” Baronio to the university, 2 April 1591, Epistolae Illustrium ac Doctorum Hominum (. . .) Cesarem Baronium, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, Manoscritti Serie Q, 44, 67–68. 34 Carafa met his Maker two months after Gravius had expressed, in his letter to his friends in Brabant, his concern for the cardinal’s health. Cruciani Troncarelli, “Carafa, Antonio,” 485. 35 The church was (and is) also host to an archconfraternity. On Gravius’ small epitaph in the right side aisle, read Verweij, De Santa Maria Dell’Anima, 43–44. 36 “Et instar Jonathe cum Davide conglutinata est anima mea cum anima illius, adeoque tenaci vinculo, ut nec mors ipsa, que soluit omnia, valuerit me ab eo separare.” Baronio to the university, Epistolae Illustrium ac Doctorum (. . .) ad Cesarem Baronium, 2 April 1591, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, Manoscritti Serie Q, 44, 67–68. 37 Another letter of condolence from Pietro Francesco Giusti, the prefect of the college of the Typographia Vaticana, arrived in Louvain as well. Acta Universitatis, 15 March 1592, RAL, OUL, 60, 252r. 38 He was the editor of the Martyrologia, which would become, as far as we know, the subject of his learned correspondence with Gravius in 1588, whom he lauded for the edition of Saint Augustine. Gravius and Baronio had exchanged friendly comments on each other’s work. See Claeys-Bouuaert, “Un théologien belge,” 864–65. It
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as well as his profound Augustinianism, may have been particularly appealing to the Louvain doctor and his colleagues in Brabant.39 At Louvain, Baronio’s letter was immediately put to use for the university’s public relations.40 It also convinced university men that they were not without friends in the Eternal City, an impression that was vindicated by letters from the pope, from Sfondrati, and from Giovanni Andrea Caligari.41 The Roman erudite, who had been obliged by his honorary assumption in the Louvain assembly of doctors just two weeks before Gravius’ death,42 was immediately asked to lobby not only for another scholar of the university to be appointed official censor of the Holy See but also for this appointment to become the theological faculty’s reserve in the future as well, which had been, from the academics’ point of view, the late Sixtus’ evident intention.43 Articulating intentions of popes and princes will prove to be is not unthinkable that Gravius may have used his contacts with the Plantin presses in Antwerp to have the first parts of Baronio’s famous opus magnum reprinted. Pincherle, “Baronio, Cesare,” 477. On the Annales, see Norelli, “The Authority Attributed to the Early Church.” Other erudite contacts of Baronio in the South Netherlands included the abbot of Tournai; Martinus Delrio, the famous Jesuit author; and the humanist Lindanus, co-founder of King’s College at Louvain and bishop of Roermond (1569– 88) and Ghent (1588). 39 On Baronio’s Augustinianism, read Pastine, “Baronio e il Molinismo,” and his diatribes during the Congregationes de Auxiliis. Cf. p. 383. 40 “Speramus fore ut ea de Lovaniensi academia existimatio quae modo Romae est in nostram totius huius reipublice Belgice commoditatem . . . redundet.” Cuyckius to the Privy Council, 12 May 1591, Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281. 41 Letters from the pope in Acta Universitatis, RAL, OUL, 60, 189v–190r, Sfondrati, 190r–v, and from Giovanni Andrea Caligari, the bishop of Bertinoro, 190v–191r, whom Gravius had recommended as a potential broker in his last letter read in the Deputation of the university of 2 April 1591, ibidem, 165v–166r. 42 The rector and the university to Baronio, 29 March 1591, Epistolae Illustrium ac Doctorum Hominum (. . .) Cesarem Baronium, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, Manoscritti Serie Q, 44, 22–23. 43 “Et ab initio quando primum ad vos ex mandato Sixti Quinti de mittendo ad huius muneris functionem, nostrorum aliquo, prescriptum est, simul hoc etiam fuit adjectum, quod illo qui mitteretur defuncto, vel translato ad alterius muneris functionem successoris eligendi facultas esset penes universitatem hanc pro perpetuis futuris temporibus, idemque hoc bulla erectae typographiae apostolicae continere videatur, . . . nec deerunt ex nostris qui digne Gravio succedant sanctissimo pontifici, . . . qui paratos magis se exhibere non qui enixius se ingererere contendant, ante exploratam a te paulo propius S. Beatitudinis voluntatem uti ex exemptio litterarum quod hic adiunximus Paternitas tua deprehendet.” The university to Baronio, 4 August 1591, Epistolae Illustrium ac Doctorum Hominum (. . .) Cesarem Baronium, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, Manoscritti Serie Q, 44, 227–34. Compare: “Mittet vobis sanctitas sua litteras apostolicas, in quibus concessa esse universitati vestre electionis illius perpetua potestas [my italicisation] apparebit, vestrarum erit partium videre, ne ab aliis provinciis, atque
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the academics’ special field of expertise during the next three decades. Nonetheless, in the early 1590s, Rome failed to abide by whatever bargain university men may have made with Montalto back in 1589, the more so since the whole Lessius episode must have become old news in light of new events.44 Two conclaves and one pontificate after Gravius’ arrival in Rome,45 in March 1592, news reached the university that Ippolito Aldobrandini, a creatura of Montalto’s, had come to occupy Peter’s chair under the name of Clement VIII.46 Academic hopes, aired in the obligatory congratulation letters sent to Rome in such circumstances, were dashed one year later. A papal brief of 5 February 1593, addressed to the academic senate, limited itself to displaying the pontiff ’s favourable disposition towards the university and to recommending Baronio (the new pope’s confessor) as the academics’ best advocate ever in Rome.47 The latter was left with the task of bringing his friends at Louvain the ill tidings of wars against the Turks, heretics engulfing the Peninsula, and soaring criminality in the streets of Rome and in the States of the Church—pressing problems that distracted the pope’s attention from arts and letters.48 Qualifications are in order. Sixtus’ plans were watered down, but not buried altogether; nor were universitatibus a quibus tales viri ad urbem mittentur, vinci vos patiamini.” Montalto to the university, 5 August 1589, in Acta Universitatis, 13 September 1589, RAL, OUL, 60, 74v–75r. 44 A vague answer from Baronio to the university on June 30th, 1591: “Et si quem miseritis Romam loco Gravii, erit mihi alter Gravius.” Epistolae Illustrium ac Doctorum Hominum (. . .) Cesarem Baronium, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, Manoscritti Serie Q, 44, 236–237. 45 Gregory XIV followed Gravius into the grave in October and was succeeded by Innocent IX during the Fall of 1591. Baronio cited the constant turmoil caused by three short pontificates in a row as the reason for his failure to achieve anything for his Louvain brethren. “Irritas esse redditas ob inexpectatam mortem Summi Pontificis cui egrotanti eedem minime reddi valuerunt cardinales autem qui eas acceperunt omnes una eademque responsione atque sententia, dicunt exspectandam electionem novi pontificis.” Baronio to the university, 18 October 1591, in Acta Universitatis, 29 November 1591, RAL, OUL, 60, 234v–235r. 46 Acta Universitatis, 3 March 1592, RAL, OUL, 60, 250r–v. Attestations of correspondence with Baronio and with Pietro Francesco Giusti, the prefect of the censors of the Typographia, in which the latter was thanked for his favourable disposition towards the university, Acta Universitatis, 15 March 1592, RAL, OUL, 60, 252r. 47 Clement VIII to the university, 5 February 1593, transcription in Acta Universitatis, 29 March 1593, RAL, OUL, 60, 314r. 48 “Ut in prestenti de re litteraria nec quidem cogitandi tempus dari videatur, vos autem Petri navicule, tot fluctibus agitate, precibus subvenite, et magnis clamoribus Dominum in ea dormientem excitate.” Baronio to the university, 13 February 1593, Epistolae Illustrium ac Doctorum Hominum (. . .) Cesarem Baronium, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, Manoscritti Serie Q, 44, 237–38.
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the Louvain academics now barred from channels of communication with the Eternal City. Another countryman in the heart of the curia would be called (but declined the offer) to succeed the late Gravius as censor: Gerardus Vossius of Borgloon (1547–1607), a patrologist who, an expert of the Index Congregation,49 was in close contact with both Baronio and Cardinal Borromeo and had been in the good graces of Sirleto and Carafa as well.50 We will learn more about him later, as he figures in the next sections as Louvain’s best friend in Rome.51 Despite or because of these setbacks, the academic senate took to discussing, in September 1593, which cardinal had to be appointed as the university’s protector. At the request of Henricus Cuyckius, deacon of Saint Peter’s, chancellor of the university, and regent of the theological faculty, the academics’ first choice, Federico Borromeo,52 was eventually abandoned in favour of Giulio Antonio Santori, the cardinal of Santaseverina.53 Santori would remain the university’s cardinal-protector until his death in 1602. The latter had not only offered his services himself to the university (or to Cuyckius in the first place)54 but also was the face of the Holy Office,55 the Suprema among Roman congregations and the anticamera to the papacy in the previous decades.
49 Cf. the list of consultors recorded on 19 September 1592, ACDF, Index, Diarii, 1571–96, 52r. 50 Gysens, Gerardus Vossius, 219. 51 “Prestabit haec diligentius noster [my italicisation] Vossius.” Baronio to Lindanus, before 1588, Epistolae Illustrium ac Doctorum Hominum (. . .) Cesarem Baronium, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, Manoscritti Serie Q, 45, 30. Vossius dedicated one of his works to Baronio; see Gysens, Quatre lettres inédites de Gerardus Vossius, 161, n. 3; the author elaborates on Vossius’ contacts with Borromeo as well. The newly erected Typographia Vaticana was already weighed down by debts at the moment of Sixtus’ death, and his successors would be less generous than the Montalto pope, even if Clement VIII resumed much of Sixtus’ plans in the bull Inter Gravissimas of 20 August 1593. Bignami Odier, La Bibliothèque Vaticane, 81. With respect to Vossius’ participation to text editions patronised by the pope, his appointment and refusal, see ibidem, 80 and 91, n. 62. 52 “Pro bono affectu erga hanc universitatem et studia.” Acta Universitatis, 13 September 1593, RAL, OUL, 60, 338v–339r. 53 On Santori as a learned cardinal and a bureaucrat of the Faith, read Ricci, Il sommo inquisitore. 54 Cuyckius, faculty dean in 1588, had been the spokesman of the Louvain divines in the Lessius controversy. Cf. his correspondence with Carafa and with the pope, ACDF, SO, St. St., E 7–c, 502r, 506r–v, 684r–685v. 55 Meanwhile, letters of recommendation were sent to the Jesuit father Francisco de Toledo, who had recently been created a cardinal by Clement VIII.
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During the last conclave, he had been among the papabili;56 in order to cushion the blow, the fresh pope had appointed him Penitenziere Maggiore of the Apostolic Church.57 A professional keeper of secrets, Santori was a public persona in the Rome of Clement VIII. His Louvain move has not been documented58 and therefore leaves ample room for speculation. The supreme inquisitor may have sought to renew Louvain’s bargain with Montalto. A watchdog of the Suprema’s prerogatives from the 1570s onwards, he may have anticipated the need for support in the row he had stirred up in the summer of 1593 between the Holy Office and the cardinals of the Congregation of the Index, over the Sisto-Clementine Index of prohibited books drafted by the latter (and blocked by Santori).59 The Diari or journals of the Index reveal that the Louvain divines were charged at several occasions with the expurgation of books and that Louvain censures, notably on Erasmus, the Talmud, and Cornelius Jansenius of Elder, were a point of reference for Roman experts. The aborted Index of 1593 contained a surprisingly long list of books in Dutch.60 In 1594, the university’s censor of books—Cuyckius—was lobbying for a timely publication of the new Index.61 Or the cardinal may just have been prodded into applying for the job by Cuyckius, which does not exclude the other options. The tug of war between the two Roman congregations over their respective 56 Santori was an exponent of the Roman wisdom that whosoever enters a conclave as a pope will leave it a cardinal. A moving description of Santori’s lonely hours after the failed attempt to seat him on Peter’s chair in Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste, 11, 10–16. “Et de eoque pluries actum fuit et spes fuerit quod esset futurus pontifex summus.” Acta Universitatis, 25 September 1593, RAL, OUL, 60, 340r–v. 57 I.e., the cardinal chairing the oldest tribunal (in foro interno) of the Apostolic See: the Penitenziaria Apostolica, the supreme confessional of the Church. Cf. Borromeo, “La Penitenzieria Apostolica,” and Rodríguez, “La Riforma della Penitenzieria Apostolica.” 58 No indications are found in his diaries (Memorie de i negozi che trattò il card. Santorio (. . .), ASV, Arm. LII, 22 and 22a) of his private audiences with several pontiffs nor in Tamburini, “Gli scritti del cardinale Giulio Antonio Santoro.” 59 In this context, read Frajese, Nascita dell’Indice, 139–75, and Ricci, Il sommo inquisitore, 380–82. 60 Cf. the 1593 Index in ACDF, Index, XXXVI, 8b. The list of Dutch books seems to be a copy of the Antwerp Index; however, some titles were added and an Index Lovaniensis was referred to as a point of reference for the Latin titles. It unclear whether an updated list was referred to, or the older versions of the 1540s. 61 “Lectae literae Regii et Pontificii Censoris librorum apud Lovanienses quae Sanctissimo Domino Nostro praesentatae fuerant, et decretum quamprimum insistendum expurgatorio Indice conficiendo ut pro utilitate omnium publicari possit.” 3 June 1594, ACDF, Index, Diarii, 1573–1596, 74r.
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competences and the methods of censorship to be applied involved, among others, Louvain’s famous and recently returned celebrity, Justus Lipsius, and his Politica.62 This book would, together with his De magnitudine Romana, exert an immense appeal throughout the courts of Europe. In Rome, it was notorious for its controversial inclusion in the suspended Index of 1590 and that of 1593.63 Cuyckius himself had become a stakeholder as well: the university’s censor of books,64 he had supervised and rubber-stamped Lipsius’ revision of the Politica following his reconciliation with the Church and his return to the South Netherlands and had corresponded on his behalf with another acquaintance of the Lovanienses, Bellarmino, who had to be rehabilitated by Clement VIII as a consultor after the unsavoury affair of the Sixtine Index. A former professor at the Louvain Jesuit college, Bellarmino was not only proposed by Cuyckius and Lipsius as an acceptable mediator in their issues with the congregation65 but also would recurrently be appealed to by the Brabant Alma Mater in the decades to come. At first sight, the link among Louvain, Cuyckius, and Santori looks like a renversement des alliances, Gravius having been associated by Baronio with Borromeo and Colonna, prominent members of the Index Congregation. Had academics at Louvain got bogged down in the quagmire of curial intrigues? That would require more evidence. It is intriguing that the late Sixtus had installed an international committee of no fewer than eight censors based in the Vatican Library, with the explicit goal of confining Catholic readers of patristic and ecclesiastical works to editions
62 On Lipsius, the Politica, and the reception and recuperation of his ideas in Europe, read the chapter “Scepticism, Stoicism and raison d’état” in Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 31–64. 63 De Bujanda, Index de Rome, 314, 420–21. The Politica’s fate was a hot topic of conversation in Rome: in the Congregation of the Index, which had explicitly included it in a session in October 1592 (Waszink, Justus Lipsius: Politica, 175); as well as by Clement VIII, in his Animadversiones to the Congregation’s cardinals urging them to remove the book from the list together with Bodin, Scaliger, and Masson. Frajese, Nascita dell’Indice, 153. 64 Cuyckius would occupy this role, and the related “royal” canonship in the first chapter of Saint Peter’s, until 1596 (when he was appointed bishop of Roermond), and he was succeeded by Guilielmus Fabricius. Vingeroedt, Chanoines de Saint Pierre. 65 Waszink, Justus Lipsius: Politica, 175–76. On Bellarmino’s double role as an author figuring in the Sixtine Index of 1590 (the predecessor to the suspended Index of 1593 that never went public because of the pope’s death in 1590) and as a consultor of the Index, cf. Godman, The Saint as Censor. Cf. Ceyssens, “Bellarmin et Louvain (1569–1576).”
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approved by Rome and produced by the Typografia.66 It is even more intriguing that simultaneously the Congregation of the Index’s room for manoeuvre was seriously curtailed by the pope,67 among others in the momentous reform of the curia in 1588.68 But Gravius had arrived in Rome two (admittedly short) pontificates too late, and did not live long enough, for the university to become a highly visible stakeholder, let alone a stake, in affairs that did more than opposing just a few cardinals of two competing congregations. The debates of the day antagonised supporters and opponents of moderation in the use of repressive methods (which did not unequivocally overlap with membership of one of the two congregations involved); over the position to be adopted towards nervous Venetian printing offices, which feared that Roman indecision or rigidity would ruin their business; and over the policy to be conducted towards the Serenissima’s major ally on the Peninsula, Henry of Navarre, the heretic king of France who was waging war on the Habsburg Netherlands. The rehabilitation of Henry IV among Catholic princes by Clement VIII, which was one of the most momentous events of the Aldobrandini pontificate,69 as well as the Clementine compromise in the Index of 1596 (which rehabilitated the Politica)70 were not merely the result of the victory of one curial faction over another.71 Roman politics of the day were compatible with Clement’s desire to redraw the political map of the curia and to keep at bay Spanish hegemony in Rome (whose champions were identified with hardliners in the Index and in the Holy Office)—a hegemony 66
Godman, The Saint as Censor, 103. The board of censors based in the Vatican Library is not discussed in recent scholarship. 68 It is this reform, only to be readdressed fundamentally under Pius X (1903–1914), which systematised and institutionalised specialised committees of cardinals (the Roman congregations) which were to function alongside the medieval Consistory (the assembly of the Sacred College of cardinals that advised the pope), the tribunals (Signatura Justitiae, the Sacra Romana Rota and the Penitenzieria Apostolica), and the offices (Cancellaria Apostolica, the Reverenda Camera Apostolica, the Dataria). Outlines in Del Re, La Curia Romana. 69 On the grand affairs of Clement VIII’s pontificate, read Fattori, Clemente VIII e il Sacro Collegio. 70 The appointment of Marcantonio Colonna, the leading figure of the beleaguered Index Congregation, to the protectorship of the Vatican Library after Carafa’s death, should probably be situated in this context. 71 This notwithstanding the opposition respectively from Spain against the absolution of Henry of Navarre and from Philip II’s man in Rome Peña, the Spanish auditor of the Sacra Romana Rota and a consultor of the Roman Index congregation. On Lipsius’ reception by the Spanish Inquisition, read Waszink, Justus Lipsius: Politica. 67
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from which academics had greatly benefitted under the pontificate of Gregory XIII72 but which now risked inflicting collateral damage on those involved in the Lipsius affair. Nor were Roman politics the result of grand strategies designed by the Supreme Pontiff himself. The outcome of both affairs was mediated, to a great extent, by circuits with wide ramifications that more often than not were related somehow to the Oratorio, the religious community that was to evolve into Papa Aldobrandini’s main think tank. It is from among the pious and erudite members of Neri’s Oratory that Clement chose his confessor: Cesare Baronio, who had recently been restyled a full-blown doctor Lovaniensis. Louvain probably failed to become the plaything of different curial or national factions, and it is relatively safe to conclude that curialists hardly bothered identifying the Louvain doctors with one of these factions. Individuals such as Santori or Baronio may have anticipated events or opportunities that never came about. The affair of the Censura Lovaniensis was eventually shelved by the Holy Office, the virtues of doctrinal imprecision being more valued in the Eternal City than among pedanti with an axe to grind in Belgium.73 Yet, it is evident that c.1590, the university’s official channels of communication with the Eternal City, which involved the learned cardinals and erudites at the courts of Sixtus V and Clement VIII, were monopolised by the theologians (and in 1593 by Cuyckius in particular). Seen from this perspective, the prime mover behind the Louvainists’ repeated attempts to establish close relations with the curia were theological issues in which they had high stakes. In this scenario, Homo Academicus’ most precious commodity was the university’s cultural capital, which was the object of the endless struggle for domination within the university and in the Eternal City. Conversely, contacts with the curia could reinforce considerably one’s position in the academic field, as the example of Cuyckius suggests. In Roman politics, however, a pedantic disposition towards toxic theological debates hampered Louvain ambitions to
72 I.e., with respect to the confirmation of the academics’ privileges of nomination and the derogation to the Council of Trent that had to make their privileges viable; as well as the donation of 2,000 ducati de camera (c.4,000 florins): measures that were taken at the request of Philip II. On the unique position of the Monarquía in Rome under “El Rey Prudente,” read Dandelet, Spanish Rome. 73 On the notion of the “pedante” in Italian courts, which was associated with monks and academics, read Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier, 115–16. The concept should not be overstretched, as the Inquisition is, of course, not an exponent of court life.
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redeem its cultural capital in social, corporate capital (sufficient support among members of the Sacred College resulting in a confirmation of academic privileges) until 1616. 4.1.2. Modesty, books—and benefices Another scenario is possible, however. Relations between Rome and Louvain went beyond theological disputes; these may not have mattered that much at all, as they were barely discussed in official university minutes; and many of the preliminaries in the previous section are sheer coincidence rather than grand strategies concocted by the theologians. The Louvain divines did not insist on a swift decision in the Lessius dispute either, despite the silence imposed on them by Frangipani until Rome had spoken. This suggests that theologians and their colleagues on the university board were concerned about something else; that being disowned by Rome in doctrinal affairs would harm other, more fundamental interests; and that Academia’s wiremen established communication lines with the major centre of patronage in the West in order to preserve these interests rather than to settle theological conundrums. In this scenario, the relation between knowledge and social resources is to be inverted. It is this plot that is most supported by the evidence in faculty and university minutes from the 1590s. To start with, Wamesius and the university had been informed in 1589 and 1590 about Sixtus’ promising plans to have a Louvain doctor elevated to the cardinalate by a student and client of his, Godefridus Chineij. The latter apparently had high stakes of his own in having a protector at the curia. A nominee of the Arts faculty, his acceptation of a canonship in Tongeren had been challenged by Roman writs, and he had complied. While pursuing his case for the Sacra Romana Rota, he spied on behalf of his colleagues at Louvain on the bishop of Tournai who was believed to be lobbying, during his visit ad limina apostolorum,74 for the University of Douai taking over Louvain’s rights 74 Sixtus V had, with the apostolic constitution Romanus Pontifex of 20 December 1585, extended the (obsolete) obligation for Italian bishops to visit the tombs of the Apostles at regular intervals to all bishops of Latin Christianity. Every 3, 4, 5, or 10 years they were expected to inform the pope of the “state of their diocese,” which in many cases came to replace, in a written form, the quinquiennial travel from the South Netherlands to the Eternal City. A list in Cloet, Repertorium van dekanale visitatieverslagen.
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of nomination in its own hinterland.75 In the past few years, another nominee had faced similar problems: in 1588, Gisbertus Danielis, a teacher in Philosophy, had asked for litterae inhibitoriales of the conservator of the privileges against a competitor for another canonship at Tongeren. He had been told by the academic senate that a friend in Rome (who turned out to be Carafa) would be contacted in order to shield him from being summoned by Roman tribunals.76 Soothing answers from Carafa notwithstanding,77 Danielis was summoned with reference to the bull In Coena Domini by Orazio Borghese, the auditor of the Apostolic Chamber and general executor of apostolic letters,78 to appear before his tribunal within 60 days.79 Two delegations of academics armed with copies of the academics’ papal bulls were sent to Frangipani, who then stayed at Louvain in the context of the Lessius controversy,80 to recommend the faculty’s case; but in spite of the nuncio’s promise to intervene,81 Danielis’ brother in misfortune Chineij was the next victim of a papal writ. 75 Chineij to Wamesius, 2 December 1589, in Acta Universitatis, 5 January 1590, RAL, OUL, 60, 85r–86v. Louvain’s suspicion about its sister institution’s plans would not be roused again in the period under investigation. Cfr. Part I. The university’s attitude towards Vendeville, the bishop of Tournai, was ambiguous, the latter having been asked before his departure to recommend the university’s interests in Rome. Acta Universitatis, 14 November 1589, RAL, OUL, 60, 80r. It is indeed this bishop who would be identified as a “patronus singularis” for having invested in the Louvain pedagogy of the Falcon. 76 Acta Universitatis, 6 September 1588, RAL, OUL, 60, 21v. 77 “Placuit Sanctissimo domino nostro cum quo nomine universitatis vestre de causa beneficiaria magistri Gisberti Danielis diligenter ei, ut ea cognoscenda, et decidenda iuxta privilegia apostolica vobis concessa istuc remitteretur.” Carafa to Wamesius (in his quality of dictator litterarum of the university, see Reusens, Documents relatifs, 1, 311), 12 October 1588, in Acta Universitatis, 30 January 1590, RAL, OUL, 60, 30v. 78 The Auditor Generalis Causarum Reverendae Camerae Apostolicae, often referred to as the Uditore del papa or A.C., had as the president of the tribunal of the Apostolic Chamber initially been competent in financial crimes committed by papal collectors and in civil disputes between the latter and those who had to pay taxes and annates, and had gradually expanded his field of action. Del Re, La Curia Romana, 299–301; but Borghese’s jurisdiction as executor generalis was legitimised by special faculties granted by the pope. Cf. the copy of a decisio rotalis, Leodiensis canonicatus coram Pegna, 12 May 1597, in Acta Universitatis, 18 September 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 335v–336v. 79 A copy of this writ (no date) in Acta Universitatis, 10 April 1589, RAL, OUL, 60, 335v–336v. 80 Frangipani arrived at Louvain, according to his correspondence, on 22 June 1588 and stayed in the Brabant city until 3 December, when he corresponded from Liège with the Segretaria di Stato in Rome. See Ehses, Nuntius Ottavio Mirto Frangipani, 2, 159 and 206. 81 Delegations that included several university officials visited the nuncio on 24 and 25 September 1588; no recommendation letter in support of academic pleas is
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All this puts Montalto’s letter to the Faculty of Theology of February 1589 into a different perspective. In response to a recommendation letter from Wamesius (Chineij’s academic patron), Montalto had intervened with his uncle to have the affair of the Louvain privileges transferred to an auditor of the Sacra Romana Rota. Montalto’s may have been a subtle warning rather than a favour, however, as another option was on offer: the way of grace. The Supreme Pontiff had displayed his willingness to confirm the university’s privileges, provided that the academics were prepared to acknowledge the pope’s benevolence.82 The call for modesty to be displayed by the theologians and Louvain’s subsequent demonstrations of obedience and reverence towards the Holy See obviously aimed at negotiating another bargain between the pope and the academics:83 in his already mentioned letter of 13 September 1589, which lauded the academics for their modesty, Montalto indicated that the file of the Louvain privileges had been transferred for examination from the Rota to Cardinal Lancelotti.84 More favours were to follow in exchange for Louvain’s reverence towards the Holy See, this being the letter in which the university was invited to appoint one of the pope’s future censors. Montalto’s warning that the path of grace was more likely to produce results was verified in the last months of 1589 and in 1590. In Chineij’s letters to Wamesius and Danielis, competing clientelist factions materialised that were firmly embedded in the microcosm of the tribunals and offices at the curia. The fact that the pope had suggested charging the cardinal datario (Gianbattista Palotta) with the examination of the university’s privileges suggests that it was not the university’s intellectual interests but its material interests that became the play-
recorded, however, in the dispatches of the nunciature (Ehses, Nuntio Ottavio Mirto Frangipani) in between 1588 and 1590. 82 “Id enim et Sanctitas Sua propensio erga vos, et merita virtutis vestre postulant, ut in eiusmodi rebus, que ad commoda vestra pertinent Romani pontificis beneficentiam agnoscatis.” Montalto to the university, 10 December 1588, Acta Universitatis, 8 March 1589, RAL, OUL, 60, 34. 83 In order not to stir things up, the university decided to drop its allusions to the Jesuit controversy in the letter it planned to write to Carafa for the preservation of their privileges; instead, the secretary of the Inquisition, Santori, had to be “instructed” on the Jesuit controversy. Another letter had to be written to Orazio Borghese. Acta Universitatis, 3 June 1589, RAL, OUL, 60, 46v. 84 Cardinal Scipione Lancelotti (cardinal 1583–98), who had been an auditor of the Rota himself, not his nephew Orazio Lancelotti (cardinal 1611–20). See Weber, Genealogien zur Papstgeschichte, 2, 547.
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thing of different factions within the curia. Chineij found out that the datario had a case pending before Franciscus Oranus, a Rota auditor who happened to be the patron of Chineij’s challenger. In order not to offend Oranus, the cardinal refused to comply with his request to examine the university’s privileges.85 Chineij was duly deprived from his canonship within the next few months. Another protest letter from Wamesius, the university’s dictator,86 and another display of favour by Montalto later, the case had been removed (once more) from the Rota by the pontiff himself, as His Holiness was inclined, the cardinalnephew insisted, to cover the university with favours. Instead, Cardinal Pinelli (a member of the Holy Office and well acquainted with the Lessius affair)87 had been commissioned with the hearing of the case at the request of the Louvain procurators in Rome.88 Despite letters of recommendation and an instruction sent to Pinelli by Wamesius in favour of his client, these events did not shield Chineij’s colleague Danielis from sharing the same fate and being declared by the Rota an intrusus who had to be removed from his canonship. Meanwhile, Chineij had lost his academic patron at Louvain with the death of Wamesius in the first half of 1590. Two conclusions leap to the eye. First, after Wamesius’ death, the academic senate of the university, in sharp contrast to the congregation of the Arts faculty, refused to become a party in Danielis’ and Chineij’s case and balked at complying with Chineij’s request to appoint Laurens Dublioul (his Majesty’s agent for the Netherlands), 85 “Et propterea insteti quod alius ex illustrissimis cardinalibus surrogaretur, verum hactenus hec non potui impetrare licet maximam adhibuerim diligentiam, et propterea . . . tandem adivi illustrissimum cardinalem datarium et ipsum cum meo advocato informavi qui videns iusticiam cause mee, et tamen nolens offendere rotam et D. Oranum quem habet iudicem in propria causa, noluit causam nostram acceptare.” Chineij to Wamesius, 2 December 1589, Acta Universitatis, 4 January 1590, RAL, OUL, 60, 85r–86v. 86 Wamesius to Montalto, 12 January 1590, regest in Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 32. In his answer of 20 March, Montalto referred to another letter from the university in its entirety, dated on 12 February 1590. 87 Domenico Pinelli, card. 1585–1611. Weber, Genealogien zur Papstgeschichte, 2, 770. He was mentioned, alongside Asculano, Bellarmino, del Buffalo, Bianchetti, Arrigoni, De Givry, Du Perron, and the inquisitors Monopoli and Taverna, in a letter from Frangipani to the university that included a list of cardinals who had been charged with the examination of the Louvain censure against Lessius, 1588, in KBR, Manuscrits, 22192, 62v. 88 Montalto to the university, 20 March 1590, Acta Universitatis, 7 May 1590, RAL, OUL, 60, 100v. The term procuratores vestri probably refers to Chineij’s private solicitors and advocates in Rome.
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Gerardus Vossius, and Clemens Sublindius89 as its procurators in Rome.90 The monitoring of the nominees’ cases was, apparently, as much the work of different factions and clienteles at Louvain as it was in Rome. Second, not only the academics’ correspondence with Montalto was dominated by Academia’s more prosaic concerns rather than by ethereal discussions on Grace and Free Will. University officials eventually agreed—without involving the name of the Alma Mater as such—to write letters of recommendation to the cardinals whom Chineij had suggested.91 Their names—Santori, Allen,92 and Colonna—are particularly revealing. Contacts with erudite cardinals in Rome, which had been established in the course of the Lessius affair and via Louvain’s recent stakes in the Sixtine Index, apparently were used as transmitters in the defence of the academics’ endangered niche in the clerical job market in the first place.93 This scenario unfolded along similar lines throughout the 1590s. As a matter of fact, it was Chineij’s letters in July and August 1590, in which he testified that an anti-Louvainist faction was being formed at Rome, that informed the university’s decision to send Gravius to the Eternal City. Academics at Louvain drew the same conclusions as Chineij, the future censor of the pope being charged by the university’s congregation with advocating a confirmation of the privileges of nomination rather than reviving the case of the censura Lovaniensis.94 89 From Ranst, near Antwerp, in the duchy of Brabant. He stayed in Rome from 1565 onwards as a notary and as a sollicitator causarum and became revisor supplicarum in 1598 (until 1609). Vaes, “Les curialistes belges,” 107. 90 See Acta Facultatis Artium, 27 May, 2 July, 13, 16 and 18 August 1590, RAL, OUL, 713, 286v, 290r and 291v–293r; Acta Universitatis, 2 and 27 June, 11 August 1590, RAL, OUL, 60, 104v, 105r, 110r. This in spite of Chineij’s despair, that his cause was lost without letters of recommendation that involved the university itself as a full party the rights of which were being harmed. “Et propterea nisi iuver commendationibus despero de causa.” Chineij to Wamesius, 2 December 1589, Acta Universitatis, 4 January 1590, RAL, OUL, 60, 85r–86v. 91 In the session of 11 August, Philippus Zuerius, the university’s new dictator, was commissioned to write the recommendation letters to Montalto et alios. Acta Universitatis, 11 August 1590, RAL, OUL, 60, 110r. 92 Allen, an English exile, was a member of the Index Congregation and had recently been appointed archbishop of Mechlin by Philip II. In addition to his work as a cardinal-censor, he may have been interested, from the point of view of Chineij and his friends in Brabant, in advancing the cause of the university in his future diocese. More on the circumstances that eventually prevented him from occupying his episcopal see in the Netherlands in Harline and Put, A Bishop’s Tale. 93 The discussion of Chineij’s second letter in Acta Universitatis, 13 August 1590, RAL, OUL, 60, 110v. 94 Acta Facultatis Artium, 2 July and 13 August 1590, RAL, OUL, 713, 290r and 291v; Acta Universitatis, 13 August 1590, RAL, OUL, 61, 110v.
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The beneficia promised by Sfondrati in his letter to the university, in which he reported on Gravius’ private audience with his uncle, Gregory XIV, are apparently to be taken quite literally. Seen from this perspective, books appear as mere vehicles for benefices. When Baronio was implored, after Gravius’ death, to represent the university’s interests in Rome, the academic senate did not bother mentioning the Lessius affair but instructed him to promote the cause of Danielis95 with Sfondrati and with Caligari, the bishop of Bertinoro;96 it is also in this context that the theologians’ old fellow Toledo was to be rallied for their cause. In like manner, discussions over appointing an official cardinal-protector in the Fall of 1593 and the academic senate’s eventual choice of Santori were explicitly part of its strategy to have the university’s privileges confirmed.97 In the diaries the inquisitor kept of his audiences with Clement VIII, two interventions of Santori’s have been recorded that concerned Louvain. In both cases, respectively the university’s and Cuyckius’ beneficial interests were on the agenda.98 In 1594, the cardinal came up with the idea (suggested to him by the academics) of submitting the university’s privileges to the Congregatio Nationis Germanicae,99 a congregation charged with the affairs of Germany installed in 1591 and presided over by Cardinal Giovanni Ludovico Madruzzo, the prince-bishop of Trent.100 The cardinal had
95 Chineij, meanwhile, had been provided by the pope with a canonship in the same chapter and had disappeared from the scene. Cf. Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 32. 96 The university to Baronio, 4 August 1591, Epistolae Illustrium ac Doctorum Hominum (. . .) Cesarem Baronium, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, Manoscritti Serie Q, 44, 227–34. Gregory XIV’s death aborted once more Baronio’s attempts to meet Louvain’s expectations. “Irritas esse redditas ob inexpectatam mortem Summi Pontificis cui egrotanti eedem minime reddi valuerunt cardinales autem qui eas acceperunt omnes una eademque responsione atque sententia, dicunt exspectandam electionem novi pontificis.” Baronio to the university, 18 October 1591, in Acta Universitatis, 29 November 1591, RAL, OUL, 60, 234v–35r. 97 The new cardinal-protector’s job description in Acta Universitatis, 25 September 1593, RAL, OUL, 60, 340r. 98 “Di Henrico Cuichio provisto della Chiesa Ruremondense, ch’è veramente decano della università di Lovanio, mostrarle le sue lettere (. . .). Le vide.” Diario Santori, 23 November 1595, ASV, Arm. LII, 21, 115r. 99 “E delle lettere per Sua Santità del rettore et università di Lovanio di non essere costretti venire a Roma, et delli privileggi loro che Sua Santità la rimette alla congregazione di Germania etcetera. Sua Santità disse che glie le mandasse il loro agente a parlarle.” Diario Santori, 26 May 1594, ASV, Arm. LII, 20, 352r. 100 Ad hoc commissions charged with the restoration of Catholicism in the Empire evolved into a stable Congregatio Germanica under the pontificate of Pius V in 1568, with ten cardinal-members under Gregory XIII. It was abolished under Sixtus V but was re-established in 1591 by Innocent XI, at the instigation of Madruzzo, and
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not only been a commilito of the late Gravius at Louvain in the 1540s but also had earned his spurs as an ally of the university in the previous decades during the negotiations leading to the bull In Praecelsa.101 Madruzzo had been enrolled by the academics as a scientific patron as well, the prestigious Louvain edition of Saint Augustine of the late 1570s being dedicated to him and to his nephew.102 Santori’s move must be situated in recent events in Belgium. There, the unfortunate Danielis had got himself into trouble for another canonship he had accepted in the collegiate church of Visé.103 Meanwhile, Joannes Clarius, a royal professor in Divinity, had been summoned— despite conservatorial litterae inhibitoriales and the involvement, by virtue of the constitution Eximiae, of the procurator general of Brabant—to appear before the new Uditore del papa,104 Camillo Borghese, a favourite and future creatura of the Aldobrandini pope.105 Danielis’ first case with respect to the canonship at Tongeren, which was still pending in Rome, had already been submitted to the German
remained active until the cardinal’s death in 1600. See Krasenbrink, Die Congregatio Germanica, esp. 261. No protocols have been preserved. Ibidem, 265 and 283. Its competences were subsumed by the equally ephemerical Congregatio de Propaganda Fide of Clement VIII. Cfr. Jačov, “Clément VIII et la fondation de la Congrégation pour la Propagation de la Foi.” The continuity with the contemporary Congregazione per l’evangelizzazione dei popoli dates from 1622, when Urban VIII installed the congregation De Propaganda Fide monitoring Catholic missionary activities in Europe and overseas. 101 This intervention had brought along rather expensive gifts. Cf. the bill presented by Gerardus Vossius (see below) in Acta Facultatis Artium, 6 June 1575, RAL, OUL, 713, 73v–73r. On Madruzzo’s studies at Louvain, see Motta, Bellarmino, 543. 102 Ceyssens, “Le ‘Saint Augustin’,” 115. 103 Acta Facultatis Artium, 30 April 1594, RAL, OUL, 713, 364v–365r; Acta Universitatis, 30 April 1594, RAL, OUL, 60, 371v. 104 He had accepted a canonship in the collegiate church of Saint-Denis at Liège. Acta Universitatis, 10 January 1594, RAL, OUL, 60, 359r–v. “Per calumniam nuper privatus, nulla monitione praevia ac qualitatibus meis callide suppressis, ad tribunal etiam nunc evocor reverendi domini Camilli Burghesii, et hoc Sanctitate Tua ignorante, idque contra notoria privilegia apostolica . . . nobis concessa, dictique domini Auditoris evocationem, prout ea ex superiorum beatae memoriae PPcum Pauli ac Gregorii XIII irrita est, irritam quoque Sanct. Tua declaret; aut si ea gratia indignus sim, caussam ad quemcumque iudicem in Academia nostra ab Apostolica sede constitutum remittat.” Letter of supplication of Clarius, 14 April 1594, ASV, Segr. di Stato, Fiandra, 10, 15r, in dorso 18v: “Al Card. Aldobrandini.” 105 The brother of Orazio, the previous auditor of the Apostolic Chamber, who had died on 3 October 1590. Weber, Genealogien zur Papstgeschichte, 1, 123. Normally the office of Uditore del papa, one of the most expensive venal offices at the curia, returned to the Reverenda Camera Apostolica, but thanks to a coup led by Cardinal Montalto and to Medici protection, the Borghese family could “inherit” the office and pass on one of the most promising stepping stones for a curial career to Camillo. Emich, Bürokratie und Nepotismus, 3.
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Congregation, a move that had produced the desired effects: the congregation had ruled, in the middle of 1593, that the Louvainist’s case had to be remitted to the university’s apostolic conservator and that the Uditore del papa had to abstain from further evocations of Louvain nominees to the Eternal City.106 The involvement of the Congregation of the German Nation (which Santori probably had to turn, in 1594, into a venue for Clarius’ case as well) is significant. It highlights, first, the academics’ strategy to exclude the regular offices and tribunals charged with benefice affairs from interfering in the networks they had forged to preserve their interests. It also indicates that, after Gravius’ death, other circuits at Louvain took over many of the channels of intelligence and the initiative from the theologians. As a matter of fact, these circuits are likely to have continued their activities behind the grand strategies deployed in the academic senate and in the university’s correspondence. This calls for some qualification. Madruzzo was a promising patron; and appealing to a congregation charged with the co-ordination and supervision of reform and missionary activities in the Empire added substance to Louvain claims that, as the only bulwark of orthodoxy in a sea of heretics, the university deserved a special treatment. Yet, it is the middlemen who interest us here. Two secretaries of this congregation could be trusted to pass on the academics’ point of view: Clement Sublindius, Chineij’s sollicitator causarum, and Jacobus Blavirius from Grandville, a former subregent of the pedagogy of the Pig under Mattheus Boden.107 Blavier had been a nominee himself before disappearing from academic sources108 106
Acta Facultatis Artium, 10 September 1592, RAL, OUL, 713, 352v. From Ruckelingen, licenciate in Theology, president of Standonck College, from 11 July 1562 onwards regent of the pedagogy of the Pig. He died in September 1597. Reusens, Documents relatifs, 4, 209. 108 Blavirius was subregent of the pedagogy of the Pig before 29 March 1589, when he was nominated in this quality with respect to the collations of the dean of SaintLambert’s in Liège. Liber secundus nominationum, 29 March 1589, RAL, OUL, 4752, 217r; admission to the congregation of the Faculty of Arts in Acta Facultatis Artium, 7 October 1589, RAL, OUL, 713, 281v. The last attestation of Blavirius is to be found, again, in the Liber secundus nominationum, 2 August 1591, RAL, OUL, 4752, 226v. His identification remains dubious, as Vaes mentions a Blavirius who would have been performing as the agent of the cathedral chapter of Liège between 1588 and 1603. Another Jacobus Blavier (from Hodeige), a pupil of Gerardus Corselius, Ordinary Professor in Law, and frequent nominee of the Faculty of Arts between 1591 and 1598 (Liber secundus nominationum, RAL, OUL, 4752, 224r, 231r, 237r, 248r, and 270r) would accompany Lombard to the Eternal City in 1598, where he joined the famiglia of an auditor of the Rota (probably d’Ortembergh). In 1600, he asked, via his academic patron in Louvain, for letters of recommendation to the bishop of Liège, to whom he had been recommended by Clement VIII, in order to obtain a benefice. Clement VIII 107
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from 1591 onwards and then popping up again in the dispatches of the nunciature of Cologne as a papal providee three years later.109 Just as much as Blavier, Sublindius figured on many an ecclesiastical institution’s paylist as the Belgian factotum in Rome, and surfaces in this quality in academic minutes as well.110 In their quality of both curialists and sollicitatores, their interests in drawing benefice affairs within the orbit of their young and still feeble congregation may have been many. In addition, Sublindius and Blavirius lead us, via Leonardus Vossius,111 formerly member of the Faculty of Arts, deacon of Saint-Jean at Liège, ex-cubicularius of Pope Gregory XIII, and, respectively, their correspondent and apostolic executor in the Principality, back to the Eternal City, to the latter’s uncle Gerardus Vossius, the scholar who had lived in Rome since 1573 and who had been mentioned as Gravius’ successor in the Vatican printing offices.112 Vossius, Chineij’s other candidate to perform as the university’s official procurator, and his nephew had an impressive record of lobbying for the university in the negotiations leading to the Gregoriana and the brief In Supremo Militantis in the 1570s and against the attempts of Douai to haul in part of Louvain’s privileges of nomination in the 1580s.113 A doctor in theology of the Sapienza who would go down in history as the Belgian editor of patristic texts, befriended by Borromeo and Baronio, Vossius was a wintered curialist too.114 to Ernest of Bavaria, 1 March 1600, regest in Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 138; Acta Universitatis, 27 April 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 401v. 109 Brief from Clement VIII to Guilielmus of Grimbergen and Leonardus Vossius, respectively deacon of Saint Lambert and Saint Jean at Liège, providing Blavier with the rectory of Thynes in the diocese of Liège. Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 69. 110 No official appointment has been registered, but many decisions never pop up in the minutes of the university and faculty boards. Academics complained about communication fall-outs with Sublindius in Acta Universitatis, 3 April 1594, RAL, OUL, 60, 369v. On Sublindius as a professional lobbyist in Rome, see also Acta Capituli Antverpiensis, 20 July 1591, UAA, Kathedraalarchief, 1, 95. 111 Leonardus Vossius, from Hasselt, was admitted to the faculty board on 24 June 1564 (RAL, OUL, 747) and pops up repeatedly in the Liber secundus nominationum, 1563 and 1569, RAL, OUL, 4752, 118r and 170r. See also Gysens, Gerardus Vossius van Borgloon, 30. Leonardus stayed in Rome until 1575 and may have advanced, in return, the career of his uncle in the corridors of Roman palaces. 112 Warm recommendations of Sublindius by Vossius to Cardinal De Torres, 7 December 1607, ed. Gysens, “Quattre lettres inédites,” 170. 113 E.g., Acta Facultatis Artium, 15 December 1574 and 20 October 1579, RAL, OUL, 713, 57r and 162r. In 1575, one of the Vossii returned to the Netherlands and asked the restitution of 20 ducati de Camera spent on gifts for Madruzzo and Alciati in the proceedings for the Gregoriana. 1 June 1575, ibidem, 70r. 114 On Vossius as an erudite in Rome, see Gysens, “Quattre lettres inédites,” which draws on the unpublished licenciate thesis of the same author, Gerardus Vossius van
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Back again at Louvain, talking about Vossius was talking about Mattheus Boden, once Blavier’s superior at Louvain, under whom Vossius had graduated in the arts in 1566.115 Boden’s engagement in the so-called negotia academica at Louvain mirrored those of Vossius in Rome: when Vossius is mentioned in faculty or university minutes, Boden pops up as well. The latter acted for Danielis along the same lines as the late Wamesius had acted for his clientulus et discipulus Chineij: as an academic patron who could be obliged to activate his contacts in Rome in favour of a beleaguered professor of his pedagogy. His, and Vossius’, activities may have been obscured or sidelined for a while by Wamesius, Gravius, and their like, but from the early 1590s onwards, they, and with them the Arts faculty, took over much of the initiative (in the academic minutes) from the dons of the higher faculties in the exchange with the Eternal City.116 Santori, for his part, failed to surface in the minutes again until the early 1600s, and no other stakes emerged that lured Louvain divines and Roman circuits into becoming partners again—except, maybe, in the Lipsius affair, but that was always handled in private correspondence, not in official academic minutes. In the course of 1593–94, channels of communication to the Eternal City diversified and started to run over the interim Governor General Mansfeldt, the duke of Sessa who was Philip II’s ambassador to the Holy See, and the agent for the Low Countries, Laurens Dublioul.117 The arrival in January 1594 of Ernest of Austria, a Habsburg prince who was to boost the dynasty’s tarnished reputation in the Low Countries,
Borgloon. He acquired several benefices and had occupied thrice the position of clericus consistorialis for the Empire. Read Vaes, “Les curialistes belges,” 109. See also Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 25, 136, 246, and 452. The national clerici consistoriales had to represent the clergy of their respective nations in the Sacred College during a one year’s term. 115 Reusens, “Promotions de la faculté des Arts,” 389. 116 It had been Boden who, together with the dean and the notary, had to inform the higher faculties in September 1593, after six months of silence in the minutes, about the decision of the Congregation of the Germanic Nation. Acta Facultatis Artium, 10 September 1593, RAL, OUL, 713, 352v. 117 Mansfelt to Laurens Dublioul, 6 October 1593, Correspondance du gouvernement avec Laurent Du Blioul (. . .), AGR, Audience, 1468/12: “como los de la universidad de Lovayna se queran de que de cinco, o seys annos a esta parte algunos vasallos del Pays de Liega ayan pretendido de tirar en derecho por ante el Auditor dela camera apostolica algunos suppostos de la universidad directamente contra sus privilegios.” The same to the duke of Sessa, 16 October 1593, ibidem. The Ambassador represented the dynasty as such, while agents for the respective kingdoms and territories constituting the Monarquía assisted him in his tasks.
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may have informed the academics’ decision to go constitutional and to mobilise dynastic support for a confirmation of the privileges in Rome. In January 1594, the academic senate had granted Clarius the permission to involve the Council of Brabant and the Procurator General of the Duchy by virtue of academic privileges and the constitution Eximiae of Leo X, a measure that reportedly led to the imprisonment of an apostolic executor and that would not go unnoticed in the Eternal City.118 A few months later, it was decided that Danielis’ legal problems (and excommunication) because of another canonship he had accepted in the collegiate church of Visé were to be recommended to the Governor General as well.119 A delegation of Cuyckius, Boden, and the law professor Stephanus Weyms was sent to councillors that could be trusted,120 and found the archduke most benign—as could be expected from fresh rulers anxious to muster support in an area where the dynasty’s position was still fragile.121 Other diplomatic channels were tapped as well. After earlier attempts to rally the papal nuncio for their cause both in Brussels and in Rome,122 Frangipani’s appointment to the newly created diplomatic
118 Allegations in “obtinuit tam a concilio Brabantie supersessoriam quam a gubernatore Bruxellensi inhiberi iudicibus apostolicis ne in huiusmodi causa procedant et etiam fecit carceribus mancipare executorem qui sibi monitorium ab A.C. decretum presentavit ex quibus incidit in penas Bulle In Cena Domini.” Copy of the decisio rotalis of March 1597, coram Blanchetto, introduced in June 1596. A copy of the sentence in Acta Universitatis, 18 November 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 335v–336v. In June 1594, the Procurator General of Brabant was honoured, with explicit reference to the services he had rendered in the defense of the university’s privileges, with a munusculum academicum in wine at the occasion of a visit to the university town. Acta Universitatis, 23 June 1594, RAL, OUL, 61, 335v–336v. On academic gift exchange, see p. 499. 119 Acta Facultatis Artium and Acta Universitatis, 30 April 1594, RAL, OUL, 713, 364v–365r and 60, 371v. 120 Craesbeke, Assonleville, Houst, Maelcote, and Vander Borch, the president of the Privy Council, were honoured by a visit of the university’s delegation. Other issues had to be discussed as well, of course, as the university’s exemption from the Aids was under fire of other bodies represented in the States of Brabant. A report of the activities of this delegation in Acta Universitatis, 11 May 1594, RAL, OUL, 60, 373r. 121 A second mandate left for Rome the day after the academics’ delegation to the Governor General. “Que se les mantenga el previlegio que tienen sus subditos de no estar a derecho por ante el Auditor de la Camera Apostolica, y aunque soy cierto que VS lo habra ya mandado tratar este negocio por Lauro Dublioul agente de su mag.d en aquella Corte, todavia haviendome los dechos de Lovayna hecho nueva instancia sobre el mismo negocio.” An anonymous letter (Ernest of Austria?) to the duke of Sessa, 12 May 1594, Correspondance du gouvernement avec Laurent du Blioul (. . .), AGR, Audience, 1468/12. 122 Letters of recommendation would have been sent by Frangipani to the Secretariat of State in Rome in the course of 1594. In any case, a copy of the recommendation
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post in Flanders in 1596 may have fostered hopes that the diplomat would become the spokesman of academic elites rather than of the Liège clergy, which remained under the jurisdiction of the nunciature of Cologne. In 1597, the Louvain faculties of Canon Law and Divinity would link, via a favourable censure at the request of the nuncio himself,123 their prestige to one of Frangipani’s most cherished projects: the Directorium for the archdiocese of Cologne, a collection of laws and decrees in conformity with the Council of Trent that had been translated into a number of practical counsels. Frangipani dedicated the Directorium to the coadjutor of Cologne, Ferdinand of Bavaria, but his work had to settle old accounts as well. The fierce reaction from Garzadoro, his former co-operator (and competitor) at Cologne, indicates that not everybody hailed the Directorium as a labour of love.124 The nuncio’s friends at Louvain also welcomed Frangipani’s protégé and secretary, Sandrino, into their midst, and he could, thanks to a special regime, complete his law studies under the protection of Weyms. This would earn the latter, in 1605, a recommendation of Frangipani for a job in the Grand Council of Mechlin, the highest tribunal of the Habsburg Netherlands.125 Sandrino would function as a go-between between the Brussels nunciature and the Louvain schools in the years to come, and in return other members of the nuncio’s famiglia would find a refuge under the folds of academic patronage as well in the near future.126 arrived at Louvain, with an accompanying letter addressed to the academics themselves. No explicit mention was made of the university’s troubles in Rome, however; the letter does not figure in Roberg, Nuntius Ottavio Mirto Frangipani, vol. 4. 123 The Directorium was a matter of great concern for the Italian diplomat, as is reflected in his correspondence with Tilman Vosmeer (see the editions by Louant and Van der Essen, Correspondance), the brother of Sasbold, the apostolic vicar of the north—and a friend of Jacobus Jansonius. Academics may well have suggested, for instance via the line Jansonius-Vosmeer-Frangipani, to grant their support to the nuncio’s initiative themselves. 124 Garzadoro was sent by Rome to Cologne in 1593 with virtually the same competence as Frangipani for reasons which are of no avail here. The competition between the nuncios escalated into a regular war, especially after Garzadoro imprisoned one of Frangipani’s clients. See the introduction to Van der Essen, Correspondance, xlix. The Italian’s transfer to Brussels may have aimed at easing tensions at the two-headed nunciature of Cologne as much as at raising the profile of the Brussels court as a centre of European diplomacy. 125 Frangipani to the college of doctors in Law, 12 September 1597, ed. Louant, Correspondance, 213; Frangipani to Weyms, 2 January 1598, ed. ibidem, 271; Frangipani to the Great Council of Mechlin, 29 October 1605, regest in ibidem, 551. 126 Cf. a letter of recommendation from the university to Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, at the occasion of Sandrino’s return to Rome in the beginning of 1604: “Jam complures anni sunt quod hic in Belgio nostro continuis officiis tam publice tam
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This does not imply that all was quiet on the Roman front. In the course of 1594–95, Sublindius was struggling to keep further summons of Louvain academics at bay, and he managed to have the examination of the lawsuits of Danielis and Clarius assigned to Arrigoni, an auditor of the Rota and one of the new pontiff’s favourites. Again, a strictly legal context was avoided, as Arrigoni was to perform as a papal advisor extra rotam.127 Vossius resurfaced in academic minutes in September 1596 and urged the academics to write letters to Ascanio Colonna (Marcantonio’s nephew) and his friend Baronio, who had recently been elevated to the cardinalate. The patrologist complained that he failed to answer accurately the numerous questions in Rome on the state of the University of Louvain and suggested that, in the absence of a physical representation at the curia, the academics had to mobilise the dead by attaching a catalogue of the university’s illustrious scholars to a formal treatise of the privilege128—a device that probably had to boost his own credit as the famous university’s agent at the curia as well. Academics at Louvain may have badly needed such propaganda stunts in 1596, as Vossius’ letter brought ill tidings: the battle for suitable judges was lost; Danielis’ case having been assigned to Peña, the auditor of the Rota for the crown of Aragon, instead of being remitted to the academic tribunals at Louvain. Clarius, for his part, was considered an enemy of ecclesiastical liberty in the corridors of Roman
privatim bene de omnibus meretur egregius vir Joannes Xandrinus illustrissimi hic Octavii Tricaricensis episcopi Sancte Sedis Apostolice apud principes nostros nuncii secretarius tanta sua dexteritate et fide ut ad eius merita accedere nihil possit quo fit ut omnes ei multis nominibus simul devinctissimi et merito ingrati censeri debeamus nisi quacumque ratione possumus paria illi faciamus.” The university to Aldobrandini, 2 December 1603, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 25r–v. 127 Attestation of a letter to Danielis (anonymous) and plans to write, in return, letters of recommendation to Sublindius and Arrigoni, mentioned in Acta Universitatis, 22 August 1594, AGR, OUL, 60, 390r; briefing by “avunculum meum Jacobum” [= Blavirius] in a letter from Rome (anonymous) to Clarius, ibidem, 6 February 1595, RAL, OUL, 61, 20v; fragments of letters from Sublindius to Leonardus Vossius, deacon of Saint Jean in Liège, 28 October and 4 November 1595, sent to Clarius, minutes of 2 December 1595, ibidem, 95r; official act of the university sanctioning its iniunctio in Clarius’ case, 14 January 1596, ibidem, 110r. 128 “Cuius rei omissio forte aliquando vobis poterit esse detrimento dum de Lovaniensi statu a plerisque sepius interrogor quod respondeam non habeo.” Vossius to the university (with references to his correspondence with Boden and Cuyckius), 3 August 1596, Acta Universitatis, 7 September 1596, RAL, OUL, 61, 165v–166v. If the illustrious scholars of Louvain could not be present physically, they just had to mobilise their dead predecessors, the latters’ books, and their merits to represent the university in the curia.
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tribunals. Vossius’ pessimism about their chances was verified when the Sacra Romana Rota struck two severe blows to the Louvain aspirations: the supreme tribunal of Catholic Christianity found in 1596 that the Louvain privileges, despite their confirmation by Gregory XIII in 1573 and 1578, had been derogated by more recent papal legislation on the competences of the Uditore del Papa (in the Danielis affair), and ruled in 1597 that Clarius had forfeited his right to use academic privileges altogether when trying to enforce them with the help of secular authorities rather than appealing to the pontiff himself.129 The vicissitudes of Danielis and Clarius seem to have triggered a knock-on effect: in October 1597, five more cases were enumerated in an academic memorandum that was to be submitted to the Privy Council. They involved another professor in philosophy in the pedagogy of the Pig (Guilielmus Flechin), three students whose acceptations of altars (in the collegiate church of Saint-Bartholomé at Liège and in the parishes of Brustem and Dommaert), and a rectorship (of Jusserenne) in the Principality of Liège were challenged by Roman writs.130 On 16 April 1598, the rector of the university opened a session of the academic senate with the dramatic statement that now all university men claiming benefices in the prince-bishopric with the help of academic nominations were summoned by the auditor of the Apostolic Chamber.131 In that year, it was about time the academics started to rethink their networking strategies. But what was at stake? 4.1.3. “Quei di Liegi che per natura sono litigiosi.” Nobles, curialists, and poor academics in the clerical job market Not all legal conflicts over nominations were lumped together in the “Roman Question” basket. Alongside the legal assistance that was
129
The fact that both rotal decisions (copies in Acta Universitatis, 18 November 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 335v–336v) only deal with questions de jure and not de facto or, more precisely, that they largely deal with the admissibility of both cases—the very issue that Arrigoni had to examine—suggests that another move had been made by the two litigants’ opponents to get “more suitable” judges, a strategy that the Louvain academics, of course, continuously practiced themselves. 130 Draft of a memorandum in Acta Universitatis, 13 October 1597, RAL, OUL, 61, 256r–260v. 131 It is difficult to verify this statement. The archives of the ten parallel bureaus processing files for the tribunal of the uditore del papa contain only fragmentary documentation with respect to the period under investigation. Inventory available in ASR.
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routinely granted to other nominees, conflicts over benefices in the neighbouring Principality of Liège (and therefore the preservation of the Faculty’s privilege) raised concerns at Louvain. It is tempting to account for this by pointing at the impressive record of Liège clerics harassing Louvain nominees in the 16th century and to the endless list of jurisdictional disputes between the ecclesiastical enclave and the Duchy of Brabant. These were indeed fuelled by conflicts over benefices between nominees and Liège clerics. Belgian councils of justice could not intervene directly in the Principality, but they had other tools at their disposal to assist academics, such as harassing officers of ecclesiastical tribunals or seizing property of Liège churches in Brabant, Limburg, and other limitrophic areas. Conversely, the church of Liège could produce an impressive corpus of privileges of its own, it disposed of its own apostolic conservators, and it had in the past displayed its willingness to defend its prerogatives with vigour. Nonetheless, new incentives are to be found to account for new sparks of opposition. Precedents are likely to have informed the patterns of conflict, as indeed it was in the interest of the parties involved to keep new disputes recognisable enough so that they might be solved. However, reifying orchestrated conflicts into a constellation that can account for them, would not only be tautological; it would also fail to explain why the prince-bishopric of Liège became a troublespot again after 30 years of relative peace. Jurisdictional conflicts over the meandering border between the Habsburg Netherlands and Liège may have been part of political folklore, but there is no evidence—in academic minutes (despite numerous references to the Leodienses), in the regests of the minutes of the chapter of Saint-Lambert representing the clergy in the Principality’s States, or in the remaining minutes of the prince-bishop’s Privy Council—that these became a vehicle of systematic opposition to Louvain claims orchestrated by clerics who identified with the privileges and liberties of the “national” church of Liège.132 The 1555 brief Decet Romanum Pontificem probably had removed the incentives to do so and was indeed observed—if not in principle, then in practice—by nominees balking at accepting Liège benefices that had become vacant in ordinary months. One or two 132
Regests in Bormans and Huisan, “Répertoire chronologique.” The minutes of the Privy Council were gravely damaged in the Second World War. Only the resolution books for 1587–88, and 1606–11, have been preserved (AEL, Conseil Privé, Protocoles et Résolutions, 18–21), but their condition is highly affected.
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conflicts with ordinary candidates were recorded, but they failed to attract the academics’ attention.133 The meddling of Roman tribunals in the vicissitudes of Chineij, Danielis, Clarius, and others is significant. To be sure, the Sacra Romana Rota was the supreme court of appeal for all legal disputes over Liège benefices, including those which had become vacant in ordinary months. The Auditorate of the Apostolic Chamber, by contrast, which had to see to the execution of apostolic provisions, was not. Liège clerics also were troubled by summons of the Uditore del papa and invoked their own privileges to oppose them.134 The minutes of the Privy Council of Liège, which just as much as its Habsburg equivalent had to preserve, in the name of an absentee prince-bishop, the country’s privileges and constitutions, contain references to conflicts that bear resemblance to those surfacing in academic minutes. In contrast to the first half of the 16th century, it was a Rome-centred terminology that was used to counter Louvain claims.135 Gravius’ discussion of the Chineij case offers an interesting point of departure. In his letter from Rome of 12 January 1591, he stated that Chineij’s opponent for the canonship in Tongeren had died. As the notion of “equity,” central to beneficial law, provided for the possibility of substituting another candidate in the place of the deceased,136 the Louvain agent
133 Requests for legal assistance submitted by Joannes Roberti of Marchiennes, a student in Divinity who had got into trouble over a canonship at Thuin, were not granted “ratione malorum temporum” (Acta Facultatis Artium, 23 July 1594, RAL, OUL, 713, 369v)—because Roberti had accepted an “ordinary” benefice. The faculty seemed to invite him to be compliant: “Permissum quoque est dicto M. Johanni ut si velit receptis sumptibus quos fecit a capitulo Tudiniensi desistat hac vice in jure suo prosequendo.” After a few letters to and from the secundary and primary clergy of Liège, the faculty was apparently not prepared to get involved: “[conclusit] . . . placere dominis ei cuius nomine ille propositus fuit, liberum omnino relinquere tentare quod videretur suo periculo et preiudicio: excepto quod si conveniat cum adversa parte (non pretensurus tamen ad hoc se habere facultatis suasionem et consensum) habeatur liber a periculo perjurii [concerning the statute, that no nominee could engage in a transaction with contingent opponents without the consent of the faculty].” Acta Facultatis Artium, 2 November 1595, RAL, OUL, 713, 435v. 134 “Sed cum maximo scandalo fere semper ita provisi, a provisis apostolicis turbantur, citantur sc ad Rom Cur vigore brevium de capienda possessione, ita quod pauperes clerici vel ius suum deserere vel ingentes sumptus subire cogantur.” Status Dioecesis Leodiensis, discussed in Congr. 6 February 1591, ASV, Congr. Concilio, Relat. Dioec., 443, 2nd bundle. 135 Cf. Boute, “‘Regnum,’ ‘Sacerdotium’ en ‘Studium’,” 169–76. 136 The death of one competitor, jurists reasoned, could not automatically imply that his adversary was allowed to take advantage of the situation, as it did not affect his rights on the possession of a benefice; hence, another candidate could be introduced
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had tried to ensure that Chineij himself obtained a surrogatio of his opponent’s rights, which would have solved the problem. According to him, substitutions in favour of other claimants were generally applied at the curia.137 However, via his agent in Rome,138 the papal nuncio (Frangipani) had successfully substituted a noble in Chineij’s opponent’s place, in order to accommodate Ernest of Bavaria, archbishop of Cologne, bishop of Münster, Freising, Hildesheim, and Liège.139 The identification of Chineij’s opponent as a noble who enjoyed the protection of the archbishop of Cologne, one of Rome’s cornerstones in the North Sea area, is instructive. The clergy of the Principality of Liège and its intertwining with the local and imperial nobility has not yet been able to attract the attention of modern scholarship, but a few elements may add, for the time being, to a better understanding. The church on the shores of the Meuse was, together with Cambrai until its integration into the Spanish Netherlands, the western outpost of the Reichskirche. The imperial Church covered, after its partial secularisation by Protestant princes, c.100.000 square kilometres and c.10 per cent of the population of the Empire.140 Its cathedral chapters were the playground of different segments of the German nobility.141 Bishops combined their episcopal dignity with that of worldly princes who were elected by the canons of the Domstifte. They were recruited from among the highest ranking dynasties of the Empire, as other noble lineages could not field, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the social, diplomatic, and economic clout that was necessary to
against him. Cf. Barraclough, Papal Provisions. A number of entries in the Per Obitum list of the Dataria Apostolica indeed involved surrogationes. 137 “Maxime cum huius curie et cancellarie stylus et consuetudo sit, collitigantibus pro beneficio duobus alterum in alterius demortui suffici locum, nec novum adversarium dari.” Gravius to the university, 12 January 1591, Acta Universitatis, 27 February 1591, RAL, OUL, 61, 163r. The data in Per Obitum suggest that this practice was less widespread than Gravius suggests. 138 Marcello Filonardi (Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 31), Advocatus Fiscalis, then assessor of the Holy Office and the brother of the bishop of Aquino, which explains why Gravius had urged the university to send letters of recommendation to the latter. 139 “Nam reverendissimus Calatinus apostolicus nuntius nescio quem nobilem archiepiscopo Coloniensi agente commendavit, cuius causam dominus Marcellus Aquinatensis Episcopi frater negotiorum hic supradicti nuntii actor et gestor . . . per potentissimos amicos sollicitavit” Gravius to the university, 12 January 1591, Acta Universitatis, 27 February 1591, RAL, OUL, 61, 163r. 140 Duhamelle, L’héritage collectif, 23. 141 The standard work is Hersche, Die Deutschen Domkapitel.
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be elected to an episcopal see, and to defend ecclesiastical property against voracious, let alone heretic, princes.142 Liège and the abbatial principalities of Stavelot and Malmédy would constitute, together with the ecclesiastical principalities of Cologne and several other Hochstifte, the Sekundogenitur par excellence of the house of Bavaria until the 18th century.143 This implied, of course, integration of interests with the local elites.144 The strategies of Verflechtung developed by Ernest of Bavaria (1581–1612) and by his nephew Ferdinand (1612–50; coadjutor with right of succession in 1602)145 in their Liège prince-bishopric have not been studied yet, but there are moments of negotiation that merit our attention here. In 1600, Ottavio Mirto Frangipani, by then nuncio in Brussels and the author of the Directorium for reform in the diocese of Cologne dedicated to Ferdinand, had been charged with an apostolic visitation of the churches in the city of Liège. In the report resulting from this visit, he transmitted the pleas of the cathedral and collegiate chapters of the capital, which had received the endorsement of the archbishop of Cologne. It was Ernest of Bavaria who performed as the official petitioner for this visitation, which in turn provided a platform to pass through a number of requests to the Eternal City. A win-win situation was in the make: while Ernest tried to haul in a taxation on abbeys and provostships in order to land his episcopal mensa and sought to prepare a smooth transfer of power to his nephew after his death, he provided, in return, the churches of the city with powerful channels of communication to Rome to pass on their views; Frangipani, for his part, was eager to outperform Garzadoro (nuncio of Cologne 1596– 1606) in his own backyard as the reformer of local churches.146 Two
142 Reinhard, “Kirche als Mobilitätskanal.” The free election of bishops had already been granted in the Concordat of Vienna (1448), but only the fear for a major desertion of entire chapters to Protestantism made Roman circuits respect the German nobility’s claims. Meyer, “Bischofswahlen.” 143 Reinhardt, “Die hochadeligen Dynastien in der Reichskirche,” 224. 144 “Wer aufsteigen will, muss sich in den Domkapiteln Freunde, aber darf sich keine Gegner schaffen.” The motto of the elector of Mainz, Lothar Franz von Schönborn (1655–1729), Maier, “Bishof und Domkapitel,” 237. 145 Strubbe and Voet, Chronologie, 286–87. Ferdinand was already coadjutor in 1596; cf. the university to Frangipani, 10 November 1596, ed. Vander Essen, Correspondance, 18. 146 This story, in which Frangipani reportedly tried to bring the nunciature of Cologne under the jurisdiction of Brussels, would drag on at least until 1606, when Garzadoro and Frangipani were called back to Rome at the start of a new pontificate.
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major themes were addressed in the nuncio’s report: the collegiate churches and the cathedral were in a dire state; and the nuncio and the clergy asked the pope to remedy this state of affairs. This was to be done by limiting the access for non-nobles to the city’s canonships in order to reverse the “gran diminutione dello splendore et dignità della chiesa” by doctors in Law and Theology “di bassa conditione.”147 The diagnosis had, of course, to legitimise the remedy, but there may have been good reasons to present things the way in which Frangipani and the Liège chapters did. Civil war in the Netherlands did affect economic conjunctures, and consequently the clerical job market, in the neighbouring ecclesiastical enclave.148 Many chapters were the proprietors of landed estate situated in the war zone. The collegiate church of Saint Paul in Liège, for instance, had been forced to suppress temporarily five canonships out of 30 in order to pay its debts,149 and the chapters of Saint Peter’s and Saint Bartélémy’s asked for the suppression of seven canonships out of 30.150 A similar, but even more drastic reduction of the benefice reservoir had, in Frangipani’s report, to be conducted in the main chapter of the cathedral of Saint Lambert’s: half of the 60 canonships had to be suppressed, according to the canons, in order to ensure the financial viability of the others. Fluctuations in the clerical job market must have made it more difficult for the circuits in and around the Liège chapters to sustain their clientèles. However, they also furnished the arguments to boost the chapters’ exclusivity. It consequently is not surprising that clerics who claimed benefices with reference to their academic status, let alone with reference to an academic nomination, were not particularly welcome. The cathedral chapter asked, “con molta instantia,” another favour from the pope,
Cf., for instance, Garzadoro to Scipione Borghese (the new cardinal-nephew and secretary of State, 20 May 1606, regest in Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 220. 147 Cf., for instance, the Informatione per l’Ill.mo et Rev.mo Signor Cardinal Aldobrandini sopra i particolari dimandati a Nostro Signore dal Ser.mo S.or Elettore di Colonia, come vescovo e principe di Liegi, ed. Louant, Correspondance, 119–20. 148 Several files concerning the use of the income of temporary vacant benefices (including canonships) in Liège churches, their temporary suppression, or their incorporation in the Jesuit college are preserved in ASR, Paesi Stranieri, Francia e Belgio, 6, fasc. 53. On the devastation of the Principality by marauding troops, see Status Dioecesis Leodiensis, discussed in Congr. 6 February 1591, ASV, Congr. Concilio, Relat. Dioec., 443, 2nd bundle. 149 Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 45–46. 150 Frangipani to Aldobrandini, Informatione dello stato della chiesa di Liegi et delli pesi et gravezze del suo capitolo, ed. Louant, Correspondance, 117–19.
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i.e., to be exempted from the Louvain privileges of nomination. Seen from their perspective, it was “poco honesto” that the cathedral chapter had to tolerate “strangers” in its midst while Liegesi were (reportedly) barred from canonships in the Netherlands.151 The suggestion that non-nobles were to be excluded to restore the reputation of the Church and to strengthen heavenly and earthly networks suggests that the primary clergy of the Principality, the archbishop of Cologne who supported its claims, and Frangipani (who needed local support for his reform plans) shared a lot of assumptions and ambitions with the aristocratic church of the Rhineland. This is likely to have affected, according to the same principle of Verflechtung and due to the cumulation of benefices, the recruitment of its secondary clergy in peripheral collegiate churches as well, whose top positions were the reserve of canons of Saint Lambert’s. The desiderata of the Liège cathedral chapter, which represented the clergy in the States of the Principality, reflect the same strategies of closure as the other Domstifte in the Empire and may have heralded generally observed patterns of “aristocratisation” in the course of the 17th century.152 This aristocratic model of Church hierarchy—which had its ramifications in the lower ranks of God’s army as well, nobles having to sustain their own clients—did not match well with the Belgian, “academic” model of a Church of and for poor, pious, and learned men. Poverty, alongside modesty, was central to the academic self-understanding, and in the period under investigation, university men went to great lengths to ensure that they were poor. Research into the settings and the vestimentary codes on 16th- and 17th-century professorial portraits153 has revealed how university men at Louvain, despite 151 “Ha similmente domandat’ il capitulo, . . . quest’altra gratia cioè che l’indulti concessi da quella Santa Sede a diverse academie, et particolarmente a quella di Lovanio, di nominar persone alle prebende . . . non s’estendessero a questa chiesa di Liegi, giudicando poco honesto che rifutandose da Brabantini qualsivoglia persona di Liegi provista con autorità apostolica di alcuno beneficio nel ducato di Brabanza, stimandolo straniero, sia chesta chiesa obligata all’accettar indifferentemente alcun di loro.” Frangipani to Aldobrandini, Informatione dello stato della chiesa di Liegi et delli pesi et gravezze del suo capitolo, ed. Louant, Correspondance, 114. 152 The number of noble quarters required for admission rose, in 1615, from four to eight. Most Domstifte in the Empire required eight to 16 noble quarters c.1600, a number which would increase, in the course of the 17th century, to 32 quarters. See Pölnitz, “Stiftsfähigkeit und Ahnenprobe,” 349–55. 153 Cf. De Ridder-Symoens, “Professorial Representation and Self-Representation in Portraits,” paper presented at the symposium Image and Imagination. A new approach to university history from the Middle Ages to the present (International Committee for
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their integration with clerical and secular power elites, continued to convey, until well into the 17th century, a strong corporate identity that was indebted to monastic ideals of gravitas and austerity.154 Codes of conduct to be embraced by teachers and students in university statutes sought to propagate restraint and modesty.155 This should by no means be understood as an awareness of the loss of prestige and of status inconsistency of the academic caste in the Age of Absolutism. In tandem with hyperbolic statements about the academic role in Society, Paupertas academica was highly distinctive. Academics were poor because their aristocratic poverty befitted them, not because of their financial situation. And indeed it was the academic’s best friend, poverty, that was under attack in the late 1580s and in the course of the 1590s. From 1588 onwards, rumours were rampant at the curia that the Louvainists used their privileges to enrich the opulent instead of bringing relief to the poor, and that academics acquired nominations only in order to pass them to third parties.156 Armed with papal bulls and faculty statutes which had to prove the groundlessness of these calumnies, the university’s delegates on two occasions implored the papal representative—Frangipani was residing at Louvain in order to settle the dispute between Jesuits and divines of the faculty—to recommend to the pope the cause of the Faculty of Arts, the self-proclaimed seminarium of the Holy See.157 It was in Chineij’s case that the Sacra Romana Rota found, in 1589, that the onus of proof with respect to poverty fell the History of Universities, Sydney, 5 July 2005). I wish to thank Prof. Symoens for sharing her paper with me. 154 This in sharp contrast with more luxurious and colourful attire emerging from the 16th century onwards in universities elsewhere in Europe. De Ridder-Symoens, “Management and Resources,” 206–07. 155 Cf. the habitus theologicus, the dressing code for divines, that was obligatory for students living on a grant at the Major and Minor colleges of the Holy Spirit; “Et ex unanimi consensu fuit conclusum, neminem admittendum ad possessionem realem bursae, qui non prius sibi providerit de toga oblonga, casacca et pileo quadrato.” Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 12 September 1619, RAL, OUL, 387, 118. 156 Acta Facultatis Artium, 12 September 1588, RAL, OUL, 713, 269r. 157 Frangipani arrived, according to his correspondence, on 22 June 1588 in Louvain and stayed in the Brabant city until the 3rd of December, when he started to correspond with the Segretaria di Stato from Liège. See Ehses, Nuntius Ottavio Mirto Frangipani, 2, 159 and 206. The nuncio had promised to intervene, was enthusiastic about the rigid legislation of the faculty, and in the end did nothing. The delegations sent by the Faculty of Arts, including several university officials, visited the nuncio on 24 and 25 September 1588. No recommendation letter in support of the academic pleas could be retrieved in 1588–90. Ehses, Nuntio Ortavio Mirto Frangipani.
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on the academics, not on their opponents—a fate that would also be bequeathed to Danielis and, a few years later, to Clarius, who tried to put things right in a 1594 letter of supplication to the pope.158 Clarius’ supplication was accompanied by a memorandum of the university in which Clement VIII was urged not to abolish the taxa patrimonialis altogether but to raise it to 200 Ducatus de Camera (or approximately 400 florins) in order to avoid “molestations” of poor academics by the tribunal of the uditore del papa in the future.159 Seen from this perspective, the notion of poverty must have been bolstered as a benchmark of academic identity against aristocrats who sought to revamp the Church with pomp and circumstance and who were eager to reserve the benefices of the Principality for their own cronies. Qualifications are in order. The canons of Saint Lambert’s main target were the Liège patrician families, which claimed prebends for their offspring and which used academic titles as an alternative entry ticket. In the early 1600s, one-third of the 60 canonships in the cathedral were occupied by members of patrician families—their number would increase to two-thirds in the course of the 17th century—which apparently was a thorn in the flesh of Frangipani’s informants during his visitation tour in 1600.160 Enter the opponents of the Louvain academics. While they can easily be lumped together as papal providees, they are difficult to identify unambiguously as members of an imperial
158 “Calumniae nos isthic Leodiensium presertim quorundam conturbant . . . et opulentes nihilominus fingunt . . . per calumniam nuper privatus, nulla monitione praevia ac qualitatibus meis callide suppressis, ad tribunal etiam nunc evocor reverendi domini Camilli Burghesii.” Letter of supplication of Clarius to the pope, 14 April 1594, ASV, Segr. di Stato, Fiandra, 10, 15r, in dorso 18v: “Al Card. Aldobrandini.” 159 “Itaque rogamus per viscera misericordie christi, decreto suo hanc evocandi iniuriam Sanctitas Tua e medio tollere dignetur, simul illud etiam sancire, ut magistris ac professoribus nostris tantillum beneficiorum cumulare liceat, unde absentes simul ad ducentos auri de Camera ducatos annuos, percipiant. Ne similis molestiarum occasio, aliis post Clarium ex hoc capite deinceps oriatur.” Supplication of the university, 14 April 1594, ASV, Segr. di Stato, Fiandra, 10, 14r. 160 “Ma esaminandose tal gratia da me, l’ho giudicata d’esecution difficile et pericolosa . . . essendone alcuni figli di cittadini di questa città, e pigliariano protettion i loro padri, per non privarse del mezo loro da penetrar i segreti del capitolo, ch’è capo di tutti l’Ordini di questa patria.” Informatione dello stato della chiesa di Liegi (. . .), ed. Louant, Correspondance, 110; “vi s’introdussero i graduati ignobili, quali sono adesso di tanto numero nel capitolo . . . l’effetto della qual è il posto in questo, cioè ch’ . . . li nobili . . ., se sdegnono adesso di trattare con i capitolari ignobili delle cose publiche di questa chiesa, onde col tempo è da timerse qualche scisma.” Informatione (. . .) sopra i particolari dimandati a Nostro Signore dal Serenissimo Signor Elettore di Colonia, come vescovo et principe di Liegi, ed. ibidem, 129–30.
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nobility that confronted the meritocratic claims of poor and learned scholars with its own, aristocratic logic. In the previous section, Chineij’s first opponent was identified as a famigliare of Franciscus Oranus, an auditor of the Rota—which had kept the datario from intervening in the affair despite the orders of Montalto.
Plate 4.2. Funerary bust Franciscus Oranus Bust of Franciscus Oranus (1545–99), Liège patrician, former professor in Philosophy at the Pedagogy of the Castle, and Rota Auditor, on his funerary monument. [Santa Maria dell’Anima, Rome]
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Oranus was a native of the Principality and a member of a Liège patrician family. On several occasions, however, he was identified as a curialist in the first place, as recurrent complaints from the Liège clergy that Oranus violated its privileges reached Rome in the 1580s and the 1590s.161 Traditional historiography claims that the numbers of Fiamminghi and Lieggesi in a curia increasingly dominated by Italians had diminished considerably by the end of the 16th century.162 At this stage of research, data suggest that the “Italianisation” of the curia in the early modern period needs to be revised: the phenomenon may have been partially created by the selection of sources, most of which were produced by cardinals as protagonists of high curial politics, or by their households and clientelist networks. The data furnished by the Per Obitum list or by “peripheral” sources listing leaves of absence suggest that more foreign clerics were present at the curia than generally assumed. Young clerics with the same profile as those nominated by the Faculty of Arts roamed the Roman curia in search of knowledge, benefices, or both.163 It remains unclear to what extent the recent installation of apostolic nunciatures in Cologne and (from 1596 onwards) in Brussels had boosted the Liège presence in the heart of Christendom. Several Liège clerics were employed by the nuncios of Cologne and Flanders, but these officials often had strong ties to bureaucratic circuits that were already active in Rome.164 From the second half of the 16th century
161
For instance, Ernest of Bavaria to the Secretary of State Tolomeo Galli, 6 October 1584, regest in Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 15 n. 1; Ernest to Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, 26 May 1594, regest in ibidem, 68. 162 Cf. Vaes, “Les curialistes belges,” 101. 163 “Versatur semper in Rom. Cur. numerosa iuventus ex civitate et dioecesi Leodiensi ex quibus sicuti multi industria et omnibus artibus sibi et patrie prodesse student, ita plures in hoc tantum incumbunt ut diversis modis, diversorum impetrent beneficia pretexent ut plurimum bullas noviter editas, nova decreta, decisiones Rotae, notabilia cancellariae, interpretationes concilii, et similiae quae ut extra corpus iuris sunt, ita ad notitiam nostram nunquam pervenerunt hoc interim dumtaxat satagentes ut a possessoribus beneficiorum pro cessione iuris et redimenda (hoc vocant) vexa, aliquid extorqueant, supplicatur obnixe ut huiusmodi provisionibus parce atque illis tantum quorum actiones suspectae non sunt concedantur.” Status Dioecesis Leodiensis, discussed in Congr. 6 February 1591, ASV, Congr. Concilio, Relat. Dioec., 443, 2nd bundle. 164 Members of the Stravius and Vervianus family recurrently pop up as administrators of the nunciature of Flanders. Henricus Stravius was the datary of the nuncio in Van der Essen, Correspondance, lxxviii; his uncle, Franciscus Stravius, was revisor supplicorum in Rome; see Vaes, “Les curialistes belges.” Another “Liegese” had been Frangipani’s secretary during his Cologne nunciature. Cf. the signatures in documents
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onwards, key positions reserved for representatives of the Germanic nation (e.g., one seat in the Rota, a position of reviser of supplications in the Signatura Justitiae and the consistorial cleric representing the clergy of the Empire in the consistorial meetings of the Sacred College) had become the reserve of Liège clerics, competition being limited due to the lapse of many other regions in the Empire into heresy; to Wittelsbach and Habsburg protection; or both.165 The Congregation for the German Nation was an employer of Liège secretaries, who also performed as sollicitatores at other curial offices. Last but not least, dozens of Leodienses were recorded in the Per Obitum list as present in Rome and/or as regular officials of the curia. At this stage of research, it is impossible to map this group of Liège bureaucrats who, in the words of Philip Maes, the archducal resident in Rome in 1615, had colonised the Dataria Apostolica and the Apostolic Chancery.166 Dynasties of curialists from the Principality—Stravius, De Salmis, Oranus, De Vivariis, Emerix, Mottman, Vander Ameyden, and others—can also be traced as members and provisors of the confraternities of the Santa Maria dell’Anima and Campo Santo Teutonico, the churches and hospitals for pilgrims from the Empire in Rome. While some of them made a brilliant career,167 many others manned lower offices at the
by Frangipani in 1602 to Rome, Collectanea Peña, ASV, Arm. LIV, 49, 8r sqq.; Bertrandus Vervianus as the nuncio’s secretary in Gesualdo to Borghese, 1 April 1616, summary in Van Meerbeeck, Correspondance des nonces Gesualdo, Morra, Sanseverino, 29. Compare this text fragment: “cum illustrissimus nuncius et eius predecessores abbreviatoribus leodiensibus, quas ex urbe secum adduxerant usi sint.” Memorandum of the university, 1616, Négociations de Rome, AGR, Audience, 450, 185r–188v. 165 Vaes, “Les curialistes belges,” 103. The Signatura, precursor of the Supremo Tribunale della Segnatura Apostolica, derived its name from the central act in the processing of supplications, i.e., the putting of a signature under a supplication either by the pope or by the referendarii in praesentia domini nostri papae. From the 13th century onwards, it assisted the pontiff in the processing, summarising, and briefing of the thousands of supplications sent to the curia. In the beginning of the 16th century, a Signatura Justitiae developed alongside a Signatura Gratiae, the first being charged with the hearing of judicial affairs, as a court of first instance, of appeal, and of cassation or revision. Del Re, La Curia Romana, 229–31. The college of referendarii was charged with supplications submitted to both Signaturae; cf. Weber, Die Päpstlichen Referendare, 1, 17–30. 166 “Pour cause des liegeois desquels estant la plus part composee si bien la chancellerie que datarie.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 17 October 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 353r–v. 167 Cf. Indekeu, “Emerix (Em(m)erick(x)), Johannes,” and idem, “Motmans (Mot(t)man(n), Motmanno) Cornelius Hendrik (Cornelio Arrigo).”
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curia; at the national churches of the Empire; or in San Giuliano de’ Fiamminghi.168 The profiles of the nominees’ opponents are highly instructive. Danielis’ second opponent, with respect to his canonship at Visé, was the candidate of Oranus’ brother, the archdeacon of Kempen.169 Clarius, for his part, stated in his 1594 letter of supplication that his opponent—a member of the De Blocquerie family—had blatantly ignored a papal mandate to send the case back to the Louvain conservator of the privileges. His claim that the Uditore had renewed his summons behind the pope’s back is probably correct as the pontiff himself did not meddle in the bureaucratic routine of curial offices.170 However, it is probable that the cardinal-nephew, Pietro Aldobrandini, had been involved, as another De Blocquerie was two years later referred to as his commensale e famigliare.171 The student Matthias Ghennaert’s path to office was blocked by Lambertus Ursinus, a member of the De Vivariis family and an abbreviator of the Apostolic Chancery,172 while one of his comilitones, Joannes Censier, had to overcome the networks at the curia of Leonardus Thisius, a former Romanist himself.173 Thisius had emerged victorious in the diocesan concursus and 168 Only a small minority was identified, in the Per Obitum list, as famigliari of the pope, or of the households of the cardinals: Zollern, Pamfili, Bentivoglio, and Barberini. This does not rule out the possibility of many roles accumulated by one curialist. The Per Obitum list does not list a full curriculum vitae of providees, but (sometimes) registers the quality in which a petitioner had been granted a benefice and the prerogatives he consequently enjoyed according to the papal chancery rules. 169 Identification based on Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 36 n.1. 170 “Et hoc Sanctitate Tua ignorante, idque contra notoria privilegia apostolica, cum potestate invocandi bracchium seculare adversus illorum temeratores, nobis concessa.” Letter of supplication of Clarius to the pope, 14 April 1594, ASV, Segr. Di Stato, Fiandra, 10, 15r. 171 Brief of Clement VIII to the deacons of Saint-Jean and Saint-Paul at Liège, 13 November 1596, regest in Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 113. Christophe De Blocquerie was Aldobrandini’s secretary 1603–11. Vaes, “Les curialistes belges,” 115. 172 On Lambertus and his family, see Vaes, “les curialistes belges”; on his career (Abbreviator maioris praesidentiae in 1597, referendarius utriusque signaturae in the same year, provisor of the Santa Maria dell’Anima and, later on, prodatario of the Apostolic Church, and diplomatic emissary of the Holy See in France and in the Empire), see Weber, Die Päpstlichen Referendare, 3, 955. 173 Leonardus Thisius, probably a relative of Theodatus Thisius, had been an employee of the papal chancery in between 1575 and 1595 (Vaes, “Les curialistes belges,” 113). A brief of 30 April 1588 urges the archdeacon of Ardennes and the deacon of Saint-Servais in Maastricht to bestow a Liège altar to Leonard Thys, scriptor of apostolic letters and familiaris Sanctissimi. Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 28. In the 1590s, he pops up as the rector of Lisse. Brief of Clement VIII to Theodorus Thys, 28 February 1597, regest in Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 115.
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tried to realise his claims to the rectorship of Jusserenne via Rome. Two other papal providees could not be traced back to these Roman circuits, but a third specimen, Joannes De Chapeaville, a canon of Saint Lambert’s and the Vicar General of the diocese, was charged regularly, in the 1590s, with helping Roman curialists seize their benefices in the Principality.174 As a matter of fact, it was Franciscus Oranus who turned out, by the end of the 1590s, to be the author of the renewed clashes between Louvain nominees and Liège competitors, claiming as he did the glory for inserting a particularly harmful clause in papal briefs that turned all potential competitors of papal providees, including Louvain nominees, into intruders.175 Oranus was a hands-on expert of the Louvain privileges. He had studied at Louvain; taught Philosophy for a while at the Pedagogy of the Castle, and had been rewarded with a nomination burdening the collations of the bishop of Liège.176 The Rota judge was well acquainted with the jurisdictional privileges coming with the academic status as well, having procured the incarceration, in the beginning of the 1580s, of an executor of the diocesan tribunal of Liège.177 Oranus’ activities (just as much as those of Lambertus Ursinus, for that matter) may provide a textbook case of the slippery quality of networks. Most, if not all, members of the Liège “primary” clergy (i.e., the cathedral clergy), and many future curialists had completed part of their studies at Louvain. Just as much as the offspring of the power elites in the Habsburg Netherlands who visited universities across the Alps during their grand tour, however, almost all Liège patricians and
174 The two providees whose background remains unknown are Saverbroot and De Freisne. A dozen briefs to De Chapeaville, canon of Saint-Lambert, as apostolic executor in Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique. 175 Oranus took the glory for having interfered in the formulation of the clauses in papal briefs (“. . . ‘Non habentes provisionem a Sede Apostolica’ ab aliquot iam annis mutata ea forma ita conscribuntur ‘et non habentes provisionem a nobis ipsis.’ Cuius mutationis auctorem se fuisse gloriabatur D. Oranus”) and was said to have opposed a confirmation of the privileges in general as well (see below). Lombard to the university, 28 August 1599, Acta Universitatis, 18 September 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 332r–335r. 176 Liber secundus nominationum, 30 December 1580, RAL, OUL, 4752, 197v. See also Reusens, Documents relatifs, 4, 35. 177 “Devote sincere dilecte, intelleximus te in oppido Lovaniensi curasse arrestari et adhuc ad tuam instantiam detineri Hermannum Oplen civem huius nostre civitatis et executorem curie nostre Leodiensis notorie contra statuta et privilegia.” Partially burned letter of the Privy Council of Liège to Franciscus Oranus, “scholar at Louvain,” Dépêches du Conseil Privé, c.31 August 1581, AEL, Conseil Privé, 105, 44v.
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many curialists moved on to other universities in the Empire or even in Italy to obtain academic degrees.178 Oranus obtained a doctorate in Law in Siena before joining the Roman curia. He and many others probably did not belong to the inner circles of Academia, especially after they had left and redefined their loyalties and allegiances accordingly. It was difficult for Louvain academics to integrate themselves into bureaucratic networks at the curia that considered provisions of benefices their birthright.179 The interests of curialists and of their clients and allies in Rome or in the periphery merged, moreover, with those of other networks operating on a higher level. The Auditorate of the Apostolic Chamber had been beefed up in the course of the 1560s with new competences and legal instruments. A venal office, it was an asset to investors, new families seeking to breach into the curia, and the treasury of the Holy See. Its purchase in 1588 by Orazio Borghese (for 60,000 scudi or 120,000 florins), with the support of Montalto, had nearly caused his family’s ruin, as Orazio died prematurely in 1590 without even having obtained the cardinal’s hat that normally came with the job after a term of six years. Whereas the position would normally have been put up for sale again by the Apostolic Chamber, it is high protection that saved the Borgheses’ fortunes: the new Sfondrati pope, Gregory XIV, the godfather of the late Orazio’s brother Camillo, benignly allowed the latter to inherit the vacant post.180 Under the pontificate of Papa Aldobrandini, Camillo’s career boomed. He entered the Sacred College as a creatura of Clement VIII in the second wave of promotions to the cardinalate in 1596181 and surfaced in Santori’s Diario as one of the pontiff ’s most trusted ministers,182 until he eventually succeeded Clement VIII in 1605. It is such practices that have been described by Emich, Reinhard, and others as textbook-cases of Verflechtung. Taken
178
Nearly all graduated canons of Saint Lambert’s cathedral studied at Louvain, but 80 per cent of them had obtained their degrees elsewhere. See Chapeau, “La formation universitaire des chanoines,” 79–114. 179 This may reflect in the strikingly low numbers of foreign clerics seizing benefices in the diocese of Liège via papal provisions, compared with the dioceses of the Habsburg Netherlands. 180 Emich, Bürokratie und Nepotismus, 3–4. 181 Fattori, Clemente VIII e il Sacro Collegio, 4–5. 182 Memorie de i negozi che trattò il card. Santorio detto di San Severina nelle audienze che ebbe da varii pontefici dall’anno 1566 al 1594 (. . .), ASV, Arm. LII, 20–22 A. The competences of the Uditore del papa were confirmed by Clement VIII in 1596. Del Re, La curia Romana, 300.
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at face value, the paradigm of Verflechtung can be extrapolated, via bureaucratic patronage and otherwise, to the lower echelons of the curia as well. In this scenario, the Louvain networks were no match for those of wintered curialists who could plug their own clientelist practices into the interests of the high nobility in Rome. Conversely, it is academic networks and factions that put a confirmation of the privileges on the agenda of the academic senate at Louvain or that removed the Roman Question from it, according to the circumstances. Although the evidence is more fragmentary than the sources produced by papal families, it is largely sufficient to conclude that clientelist networks were omnipresent in Academia too. Another (or a complementary) working hypothesis is on offer, however. It is not colliding networks but the practice of privilege itself that shaped conflicts over benefices. The assessment that “obviously, Louvain professors could not integrate into Liège circuits at the curia” is not just tautological; it is also incorrect. Close to 15 per cent of the Louvain staff in the beginning of the 17th century were natives of the Principality, constituting the second biggest group after the Brabantines (35 per cent) when grouped along geographical lines;183 60 per cent of the nominees burdening collations in the Principality were Leodienses as well;184 and Clarius, a native of the Principality, was to become, in 1605, the first president of the Collegium Leodiense founded at Louvain by the prince-bishop and the cathedral chapter.185 Camillo Borghese’s activities as uditore del papa have to be put in a broader perspective. An edge of the veil is lifted by his successor, Marcello Lante, who would suggest, in 1604, draconian measures against the academics because “he could not bear their contempt of the authority
183 In the course of the 17th century, the number of Liège clerics among the teaching staff remained considerable. See Roegiers, “Professorencarrières.” 184 At least in between 1598 and 1621. This implies that the number of “diocesan acceptations” was substantially higher than the average for the entire research group (45 per cent). 185 Reusens, Documents relatifs, 3, 413–14. This was already proposed to Frangipani by the cathedral chapter of Saint-Lambert’s: “Oltra le sudette gratie s’è dimandato de più dal capitulo a Nostro Signore che, trovandose alcune borse di buon numero fondate da molti canonici di questa chiesa in diversi collegii et diverse academie, come di Lovanio et di Colonia, si contentasse la Santità Sua di commutare la voluntà d’i fondatori in questo caso . . . se reducessero in un collegio o in una casa da comprarse da questo capitulo nell’Università di Lovanio, et ordinare di più che tutte le borse se fundassero per l’avvenire, . . . s’unissero et incorporassero alla casa o collegio sudetto.” Frangipani to Aldobrandini, Informatione (. . .), ed. Louant, Correspondance, 114.
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of the Apostolic See and of himself.186 In the “culture of office” governing the Roman curia, ceremonial and jurisdictional prerogatives and competences that came with officialdom became the prerogatives of the individual. Because of the fluidity of identity in an increasingly diffuse socio-religious order, the office-holder felt compelled to defend his honour and that of the office in order to accumulate reputazione, the very basis of power.187 Faced with status-inconsistency in the face of competition by diocesan seminaries and Jesuit colleges, academics, for their part, were likely to answer in kind to challenges of privileges that symbolised academic poverty and learning. The analogy with another fight in the 1590s, now over full-blown symbolical practices such as graduation rituals, is difficult to ignore. As a matter of fact, this quarrel over rituals may explain partially why the Louvain doctors did not manage to get their benefice affairs accomplished in a suitable manner in Rome and why they allowed, as a consequence, Liège curialists to harden their position and the problems of Clarius and Danielis to escalate. The university would recommend the “Roman Question” again to the papal nuncio only at the end of 1597,188 while the feeble attempts to mobilise the princely councils for their cause in 1594 were only resumed in that year as well. According to the nuncio, academics and members of the Privy Council had become alienated in the meantime.189 Vossius cum suis continued to lobby in Rome “pro aris and focis Lovaniensibus,” but he barely referred to the troubles of Louvain nominees when reporting on his activities. His 1596 correspondence did not focus on the
186 “Auditor eidem Sanctissimo retulit indigne ferens contemptum Sedis Apostolice et sui.” Thomas White Lombard to Arnold ab Eynthouts, abbot of Saint-Gertrudis and conservator of the privileges, 21 August 1604, Acta Universitatis, 8 October 1604, RAL, OUL, 62, 205r. With respect to the context, see p. 332 and 342–43. 187 “Se il senso della propria identità è intessuto di una forte qualità relazionale, e si percepisce la propria collocazione come perennemente minacciata e perennemente da difendere, anche la gestione delle cariche di cui si trova investiti ne sara permeata . . . Come il bisogno di difendere perennemente il proprio onore deriva dal fatto di assumere la reputazione, e quindi gli altri, a far parte della propria identità, così la necessità di rivendicare continuamente le proprie facoltà giurisdizionali deriva dalla mancanza di precisi confini tra i diversi poteri.” Ago, Carriere e clientele, 141. 188 The university to Frangipani, 9 October 1597, ed. Van der Essen, Correspondance, 101–02. 189 “Havendo talmente offeso l’animi di questi signori del consiglio privato, che l’hav’ in gran parte alienati dall’università.” Frangipani to Aldobrandini, 23 October 1596, ed. Van der Essen, Correspondance, 239.
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Roman Question in the first place, nor did he call for a solemn catalogus transporting the famous doctors of Louvain to Rome in order to support a swift confirmation of the Louvain privileges.190 In the minutes of the academic senate and of the Congregation of the Arts faculty, another issue had come to haunt academic minds, and it was apparently given absolute priority—even to the extent that university men in Louvain were willing to jeopardise their cordial relationship with power elites in Brussels whose support they badly needed in the Roman Question. Between 1592 and 1597, Louvain Jesuits tried to imitate their Douai and Cologne co-religionists and to acquire the right to organise public courses in Philosophy. In line with events elsewhere in Europe, academics at Louvain sought to counter these attempts. For obvious reasons, there was little use in underscoring their status as poor and learned clerics: the Jesuits claimed to be all that too, and could reasonably object that their fathers were not even allowed to hold benefices in return (although their colleges devoured large quantities of benefices via incorporation). So in this conflict, academics pulled another building stone of their identity out of the bottom drawer that was central to their self-understanding, an item that was directly related to their claims to a niche in the benefice system but had been of little use in their wrangling with Liège curialists: that public teachers at Louvain and their alumni were, or rather had to be, secular clerics in the first place. Just as much as leading university dons felt compelled to defend the scholars’ poverty by stepping into the breach for embattled nominees, now they had to project the university as a monolithic bastion of secular clerics.
4.2. “Veluti altare contra altare.” the battle of the schools, 1592–98 The distinction between secular and regular clerics was not invented for the noble cause of keeping out the Jesuits in the 1590s, drawing as it did on a long and venerable tradition of infighting between secular clerics and mendicants at medieval universities.191 In the Louvain
190 Vossius to Boden, 10 November 1596, in Acta Universitatis, 28 December 1596, RAL, OUL, 61, 185r. 191 See, for the medieval universities, Traver, “Secular and Mendicant Masters.”
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context, the religious orders barely surface in academic councils; they were virtually absent from the faculty board of the Arts faculty, do not figure in its promotion lists, and did not perform as examiners. The religious houses incorporated into the university—i.e., all religious institutions in the university town, bar the Jesuit college192—mostly catered their own teaching in Philosophy and Theology. The Faculty of Divinity remained ultimately in control of the granting of academic degrees and public teaching. Although statutes allowed two or three members of the religious orders to be co-opted as faculty regents, their representation in the Collegium Strictum tended to be precarious and short-lived in the early 17th century.193 The Spanish Blackfriar De Torres, regent between 1611 and 1615, was allowed to teach publicly and obtained a special permission from the faculty to perform as the mentor of secular clerics as well.194 Immediately after Torres’ departure for Spain, this “Dominican chair,”195 funded by the Archdukes, was suppressed under pressure of the academics. Torres would be one of the two friars who occupied a public chair at Louvain until the French Revolution.196 Beyond the walls of the university town, the Faculty of Arts would enter a coalition with Douai against the public courses in Philosophy offered at the Blackfriars’ college of Saint-Omer.197 Simultaneously, requests from their co-religionists at Maastricht had to be rejected, while the Louvain Blackfriars were admonished not to follow the example of the convent of Saint-Omer.198
192
Qf. Quaghebeur, “L’echo européen.” In the period under investigation, two Blackfriars occupied a seat in the Strict College of Regents of Theology; another one or two probably had a seat in the Lata Facultas which all doctors and licenciati in Divinity residing at Louvain could attend. Later in the 17th century, the representation of the Dominicans and the Augustinians in the Strict College became more or less institutionalised. Cf. Roegiers, De Leuvense theologen. 194 “Supplicavit D M N Fr Thomas De Torres sibi permitti ut non solum sui ordinis et aliis religiosis id etiam aliis quibuscumque requisitus presidere posset . . . conclusit decanus . . . hanc tamen permissionem domino Torres concessam ad alium extendi nolimus.” Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 14 May 1612, RAL, OUL, 387, 29. 195 Torres’ chair was founded after the model of the extraordinary chairs in Divinity and Philosophy reserved for the religious orders at Spanish universities, whose public colleges were in most cases administered by the secular clergy. Cf. Peset, “La organización de las Universidades españolas,” 105. 196 The attempts of the Dominicans (and other orders) to acquire for themselves the chair of Scripture in 1625 were blocked by the secular clerics. Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 26 October 1625, RAL, OUL, 387, 231. 197 Acta Facultatis Artium, 5, 27, 28 January and 16 July 1618, RAL, OUL, 715, 111 and 151; Acta Universitatis, 20 January 1618, RAL, OUL, 64, 78v–79r. 198 Acta Facultatis Artium, 1 February and 16 July 1618, RAL, OUL, 715, 118 and 152. 193
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Yet, the most clamorous conflicts between secular and regular clerics did involve the Jesuits.199 In all three universities of the Burgundian heritage—Louvain, Douai, and Dole—the adaptation of the learned corporations to new circumstances was related to the rise of the Society as an international player in the field of higher education. As elsewhere in Catholic Europe, relations with the fathers were often drawn into a conflict mode. And it is a striking fact that graduation rituals were recurrently staged as a casus belli by the academics. In the late 1580s as well as in 1613, the secular clerics in the faculty and university boards at Douai, supported by their Louvain colleagues, tried to force the Jesuits to ditch the separate graduation rituals for their alumni at the College of Anchin.200 At Louvain, Jesuit attempts in the 1590s and in the 1620s to organise a philosophical college after the model of their Douai college met with fierce resistance from the academics, among other reasons because the Jesuits insisted on separate graduation ceremonies for their alumni (in the 1590s) or were suspected of aspiring to them (in 1618–27). In 1620, academics at Dole observed with horror, in a letter to their Louvain colleagues, that the Jesuits did not flinch from imitating the academic pomp displayed during the promotions of the Arts faculty—and briefly opened a Pandora’s box of expectations to which rituals had to respond: Nam cum ceremoniae quibus in suorum promotionibus quaevis academia utitur ludicrae aut mimicae non sint, sed in eis insit aliqua dignitatis ac ornatus ratio: consequens profecto et a privatorum collegiorum moderatoribus usurpari non debere.201
The administrators of private colleges (the Jesuit college at Dole) had to be stopped from imitating academic rituals, because ritual practices are not ridiculous or merely mimetic games. However, the rich ritual life of Academia is apparently supposed to do just that: symbolise a logic of dignity and decorum. The reasoning seems a wee
199 The first attempt dated back from 1583. See Donnelly, “Padua, Louvain and Paris.” 200 The Douai Faculty of Arts to the Privy Council, 1 October 1587, Université de Douai 1584–1698, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1285, and Acta Universitatis, 8 August 1613, RAL, OUL, 116v–121v. 201 University of Dole to the rector and University of Louvain, 25 August 1620, in Acta Universitatis, 6 September 1620, RAL, OUL, 64, 233v: cf. the University of Louvain to the rector and University of Dole, 10 September 1620, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 209r; more correspondence with the universities of Dole and Douai with respect to the Jesuit Question in the Autumn of 1620, ibidem, 210r–216v.
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bit sophistic. It obliges nobody (except for other 17th-century academics, of course); nor will this type of reasoning convince sceptics that academic rituals are indeed more than “empty gestures.”202 Therefore, it is hard to do justice to the attempts of academics in Dole, Louvain, and Douai to raise the profile of graduation rituals as a credible stake in their clashes with the Jesuits. Scholarship on the conflict at Louvain in the 1590s has struggled to attribute any credibility at all to the squeals of academics about their beloved rituals. “In fact, the faculty of arts wanted to keep the Jesuits from teaching by all means.”203 In his outdated but inevitable Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus, Poncelet invokes the vested interests of the Arts faculty and its leverage over the higher faculties when accounting for the opposition against Jesuit teaching. While Poncelet fails to involve rituals in his analysis, Donnelly does not even mention them in his comparative study of antiJesuit antagonism at Paris, Padua, and Louvain.204 This approach is problematic. First, the Arts faculty was not always able to dictate its agenda to the other faculties, which raises the question of how its power was assembled in this specific context.205 Second, vested interests are not a haven for historians trying to articulate the ultimate cause of the conflict. A consensus about these interests was only gradually reached in the course of the 1590s. Making this outcome a cause is tantamount to turning upside down the chronology of events. Third, scholarship has abandoned the notion of “mere ritual” informing the traditional scepticism of historians in the 19th and 20th centuries towards ritual practices.206 After the crisis of structuralism, historians have avoided going from one extreme to the other and attaching too much meaning to rituals as functionalising rites that minimise conflict and that restore the equilibrium of organic, homeostatic societies. Students of rituals deploy the uncertainties surrounding them,
202
Judging by the attempts of the Dole professors to anticipate sceptical arguments, sceptics of ritual were already around in the 17th century. The Reformation is widely known to have triggered the first “crisis of representation,” but this was not limited to Reformed churches. Moreover, a long tradition of bashing of rituals already existed in the Middle Ages. Genealogies of ritual scepticism in Buc, The Dangers of Ritual. 203 Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus, 196. 204 Donnelly, “Padua, Louvain and Paris.” 205 “Composite power” will be discussed below, see p. 482–86. 206 Trail-blazing insights on rituals in the Burgundian Netherlands on the crossroads of courtly and urban culture in Arnade, Realms of Ritual; the emergence of a group of “experts” of performative practices constitutes the central theme of Van Bruaene, Om beters wille.
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their strategic manipulation, adaptation, or appropriation by different actors with diverging purposes, their emotive power, or their explosive potential in a contentious society,207 in line with Renata Ago’s correlation between the fragility of status and conflicts over ceremonial or jurisdictional prerogatives.208 The notion of ritual as a distinctive, symbolic strategy is also central to a captivating book entirely dedicated to academic rituals in early modern Germany, Marian Füssel’s Gelehrenkultur als symbolische Praxis.209 Conflicts over academic rituals, which became increasingly common in early modern Germany in line with a generally observed inflation of rank conflicts,210 had the same function as the conflicts analysed in Ago’s Roma barocca. At German universities, maintaining one’s status proved to be an uphill struggle in the face of competition from nobles and a rising class of state officials. Füssel’s insights will prove to be as crucial for a clear understanding of the Louvain case as Ago’s. However, in her approach, any contested practice can become a challenge to one’s identity as well as an opportunity to affirm it. This is a sound analytical position but does not solve the problem of why exactly these practices (the imitation or duplication of academic rituals) became highly controversial in these particular circumstances— and not, say, the Jesuits’ concerns about vestimentary codes during public disputations.211 Füssel, for his part, is more focused on the specific advantages offered by rituals to settle status conflicts,212 but he does have to resort to arcane forces such as a “logic of distinction” or “social magic” to explain why academics believed their rituals did, in effect, design the academic order, and how rituals could become a credible stake.213 207 Cf. Buc, The Dangers of Ritual, and a criticism of Buc in Koziol, “The dangers of polemic,” 383. 208 Ago, Carriere e Clientele, 141. Cf. p. 267 n. 187. 209 Füssel, Gelehrtenkultur. 210 In 17th-century Germany, the inflation of rank conflicts brought before princely courts was considered a relatively new phenomenon; cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, “Rang vor Gericht,” 410. 211 Cf. the 3rd article in the Notata a deputatis societatis Jesu circa statuta almae universitatis Lovaniensis & vener: facultate artium quoad ea a quibus societas eximi cupit, no date, in UAL, Ghent (1958–1959), 157. 212 The spatial positions allocated during the performance of rituals to the participants is unambiguous and is therefore likely to become a symbolic bone of contention when participants wish to reopen negotiations over their status. Füssel, Gelehrtenkultur, 94–95; Stollberg-Rilinger, “Rang vor Gericht,” 402. 213 Füssel puts to practice the approach advocated in Burke, “Performing History.”
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It is time to revisit the ritual theory of the Dole professors. If we stick to a literal translation of their words, this “logic of dignity and decorum” was to be found in the practice itself. The Louvain conflict in the 1590s will prove to be a case in point. If one respects the chronology of events, a multi-layered logic of sorts was constituted in the practice itself, and rituals were not just controversial but also highly performative—otherwise they would not have become controversial in the first place. Historians have been pulling down the walls between society and theatre by considering rituals one among many performative practices that generated the realities they described. Academics trying to keep the Jesuits out prove to be much more inventive, however, when it comes to tearing down all kinds of boundaries. In order to trace this demolition work, we should go back to Poncelet’s assessment of academics trying to stop the Jesuits by all means. The argument is that academics had their own theories about rituals, that they were capable of making this theory work in more than just a “symbolic” way, and that rituals therefore not only mediated, in line with Poncelet’s innocuous reference to “by all means,” the conflict between Jesuits and academics, but also the fabric of Academia itself. A brief chronology will serve as a vademecum. 4.2.1. The anatomy of a conflict In 1593, the town of Louvain launched the plan to allow the fathers of the Society, following the example of other universities, to teach litterae humaniores, philosophy and metaphysics.214 Already in 1583 the Jesuits had tried to acquire a position at Louvain similar to that which they held in the University of Douai, but they failed to obtain the consent of the Faculty of Arts. The matter gained momentum when, one year later, in 1594, news reached the faculty board of the Arts that the bishop of Antwerp, Laevinius Torrentius, intended to found in his testament a Jesuit philosophical college in Louvain.215 The faculty board reacted vehemently and implored the bishop to abandon his 214 Acta Facultatis Artium, 23 January, 10 February and 2 August 1593, RAL, OUL, 713, 342r, 344 r, 351r. 215 Acta Facultatis Artium, 26 March 1594, RAL, OUL, 713, 364r. Read Marinus, Laevinius Torrentius. On his activities as a humanist, see De Landtsheer, “The Library of Bishop Laevinus Torrentius.” Alongside his library, his legacy to the fathers consisted in a capital of 24,000 florins that could be used to buy rents of approximately 1,500 florins yearly. Cf. the Testament of Torrentius, 29 March 1595, ARSI, Fondo
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plan to found a “fifth pedagogy.” Two arguments would frame the negotiations in the early stage of the conflict. First, free courses after the Jesuit model would cause the ruin of the other pedagogies. Second, the fathers of the Society would never be prepared to submit themselves to rectoral jurisdiction.216 A compromise was reached, including a yearly dotation of 600 florins to be paid in the future by the Jesuits to the old pedagogies. Until then, they would limit themselves to lectures in metaphysics, which was not a part of the curriculum taught at the pedagogies.217 As Poncelet suggests, however, more was at stake than merely financial practicalities. When negotiations on the modalities of the order’s teaching failed, the Faculty of Arts appealed to the council of Brabant for arbitration; the Jesuits mobilised the Society’s privileges to teach and to grant academic degrees in Theology and Philosophy and appealed with the support of the city to the Privy Council.218 In August 1595, a royal decree was issued to settle the affair: the Jesuits were allowed to establish a fifth philosophical college alongside the old pedagogies; Jesuit courses would not be free; and the resulting minervalia had to compensate for the loss of income of the other pedagogies. The Jesuits’ teaching in the new college and their students as well were subjected to rectoral and decanal jurisdiction, but the order could organise its own examinations extra lineam, without participating in the central examinations and the promotion ceremony of the four pedagogies. In return, the honour of furnishing the primus of Louvain emerging from these central examinations remained a reserve of the pedagogies.219 This applied also to the ranking of the students according to their scholarly achievement in lineae in the central promotion list, which gave access to grants in the higher faculties.220 Academics had not awaited this verdict—with which they would refuse to comply—as they felt
Gesuitico, Collegia, 1459, Nr. 26, and Torrentius to Claudio Acquaviva, general of the Society, 1 February 1595, ibidem, Nr. 25; a copy in UAL, Ghent (1958–1959), 158. 216 Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus, 196. 217 Compare the instructions from Acquaviva to Oliverius Manareus, SJ, provincial of Belgica, 4 November 1595, UAL, Ghent (1958–1959), 159. 218 Memorandum of the town of Louvain to the Privy Council, 20 April 1594, Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281. 219 Cf. Bruneel, “De Primus.” 220 Edict of the Privy Council of August 1595, Acta Universitatis, 5 September 1595, RAL, OUL, 61, 79r.
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that they could not, this time, go against the support commanded by the Jesuits in Brussels.221 A first supplication letter had left for Rome in order to rally the papacy to its cause in June 1595, and another one followed two months later.222 The resulting papal brief Accepimus Nuper prohibited the Jesuits from teaching logics and physics, but they could continue their classes in metaphysics and in the other sciences that the university had allowed. The brief was destined to the abbots of Park and Saint Gertrudis, who had to see to its execution.223 The Privy Council got wind of it and admonished the Louvainists that they should not try to have their brief executed without a placet. Similar letters were sent to the abbots, whose content left little doubt that such a placet would never be granted. The academics received an angry letter from Cardinal Albert of Austria, who had recently arrived as governor of the Habsburg Netherlands after his brother Ernest’s death. The new Governor General simultaneously mobilised the Spanish ambassador in Rome in favour of the Jesuits.224 Meanwhile, the fathers abided their time and continued to teach, which resulted in another papal intervention. A second brief, this time directed to the Society’s general in Rome, Claudio Acquaviva (1581–1615), was more successful, because it could be passed on to the fathers without requiring a formal placet, thus dissolving the awkward situation which “inhibited” them to obey papal orders.225 The fathers ceased lecturing at once,226 which created a promising context for the university to move towards the centre of the negotiations again. As the Privy Council had now openly been repudiated by Ignatian obedience, the academics could accommodate the interests of “Brussels”—avoiding a loss of face—with their own concerns. Negotiations over the suppression of one pedagogy in order to improve
221
Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus, 204. Letter of supplication of the Arts faculty to Clement VIII, 30 June 1595, in ASV, Segr. di Stato, Fiandra, 10, 8r–v; 30 August 1595, Acta Universitatis; 30 August 1595, RAL, OUL, 61, 74r. 223 22 December 1595. A copy in A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xxiv, 2nd bundle. See also the accompanying letters from Vossius to the university, 23 December 1595, UAL, Ghent (1958–1959), 157, and from his nephew Leonardus Vossius (at Liège), 22 January 1596, UAL, OUL, 344. Cf. Acta Universitatis, 25 January 1596, RAL, OUL, 61, 115r–117v. 224 Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus, 218. 225 Gysens, Gerardus Vossius van Borgloon, 191. 226 Notarial acts, 10 April 1596, ASV, Segr. di Stato, Fiandra, 10, 3r. 222
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the financial state of the others carried the official approval of the university, but they came to a halt when academics proved unable to sort out which pedagogy had to be suppressed, and which logic could be found to justify the measure227—a failure that was ascribed by exasperated commissioners of the Privy Council to the emotional attachment of university men to the colleges where they had spent their youth.228 Academics, for their part, felt that the suppression of one pedagogy—a manoeuvre to furnish the Society with teaching infrastructure229—would be interpreted as a rejection of the traditional ways of Academia in favour of the Society’s didactic models.230 Backed by the abbots of Saint Gertrudis and Park, the university eventually humbly implored the Supreme Pontiff to recommend their case to the cardinal of Austria.231 The papal brief Bonarum Artium of 11 October 1596 indeed would warmly recommend the university to the pious governor of the Netherlands, urging him to silence the legists disseminating discord and envy.232 The brief offered the latter, while performing as an obedient son of His Holiness, the occasion for which he was
227 “Inherendum esse conclusioni de servando pedagogiorum numero . . . quandoquidem oportunum medium aut rationem qua extingui pedagogium aliquod possit, non videant.” Memorandum of the Arts faculty, Acta Universitatis, July 1596, RAL, OUL, 61, 147r. 228 “Domini licet fateantur quattuor pedagogia subsistere non posse, constanter tamen persistunt, diminutionem, ob affectum, quo singuli in suas scholas, ex quibus emerserunt, feruntur, a facultate vix sperari posse.” Anton Houst, Commissioner of the Privy Council to Louvain university, to Nicolaus Bonnart, SJ, 26 June 1596, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. 229 “Collegium Porci patribus facile concedendum, vix tamen audeo in latum illum campum cum illis descendere, metuens ne quod nunc laudant post recantent.” Houst to Bonnart, 26 June 1596, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. 230 “Cum huiusmodi pedagogii suppressio fieri nequeat sine iusta patronorum piorumque fundatorum offensione et alienatione regentium in eo pedagogio et docentium iniuriam eiusdemque pedagogii non levi ignominia, quod quasi insufficienter hactenus philosophiam docuerit, societatis professioni cedere, et extingui mereatur, quod sane et in ceterorum pedagogiorum quibus commune est docendi institutum eadem forma et modus, iniuriam et confusionem vergere videtur.” Memorandum of the Arts, Acta Universitatis, July 1596, RAL, OUL, 61, 147r. 231 “Qua in re, quia magnum minuendae invidiae in Illustrissimi Cardinalis Alberti nomine Catholicae majestatis per Belgium optimi, et iam clarissimis contra religionis hostes victoriis gloriosi gubernatoris favore, momentum nobis positum existimamus, obnixe optaremus eidem caussam nostram Tuae Sanctitatis authoritate commendari.” Supplication of the Arts faculty to Clement VIII, 19 September 1596, in ASV, Segr. di Stato, Fiandra, 10, 9r–v. 232 “Sed quoniam interdum aliqui, ut audimus, aulici et consiliarii humano affectu, ne quo graviore verbo utamur, discordiarum semina alunt, et quae recte constituta sunt labefactare moliuntur.” Clement VIII to Albert, cardinal of Austria, 11 October 1596, ed. Van der Essen, Correspondance, 396.
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waiting233 to avoid loss of face, to find a way out of the deadlock, and to restore the dynasty’s image as the protector of the university. The fears of Frangipani, who delivered the brief to the prince in January 1597, that the pressure on the academics to reach an agreement with the Jesuits would not be removed by this manoeuvre, did not become a reality.234 4.2.2. Accounting for academia: Rituals as managerial practices It is not my purpose to discuss every single document drafted by the academics and their opponents between 1593 and 1597.235 A memorandum drafted in 1596 provides an interesting point of departure to address the question of why academics opposed Jesuit integration in the university, why opposition was not limited to the Faculty of Arts, and how promotion rituals were woven into this conflict of interests. The text was submitted in March 1596 for approval to the academic senate by Cuyckius, who was identified by the Jesuits as their major opponent. At that moment, the first papal brief to the abbots of Park and Saint-Gertrudis had failed to suspend Jesuit teaching, the Belgian fathers having convinced Acquaviva that in the meantime a compromise—the royal decree of August 1595—had been reached. The 1596 memorandum was, at least in its preamble, surprisingly moderate, stressing as it did the wish of the university to come to terms with the Jesuits. Obviously, it was a text designed to muster support for the reasonable claims of the academics, not rouse spirits that were already convinced. Moreover, it had to gratify different audiences. The document was submitted to the Privy Council in Spring,236 and a copy 233 “La differenza tra l’università co’li padri gesuiti di Lovanio . . . havendo talmente offeso l’animi di questi signori del consiglio privato, che l’hav’ in gran parte alienati dall’università sudetta non senza suo danno, ha mosso questo serenissimo prencipe a desiderar ch’io procurasse qualche concordia . . . m’ha fatto replicar ch’io la tentasse almeno per quel fine d’informarne la Santità Sua, acciochè, conosciuta perfettamente la qualità della causa, possa col suo sano e santo giudicio ovviar all’inconvenienti ch’usciranno dal lassarla nel termine, nel qual’adesso se trova.” Frangipani to Aldobrandini, 23 October 1596, ed. Van der Essen, Correspondance, 239. 234 “E temo che, nonostante lo breve, se continoarà il persuader l’università che in ciò si concorda con i padri, però ne ho avertita a fin che, se ne fusse molestata, posso io defenderla secondo la mente di Sua Beatitudine.” Frangipani to Aldobrandini, 15 January 1597, ed. Louant, Correspondance, 11. 235 An endless series of articles and reactions to these articles drafted by academics and Jesuits in UAL, Ghent (1958–1959), 157 and RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. 236 “Scriptum quod illustrissime vestre dominationi superioribus diebus misit universitas Lovaniensis non est novum, sed copia eius quod in quadragesima nuper obtu-
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of it surfaces in the archives of the archdiocese of Mechlin,237 which suggests academic rhetoric had to rally other powers that be for the university’s cause as well. The archives of the Louvain Jesuit college list several copies of Cuyckius’ text, as the fathers had to answer to it in several responsiones, and the memorandum was submitted again by the end of 1596 to Frangipani.238 Three gravamina were articulated. The two first arguments were related to the financial compensation of the old pedagogies, which was deemed insufficient and anything but honourable for the secular clerics teaching at the traditional pedagogia, and the refusal of the Jesuits to adopt the faculty’s tested didactic and disciplinary paradigms. Jesuits would be able to utilize their quickly expanding network of colleges in the Netherlands to withdraw applicants from the university colleges. As a result, different didactic models would become a threat to doctrinal stability: the laws of the market (as opposed to intrinsic arguments) would force other teachers and doctors in every discipline to adapt themselves to Jesuit methods in order to survive, “nec juvenes nec parentes judicare possunt.” A comparison between the management of the body academic and the body politic, where stability was a central concern, had to enrol the public realm’s watchdogs.239 The third gravamen, the argument involving graduation ceremonies, linked the fate of the Arts faculty to that of the other learned corporations, especially the Faculty of Theology. The Jesuits’ plans to withdraw their licenciandi from the faculty’s common promotion ceremony would have devastating effects both for the faculty and the university. It would destroy the image of unity in Academia. It would give the impression that, at Louvain, two universities competed with each other; that there would be two faculties of Arts and two faculties of Theology. This argument was rhetorically reinforced by a commonplace drawn from
lit serenissimo cardinali.” Memorandum of the Jesuits to Frangipani, end of 1596, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. 237 A.A.M., OUL, 10. 238 Memorandum of the Jesuits to Frangipani, end of 1596, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. Several copies of the university’s Gravamina can be found in the same box. 239 “Tum quia si alio meliori seu doctore, seu docendi modo se offerente, veteres doctores in quacumque disciplina, novuis cedere debent nulla erit aut docentium aut doctrine in scolis academicis stabilitas, nulla perpetuitas. Quod ut in civili gubernatione qui rebus presunt sibi fieri nollent et ad perturbationem reipublice pertinere iudicarunt, sic ut de academia republica idem sentiatur, equum esse arbitramur.” Acta Universitatis, 24 March 1596, RAL, OUL, 61, 136r–138v.
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Saint-Augustine:240 Jesuit and academic institutions of higher learning would stand up against each other as “two altars in one city.” This statement must have been particularly convincing, with heretics at the back door who were expected to triumph at any sign of discord among Catholics. What exactly did happen during these promotiones? In the administrative accounts of the Arts faculty, little ink was spilled over the socalled “solemnities that were observed in line with old and venerable customs.” In 1593, for instance, they only mention that on the 18th of November, between 10 and 11 am, the chancellor of the university (i.e., Cuyckius)—in the presence of the rector, the doctors in Theology, Law, and Medicine, the faculty’s officials, and many other licenciates and masters—had created, in the central building of the Arts faculty (the so-called vicus artium), the following licentiati in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and in the order listed below, after they had taken the oath on the profession of the Faith introduced by Pius V in 1564.241 There follows a list of consecutively numbered names of the 53 promoti of that year, the baccalaurei who had given evidence of their acquaintanceship with Aristotelian logic and physics before the examination committee of the Arts faculty.242 A horizontal line separated the numbers 1 to 12 from the rest (the so-called promoti of the prima linea).243 Another line was drawn between numbers 24 and 25, after which the remaining 29 postlineales of that year were listed.244 Little excitement can be detected in this dry account, compared to the lively descriptions of civic or religious ceremonies and festivities of the early modern Low Countries. Within an hour, academics apparently got through the entire programme. 240 On the use of commonplaces as a strategy to convince an audience, read the introduction to Waszink, Justus Lipsius: Politica, 49–52. 241 We are not informed about the physical position of the participants during the ceremony. 242 In fact, it seems that few baccalaurei did not make it to the promotio, as the lists of bachelors in the minutes of the Arts faculty overlap with those of the promoti. 243 In the margins, the faculty’s notary charged with the keeping of the Acta or the scribe acting on his behalf took the effort to annotate a few names with the initials of the respective pedagogies they represented.Only four or five names in the first linea are marked with a letter designating the pedagogy in which the students in question had earned their spurs. There are examples of promotion lists where every single student was marked with a letter, but these are the exception rather than the rule. 244 In the first decade of the 17th century, graduation numbers trebled, quadrupled, or even quintupled; the number of licentiati in the first two lineae was fixed at 12 students per linea, however. Actus Licentiae Anni 1593, in Acta Facultatis Artium, 18 November 1593, RAL OUL, 713, 359r–v.
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In that case, the Louvain promotio would probably never have made it to ego-documents, newspapers, and to a lemma in Diderot’s Encyclopédie Raisonnée, all of which tell a very different story. In 18th-century narrative sources, the attention shifted from the austere solemnities in the vicus artium to the so-called “Primus of Louvain”: the student who had outperformed his comilitones during the examinations; who was ranked first in the promotion list; and who was to become the pivot of numerous festivities, ceremonies and outbursts of joy and violence in the public space during the days preceding the solemn promotio.245 As soon as the name of the promising young man was revealed by the faculty’s authorities, his comilitones took to the streets of the university town, carrying around the insignia of the pedagogy, while provocations and insults of and from students of the other colleges recurrently resulted in riots. The day before his proclamation, a solemn entry of the Primus took place, in which he was accompanied, under salutes and bell-ringing, by his family, friends, and by musicians, via a route that was planted with triumphal arches, to his pedagogy, which was decorated with banners, emblems, and chronograms eternalising the event. After his official proclamation by the faculty’s beadle in the presence of high ranking officials of State, Church, and City who had been invited by the academic authorities, a Te Deum was sung in the victorious pedagogy’s chapel. Over the next three to five days, official feasts and banquets organised by the pedagogy alternated with excesses and corteges of disguised freshmen in the streets of the university town. Academic order was emphatically restored during the ceremony registered in the Acta: university men withdrew within the walls of the Vicus Artium and witnessed the transition of rowdy students into licentiati artium who were unambiguously ranked according to their intellectual performance.246 The Primus went on to his home town, where he was received with gifts, fireworks, and salutes. Although we do not have access to comparable sources with respect to the end of the 16th, and the early 17th century,247 things must have
245 The following description has been borrowed from Bruneel, “Le Primus de Louvain.” 246 The accounts in the Acta portray this ceremony as a purely academic one, in sharp contrast with the proclamation of the Primus a few days before. Compare, with respect to the restoration of Law and Order in a civic context by the corporate ritual of the shooting guilds after reversal feasts, Arnade, Realms of Ritual. 247 The festivities coming with the promotion in the early 17th century have not been studied yet. With respect to the second half of the 17th century, information
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Plate 4.3. Promotion List of the Arts Faculty, 1593 The Actus Licentiae or promotion list of 1593, under the deaconate of Gerardus Corselius, in the Acta Facultatis Artium, RAL, OUL, 713, 359r–v. Mark the lineae separating the first linea of students from the second one and from
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the postlineales. The Primus of Louvain, in this case Johannes Huberti from Hasselt (Principality of Liège), is not separated from the rest by textual or spatial markers. In the first linea, the pedagogy of a few students has been indicated: P(orcus), F(alco), C(astrum). [State Archives, Louvain]
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ran their course in a fairly similar way.248 In the 18th century, the celebration of the Primus of Louvain was considered an age-old tradition nurtured by the Austrian Habsburgs to accentuate continuity. In the 1595 royal decree, leaving the honour of furnishing the primus to the old, pedagogies had to woo academics who balked at embracing the Jesuits as their colleagues. And Jesuit criticism of the excessive rivalry, the violence, and the disturbance of public order by students and the teachers of the Arts faculty that accompanied the yearly promotio249 suggests that already in the late 16th century, the austere solemnities displayed in the official records of the Veneranda Facultas were preceded by burlesque and violent rites of passage and reversal ceremonies in the public space that put the ordo academicus aside for a short while250—but that conversely were not committed to documents instilling order on the academic enterprise.251 The selection of practices that made it to official records and those that did not in turn informed the ritual theory deployed by academics in the 1596 memorandum. It is from their highly formalised accounts in the Acta, not from eye-catching festivities blurring the line between academic, civic, and reversal ceremonies, that university men would distil a ratio dignitatis might be available in newspapers such as the Courrier véritable des Pays-Bas or the Ghendtsche Posttydingen. I wish to thank Prof. Dr Claude Bruneel (Université Catholique de Louvain) for his suggestions. 248 It might be rewarding to browse through the accounting books of the pedagogies, which have sporadically survived. The victorious pedagogy had to foot the bill for the festivities, a sum that amounted, in the 18th century, to 25 to 40 per cent of the pedagogy’s budget (Bruneel, “Le Primus de Louvain”). See De Vocht, Inventaire. 249 “Maxime enim dedecierit religiosos tot lites, dissidia, aversiones animorum, pericula periurii, pugnae, tumultus discipulorum, lapidationes fenestrarum et alia mala que hactenus Lovanii ex hac fonte partim inter professores pedagogiorum partes inter discipulos manarunt nec ita cessarunt, quin a biennio sit universitas hec experta.” Responsio ad pretensa gravamina quae universitas Lovaniensis exhibuit illustrissimo ac reverendissimo domino nuncio apostolico contra lectiones philosophicas Societatis Jesu, end of 1596, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. 250 Insults, violence, disguises—although more specific data would be welcome, the data suggest that Louvain students were drawing on a carnavalesque or charivari-like repertoire that, despite the obligatory but completely vain pre-emptive disciplinary measures taken by the academic authorities, may have been viewed with indulgence. See Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 99–101. 251 Jesuits, by contrast, focused on the disorder coming with academic graduation rituals, and recurred to a discourse that was much similar to the one framing other attempts to channel and Christianise traditional festivities: “quibus etiam accedet ex illa animorum aversione futurum ut fructus omnis spiritualis quem societas ex ceteris suis functionibus in tota universitate et omium pedagogiorum professoribus ac discipulis colligere possit, aut nullus sit aut exiguus.” Responsio ad pretensa gravamina (. . .), end of 1596, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12.
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et ornatus in their ritual practices. This may explain why the 1595 compromise failed to win over university men, even though the tradition of the primus of Louvain must have been a rare vehicle to project academic authority towards broader audiences.252 In addition, the academics’ “ritual theory” is quite unconventional to modern eyes. Rather than being under the spell of their rituals’ emotive power or social magic, Cuyckius cum suis turned to rather down-to-earth problems arising from the separate promotion (and examination) procedures planned by the Jesuits. In the Gravamina, grants attached to the numerous resident colleges for students of the higher faculties, most of which were reserves for aspiring theologians, were assigned on the basis of merit, i.e., on the ranking of the applicants of the respective pedagogia in the faculty’s central examination procedures and its common promotion ceremonial. This entailed that brilliant Jesuit alumni would be excluded from access to grants in the higher faculties. The Faculty of Arts would use a similar argument two decades later when it ruled, on the request of its colleagues at Douai, unfavourably against the separate promotion ceremonies held by the three colleges (including the Jesuit colleges of Anchin and Marchiennes) of the Douai faculty. But why should dons of the higher faculties suddenly bother about students who had preferred Jesuit teaching to that of the secular clerics of the pedagogies? In the previous chapters, it has become clear that grants were more than just economic units, mediating as they did spiritual, cognitive, and social hierarchies.253 In the 1596 memorandum, academics phrased their concerns from this perspective. They were not concerned bout the brilliant students who were denied access to grants. Instead, the concern was that colleges and, as a consequence, Public Interest would be deprived of brilliant students.254 The dons were very well aware that the exclusion of the Society’s students from the market of academic 252 The tradition of the Primus was indeed never used as a counterargument against separate promotions. This corresponds, again, to administrative practice: In the promotion lists, the primus was not separated by markers from the other students, in sharp contrast with the lines separating the lineales from the so-called post-lineales. 253 Cf. p. 125–32. 254 “Primum ex scola societatis promoti bursarum in collegiis theologicis aut aliis nulli capaces erunt, eo quod dicte burse afficiantur illis qui in communi promotione bonum et laudabilem ordinem sunt consecuti: ut propterea collegia supradicta preclaris omnibus ingeniis que in scola societatis excolentur hoc mo(do) penitus spolianda sint que interea primum in ipsam iuventutem deinde in universam rempublicam redundabit.” Memorandum of the university, Acta Universitatis, 24 March 1596, RAL,
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patronage gave them a only temporal lead, which would quickly evaporate. The Jesuits had already demonstrated, at Douai, that they were capable of pooling grants themselves, and they would be even more able to do so if they managed to secure an output of grateful alumni of their own, whose affection and the gratitude to their former mentors were mediated, according to academic theories, by promotion rituals.255 In this scenario, the statutory discrimination of their students in the competition for grants was likely to become a rhetorical asset in enrolment strategies towards potential benefactors instead of a disadvantage. This would result in the fabric of a parallel market of academic patronage that would escape the control of the regents of the Faculty of Divinity and that, the number of powerful patrons and generous donators being limited, would develop itself at their cost.256 But the secular clerics of the traditional colleges were likely to lose their grip over teaching as well. Jesuit grants would redirect the flow of students to the popular auditories of the Jesuit college at Louvain, where the chairs of Thomism and Scripture, occupied by theologians of renown such as Bellarmino in the 1570s and Lessius from the 1580s onwards, provided a full alternative to the public teaching provided by the faculty. In the 1590s, diplomatic correspondence between Brussels and Rome explicitly referred to the project as the nucleus of a future Jesuit seminary.257 Yet, while Jesuit teaching in Theology was a thesis
OUL, 61, 136r–138v. In 1590, the entry of nine students in the order had already sparked controversy. Cf. Poncelet, Histoire, 331–38. 255 Affection and emotions did play a role, as academics ascribed the willingness of pious donors to found new scholarships (in the pedagogy where they had studied) to the memory of the honors they had been covered with in a common promotio that, on the one hand, had to eternalise the relationship between alumni and the pedagogy where they had been trained and, on the other hand, visualised the unity of Academia. Informatio et Judicio Universitatis Lovaniensis de utilitate et necessitate concursus omnium paedagogirorum ad unam promotionem, unumque in ea ordinem, no date, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. 256 This concern was made more explicit in another document, the Rationes propter quas facultas Artium Academiae Lovaniensis putat usum privilegiorum concessorum societati Jesu quoad professionem philosophiae et gradus in ea conferendos, sibi posse incommodare (in the margins: “scriptum manu proprio Domini Cuyckii”) in RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. 257 “Et comme lon adresse un seminaire de Theologie a Louvain de la mesme compagnie et quil ny a dont le soustenir, sa majeste sest contentee que lon y unist les biens et revenuz dun monastere dict des escoliers situe en la ville de Leewe duche de Brabant.” The Secretariat of State in Brussels (?) to Laurens Dublioul, agent of Flanders, 12 February 1593, Deux letters du gouvernement (. . .) de 1593 et 1596, AGR, Audience, 1468/10.
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for some (such as, for instance, Torrentius),258 it was a reprehensible hypothesis for many a Faculty bigwig.259 It is in this sense that academics wanted their audience to read the concluding remarks in the 1596 memorandum, that the three gravamina combined had to be taken into account if one did not want to invite a hostile takeover bid against the university by the Society of Jesus.260 Performing rituals, and the exact way in which they were performed, apparently entailed much more than the symbolic constitution of an academic corporate identity. Academic graduation rituals realised this unity in a tangible way. In the logic of university men, separate promotions would inevitably create a separate infrastructure.261 The cycle of credibility in which graduation rituals generated brilliant alumni who generated, in turn, pious foundations for other promising youths, would slow down or even come to a halt. Just by performing graduation rituals separately, the Jesuits would be able to realise the very same role in society that academics considered theirs. The Jesuits’ insistence on separate promotions suggests that they agreed with the academics at least on that.262 This is not to say that 17th-century university dons, while blurring the line between managerial and ritual practices, can unequivocally be labelled as captains of (academic) industry. The businesslike approach to academic rituals in the 1596 Gravamina was entangled with other concerns. Academics stressed that the Fathers sought to dissociate
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“An forte sacram theologiam docentes Lovanii a Philosophia arcebuntur?” Torrentius to the university, 6 May 1594, Acta Universitatis, 11 May 1594, RAL, OUL, 60, 371v–372v. 259 See, for instance, the comments of Oranus, SJ, on the consequences of aborting the plan to set up a philosophical college at Louvain: “Quod si remissiores animo quodammodo concidisse aemuli viderint, suo tempore contrabuntur theologicas nostras scholas edeoque ipsum collegium evertere, cuius rei non laevia argumenta ex expositione praelectionum theologicarum horis iisdem, et suorum a scholis nostris avocatione.” Note, after 1598, ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia, 1459, Nr. 28. 260 “Deinde si utile reipublice belgice est ut tota academia Lovaniensis in unam societatis scholam transeat, saltem ex parte duarum facultatum theologice et philosophice, quarum hec academie mater et principam illa proles, maxima et culmen est, tunc utilis hec nova scola censeri poterit.” Memorandum of the university, Acta Universitatis, 24 March 1596, RAL, OUL, 61, 136r–138v. 261 Reversal feasts could be tolerated to a certain extent, because turning upside down the academic order in burlesque rites, which did not provide a viable alternative, in return may have accentuated the necessity of the “existing” academic order. Compare with respect to civic rituals Arnade, Realms of Ritual. 262 “Sur deux points ils restèrent intraitables: la liberté de suivre leurs méthodes et le refus des promotions mixtes.” Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus, 203.
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themselves not only from the faculty’s graduation ceremonies but also from the good and laudable ranking order that was achieved via promotion.263 University men wished to trigger a healthy competition between students that would incite them to virtue, piety, and zeal.264 Their insistence on the necessity of cognitive hierarchies among students devised in a common promotion refers to the order’s generally observed suspicion (at least in the 16th and early 17th century) of ceremonies that, because of the ranking they introduced, were not likely to instil humility on their students, or that conversely would damage their honour and self-esteem.265 Seen from the perspective of
263 “Eo quod dicte burse afficiantur illis qui in communi promotione bonum et laudabilem ordinem sunt consecuti.” Memorandum of the university, Acta Universitatis, 24 March 1596, RAL, OUL, 61, 136r–138v. Compare the more aggressive wording in the 1613 advice to the Privy Council on the situation in Douai: “Accedit quod distincti ordines in actibus promovendorum qui Duaci iam in usu sunt, ad formam Lovaniensem in unum magis ordinem redigendi sint quam multiplicandi. Nam Universitas Duacensis in sui erectione iussa est universitati Lovaniensi sese conformare, et id etiam quoad unum ordinem promovendorum ad aliquot annos fecit, donec spiritu singularitatis magis quam fraternitatis, divisionis quam communionis, separatione facta, promovendorum tot ordines erecti sunt quot auditoria, tot turmae quot scholae.” Acta Universitatis, 8 August 1613, RAL, OUL, 63, 116v–121v. 264 This function of rituals was made less explicit in the 1596 Gravamina, but the disciplinary function of the promotio, which may have been enhanced by the reversal of academic order in the liminal period in between the publication of the name of the Primus and the final solemn proclamation registered in the Acta, was elaborated on in the Informatio et Judicio (. . .), middle of the 1590s, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. 265 Füssel, Gelehrtenkultur, 175. Jesuit teachers resorted to different methods: they drew up catalogues ranking students according to their performance in each of the materials that were taught, a method that recalls the catalogues the Jesuits sent to Rome evaluating the members of their order according to different “dimensions” as well (cf. Quattrone, “The Jesuit Ordering”). Their aversion to committing an unambiguous ranking order of their students to writing resonates in their arguments against the reintroduction of a common promotio at Douai: “Dautant qu’il nest aucunement raisonnable, dester le droict qu’appartient a chaqun professeur de denominer choisir et avoir huict lineaux de ceus de son cours nij que d’entre de tant et de beaux et rares esprits qu’ij se rencontrent en l’un et l’autre, lon choisisse seulement huict par ou l’espoir de l’honneur, esguillon ordinaire des jeunes gens, seroit ostee, moins encore de prendre et tenir en une seule promotion des dicts deux cours l’ordre que jugeroient les professeurs de la faculte, veu qu’ (. . .) il n’est possible par le moijen d’ung examen de deux heures et peu plus pour les lineaux cognoistre et juger parfaictement de la preeminence de l’ung sur lautre, selon que se peut voir par le balancement des catalogues desdicts professeurs d’Anchin [= one of the two Jesuit pedagogies at Douai] a l’encontre des promotions esquelles diverses personnes meritoirement jugees capables des premiers places, [my italicisation] ont este rejectes vers les derniers et au contraire les moins suffisantes avances notablement par dessus leur rang, d’ou est procede, que la pluspart des mijeux verser en principales parties de la philosophie ont delaisse de promouver, e voulans hasarder leur honneur et reputation a un examen incertain de deux heures [= central examinations of the Arts faculty], et les autres, bien que grands
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university men, the Jesuits were not ready to submit to a hierarchy that was identified with virtue, piety, and doctrinal excellence. In line with Ago’s findings, the issue over graduation rituals was inextricably linked to the second gravamen about the fathers’ unwillingness to submit themselves to academic jurisdiction, which probably rendered their promised reverence towards university officials completely meaningless in academic eyes. The academics’ suspicions may have been fuelled by other experiences that we will have to return to in the next chapter, in which the fathers of the Society were identified as enemies of ecclesiastical hierarchy as well. Graduation rituals assembling the entire university behind the impenetrable walls of the Vicus Artium had to do more than visualising the unity of Academia and settling financial questions. They simultaneously had to resolve ambiguities that transcended the interests of the pedants of the schools: the nature and the inherent necessities of the social, religious, and spiritual Order. 4.2.3. Sources of uncertainty When one follows the reasoning of the dons, their ritual performances not only held the social fabric of Academia in place. That would have implied that the body academic was replaceable, a message that university men, for obvious reasons, were not trying to convey. In the “performance of a performance”266 unfolded in the 1596 memorandum, academics also emphasized in their concluding remarks their necessity for the public realm, while questioning the utility (let alone the necessity) of Jesuit teaching for the desired revival of the university and of the South Netherlands: both the university and the Faculty of Arts were, by the grace of God, already recovering quickly from the turmoil of war and would continue to do so without Jesuit help.267 In addiesprits ne tenant compte d’estudier tout au long de lannee, se sont contentees sur les deux mois derniers saddonner seulement aux definition, et autres choses semblables necessaires pour l’examen et utiles aux sciences, mais nullement suffisantes, sans les mathematicques, moraulx, livres de anima, metaphijsiq et aultres belles parties de ceste estude, dont on ne faict aucune recherche, et demande par lesdicts examens.” Memorandum of the Douai Jesuits for the Privy Council, Summer of 1613, Acta Universitatis, 8 August 1613, RAL, OUL, 63, 116v–121v. 266 The terminology here has been drawn from Füssel, Gelehrtenkultur, 143. 267 “Primum quia nulla necessitas ad novam hanc scolam cogit, sive ex parte universitatis, que hac schola tot annis caruit, et absque ea stetit ac floruit; sicut et nunc ea carere potest et absque ea feliciter reflorescit, sive ex parte societatis ipsius, que
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tion, university dons suggested that the alternative (a Jesuit university that would eventually substitute traditional teaching by secular clerics) would deprive towns and villages of learned pastors, canons, and other secular clerics versed in theology.268 The argument is interesting. Nobody could seriously assert that skilled labourers in the vineyard of the Lord were not of use, especially with triumphant heretics at the back door. Judging by the unprecedented proportion of secular clerics among the Sacre Theologie Baccalaurei, Licentiati, and Doctores in the Catalogus Promotionum between 1585 and 1618, Louvain was indeed a bulwark of the secular clergy; even among the doctors in Divinity, members of the religious orders were outnumbered by secular clerics.269 Jesuits, for their part, were notable by their absence from the faculty’s catalogus promotionum between 1585 and 1619. They took their degrees at Douai, under the auspices of the order.270
suos sibique subditos vel hic vel alibi docere potest, absque tali cursus philosophici promiscua scola, que ad promotionem ducens, reliquas scholas in discrimen vocet.” Memorandum of the university, Acta Universitatis, 24 March 1596, RAL, OUL, 61, 136r–138v. 268 “Ut insigniter noxium censeri debeat nisi forte noxium non est spoliari civitates ac pagos pastoribus, canonicis aliisque clericis secularibus theologica et philosophica eruditione imbutis” Memorandum of the university, Acta Universitatis, 24 March 1596, RAL, OUL, 61, 136r–138v. 269 Catalogus baccalaureorum (. . .) a Ven. Facultate Theologiae promotorum, 1585– 1619, RAL, OUL, 505. Seculars constituted respectively 84, 78, and 60 per cent of graduates at Louvain. At Padua, for instance, slightly less than half of the graduates in Divinity were secular clerics. Cf. Negruzzo, Theologiam discere et docere, 269. The University of Paris would narrow the gap with the Louvain figures only by the end of the 17th century (Brockliss, “Patterns of Attendance,” 520 n. 24). Brockliss’s assessment that secular clerics only became interested in theological studies in the course of the 17th century, in the context of the reaction against Protestantism, should be handled with caution. What we do see is a rise in the proportion of secular clerics among the graduates in a university system where only a very small proportion of secular clerics took degrees in theology because of the privilège des gradués, which only prescribed the quinquiennium (two years philosophy, three years theology) and the magisterium in the Arts (see Julia and Revel, “Les étudiants”). The only exception to this general rule was the University of Paris; see below. 270 Fig. 4.1 lists the Sacrae Theologiae Baccalaurei Biblici (STBBibl; the first of three bachelor degrees; cf. Fig. 1.1 p. 31), and the minority of students who obtained the degree of Sacrae Theologiae Licentiatus (STL) or Doctor (STD). Extrapolating from the STBBibl population, Blackfriars and Praemonstratensians divided half of the 149 graduates from the religious orders between them, followed by Augustinians, Carmelites, and Benedictines (respectively 22, 18, and 13 individuals). Individuals belonged to the Regular Canons of Saint Augustine, the Cistercians, and the Wilhelmites; two Spanish Trinitarians were also listed. Membership of ten individuals was not specified.
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STBBibl 149; 15%
840; 85% STL 59; 22%
212; 78% STD 17; 40%
25; 60% Secular
Regular
Fig. 4.1. Graduations in Divinity: Regulars vs. Seculars
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However, the tacit implication, that consequently the Jesuits should not be allowed to teach philosophy (or theology), is not that straightforward. Throughout the Catholic world, Jesuits were already participating in the formation of the secular clergy, which they did not omit to point out in their Responsiones to the university’s Gravamina.271 In the period under investigation, their activities in the colleges of Louvain, Douai, and St-Omer were explicitly aimed at the edification and the spiritual guidance of both aspiring clerics and practicing pastors. At Louvain, the fathers prided themselves on being the confessors of academics and students, their college functioning as a hub for pastoral activities in the university town.272 In a 1618 report to the general in Rome, they listed six Marian sodalities of more than 1,200 students and burghers, an audience that equalled membership of Jesuit sodalities in populous Antwerp.273 Their educational activities were not limited to the Theology chairs at Louvain but also involved teaching the Catechism in several Louvain colleges, including the pedagogies of the Arts faculty.274 In the absence of a clear-cut societal order, Jesuits could easily draw their pastoral and teaching practice at Louvain into a logic of necessity by merely pointing at the precedents, with the help of interpretive methods similar to those deployed, in the 1596 Gravamina and elsewhere, by academics making themselves indispensable for the realm and for Christendom. All this suggests that the Louvain doctors, although they did not say so, had a specific model of graduated secular clerics in mind, which only they could deliver, only via a thorough spiritual and intellectual formation at Louvain. Seen from this perspective, the faculty’s promotions were indeed a vehicle of Public Interest. But that model 271
Responsiones, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. “Bona pars studiosorum, maxime autem professorum, ac theologie baccaleorum, (e quo numero desumuntur fere ecclesiarum pastores) nostris confiteantur.” Note on the desirability of Jesuit teaching, 1593, ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia, 1459, Nr. 33bis. 273 Flandro-Belgica 1618, report for the general in Rome, in ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia, 1459, Nr. 41. 274 According to Poncelet, the Jesuits were already charged with the teaching of the Catechism in the pedagogies in the 1590s. Cf. Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus. The 1618 report mentions five Latin courses of the Catechism destined at students from various colleges, alongside the seven catechism courses offered in the vernacular for the Louvain youth. Flandro-Belgica 1618, report for the general in Rome, in ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia, 1459, Nr. 41. In the 1630s, the faculty decided to replace the Jesuits with domestic teachers in the four pedagogies. Cfr. RAL, OUL, 782. 272
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apparently could not be made more explicit in the 1596 memorandum. Three decades later, a terminally ill Jacobus Jansonius, a theologian whom we will identify later as a protagonist of the anti-Jesuit faction at Louvain in every single conflict between academics and Jesuits from 1588 onwards until his death in 1625,275 was much more explicit. In an internal document that we can consider as Jansonius’ testament, the old fox enjoined the other regents of the theological faculty not to yield to the pressure of regular clerics—Jesuits or Dominicans—who were trying at that time to amass public chairs in Divinity. His argument consisted of two parts. First, the royal and the ordinary chairs in Theology were endowed by canonships that could only be held by secular clerics, which excluded members of the religious orders from public teaching. In this reasoning, the measures taken to finance academic life back in the 15th century were decontextualised and reframed as clear intentions detailed by the university’s founding fathers and protectors. Second, Jansonius appealed to a clear division of labour between secular and regular clerics: while the task of the latter, in Jansonius’ world, consisted in sacris erudiri, which meant that they consequently were likely to direct their students towards a life of erudite contemplation,276 it was the task of the first ones to orientate, by their very example and by their teaching, the youth in their care towards pastoral and similar functions in the Church.277 Ecclesiastical benefices in the local churches that excluded the regulars from teaching thus became an important element in a fabric in which the dons could imagine themselves as a hierarchy of “pastoral theologians”:278 as shepherds who could figure simultaneously as experts in the—above all practical—science of Salvation, and who were—as pastors, canons, teachers, college presidents, and spiritual guidesmen alike—doubly qualified to set an example for their successors. 275 On Jansonius (†1625), Professor of Scripture at Louvain and President of the Pope’s College, read Ceyssens, “Autour de Jacques Jansonius.” 276 On the superiority of the doctus over the eruditus, read Guelluy, “L’évolution des méthodes théologiques,” 65. 277 “Convenire autem Reipublicae in ordine tam secularium quam religiosorum habere primae [notae] doctos, atque doctores, hoc etiam intuitu ut S Theologiae auditores convenientius dirigerentur ad pastoratus et similes ecclesiae functiones, et quod religiosi convenientius eos erudirent, atque adeo instantius pertraherent ad statum religionis, quam sacerdotii secularis.” Jansonius to the faculty board of Theology, Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 16 February 1625, RAL, OUL, 387, 213–214. 278 This concept has been borrowed from Grès-Gayer, “The Magisterium,” 434–35.
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In this context, it is rewarding to compare the course of things at Louvain c.1600 with the transformation of the Parisian faculty into a self-styled company of pastoral theologians in the course of the 17th century.279 Both universities furnished many of the bishops and the elites of their respective hinterlands. As the distinction between secular and regular clerics had proved for centuries to be a highly amenable tool for organising the Church Militant, structuring internal conflicts and containing them, theologians imagined their university as a university of and for the secular clerics responsible for the reCatholicisation of the South Netherlands and France, and identified their opponents accordingly. The comparison between Louvain by the end of the 16th, and Paris in the beginning of the 17th century can be pushed further. Both companies of pastoral theologians linked their double identity of scientists and shepherds to the magisterium claimed by the respective faculties in Theology. In both universities, orthodoxy was a crucial element in the development of academic identity in general and in distinctive strategies deployed against the Jesuits in particular, in the 1596 memorandum as well as in other circumstances.280 The Doctrina Lovaniensis of 1586 was matched by the body of doctrine drawn up by their colleagues at the Sorbonne a few decades later.281 The contexts in which university men sought to streamline knowledge into a body of doctrine, had been fairly similar as well: while this corporate authority in doctrinal affairs continued to be a constitutive element of the self-image of theologians at Louvain, Paris and elsewhere, it proved increasingly difficult to affirm it towards assertive bishops and above all towards the papacy who claimed a similar authority; claims that threatened to transform the status of theologians from teachers of the Church into mere councillors of ecclesiastical hierarchy.282 All this sheds a new light on the drafting of the Doctrina Lovaniensis after the
279
Cf. Grès-Gayer, “The Magisterium.” While Paris could look back on a much longer history, the heroic 16th century was a highly formative period in the identification of a “Louvain school” as a bastion of orthodoxy in the battle against Protestantism, the authority of which had to defy the centuries. On this heroic 16th century, read De Jongh, L’ancienne Faculté de Théologie; de Bujanda, et al., Index de l’Université de Louvain 1546, 1550, 1558, and Van Eijl, “Louvain’s Faculty of Theology during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.” 281 Grès-Gayer, “The Magisterium,” 426–28. 282 Cf. Minnich, “The changing status of the theologians.” 280
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Baianist episode, and on the reluctance of Louvain divines to embrace a modesty after a Roman recipe in the Lessius affair. Yet, in the 1596 memorandum, the only reference to orthodoxy can be detected in a more formal concept, i.e., the vague notion of a stabilitas doctrinae that had to be safeguarded, nothing less, but nothing more. One reason could be that academics did not want to jeopardise both their stakes in the Jesuit Question and their claims in doctrinal matters by bringing in their highly controversial magisterium. But there is more. Stabilitas doctrinae popped up already in the minutes of the Faculty of Theology in 1595. A few months before, the Council of State in Madrid had suggested that a second public chair in scholastic theology, that was to substitute the royal chair of the Sententiae, would be redundant, given the fact that the projected Jesuit college would organise courses in Thomism as well.283 In this context, the faculty board insisted that only teaching by secular clerics, following the (ambiguous) tradition of the Louvain School, could assure the stability and the uniformity of doctrine—“quod est hic potissimum pre oculis habendum”284—a qualification that obviously referred to the open-ended conflict over Grace and Free Will with the fathers of the Society. Amidst all this uncertainty about hierarchy and orthodoxy, it is not surprising to learn that Louvain academics in their 1596 memorandum did not bluntly incriminate their opponents as heretics, even if several theologians and their students running the Arts faculty considered Lessius and the Louvain Jesuits as all but Pelagians.285 Such arguments were, after all, anything but convincing towards the wider public that they tried to reach in 1596. The memory of the embarrassing controversies on divine Grace and Free Will still being fresh among their audience, academics preferred to turn to the generalised, more for-
283 “Neantmoings comme entendons que les peres de la societe du nom de Jesus audit Louvain enseigneront en leurs escolles ledict Saint Thomas nous advertirez incontinent de ce quen est, et si ladicte lecon peult suffire, sans quilz ont besoing daultre aux escolles publiques de vostre faculte.” Fragment of the Council of State to the Faculty of Theology, 28 November 1594, fragment in Acta Universitatis, 5 July 1595, RAL, OUL, 61, 63r. 284 Acta Universitatis, 5 July 1595, RAL, OUL, 61, 63r. 285 Close to 80 per cent of faculty members took degrees in Theology (30 per cent STB; 29 per cent STL; 19 per cent STD). As a matter of fact, many teachers in the Arts faculty considered their teaching assignment as a way to pursue their studies in Divinity. Only 15 per cent took degrees in Medicine or Law.
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mal concept of stabilitas doctrinae and the inscription devices286 that had to produce, in the absence of a Roman confirmation silencing the Louvain Jesuits, uniformity of doctrine towards the outside world: the promotion rituals of the Arts faculty that were put in jeopardy by the Jesuits’ insistence on separate graduation ceremonies. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, however. Did rituals actively intervene in the structuring of the relationship between academics and the outside world (e.g., the Jesuits), or were they just a cover? 4.2.4. The battle of the schools The analysis of the 1596 memorandum developed in the previous paragraphs is a rhetorical performance itself of academic performances. It is, for instance, highly questionable whether the presentation of things in 1596 could have become the university’s point of view back in 1593, 1594, or even in the beginning of 1595, when the battle over the legitimate representation of Academia was still going on. Although the concerns deployed in the previous section did figure on the academic agenda in the period under investigation, they cannot be considered clear-cut interests that fuelled opposition against the Jesuits. In fact, the university was deeply divided over the question, opinions ranging from sheer indifference to the respective anti- and pro-Jesuit attitudes aired by a minority of protagonists. It was Jacobus Baius, professor regius of Catechism, regent of the Sacra Facultas, and the nephew of the late Michael Baius, who profiled as one of the driving forces behind the project of setting up a Jesuit college in Philosophy at Louvain from the very start.287 In his letter written in 1593 to an anonymous Jesuit, he claimed the glory for engaging the local elites as well as the first men of the university, all of whom wanted to bring the affair to a favourable conclusion.288 Poncelet 286 The concept of “inscription device” has been borrowed from science studies, where it is understood as a mediator (a machine, in this case a rhetorical or performative act) that transforms an indefinite substance into a clearly circumscribed, “natural” entity. Read Law, After Method, 19–21. 287 It was Baius who proposed the matter to the congregation of the Arts faculty. Cf. Acta Facultatis Artium, 23 January 1593, RAL, OUL, 713, 342r. 288 “Post novissimas litteras T R scriptas distinctis vicibus egi cum magistratu, cum decano facultatis artium et regentibus pedagogiorum, cum domino cancell D Zuerio et variis aliis nostre universitatis primariis vicis, qui omnes propositum negotium ad optatum finem perduci vehementer desiderant. Ac ipse tandem magistratus Lovaniensis serio rem aggressus supplicationem decano et facultati artium exhibunt,
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puts the professor up on the stage as one of the main sources of information the fathers could rely on in the inner circles of the university throughout the 1590s, and as late as 1604 he pops up again as an indefatigable promoter of the good cause in the correspondence between the general and the Belgian superiors.289 The head of an academic dynasty, Baius’ interests in championing the project may be many: in the course of the 1590s, he had been negotiating with the chapter of Lille (where he held a canonship by virtue of an academic nomination)290 over the transfer of 14 grants to a house out of his uncle’s patrimony that had previously hosted the short-lived Collegium Sancti Augustini.291 Paving the path, via the Lille foundations, for a full-blown Collegium Baianum entrenching his family’s interests in the academic enterprise must have appealed to the divine.292 Excellent contacts with the Jesuits would have allowed him to dip into their pool of promising youth and to compete with older and richer colleges recruiting their students along more traditional lines. By the end of 1595, Baius seems to have isolated himself, as he refused to support the decision of the academic senate to protest formally against the fathers’ plans to start teaching the following year293—and he disappears from our sources as one of the university’s official commissionaries in the negotiations with the fathers, the city, and the Privy Council in Brussels.294 ac consules, pensionarius, et alii primarii viri personaliter comparentes cum dominis facultatis artium tractaverunt.” Baius to the Provincial of the Jesuits (?), 7 August 1593, A.A.M., OUL, 3. 289 “De collegio quod nobis attribui optat D Doctor Baius consideratae sunt rationes allatae a vestre reverentia et patris procuratoris iudicium his inclusum audivimus, quod nobis non improbatur, sed egunt, omnia istic examinanda diligentius, et curandum ut non fiat quequam, nisi consentientibus iis qui offendi alioque possent, nimirum universitati et academicis.” Acquaviva to Manareus, 14 February 1604, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 1, II, 910r. 290 His nomination and acceptation (resp. 27 August 1574/28 July 1575) are registered in Registre aux nominations, RAL, OUL, 4784, 35r. 291 Not surprisingly, the matter only surfaced in academic minutes when the deal was done. Several provisions were made in 1597 for the College of Lille to be enriched by Baius’ legacy after his death. The chapter appointed Baius and Joannes Clarius as the provisor of this new college and charged them with the drafting of the statutes. Malderus was the first president of this college. Notarial instrument of the deacon and the chapter of Saint Peter’s at Lille, 22 June 1597, in Acta Universitatis, 4 July 1597, RAL, OUL, 61, 233r. 292 Elementaries on the Baius college in Reusens, Documents relatifs, 3, 440–41. 293 “Protestatus fuit se non consentire in pretactam inhibitionem faciendam, et voluit suam protestationem per me notarium scribi et annotari.” Acta Universitatis, 2 September 1595, RAL, OUL, 61, 78r–79r. 294 Baius continued to represent the university in several delegations, but seems to have been excluded from the delegation to Brussels that had to salute the new
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Baius’ position is interesting, as he had been, alongside Jacobus Jansonius, one of the three drafters of the 1587 Censura against Lessius.295 Stability of doctrine was, apparently, not automatically incompatible with Jesuit teaching in philosophy, at least not according to most Louvain theologians. Joannes Stryen, the bishop-in-exile of Middelburg and the first president of King’s College (–1594), had given his warmest support to Torrentius’ initiative in 1594.296 Dogmatic stakes had not been an evident matter of concern for Henricus Cuyckius either, one of the co-authors of the doctrina Lovaniensis in the previous decade: the (pro)chancellor had initially supported the foundation of a Jesuit college before changing his mind and becoming the most visible member of the opposition,297 which earned him many a reproach of treason in Jesuit writings.298 Another theologian of renown, the English exile Thomas Stapleton, entertained warm relationships with the order. A former professor at Douai, he had sided with Lessius in the debates over predestination or Free Will before being transferred by the Privy Council to Louvain as Michael Baius’ successor on the royal chair of Scripture in 1589.299 In 1595, he was still considered a champion of the Jesuit cause and negotiated on behalf of the Society with the abbot of Saint Vaast over the subsidies to be granted to the pedagogies;300 one year later, however, he figured alongside an ardent governor general, the cardinal of Austria, as soon as it had been decided that the Jesuit Question had to be brought up during the audience. He was substituted by Boden, the regent of the pedagogy of the Pig and one of the opponents of the Jesuit project. Acta Universitatis, 15 February 1596, RAL, OUL, 61, 125r. 295 Van Eijl, “La controverse Louvaniste,” 210–13. 296 Joannes Stryen to Torrentius, before 8 July 1594, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. Stryen also pops up as the author of several letters in support of the Society in the Lessius Controversy, ACDF, SO, St. St., E 7–c, 737r. 297 In his correspondence with Torrentius, the bishop of Antwerp, he stated that he was favourable towards the project at first, but that he changed his mind when evaluating the opposition it provoked. Cuyckius to Torrentius, 27 February 1594, cited in Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus, 196. The above-mentioned letter of Baius to an anonymous Jesuit equally portrays the university’s Chancellor (i.e., Cuyckius) as one of the academics favourable to the Jesuits’ cause. 298 E.g., in the expositio cum Cuyckio, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. 299 E.g., Stapleton to the bishop of Middelburg (who was residing at Louvain as president of King’s College), 11 May 1588, in ACDF, SO, St. St., E 7–c, 118r. 300 Thomas Wiringus, SJ, to an anonymous co-religionist, 1595, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. Stapleton provided the Jesuit with information about financial transactions among the colleges of Anchin, Marchiennes and the King (the staff of which was composed by secular clerics) at Douai; he also surfaces as one of the academics who, at the beginning of 1595, was helping the Jesuits to find funds for the other pedagogies; Georgius Duras, SJ,to an anonymous co-religonist, 9 January 1595, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12.
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member of the anti-Jesuit faction, Jansonius, as one of the university’s commissioners to Brussels.301 The role of Jansonius, the president of one of the biggest colleges at Louvain, the former president of the College of Saint Augustine, and a critic of Jacobus Baius’ intellectual achievements,302 cannot be deduced from public records, but he does figure as the third man in exchanges among Cuyckius, Boden, and Vossius.303 Jesuit intelligence had spotted him attending a conspicuous religious ceremony in the great hall of the pedagogy of the Pig on Saint Anne’s day 1595, during which the Jesuits were bracketed as Turks and heretics plotting to overturn the pedagogy, the university, and the fatherland.304 Nor was the position of the Arts faculty itself, 75 per cent of which consisted of graduated theologians, unambiguous in the early 1590s. Its congregation was referred to, in Baius’ letter of 1593, as a heterogeneous lot whose decisions, in the absence of a streamlined hierarchy and common intellectual interests, were often annoyingly unpredictable.305 A formal concept such as stabilitas doctrinae consequently was not designed for external use alone but also may have been helpful, because of its vagueness, when trying to overcome internal differences of opinion. 301 Cf. the report on the delegation of Stapleton and Clarius to the nuncio in the Jesuit Question, Acta Universitatis, 21 December 1596, RAL, OUL, 61, 183r. As for his position in the doctrinary debates of 1587–88, see the protests of the Faculty of Theology of Louvain, in the wake of the controversies with Lessius, against the printing of some of the sermons contra predestinationem ex solo Dei placito and contra gratiam efficacem written by Stapleton, by then still professor at Douai. Frangipani to Montalto, 2 August 1590, ed. Ehses, Nuntius Ottavio Mirto Frangipani, 499. 302 Jansonius had already aired scathing comments on Baius’ intellectual skills and his position in the debates over Grace and Free Will, cf. p. 405. 303 Jansonius figures often as a representative of the university in the delegations sent to Brussels in the Jesuit Question. He was never identified by royal councillors or Jesuits as a troublemaker, but he emerges as the third man when the utmost secrecy was required. Cf. Cuyckius to Boden, 12 February 1597, UAL, Ghent, D22. 304 “Haec in Paedagogii Porcensis Aula, altari, ramis, corollis e contortis herbidisque funibus dependentibus, ornatiore, praesente Eximio Domino Magistro Nostro Jansonio, et eiusdem pedagogii moderatoribus, et studiosis, ac aliis pro libitu suo adventantibus externis publice declamata fuere, auditorum oculis interea dum haec recitantur iniectis in societatis nostrae religiosos a Domino Subregente ad eandem declamationem invitatos. Ipso Dive Anne [die] 1595.” RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. The orator had been a student of Jansonius, who was suspected of having written part of the oration himself. Kerkovius, SJ,to his superiors, 2 August 1595, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. 305 “Quoniam in ea facultate pluriorum consensus requiratur, et magna sit judiciorum varietas, cum ibi sint Theologi, jurisperiti, medici philosophi, humaniorum litterarum cultores, capellani ecclesiarum, quorum diversissimi etiam sunt scopi.” Baius to the Provincial of the Jesuits (?), 7 August 1593, A.A.M., OUL, 3.
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In this context, it is not surprising that the fathers, in their correspondence with the order’s general, Acquaviva, sought to personalise the opposition. They had good reasons to do so, Acquaviva having warned not to push through their claims without the consent of the university. As a consequence, opposition at Louvain had to be marginalised to a few noisy individuals who had lost sight of Public Interest. The fathers were not the only ones who saw things this way. Before his death, Torrentius had tried to intimidate supposedly isolated members of the higher faculties who sided with the recalcitrant philosophers.306 At the onset of the affair, the city of Louvain would inform the Privy Council about the intrigues of an anything but representative faction that consisted mainly of the regents of the Falcon and the Pig,307 the two pedagogies Baius had envisaged as possible venues for Jesuit teaching.308 As late as 1598, a memorandum of the Belgian Jesuits to the general in Rome pleaded for negotiations to resume, the anti-Jesuit faction at Louvain being decapitated after the death of Mattheus Boden, the regent of the pedagogy of the Pig and an antiJesuit of the first hour, and the departure of Cuyckius to his episcopal see of Roermond.309 But whereas opposition against the Jesuit project was anything but evident in the beginning of 1594, let alone unambiguous, it gradually became more evident and less ambiguous in the following years. This was the result of carefully crafted identity politics of which the 1596 memorandum can be considered a textbook case. In order to outmanoeuvre the advocates of a Jesuit philosophical school within the university, the anti-Jesuit faction had to position, first, the academics as
306 “Quod ex quorundam litteris intellexerim non solummodo artium facultati propositum vestrum displicere verum aliis quoque professoribus primariis, quod tametsi ita esset, egre tamen desisterem.” Torrentius to the university, 8 May 1594, Acta Universitatis, 11 May 1594, RAL, OUL, 60, 371v–372r. 307 “Estants advertij, que les regents des pedagogies du faulcon et pourceau . . . se sont transportes en la ville de Bruxelles a telle intention de tascher par tous moijens possibles dempescher et annihiler lerection de certaine fondation que Monseigneur le reverendissime dAnvers at destine de faire.” City of Louvain to the Privy Council, 20 April 1594, Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281. 308 Baius to the Provincial of the Jesuits (?), 7 August 1593, A.A.M., OUL, 3. 309 “Absunt etiam iam ab universitate primi contradictores, et turbarum autores, nam D Cuyckius in Ruremondanum episcopum assumptus, regens porci peste nuper admodum exvinctus: plerique alii in societatem propendent, a qua doctrinam hauserunt.” P. Orani de cursu philosophico Lovan., 1598, ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia, 1459, Nr. 28. Dillenus, the regent of the pedagogy of the Falcon, left the university at more or less the same time. Reusens, Documents relatifs, 4, 371–72.
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a monolithic block that stood for its clear and evident interests. The generalisation of distinctive programs cultivated by the few hard-liners in the Faculty of Arts and in a divided Faculty of Theology not only aimed to rally support outside the university but also had to realise a common ground for opposition among academics themselves, via specific rhetorical devices that identified the interests of the Arts faculty with those of the theologians; that re-enacted the familiar and visible distinction between regular and secular clerics; that covered up internal disputes via the notion of stability of doctrine; and that distinguished between necessity and utility. This identity policy framed the three concrete gravamina, in which the issue of the separate promotions postulated by the Jesuits played a crucial part. The text being designed as the voice of Academia in its entirety, most moderates among the academic staff were likely to agree that creating divisions within Academia via rituals cum managerial practices was a recipe for trouble. Rituals were not just the guarantee of stability towards the outside world. In the conflict with the Jesuits, (theories about) promotions produced a solid interest group out of a loose conglomeration of scholars as well. Graduation rituals contributed to the consolidation of this interest group too. By continuously raising reasonable objections engaging most other members of the faculty and university boards, the antiJesuit faction could gradually turn friendly negotiations over practical issues into a situation of open conflict in which the academics could perform as a party whose rights were threatened. Time was on the faction’s side. From 1595 onwards, the prophecy fulfilled itself that Jesuit teaching would only cause trouble if academic demands were not met. In front of what they considered tergiversations of a minority, the fathers had pushed through their plans, in line with Baius’ recommendations,310 before the subsidies for the other pedagogies had been secured. Later that year, academics were confronted with the tangible consequences of the incorporation of a Jesuit college when the Privy Council forced them to rubber-stamp the transfer of one student,
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“Si facultas artium . . . amplecti minus libenter velit, rogo tamen ut reverentia vestra instar periti medici phrenetico etiam invito medicamentum prebere non gravetur, neque importunitate quorundam minus sapientium fatigata propensionem animi erga nostram universitatem remittat Fortassis expediret quamprimum philosophiae saltem professionem in vestra domo institui, etiam independenter ab artium facultate cetera suo tempore obventura plane confido.” Baius to the Provincial of the Jesuits (?), 7 August 1593, A.A.M., OUL, 3.
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Florien de Montmorency, a nephew of a high ranking official of the Council of Finances, to the Jesuit college-to-be.311 Academic affiliations often being drawn into a web of patronage, Florien’s affair could easily be considered an attack on the honour of his pedagogy and his regent. Moreover, it involved the nephew of a powerful statesman and therefore may have foreshadowed the loss of patronage, interesting contacts, and the resulting meltdown of pious foundations.312 That the fathers, adding injustice to insult, continued to teach philosophy in spite of unmistakable orders from the Supreme Pontiff (the first brief Accepimus Nuper of August 1595) and from their general (who insisted on the university’s consent); that they consequently were not likely to submit themselves to the jurisdiction of the rectors or deans either; that they relied on the support of “outsiders” (the Privy Council); that the councillors in Brussels planned to suppress, presumably in favour of the Jesuits, one pedagogy; that the Council of State in Madrid had seriously considered suppressing a chair in theology destined for secular clerics in favour of the projected Jesuit seminary; and that the fathers moreover continued to raise highly divisive stakes such as separate promotions—all these events, when drawn into a confrontational format of “we” against “them,” became evident proofs that there was no talking to the Jesuits, who were blinded by ambition, who did not seek to accommodate the interests of their future colleagues, and whose project had to be considered a hostile takeover bid directed against the entire university. This brings us to the second argument. Promotion rituals allowed the anti-Jesuit faction and the moderates to get their act together. By contrast, they seem to have played a minor role the moment outsiders had to be enrolled as stakeholders of the academic cause. In his letter of 2 January 1595 to Boden, Cuyckius, who by then was lobbying for the university in Brussels, focused on the subsidies that had to be secured for the old pedagogies,313 as these were likely never to be 311 The Privy Council to the Faculty of Arts, 7 December 1595; Université de Louvain, 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281. Transfers of students from one pedagogy to another were a delicate matter that was rigidly regulated by the faculty’s statutes, the honour of the colleges in question and their regents being involved; Statuta Facultatis Artium, 1602, RAL, OUL, 707, 19v–20v. 312 Acta Universitatis, 12 December 1595, RAL, OUL, 61, 100r, 101r–102v; Acta Facultatis Artium, 13 and 18 December 1595, RAL, OUL, 713, 441r–v; 443v–444r. 313 “Si prorsus reijcerentur Jesuitae ab omni philosophica professione, numquam nos apud curiam favorem reperturos esse: quia ad invidiam hoc pertinere putabant omnes.” Cuyckius to Boden, 2 January 1595, UAL, Ghent, D22.
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found; in the worse-case scenario, it was imperative that the anti-Jesuit faction did not marginalise itself but could continue to perform as a bona fide negotiating partner that could settle reasonable conditions under which the fathers could teach the full academic curriculum.314 As a matter of fact, the university’s representative may even have dropped the case of the common promotion in the months preceding the 1595 verdict of the Privy Council,315 only to field it again in the 1596 Gravamina. When Cuyckius and his fellows were outmanoeuvred anyway by the 1595 compromise and appealed to Rome,316 separate promotions were not considered the most convincing argument by the academics themselves, failing to mention, as they did, their cherished rituals in their letters of supplication sent to the pope in the summer of 1595.317 In order to keep the fragile consensus at Louvain from dissolving with the help of intimidating papal briefs that chastised ambitious Jesuits, other enrolment strategies were required. The affair had first to be problematised in a way that could engage Roman circuits in favour of the Louvain academics; and support was to be secured from high-ranking patrons among the members of the Sacred College. In both respects, academics were successful. As for the definition of the problem, academics did not delve into distinctive programmes that risked alienating both Roman circuits and their moderate colleagues from the common cause to be, but generalised their stakes again by translating a quarrel between academics and Jesuits over promotion ceremonies into a conflict between the
314 “Non possum rebus bene expensis aliter censere quam quod satius sit ita contrahere, quam contendere, nam dos illa sexcentorum renorum . . . numquam fortassis obtinebitur, tantisper in sola metaphysica consistent Jesuitae, et si . . . et reperta illa dote admittantur, non nisi legibus illis admittentur quae praescriptae sunt.” Cuyckius to Boden, 2 January 1595, UAL, Ghent, D22. 315 “In extremo articulo qui est de concursu plus laborandum erit. Scio hanc fuisse constantem totius facultatis atque etiam universitatis ut sit concursus omnium in unam promotionem et haec mea quoque semper sententia fuit: fuit et aliorum collegarum meorum; sed flexerunt me in aliam sententiam quae ex postremo quodam scripto vestro commemoravit dominus Malcotius.” Cuyckius to the rector of the Louvain Jesuit college, 2 August 1595, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. 316 Many examples of recurrent tactics to play out the Roman curia against the authorities in the Netherlands in Roegiers, “Was de Oude Universiteit Leuven een Rijksuniversiteit?,” 545–64. 317 Registered respectively in ASV, Segr. Di Stato, Fiandra, 10, 8r–v, and Acta Universitatis, 30 August 1595, RAL, OUL, 61, 74r. Common promotions did play a role in the negotiations between Vossius and Acquaviva, however; cf. Vossius to Boden, 19 October 1596, UAL, OUL, 313.
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Louvain fathers and the Holy See. In their letters of supplication, the university had become Rome’s daughter whose scholarly peace was being disturbed by uncompromising Jesuits who had not only refused to come to terms with the university men but, moreover, had appealed to secular judges in order to gain their cause.318 This presentation of things looked all too familiar to Roman eyes, which viewed the royal councils in the Habsburg Netherlands a hotbed of lay interference in ecclesiastical affairs. It may also explain why academics adopted a low profile in the Roman Question in 1595 and 1596, as renewed clashes with the Uditore del papa would be difficult to reconcile with the profile they sought to adopt in their conflict with the Jesuits. In this context, the Jesuits’ arguments that the royal councils had only offered arbitration might only have added to the image of their insolence in Rome. Second, the anti-Jesuit faction happened to be well connected with the curia and could rely on influential members of the Sacred College to intervene in their favour. Vossius’ brokering activities in Rome mirrored once more those of Mattheus Boden at Louvain. Another academic accredited with contacts in Rome was Dillenus, the regent of the pedagogy of the Falcon and the second troublemaker identified by the town magistrate.319 Cuyckius, for his part, was the Louvain spokesman towards the university’s cardinal-protector, Santori. The latter reportedly had started an investigation of his own, as the fathers had got air of an incriminating letter of Cuyckius to the cardinal.320 There is no evidence that the supreme inquisitor intervened in his favour, but at least he could not be rallied by the Jesuits and their allies in the university either. Channels of intelligence between Louvain and the Eternal City were controlled by the Vossius-Boden team until the regent’s
318 “Neque tamen impetrari ullo modo potest, ut cum bona gratia de his nobiscum sentiant, sed ad seculare principis consilium trahunt nos invitos, et conturbant universam huius academiae quietem, non solum preter rem, sed contra mentem, etiam et voluntatem Reverend. Patris Generalis Claudii Acquavivae.” Letter of supplication of the university to the pope, 30 June 1595, ASV, Segr. Di Stato, Fiandra, 10, 8r–v. 319 Cf. Acta Facultatis Artium, 26 August 1587, RAL, OUL, 713, 250r. 320 “In prima causa nostra cum facultate Theologica, quod [Cuyckius] defenderit facultatem potest excusari, sed non . . . 3) Quod ad illustrissimum Cardinalem Sancti Severini scripserit contra me et alterum, accusans quod nos moliremur novas turbas contra quietem facultatis, quod fuerat omnino contrarium teste ipsius conscientia, meis studiis, . . . Sed ego ita probavi cardinali actiones meas ut dolum noverit viri amicitiam simulantis.” Expositio cum Cuyckio, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. It is an anonymous document written, judging by the handwriting, in the South Netherlands.
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death in 1598, while their main opponent, Jacobus Baius, probably had no contacts other than the Jesuits themselves in Rome. In order to obtain the first papal brief, Vossius had managed to involve the two Colonna cardinals, Marcantonio and Ascanio, two prominent members of the Italo-Iberian faction in Rome with whom he probably was acquainted via his activities as an erudite. Both could be enrolled as the descendants of Pope Martin V, the university’s founder,321 and indeed fashioned themselves in their supplication to the pope as the natural advocates of an obedient daughter of Rome who was being harassed, at the request of the Jesuits, by secular tribunals in the Netherlands.322 That Marcantonio was the protector of Flanders, moreover, added a national dimension to the matter, which Vossius sought to beef up by rallying, with the help of flattering letters from the Netherlands, the Spanish ambassador for the university’s cause. Letters in favour of the Jesuits from Brussels to the representatives of the Monarchy and of Flanders in Rome probably thwarted his endeavours,323 but Vossius could nonetheless work on Acquaviva by defining the negotiations in the Netherlands in terms of a conflict between the university and the fathers. This view was embodied by letters from the university (or from Boden and Cuyckius themselves) denouncing the intransigence of his co-religionists at Louvain. As a result, the Jesuits of the Belgian province became ipso facto disobedient subjects who had ignored Acquaviva’s unambiguous orders not to undertake anything without the consent of the university. Vossius 321 “Quorum uterque ex familia est Martini Quinti pontificis a quo universitas ista erecta esset et prima sua privilegia accepit.” Vossius to Cuyckius, before 12 December 1595, UAL, Ghent (1958–1959), 157. “Et illud maxime quod scriberet ille tuam illustrissimam celsitudinem ad laudatissimae illius et imortalis memoriae Martinum V Pont Max qui hanc nobis Academiam erexit et multis auxit privilegiis suum quoque genius et successionis referre originem.” The university to Ascanio Colonna, 13 January 1596, UAL, OUL, 308. 322 The Colonna cardinals to Clement VIII (no date), in ASV, Segr. Di Stato, Fiandra, 10, 11r. It is Vossius who suggested to the pope, in a postscript on the letter of supplication, what had to be done (identification based on handwriting): “Necessarium . . . paci et tranquillitati Universitatis generalis studii Lovaniensis, ut sua Sanctitas quamprimum Litteras supersessorias in forma brevis det, quibus inhibeatur patribus soc ne philosophiam Lovanii in preiudicium aliorum pedagogiorum doceant . . . Dirigi . . . poterunt dicte littere supersessorie abbatibus monasteriorum S. Gertrudis intra, et S. Marie Parcensis extra muros oppidi Lovaniensis, vel eorum cuilibet, etc.” 323 Compare the presentation of things in the diplomatic dispatches between Brussels and Rome, the archduke to the duke of Sessa, ambassador of Spain, 14 March 1596, Deux letters du gouvernement (. . .) de 1593 et 1596, AGR, Audience, 1468/10, 5r–v.
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even managed to become a broker of information between the general and his unruly fathers, after communication disorders between the generalate in Rome and the Belgian Province had come to the fore.324 Thus he could capitalise on Acquaviva’s attempts to consolidate and streamline the Society of Jesus after the heroic era of its foundation, and to assert the authority of the Roman decision-centre over an order that until recently had identified itself, to a large extent, with Castile and Spain.325 Nudging Acquaviva into action as a general whose authority was in jeopardy had required another letter, the embarrassing brief from a pontiff who had to vindicate ecclesiastical liberty and supervise the discipline among the clergy, as the academics had of course not failed to point at the tensions they had brought about between the fathers and their general.326 This coup de grâce was delivered by Vossius’ involvement of Cardinal Toledo, an old acquaintance of the theological faculty and one of the first creature (alongside the nipoti Pietro and Cinzio) of the Aldobrandini pope.327 That Toledo and Acquaviva were not exactly on speaking terms—the latter had tried to block the former’s assumption in the Sacred College—may have helped. But Toledo was known in Rome as an ex-Jesuit in the first place, as the closest councillor of the pope alongside Cardinal Baronio, and as the cardinal-protector of the Society. With Toledo’s intervention, not only the peace of the university and of Catholics in general was at stake but also the interests of the order itself. The old cardinal was the most impressive argument the Louvainists could produce in Rome against
324 Cf. Acta Universitatis, 7 December 1595, RAL, OUL, 61, 95r. The general’s instructions to cease lecturing at once were sent via Vossius to the university “ne iterum retardarentur [the general’s final order to suspend all teaching in 1596] vel iterum per patres illos traderentur.” 325 Several illuminating articles on Acquaviva’s policy and the challenges he faced in Broggio et al., I Gesuiti ai tempi di Claudio Acquaviva. Cf. p. 375–77. 326 “Et conturbant universam huius academiae quietem, non solum preter rem, sed contra mentem, etiam et voluntatem Reverend. Patris Generalis Claudii Acquavivae, explicatam litteris eius mense augusto anni superioris scriptis, ad . . . Cancellarium.” Letter of supplication of the university to Clement VIII, 30 June 1595, ASV, Segr. Di Stato, Fiandra, 10, 8r–v. This theme was rehearsed in the memorandum of 30 August as well. Acta Universitatis, 30 August 1595, RAL, OUL, 61, 74r. Compare the apologies in Acquaviva to Cuyckius, 20 August 1596, UAL, Ghent (1958–1959), 157. 327 Fattori, Clemente VIII e il Sacro Collegio, passim.
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recriminations that they had obtained their brief from the pope without impartial counselling.328 At Louvain, an investigation was launched by the Privy Council in order to find out who was responsible for soliciting the papal brief, but it seems to have consisted mainly in re-enacting the relationship between the university and the councillors in Brussels. Business had to go on as usual: the Council’s authority was vindicated, the guilty conveniently were never found, and the matter was shelved. Via its networks, the anti-Jesuit faction had been able to portray, first, the university as an interest group under threat; second, the papacy as the restorer of peace and unity among the Catholics; third, the Belgian Jesuits and their allies in the Privy Council as activists who, in their zeal and out of human affection or ambition, had misunderstood the true interests of the realm and of the true faith; and, finally, the archduke as the representative of a great dynasty whose filial piety towards the papacy was beyond doubt.329 But this constellation had been crafted by another letter welcomed by the parties involved as a way out of the deadlock: the third papal brief to the Archduke, one of the first achievements of Frangipani after his transfer to the newly created nunciature of Flanders. Further steps taken by Vossius, via the duke of Sessa and the Spanish Rota Auditor and legal councillor of the Embassy Francisco Peña, to have the Catholic king himself intervene had become redundant in this context.330 4.2.5. Achieving certainty. Rituals, ritual theories, and the legalisation of rank conflicts In their conflict with the Jesuits, academics dissolved not just the boundaries between theatre and society but also those between society and business, business and religion, and between religion and technology. In the 1596 Gravamina, grants and graduation rituals were mediators of a cycle of credibility, a concept that has been successfully applied
328 See, for instance, the playing out of Toledo against the bitter incriminations of Acquaviva, in a letter from Vossius, probably to Boden, 19 October 1596, A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xxiv, 2nd bundle. 329 Compare Füssel, Gelehrtenkultur, 289–90. 330 “Cuius etiam caussa se serio cum oratore acturum promisit mihi heri reverendissimus Franciscus Pegna Auditor Rotae Hispanus quando ipsi litteras rectoris et universitatis Lovanio 13 septembris datas tradidi.” Vossius to Boden, 19 October 1596, UAL, OUL, 313.
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by anthropologists and sociologists of science to the academic Darwinism structuring the world of Big Science today.331 The conflict with the Jesuits provides the historian with a moment of negotiation in which the hidden agency of otherwise worn rituals in organising the fabric of Academia can be brought to the surface again. Considering graduation rituals simultaneously as managerial tools, cognitive practices, sociological methods, and communication techniques, rather than confining them to the realm of so-called symbolic practices, helps us understand how academic ceremonies could become full-blown performative practices generating the (academic) world they described, despite uncertainties over society and truth slumbering even within the walls of the Ivory Tower. From the academic point of view, graduation rituals made present an unqualified socio-religious order that existed without their interference.332 Committing rituals to writing in the 1596 Gravamina reified, in return, their ritual acts into a stable and homogeneous object.333 As a consequence, rituals could do their structuring work without having to be performed continuously during the conflicts with the Jesuits at Louvain (and at Douai).334 Conversely, the Jesuits sought to reverse these procedures as well as the logic of conflict they generated: they suggested to burn the prolific writings produced in the course of the conflict as a means of pacification.335 Rituals relate to ritual theories in the Gravamina in the same way that scientific methods relate to the scientific methodology in the introduction to scholarly works. Just as much as historians delete part of their own practices and implicit understandings in order to make their models work automatically, additional work was required before graduation ceremonies could trigger a cycle of credibility encompassing
331
On this notion, read Vinck, Sociologie des sciences, 63–65. Their function was, as a consequence, metonymical rather than metaphorical. On history as a metonymical practice making present an absent past, read Runia, “Presence.” 333 Compare the role of manuals on accounting (as a homogeneous object) in stabilising the performativity of diverse and heterogeneous accounting practices (including, in our case, ceremonial practices) in Quattrone, “Books to be practised.” 334 The line between practices committed to writing and practices as such was blurred continuously by academics; compare, for instance, the performativity of academic statutes discussed in the previous chapter, a subject which will have to be elaborated on in the next chapters as well. 335 “Fore bonum ut ad pacem omnes scripture utrimque comburerentur et fieret actus de oblivione et refussione.” Expositio cum doctore Cuyckio, 1596, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. 332
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business, religion, and society alike. First, the Gravamina do not elaborate on the somewhat messy procedures underpinning the ranking order in the promotion lists of the Arts faculty. Even if one overlooks the mediation of a “tribunal of experts” that had to poll a majority in the absence of consensus,336 the practical organisation of the examination required that students be already classified in different “classes” beforehand, in order to make the interrogations “less tiresome and more certain.”337 Certainty conveniently guaranteed equal representation, the preservation of the honour of all pedagogies in each linea, and equal access to the grants bonanza afterwards, in an otherwise dangerously “open” competition. Second, the wills of the pious founders had to be modelled into clear-cut and sacrosanct intentions excluding not just Jesuit alumni but also practical solutions to a practical problem. Third, the relationship between educational achievement and access to grants had to be standardised. Other selection criteria such as regional provenance, family relationships with the founder, or the preferences of college presidents and collators of grants remain out of sight in the Gravamina. Procedures differed from college to college, which in turn may shed another light on the positions of the protagonists in the conflict with the Jesuits: in the Pope’s College, Jansonius’ empire, the collations of grants were “free” and academic ranking orders could run their free course;338 grants in Baius’ Savoye college were, for obvious reasons, distributed according to other criteria. In the 1596 memorandum, by contrast, academics sought to make unqualified statements about the fundamentals of their world, the meritocratic principles that (at least according to Jansonius and the likes) had to order academic life. Hiding this normalisation of their rituals helped transform their rituals into the norm.
336 “Reliqui una hisce demum examinibus premissis et ordine ex suffragio octo professorum pro sola doctrina constituto, unus iste a communis omnium promovendorum catalogus coram tota universitate solemniter ad hoc convocata frequentissimoque numero comparere solita per bedellum enuntiatur.” Informatio et judicium universitatis Lovaniensis (. . .), RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. 337 “Quo vero minus operosa magisque certa sit linealium designatio, iubentur cuiusque pedagogii professores tres e suis doctissimis ad primam lineam presentare, tres alios qui doctrinam hos proxime assequantur, ad secundam, tres denique ex reliquo numero qui cum his certare posse videantur: qui supersunt ad teriam lineam hoc ipso pertinere censentur.” Informatio et judicium universitatis Lovaniensis (. . .), RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. 338 “Quandoquidem bursae omnes sunt liberae in Collegio Papae,” Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 5 March 1625, RAL, OUL, 387, 222.
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Graduation ceremonies allowed the academics to get their act together and to articulate a workable definition of the Jesuit Question in terms of a conflict of interests. The lawyers of the Privy Council were not impressed, however. In their eyes, as much as in those of 20th-century scholars, the promotio was merely a ritual whose “social magic” was limited to a specific subculture; it did not engage the watchdogs of Public Interest.339 In line with Füssel’s research into the legalisation of conflicts over academic ritual, this “ritual relativism” was not an invention of enlightened philosophers.340 The emergence of princely tribunals as a venue for conflicts over rank and ritual precedence triggered an inflation of litigation over rituals in the 16th and 17th centuries. Simultaneously, however, legal solutions rendered rituals increasingly inept at devising an unqualified socio-religious order, seeking, as Court rulings did, to produce equity via endless qualifications341 based on the most sybillic arguments of all: historical precedents.342 By allowing the Jesuits to organise their own promotions in the 1595 compromise alongside the common promotio of the four pedagogies, and by leaving the academics the folklore of the primus,343 statesmen in Brussels put into perspective practices that had to put things out of perspective. As a result, opponents of separate promotions became suspicious in the eyes of councillors, while academics denounced the human affections of councillors failing to see their point. There is no evidence that a streamlined promotio could strike a Roman audience with awe. Academics had to redefine the problem 339 It should be noted that, despite my frequent use of the concept, academics themselves never referred to the promotio as a “ritual.” 340 “Die juristische Austragung von Konflikten entsprach bekanntlich der allgemeinen Tendenz dieser Zeit, in der sich die Justiz geradezu zu einem Passe-partout für die Lösng aller möglichen Probleme—sei es konfessioneller, sei es sozialer, sei es politischer Art—entwickelte.” Stollberg-Rilinger, “Rang vor Gericht,” 407. A genealogy of the concept of “ritual” in Buc, The Dangers of Ritual. I do not draw the same conclusions from all this confusion about rituals; captivating insights in this respect in Füssel, Gelehrtenkultur. 341 Cf. Stollberg-Rilinger, “Rang vor Gericht,” 417. 342 In their Responsiones to the Gravamina, the Jesuits indeed did not omit mentioning the precedents at Douai. The documents in RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12, indeed contain a full account (from the Jesuit perspective) of the outcome of the Douai controversies over rituals in the 1580s. Conversely, academics claimed in the Informatio that it had been the clear intention of Philip II that Douai would conform itself to its institutional model, the University of Louvain, in this respect as well. 343 That the primus was not considered fundamental to the promotion by the academics, was informed by their administrative practices. In the promotion lists, the primus was not separated graphically from the next promoti of the prima linea.
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substantially in order to attract support from members of the Sacred College and from the pontiff. They did so by rewriting the script they had been trapped in since 1588 in the context of the Roman Question, but that now fixated their opponents as the authors of lay interference and as insolent clerics who, blinded by ambition, ignored the orders of their own superiors, let alone orders of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. There, the universitas in its entirety as a solid interest group was devised via correspondence. Analogous to the performativity of academic rituals at Louvain, the efficiency (sic!) of letters in transporting a unified body academic to the Eternal City required additional work: in order to pair the argument that they only represented a tiny group of troublemakers, Vossius had to diversify his correspondents.344 Conversely, it was their success in breaching into the Society’s channels of communication that turned the local Jesuits into a quarrelsome lot from which the Roman generalate had to distance themselves. In the 1590s, the performativity of graduation ceremonies was, as a consequence, both orchestrated and situated. That did not prevent the rituals from engineering a configuration with a single cause (Public Interest) leading to an inevitable effect (Jesuits having to suspend their philosophical courses) in subsequent papal briefs. In these briefs, the manipulations of the academics, including their ritual strategies, had all but vanished, and the university figured as a monolithic block whose scholarly peace was under threat. This deletion work could be accumulated (from ritual practice through ritual theory and letter-writing to papal briefs) and was resumed in the 1620s: in the second conflict with the Jesuits over the right to teach theology and philosophy, the briefs in question were displaced from their immediate context, printed, and disseminated among a broader audience.345 Thus academics could re-enact speedily the format of “we” against “them” of the 1590s without having to reinvent the world all over again—and without losing credibility because of ritual/managerial theories that had failed to convince the Privy Council in the 1580s and the 1610s (Douai) as much as in the 1590s (Louvain). However, the promotio did play a role in the 1620s as an identity device within the walls of the Ivory Tower,
344 “Saluto regentem Porcensem qui bene fecit quod scripserit, ne dominus Cuyckius solus scribere videatur et rem Academie agere solus, sicut illi patres huc scripserunt ad generalem cui ego literas domini Bodeni prelegi, satis efficaces [my italicisation].” Vossius to Cuyckius, before 12 December 1595, UAL, Ghent (1958–1959), 157. 345 Prints in UAL, Ghent (1958–1959), 161.
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when they were rallied as a casus belli again, despite the Jesuits having officially abandoned their claims to separate promotions. The reader may conclude from these qualifications that graduation ceremonies are to be considered symbolic practices at best, or a merely s rhetorical device at worst. After all, a much stronger, systematic explanation for the dynamics of decision-making in the conflict with the Jesuits is still on offer. Although it is impossible to stage the protagonists as unproblematic interest groups—the academics versus curialists, or Jesuits against academics—social networks have proven to be ubiquitous in both the Roman and the Jesuit Question: in this scenario, the anti-Jesuit faction could enhance its clout within the university via the protection it enjoyed in Rome and vice versa. In analogy, powerful dons were morally obliged to put the problems of their clients on the university’s agenda in the affair of the privileges. In this scenario, the failure of the academics to capture a confirmation of the privileges until 1616 was blocked by more powerful networks of Liège curialists at the curia, just as much as the academics’ success in the 1590s was the result of patronage rather than of politics of reality. If Verflechtung turns out to be an overarching and external logic structuring academic decision-making and Roman politics, academic concerns (the confirmation of the privileges of nomination) become just an exponent of underlying realities (in casu clusters of clientelistic factions at Louvain and in Rome). In that case, we should abandon our definition of the problem about credibility and all that and should start charting different sorts of solidarity (friendship, clientelism, kinship) in order to understand the dynamics of academic politics. This hypothesis will be verified in the next chapter.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE CITY OF GRACE. ACADEMICS AT THE CORTE DI ROMA 1598–1612
In the last days of November 1599, the university town, a bastion of municipal autonomy and academic privilege, briefly became a theatre of princely power. Albert of Austria had just fetched his bride Isabella from Spain and started, in line with the political mores of the Netherlands, his tour of Joyous Entries in the cities and towns of the loyal provinces. Louvain, the first capital of Brabant, was among the first, amid the ceremonies and theatrical performances that came with the renewal of the constitutional contract between the rulers and the ruled, to hand over the keys to its sovereign princes.1 On the third day, it was the turn of the town’s learned corporations to air their expectations. In a dramatization borrowed from the Metamorphoses, the students in the pedagogy of the Falcon put the chained Andromeda Belgica on the stage falling prey to a three-headed monster (heresy and discord) due to the exuberance of her parents (the rebel provinces). But liberation was near, for Perseus (Albert of Austria), riding the winged Pegasus (Isabella), hew off the monster’s three heads (Albert’s victories over the heretics in Ardres, Calais, and Hulst), released Andromeda, and made her his bride.2 On the same day, the archduke was lectured during a solemn oration by Jacobus Baius on his task to restore Belgium to its ancient splendour.3 In the afternoon, the princes attended a lecture by Lipsius on the political philosophy of Seneca, the commentator of that other dark century in which 17th-century princes and learned pundits could mirror themselves. In his Dissertatiuncula apud principes, the humanist enrolled his monarchs as heavenly bodies that gave life to
1
Captivating insights on the evolving communication between subjects and princes in Arnade, Realms of Ritual. 2 Thomas, “Andromeda Unbound,” 1. 3 Jacobus Baius, Oratio Panegyrica in adventum sereniss. Principum Alberti et Isabellae. Antwerp: s.n., 1600.
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their subjects, comparing them to the great princes of antiquity who had visited the houses of teachers and covered them with glory.4 Focusing on the immediate relationship between rulers and subjects, Lipsius not only managed to delete the constitutional settings of Joyous Entries in which relations with power were mediated by towns and States; for obvious reasons, he also omitted to elaborate on his own success as a broker of princely patronage. From the 1980s onwards, historians have pulled clientelism out of the bottom drawer again as a constitutive element of the early modern territorial state. The ubiquity of patronage has been put in the limelight by the trailblazing studies of Wim Blockmans, Sharon Kettering, and others. Mario Biagioli’s analysis of the pervasive influence of princely patronage on Galileo’s scientific practice suggests that scholars barely differed from other clients who capitalised on the expanding political and financial resources of popes and princes, and that affliliations with power directly affected their cognitive achievements.5 In studies on papal nepotism, the older concept of Realpolitik was revived in Mikropolitik, “the more or less strategic mobilisation of a network of informal, personal relations for political purposes, in which the functions or the rank of position-holders are more decisive than the identification with a specific political programme.” In early modern “face-to-face societies,” abstract notions such as public interest were shallow, rhetorical devices, decision-making being entrenched in networks of friends, patrons, brokers, and clients. Recently, Reinhard and his students have extended the paradigm of Verflechtung to international politics and patronage under Paul V.6 The evidence suggests their findings can be applied smoothly to academic policy at Louvain, Rome, and Brussels. Qualifications are in order. Some of them are complementary: in Chapter 7, the micropolitical relations between Rome and the nor-
4 Iustus Lipsius, Dissertatiuncula apud serenissimos principes Albertum et Isabellam Belgarum Principes extemporanea. Item C. Plinii Panegyricus liber Traiano dictus. Antwerp: Joannes Moretus, 1600. An analysis in Van Houdt, “Justus Lipsius and the Archdukes.” 5 Biagioli, Galilei, Courtier. An assessment in Shank, “How Shall we Practice History.” 6 For the definition, see Reinhard, “Einleitung,” in Idem, Römische Mikropolitik, 4. On Verflechtung, read Reinhard, Freunde und Kreaturen. Cf. Dandelet, Spanish Rome. A discussion in Visceglia, “Vi è stata una Roma Spagnola”; an assessment of German scholarship in Fosi, “Amici, creature, parenti.”
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thernmost component of the Spanish world will briefly pass review; and the data in this book indicate that micropolitics was by no means the reserve of princely dynasties and the high Roman nobility. Other qualifications are more troubling. Scholarship has questioned the teleological notion of clientelism compensating for institutional weakness in an incomplete process of state formation.7 And the paradigm is just another example of historians building supposedly strong matters of fact (political systems or dynamics of decision-making) while keeping at bay the annoyingly contingent and slippery matters of concern (political programmes) that were the object of all these streneous efforts to assemble the body politic. In this chapter, we will gradually abandon Realpolitik and turn to real politics.8 In the first section, academics will still be presented as experts of Micropolitics at the papal court. Via their brokers, shifting networks within the university continued to seek, after 1598, the patronage of the occupant of Peter’s chair, the ultimate source of grace. The section “Efficient Grace” will focus on the achievements of the academics in their role as humble clients of the Vicars of Christ. Inevitably, religious and intellectual interests alternated with more prosaic concerns, networks blurring the boundaries between heaven and earth in the early 17th century. Delving into these affairs, however, comes with a price. It is not just that they will prove difficult to reduce to micropolitical constellations. Despite academics “being covered with (papal) favour,” the Roman Question over benefices in the Principality of Liège remained unresolved, although it had been the university’s public cause in Rome par excellence. This conundrum will call into question the notion that political systems are to be privileged over political programmes when accounting for decision-making at Louvain, Brussels, and Rome in the early modern period.
7 In late medieval Tuscany, in 16th-century Rome, and in 17th-century Spain, clientelist practices sided with, or replaced, established forms of government that were more bureaucratic and rational. E.g., Molho, “Lo stato e la finanza pubblica”; Partner, “Papal Financial Policy”; and Benigno, L’ombra del Re. On clientelism and modernity, see Bricquet, Clientelismi. 8 Cf. Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik.”
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5.1. “Quod nihilominus Lovanienses per favores Satagant.” Patrons, brokers and clients in the Rome of Clement VIII and Paul V By the end of 1597 and in the beginning of 1598, bad news poured in from Rome. In a few months’ time, the devastating verdicts of the Rota against Danielis and Clarius reached Louvain, and academics became fully aware that other papal providees had started to copy the dreadful practices of their opponents.9 It is in this context that the defense of the faculty’s privilege, and the university’s jurisdictional autonomy, became a public cause again, and that the academic senate decided to send another delegate to the Eternal City. 5.1.1. Upgrading the alliances. Academic mobilisation, 1597–98 The decision itself—that the choice eventually fell on Peter Lombard—and its ramifications—that the Irishman would become the pivot of academic policy in Rome for more than a decade—had not been evident from the start. Several other options had been on offer. Not surprisingly, Vossius continued to enjoy a lot of credit among members of the Arts faculty. He was to be assisted in his task by Henricus Costerius, the dean of Saint Gudula in Brussels and a favourite of Didacus de Campo, a cubicularius secretus of his Holines.10 Costerus had offered his services to the university before leaving for Rome and would indeed oversee the university’s Public Relations with the pontiff while his star at the curia was still rising.11 Support for Roman solicitors was assured in the Habsburg Netherlands too: with the embarrassing Jesuit Question now off the table, academics and officials of
9
See p. 251. Didacus de Campo, a canon of the cathedral of Cambrai who figures as a papal providee for the abbacy of Saint-Aubert in Cambrai in ASV, Dataria Ap., Per Obitum, 8, 51r (1596), was a Familiaris Sanctissimi since 1593; see Vaes, “Les curialistes belges,” 117. On the colourful personality of Costerius, see Harline and Put, A Bishop’s Tale. Both are mentioned in Acta Universitatis, 24 May 1597, RAL, OUL, 61, 220v. 11 Instructions from Clement VIII to Frangipani to remedy the shortage of priests in the South Netherlands via an assertive educational policy involving the University of Louvain were based on a report submitted to him by Costerius. Clement VIII to Frangipani, 19 October 1599, ASV, Secr. Brevium, 357, 228r–234v. 10
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the Councils in Brussels were keen to resume contacts again. They had been plotting, with the support of Assonleville, a central figure of the Privy Council who entertained a cordial relationship with the university, to involve Sessa, the Catholic king’s ambassador to the Holy See.12 Clarius and Weyms, who figured as the university’s delegates to Brussels for this occasion, had not neglected to visit another patron of the academics, Frangipani (who was obliged to Weyms for having taken his secretary Sandrino under his wings at Louvain). The latter had been most benevolent, had expressed his satisfaction that the academics knew their true friends, and had seemed confident that the affair in Rome could be resolved quickly.13 Meanwhile, the nuncio had been trying, since 1596, to convince another Louvain divine to pack his books and cross the Alps. After the death of Cardinal Allen in 1594, Hovius’ absentee predecessor at the chair of Mechlin, English Catholics had been without a representative in the Eternal City.14 On the lookout for a successor, Rome’s gaze had fallen upon Allen’s protégé Thomas Stapleton, who had succeeded Michael Baius as regius professor of Scripture in 1588. The Englishman had actively sought the pope’s favour by dedicating his Antidota Evangelica against Beda and Calvin to Clement VIII, and in
12 Craesbeke, Breugels, Canis, and the advocate fiscal of the Council of Brabant were mentioned, alongside Assonleville and Houst of the Privy Council. Report of Clarius and Weyms in the academic senate, Acta Universitatis, 13 October 1597, RAL, OUL, 61, 255r. Drafts of supplication letters to the pope were approved by the Privy Council and by the Council of Brabant in late 1597. Theodorus Le Roij, registrar of the Council of Brabant, to Clarius, alluded to in Acta Universitatis, 21 October 1597, RAL, OUL, 61, 260v. 13 The university to Frangipani, 9 October 1597, ed. Van der Essen, Correspondance, 101. “Molestissime tuli, quod a vestris legatis audivi, sed illud magne michi fuit consolationis Academiam istam ad meam fidem, quam habet spectatam iam et diu cognitam confugere, auxilium sibi per me petere.” Frangipani to the university, 12 October 1597, copy in Acta Universitatis, 13 October 1597, RAL, OUL, 61, 255r. On the triangle Sandrino-Weyms-Frangipani, see p. 249. Clarius was in the favour of the nuncio as well, at the occasion of his promotion to the deanery of Hilvarenbeek in 1599: “ha inteso volontieri Nostro Signore che ne sia stato provista persona meritevole, come ella dice esser il Clario publico lettore di Theologia in Lovanio.” Aldobrandini to Frangipani, 2 January 1599, ASV, Fondo Borghese, III, 40, 39v. Clarius had obtained a canonship in Den Bosch via a papal provision in 1597, despite his image as an ennemy of ecclesiastical liberty. ASV, Dataria Ap., Per Obitum, 9, 25r. 14 On the intrigues surrounding Stapleton’s lukewarm candidacy, see Stewart, “Thomas Stapleton’s Call.”
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return got, in the second half of the 1590s, several offers from the cardinal-nephew Pietro Aldobrandini to join his famiglia or to accept a teaching position at the Sapienza. Stapleton was wavering: his other patrons—the archduke, and Assonleville—were not amused, and he felt too old for the trip.15 While the Englishman was making up his mind, Weyms and other law professors started to introduce the divine, by the end of 1597, into the legal subtleties of the Louvain privileges of nomination, for that was of course the academics’ stake in his much anticipated departure to the Eternal City. Supplication and recommendation letters were drafted in which the poor scholars of Louvain implored the pontiff ’s mercy for Clarius, who was still waiting for the Rota’s verdict.16 Lombard only entered the picture after a series of events that allowed other circuits to take over the initiative. In line with the models of patronage developed by early modern pundits, death took its toll. Thomas Stapleton embarked on his last journey in the first months of 1598. With the blessing of Assonleville and of the academic senate, his posthumous Vera miranda seu de magnitudine ecclesiae Romanae, which was dedicated to Clement VIII, did cross the Alps in 1599 in order to be handed over to the Supreme Pontiff by his student Philippus Slins.17 In Rome, Slins was appropriately compensated for the loss of his academic patron, but the young theologian, who would return quickly in order to take up a teaching assignment in the Arts faculty, could not fill in the gap left by Stapleton.18 A few months 15 Cf. Van der Essen, Correspondance, 66, 94, 96, 99, 100, 107, 115, 161; Louant, Correspondance, 121, 181, 196, 202, 215, 233, 243, 251; and ASV, Segr. di Stato, Fiandra, 10, 95r. 16 Acta Universitatis, 30–31 August and 18 September 1597, RAL, OUL, 61, 248r–v and 250v–251r. 17 Thomas Stapleton, Vera Miranda seu de Magnitudine Ecclesiae Romanae Libri Duo. Antwerp: Joannes Moretus, 1599. 18 “Ben potra Vestra Signoria Ill.ma assicurare la Santita di nostro Signore d’un grand’utile et ornamento che dall’opera di quel buon dottore defuncto risultara alla Sedia Apostolica tanto nel spirituale che nel temporale principalmente in questi tempi travagliati.” Assonleville to Aldobrandini, ASV, Segr. di Stato, Fiandra, 10, 105r. Assonleville to the university, 27 April 1599, in Acta Universitatis, 1 May 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 312v–313r. A supplication and a resulting brief in favour of Slins from Clement VIII to Frangipani dated 17 July 1600, in Dessart et al. Inventaire analytique, 143. Before 1600, Slins was back in Louvain, cf. Catalogus Baccalaureorum, RAL, OUL, 505, 12r. A recommendation from Aldobrandini to Frangipani for a canonship at Maastricht, 25 February 1600, regest in Louant, Correspondance, 645.
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earlier, in September 1597, Mattheus Boden, the combative regent of the pedagogy of the Pig had been swept away by the plague. Jansonius, the enigmatic president of the Pope’s College, withdrew from the university’s public scene for almost a decade. Cuyckius, for his part, had been kicked upstairs to the episcopal see of Roermond and had left the university in late 1596. During his visitatio ad limina in 1599– 1600, he would provide the university with excellent press and would assist Lombard in stalling the efforts of the Belgian Jesuits to organise a course of Dialectics at Liège.19 His correspondence reveals, however, how academic micropolitics had shifted. According to Cuyckius, Vossius, “paulo remissior” in academic affairs, had been complaining to the bishop’s familiares about the ingratitude of university men who had failed to involve him, after 1597, in their Roman schemes. Obviously, the patrologist’s status as the university’s champion at the curia had crumbled in the late 1590s in tandem with the dismantling of his networks at Louvain.20 As far as official minutes allow us to draw conclusions, this was the outcome of an internal battle over the representation of the university; a struggle that can also be considered a contest between the Arts faculty and the Faculty of Divinity. It was Jacobus Baius who had abruptly put forward Lombard as the university’s future agent in Rome in the congregation of 29 May 1598, one month after the academic senate had decided to send a representative to the curia despite Stapleton’s passing.21 Baius was the university’s rector in the first half 19 Cf. Lombard to the university, 18 December 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 382r–384r and Gysens, Gerardus Vossius. 20 “Scio illum [=Vossius] dixisse uni e meis cum litteras vestras ad eum perferret universitatem Lovaniensem parum memorem esse accepti ab ipso beneficii et videbatur innuere nulla se remunerationem consequutum esse que tamen isthic existente communi academie et facultatis voluntate decreta erat.” Cuyckius to the university, 25 December 1599, Acta Universitatis, 15 January 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 382r–384r. At his return to the Low Countries one year before his death in 1607, it was his nephew Leonardus who had to prod the academics into honouring him as their patron in Rome. “Proposuit etiam decanus . . . qua ratione cum domino Gerardo Vossio preposito Tungrensi agendum esse videbatur enim is conqueri de facultate artium quasi parum grata dum ne quidem litteris domini prepositi respondisset . . . maxime cum a suo in Belgium adventu non fuerit aliquo honorario donatus, et ob legationem Romam antea decretam satis offensus fuerit.” Acta Facultatis Artium, 12 October 1606, RAL, OUL, 714, 335. 21 Acta Universitatis, respectively 17 April and 29 May 1598, RAL, OUL, 61, 282v and 285v–286v.
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of 1598. But his own interests in sending Lombard must have been many. He had, after all, learned the hard way that having a man of trust in the heart of Christendom who could act as the university’s agent was a prerequisite for successful policy. Lombard was fit for the job. An Irishman, he had found shelter at the Pope’s College under the presidency of Michael Baius. A poor student who lived on grants and could not afford to leave the university in the disastrous 1580s, he was one of Baius’ few remaining loyals at Louvain. After the latter’s passing, Lombard remained firmly embedded among the Baius dynasty’s academic clientele, surfacing again as Jacobus’ candidate for the doctorate in faculty registers in 1594.22 References in the Acta to his private correspondence with Baius after 1598 bear testimony to their enduring relationship. Interestingly, the representatives of the Faculty of Arts in the academic senate had insisted that Lombard was to be sent to Rome as Vossius’ assistant.23 With the benefit of hindsight, it is telling that Joannes Dillenus, the other heavyweight who had been accredited in 1587, alongside Boden, with “contacts in Rome,” refused to write a recommendation letter for Lombard to Vossius. The outgoing regent of the pedagogy of the Falcon,24 Dillenus had entered the picture as one of the opponents of the Jesuits in the previous years. He must have felt that Lombard’s mission inevitably would hurt Vossius’ visibility as the university’s representative in Rome and would reverse the position of his remaining friends at Louvain.25 However, Lombard, 22 Cf. the beadles’ registers of the Theological faculty, 1580–81, RAL, OUL, 504, 60r–60v, where he graduated as Baccalaureus Biblicus, Sententiarius, and Formatus under Michael Baius; he became a Doctor under Jacobus Baius in 1594. Ibidem, 126r. A recommendation letter from the university to Girolamo Mattei, the cardinal-protector of the Irish nation (cf. p. 322), 8 November 1597 (regest in Jadin, Relations des Pays-Bas, 3–4) mentions him as a regent of the Theology faculty and a teacher in Divinity. Lombard never occupied a public chair, however, which suggests that he was a private professor/tutor at one of the resident colleges. 23 Acta Facultatis Artium, 5 and 6 June 1598, RAL, OUL, 714, 19r–20r. 24 Dillenus moved on in 1598 to reside in his canonship at Lille. Reusens, Documents relatifs, 4, respectively 93–94 and 371–72; nomination by the faculty in Liber secundus nominationum, 5 January 1597, RAL, OUL, 4752, 261r. There is no evidence that the reversal of clientelist alliances at Louvain was the reason of his departure. 25 “Placere litteras [to Vossius] et simul iudicare dominos esse adiungendas alias nomine facultatis ad easque scribendas rogandum esse dominum Dilenum regentem falconis quas postea illo sese excusante scripsit rogatus . . . doctor Stephanus Weyms.” Acta Facultatis Artium, 10 June 1598, RAL, OUL, 714, 20v–21r.
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a former teacher at the Falcon and a prominent faculty member until 1594, must have been an acceptable candidate for most members of the Arts faculty as well. The faculty board agreed to contribute two thirds of Lombard’s salary of 600 florins, which were to be assembled via a general raise of matriculation, graduation, and nomination fees; it asked Weyms to instruct its future representative on the legal aspects of the privileges; and installed a committee of the four regents, the “natural protectors of poor scholars,” to monitor Lombard’s activities in Rome with the same powers as the late Boden had wielded in other Roman “solicitations.”26 The academic senate commissioned a parallel committee of the rector—the Law professors Philippus Zuerius (who had succeeded Wamesius as dictator of letters)27 and Weyms, and the notary of the university Conrardus Sylvius—for the same purposes.28 Arguments were pruned; a letter of supplication was drafted in which the pope was implored to confirm the 1593 censura of the Congregatio Germanica;29 and Zuerius and Weyms were sent to Brussels in order to muster the support of the archduke, the nuncio, and high ranking state officials for a university that was now hampered in its glorious resurrection by greedy benefice hunters, after having suffered so much because of its staunch loyalty to King and religion.30 Lombard’s Roman adventure could begin.
26
Acta Facultatis Artium, 11 August 1598, RAL, OUL, 714, 34v–35r. “Die lune 16a augusti . . . convocatio ad edes eximii D.M.N. Clarii eorum qui ad conceptum instructionis erant commissi.” Ibidem, 35v. The appointment of the four regents (“presertim quod obligatio spectet in sublevamen docentium pauperum in pedagogiis”) in the minutes of 31 August 1598, ibidem, 36r. 27 Reusens, Documents relatifs, 1, 315. 28 Acta Universitatis, 7 September 1598, RAL, OUL, 61, 295v–296v. 29 See p. 244–46. Supplication of the university to Clement VIII, 14 October 1598, ASV, Segr. di Stato, Fiandra, 10, 13r; in dorso 20r: Al Card. Aldobrand. 30 “Sed excutiunt plene restitutionis spem, quidam beneficiorum aucupatores, qui ab annis iam decem, ex urbe, circumvento (ut opinamur) Pontifice, usum fructumque duorum precipuorum privilegiorum, quae a Sacrosancta Sede Apostolica ad principum Belgicorum intercessionem eidem Academiae concessa sunt, sic turbant.” Letter of supplication to the Archdukes, 31 August 1598, Correspondance du gouvernement avec Laurent du Blioul (. . .), AGR, Audience, 1468/12.
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5.1.2. Louvain academics and Irish martyrs in Spanish Rome, 1599–1600 Lombard’s blitzcareer reflects to the support he would enjoy during the quarter of a century he stayed in Rome. Under the pontificate of Gregory XV (1622–23), the Irishman figured in the Ruoli of the Apostolic Palace as a member of the papal household a tutto vitto, a position that he had held in the previous pontificates.31 The divine would serve in several papal commissions as one of the closest advisors to the pontiffs: in the Congregationes de Auxiliis (cf. below) but also as the president of a committee of theologians preparing the condemnation of Galileo’s cosmology as heretical in 1616. In the 1620s, he became involved in the controversy over the methods used to convert the natives in Madura and chaired a commission that had to examine Jesuit accomodations of Christianity to Brahmin customs. He pops up in the Decreta Sancti Officii as a censor and a controversialist in the 1610s, as a qualificator in 1621, and as a lobbyist for clerics who needed special faculties for their missionary work in Ireland.32 It is especially his meddling in Irish and English affairs that has attracted the attention of historians. In 1599, he already acted as the agent in Rome of the earl of Tyrone Hugh O’Neill, the leader of the rebellion in Ireland against the English crown in the Nine Years’ War (1594– 1603). In his Commentarius, submitted in 1600 to Pope Clement VIII, Lombard, a witness of Farnese’s successes in Flanders in the 1580s, revealed himself as a supporter of foreign (read: Spanish) intervention in his fatherland, in order to turn the island into a cornerstone of the Catholic offensive.33 The Irishman could rely on the protection of Sessa and of Cardinal Mattei, the protector of Ireland, but in turn had to back down with a pontiff reluctant to raise the profile of Monarquía in a military solution to the Irish Question, a project that did not
31
Famiglia di NS Gregorio XV, BAV, Manoscritti Chigiani, 1794. For instance in ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1609, 526; 1610, 31 and 325; he has not been registered in ACDF, SO, Juramenta SO, 1575–1655, although he was identified as a qualificator theologus of the Holy Office in ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1621, 104r. For his biography, see Clavin, “Lombard, Peter.” 33 More on the De Regno Iberico Commentarius in O’Connor, “A Justification for Foreign Intervention.” 32
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match well with Roman policy favouring peace and a balance of power between Spain and France.34
Plate 5.1. Portrait Peter Lombard from Waterford, Archbishop of Armagh Peter Lombard from Waterford (c.1555–1625). Copy of a 17th-century portrait that perished in the Flames of Louvain of 1914. [House of the Archbishop, Armagh]
It is difficult to isolate Lombard’s Irish policies at the curia from the mission that had been the immediate cause of (or pretext for) his journey to Rome in the Autumn of 1598, even though he never referred to Irish affairs in his official correspondence. In 1600, the Irishman was still identified primarily as the university’s agent in Rome by third parties.35 The bags he had when leaving for the Eternal City carried 34 On Lombard’s wavering affiliation with O’Neill, read Silke, “Later Relations”; with respect to the international dimension, see also O’Connor, “Diplomatic Preparations.” 35 “Que esta dada al Doctor Lombart, que reside a qui por la universidad de Lovanio a un negocio particular.” Dublioul to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 16 April 1600, RAL, OUL, 438, 96r.
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recommendation letters not only to the pope and to Vossius but also to the cardinal-nephew Pietro Aldobrandini, to the cardinals Girolamo Mattei and Ascanio Colonna, who had succeeded his uncle Marcantonio as protector of Flanders, and to other old acquaintances of the Louvain doctors in the Sacred College: Baronio, the honorific Louvain doctor who had recently obtained his cardinal’s hat; Montalto, the nipote of the late Sixtus V who still commanded widely ramified clientelist networks at the curia; and to Cardinal Francesco Maria Tarugi. Another letter was directed at the duke of Sessa, while instructions had been sent from Brussels to Sessa’s assistant Laurens Dublioul, the agent of Flanders.36 An answering letter from Aldobrandini to the nuncio in the beginning of 1599, in which the cardinal-nephew declared he had recommended the university’s cause to his pontifical uncle with the same fervour as Frangipani had done, and that he would see to it in person that this bulwark of Catholicism would not be deprived of papal favour, indicates that the diplomat in Brussels had been involved as well.37 By then, Lombard had already been residing for several months near the Ponte Sant’Angelo, in the house of Gerard Hornkens, a Belgian notary of the Rota, an alumnus of the university himself and the uncle of one of the young clerics who had accompanied Lombard to the Eternal City, Nicolaus Micaultius.38
36 Letter of recommendation for Lombard from the university to Clement VIII, 23 August 1598, ASV, Segr. di Stato, Fiandra, 10, 12r; decisions on the other addressees in Acta Universitatis, 20 August 1598, RAL, OUL, 61, 291v–292r. Instructions for a letter to Laurent Dublioul, the royal agent for the Netherlands in Rome, 4 September 1598, Correspondance du gouvernement avec Laurent du Blioul (. . .), AGR, Audience, 1468/12. 37 “Me li sono offerto prontissimo a protegerle presso Nostro Signore favoritamente, et in particolare mi adoprerò per la conservatione dei privilegii, che questa Santa Sede li ha concessi per il merito, de questa università si ha acquistato per la difesa della religione cattolica.” Aldobrandini to Frangipani, 27 March 1599, ASV, Fondo Borghese, III, 40, 42v–43r. Cf. Frangipani to Aldobrandini, 2 September 1598, ed. Louant, Correspondance, 377. 38 Hornkens (Horcheus, Huerkens) had been an employee of the Rota since 1580 and was the brother of the deacon of Lier near Antwerp; member of a fief-holding family, cf. Vaes, “Les curialistes belges,” 112. Micaultius (Nicolas Michout), from Brussels, was a student in the pedagogy of the Falcon—he ended up in the Linea prima of the promotion list—and obtained his degree of Master in the Arts as one of Lombard’s students on 2 May 1591 (Acta Facultatis Artium, RAL, OUL, 713, 319v). He became a Sacrae Theologiae Licentiatus in 1598. Catalogus promotorum, RAL, OUL, 507.
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His first official report dates from 12 December 1598, one month after his arrival.39 The dozens of letters he wrote to the academic senate in the next years provide lively information on high-ranking officials of the papal curia; on Belgian clerical networks in Rome; on the channels via which Roman solicitors and hopefuls in the Low Countries could raise money for their endeavours; and on the political culture of the Gran Teatro del Mondo in general. They also reveal that Lombard’s networking strategies mirror those he deployed in Irish affairs, and probably were entangled with them. Spanish-Habsburg support emerges in Lombard’s correspondence as vital to the success of the university’s programme in the first years. Archducal recommendation letters identifying the university’s cause with the fortunes of the afflicted Netherlands served as a stepping stone for Lombard’s career in Rome. The intervention of Archduke Albert in Ferrara had already created, according to Lombard, very promising circumstances to push through the academic claims, but floods in the beginning of 1599 had turned Rome into a disaster area and delayed its desired effect—among others because part of Lombard’s precious files had disappeared in a swirling Tiber.40 In his letter of 7 April 1599, Lombard reported that—at last!—Sessa had returned from Ferrara to the afflicted city. The ambassador had promised Lombard not only to perform as a “fautor,” but even as a sollicitator and recommended the university in person to Clement VIII. Sessa’s commitment sheds a light on Lombard’s insistence on the university sending letters of recommendation to Cardinal Madruzzo, an old acquaintance of the academics; the protector of Germany; and a prominent member of the Habsburg faction in Rome.41 One year later,
39 Lombard to Conrardus Sylvius, university notary, 12 December 1598, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. 40 “Superveniens illa quam audistis, toti Urbi, et vicinis locis ferocissima inondatio tum propter communem quam attulit tristitiam, in qua parum erat oportunum, vel Summum D.P. (quem tristicia illa precipue affecit), vel alios principes sollicitare.” Lombard to the university, 7 April 1599, Acta Universitatis, 8 May 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 313v–314r. Lombard to Baius, attested in Acta Universitatis, 16 February 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 306r–v. New copies and instruments were sent by the academics. 41 Lombard to Sylvius, 12 and 30 December 1598, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. Cf. the remarks on the hereditary loyalty of the Madruzzo family when a new cardinalprotector had to be appointed in 1607: “Semblablement fuis je recherche de la part du Cardinal Madruzzo, les ancestres duquel se sont tousiours employez au service . . . de la serenissime maison daustriche.” Herman d’Ortembergh, archducal resident in Rome, to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 17 May 1608, AGR, Audience, 443, 97r.
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the Irishman would call on the university to write letters to Cardinal Farnese at the occasion of the wedding of his brother, the duke of Parma and the successor of the Monarchy’s former general in Flanders, Alessandro. Ascanio Colonna figures in Lombard’s accounts alongside Aldobrandini as one of the cardinals who had excelled as protectors of the university.42 In an answering letter from the cardinal, protector of Flanders (1597–1607) “quasi jure hereditario” since the death of his uncle Marcantonio, the cause of the university had become the cause of God. The famous Academy was an unassailable fortress in the midst of the Germanic tides, and it was a matter of dynastic pride, the university being founded by the Colonna Martin V, to defend its privileges. Meanwhile he urged the academics to display obedience and reverence towards their new princes,43 seizing the opportunity to reaffirm the Colonna’s loyalty to the Most Serene House of Austria.44 On 18 June 1600, Nicolaus Micaultius, who had returned to the Netherlands, reported to the academic senate that Colonna had declared in public the interests of the university his own.45 Lombard could report already in April 1599 that he had been introduced by Aldobrandini to Clement VIII. In a private audience with nobody else present but the Irishman and the nipote, the Vicar of Christ had been most benign: instead of remitting the Louvain case to the Rota or to another regular office of the curia, which had proved to be disastrous in the Clarius and Danielis affairs, His Holiness had proposed to charge a committee of cardinals with the examination of the Louvain privileges, an external consultancy bureau of sorts that would purify the university’s image from abuse.46 Lombard immediately 42 “Ex cardinalibus ad quos habui litteras qui alacrius me iuvant, sunt Ascanius Colunna et Petrus Aldobrandinus.” Lombard to the university, 7 April 1599, Acta Universitatis, 8 May 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 313v–314r. On Farnese, see Lombard to the university, 18 December 1599, Acta Universitatis, 13 January 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 279v–381r. 43 Colonna to the university, 20 December 1599, Acta Universitatis, 16 March 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 395v–396r. 44 “These men and others, such as Colonna, Sforza and Madruzzo, were described as generally attached and obligated “as vassals” of the king, and also were praised for their role in gaining other servants for him.” Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 140. See also von Thiessen in Reinhard, Mikropolitik, 136. 45 Report of Micaultius to the academic senate, in Acta Universitatis, 18 June 1600, RAL, OUL, 62, 1v–2v. 46 “Quod ut fiat convenientissima ratione ordinavit eius Sanctitas tres cardinales cum quibus conferam familiarius, et particularius de omnibus eo spectantibus, nempe de remedio contra gravamina que hactenus passi sumus, de expurgandis nobis ab abusibus qui pretenduntur vel putantur admissi, et de illo confirmationis modo statu-
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urged the academics to write an informatio and letters of recommendation to the three cardinals: Camillo Borghese, Pompeo Arrigoni, and Lorenzo Bianchetti, prominent members of the Sacred College and of the Holy Office.47 At least two of them—Borghese and Arrigoni—had performed as brokers in the Monarchy’s interests in Rome before and figure in the list drawn up for the archduke by Dublioul, the agent of Flanders, as cardinals “de crédit et bien affectionez a vostre Altèze.”48 Bianchetti, for his part, had gradually moved towards the Spanish faction after his promotion to the cardinalate in 1598.49 The three of them were beneficiaries of pensions on benefices in Spanish kingdoms and/or sought to secure habitos of Spanish chivalric orders for family members.50 Lombard, the agent of a pro-Spanish policy in Irish affairs, did not hesitate to call the cardinals of the committee “our cardinals” by the end of 1599, and in turn hired legal councillors who were into their favour.51 Meanwhile, another intervention of the duke of Sessa (and of Peña) had made the committee a venue for the examination not just of the privileges but also of Roman writs against Louvain nominees. Lombard reported, not without pride, that the fresh Uditore del papa, Marcello Lante, had been most compliant when the agent of the university had handed over, in the Summer of 1599, the pope’s orders
endo.” Lombard to the university, 7 April 1599, Acta Universitatis, 8 May 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 313v–314r. 47 Arrigoni in 1598 (De Caro, “Arrigoni, Pompeo,” 320), Borghese succeeded Santori as Secretary of the Congregation of the Holy Office in 1602. Bianchetti’s intervention in the Congregationes de Auxiliis reveals that he was a member of the Inquisition as well. 48 Borghese had functioned as a special papal envoy to Spain in the first half of the 1590s, which had earned him the cardinal’s hat; Arrigoni, for his part, had been a key lawyer of Philip II before he was appointed auditor for the Crown of Aragon in the Sacra Romana Rota by Sixtus V. Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 89. “Et plus les lettres generales de credit ie diz a vostre Alteze a Milan quil estoit necessaire daultres plus particulieres pour certains cardinaulx de credit et bien affectionnez a vostre alteze comme les cardinaulx Salviate, Sainct Severin [Santori], Rusticucce, Burgese, Arigone, Montelbero, Aldobrandin” Dublioul to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 10 October 1599, AGR, Audience, 438, 57r. 49 Caccamo, “Bianchetti, Lorenzo,” 51. 50 Cf. Von Thiessen, in Reinhard, Mikropolitik, 109. 51 He mentions the advocate Incoronato, as a replacement of the consistorial advocate Planca, who died quasi immediately after being hired by Lombard. Anthonius Marca Coracius, Planca’s procurator, would compensate for the loss, however, as he was “doctus atque probus et utroque nomine commendatus ipsi pontifici quam nostris cardinalibus [my Italicisation].” Chances were odd that he would succeed Planca. Lombard to the university, 20 November 1599, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102.
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to suspend all cases running against Louvain nominees, as the official had heard that the privileges would be confirmed soon.52 While Liège patricians were worrying about the favours the university was being covered with in the Eternal City,53 the Irishman managed, moreover, to redeem his credit at the curia in a papal brief, dated 4 December 1599, to the university in which Clement VIII encouraged the academics to keep up their struggle for Catholic religion and the Christian res publica; and in which he stressed his favourable disposition towards Lombard.54 This brief became, in return, an important argument in renewed lobbying in Brussels towards Richardot, the president of the Privy Council, Van Schoore of the Council of Brabant, and the papal nuncio.55 Already in August 1599, Lombard had called for a new supplication that was to be supported by letters of recommendation of the archduke, the latter having returned from Spain, in order to keep up the pressure and to remind the pontiff that a confirmation of the privileges was in the interest of the entire Low Countries.56 The Joyous Entry of the Archdukes at Louvain provided an excellent occasion to
52
“Quo mei intimato auditorem assumpto mecum optimo D. Borrio [unidentified] adii et is . . . promisit quod imposterum supersederet eo magis quod intelligeret resolutum iam esse de confirmandis nostris privilegiis.” Lombard to the university, 28 August 1599, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. Lante was promoted to the cardinalate in 1606, and probably resigned his office at the Auditorate by then. He belonged to a noble family of patrician descent which counted many cardinals until the beginning of the 19th century. See Weber, Genealogien zur Papstgeschichte, 2, 551–53. The archives of the family Lante-Della Rovere in the ASR do not list materials related to their activities as officials of the Holy See. 53 “Secundo quod Lovanienses nihilominus per favores satagant atque sperent se obtenturos illam confirmationem etiam quoad patriam Leodiensem.” Paraphrase of the supplication of the Liège mayors (“consules”) Georgius Goswinus and Bernardus a Tollet to Ernest of Bavaria, in Lombard to the university, 20 November 1599, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. 54 “Vera ad vos scripsit Lombardus vester de nostro erga vos paterno amore et voluntate nos enim vos et insignem Academiam istam tanquam domicilium virtutis et bonarum artium unde multi pietate et doctrina prestantes viri prodierunt complectimur in visceribus Christi itaque et littere vestre grate nobis fuerunt et Lombardum ipsum libenter vidimus et vestris commodis semper quantum cum Domino licebit animo libenti suffragabimur Vos autem Deo bene iuvante pergite in studiis vestris ut patrie et Christiane Reipublice et fidei Catholice propagande his presertim luctuosis temporibus usui esse possitis.” Clement VIII to the university, 4 December 1599, Acta Universitatis, 13 January 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 379v–382r. 55 Acta Universitatis, 13 January 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 379v–382r. 56 “Consultum ut nunc in reditu serenissimi principis . . . renovetis memoriam nostre hic cause quin potius vero ipsorum et totius patrie et supplicetis ut ambo velint eam commendare.” Lombard to the university, 28 August 1599, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102.
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attract the attention of the princes to academic grievances.57 Letters were sent to the pope and to Aldobrandini to thank them for their “singulari studio ac amore” and to celebrate themselves, Lombard, and the papacy with the help of tested rhetorical strategies.58 Last but not least, in 1599, Oranus, the auditor of the Rota and the self-acclaimed author of the academics’ troubles, had died, and was buried between his countrymen, not far from Gravius’ modest epitaph, in the Santa Maria Dell’Anima. In the light of all these events, it is not surprising that Lombard grew with self-confidence in the course of 1599. This resonates in the proposals he made to the university, “in line with the advice of prominent members at the curia,” for the new supplication. In order to counter traditional claims, that Liège clerics could not access the beneficial stock of the Habsburg Netherlands and that therefore academic job hunters should be excluded from the Principality, the university’s agent suggested moving boldly forward. According to him, the academics had to obtain an explicit declaration from the Privy Council that the 1531 Concordat did not extend to territories outside the Habsburg Netherlands (and that Liège nationals could apply for nominations in the Principality); second, he suggested asking for an extension of the university’s privilege of nomination to the Principality too, in order to improve the chances of Liège graduates.59 All this indicates that Lombard and his friends in Rome were not on the defensive; to the contrary. In the Summer of 1600, Nicolaus Micaultius, while reporting on the Roman mission in the academic senate on his return to the Netherlands, announced the return of a triumphant Lombard and urged the university men to hire a permanent agent at the curia—preferably (his uncle) Hornkens, whom Lombard had already recommended to the academics.60 In October
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Damant (the chancellor of Brabant), and Assonleville and Richardot, respectively councillor and president of the Privy Council, were honoured with a visit. Report of Clarius, Acta Universitatis, 25 November 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 338r–339r. 58 The name of Lombard, which apparently was worth mentioning, surfaces several times in these letters. Drafts, 27 January 1600, in Acta Universitatis, 16 January 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 384v–385v. No specific issues were recommended. 59 Lombard to the university, 28 August 1599, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. 60 Report of Micaultius, Acta Universitatis, 18 June 1600, RAL, OUL, 62, 1v–2v. Lombard had already insisted that the university should air its gratitude via Hornken’s brother, the deacon of Lier: “constitit mihi in his et in aliis omnibus subsequatis, et in ipsa principali serio et syncere adest, dominus Gerardus Horcheus Belga, . . . cui preterquam quod ego plurimum sum devinctus ob insignem commoditatem honeste
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1600, Lombard himself expressed his hopes of returning soon before the winter could keep him in Rome, as he did not expect to obtain “aliquam conditionem” there—which sheds an interesting light on his own expectations for his Roman mission.61 Academics started to deliberate on the way in which financing had to be organised to foot for the bill of the new bulls.62 Eight months later, the Irishman urged his friends in Louvain to write to Hornkens, who could help him “to add the finishing touches to the affair.”63 In a letter of 3 November 1601 to Philippus Goudt, a former colleague from the pedagogy of the Falcon, Lombard was already less confident, despite the trust he still put in the pontiff and the cardinals of “his” committee: the pope had promised that the bulls would be issued quickly, but the Irishman had no idea when he could finally come back to the Netherlands.64 In May 1602, his way of putting things had changed profoundly: Lombard was retained in Rome because the pope wanted to keep him in the Eternal City, but this enabled him to continue the good work for the academics in Louvain.65 Indeed the Irishman did not show up in the university town on the banks of the river Dyle, nor did the confirmation bulls. A tentative answer to this conundrum may come down to this: in the course of 1600, references to the support of diplomats employed by Rome (Frangipani), by the Archdukes (Jean Richardot Jr., the son of the president of the Privy Council and archducal resident in Rome
immo honorifice habitationis etiam universitas nostra, . . . Rogo igitur ut quam vobis mihique grata hec officia intelligat per opportunitatem eiusdem notarii frater isthic D. Decanus Lyranus quem ex animo saluto.” Lombard to the university, 9 October 1599, Acta Universitatis, 27 October 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 351r–354r. 61 Lombard to the university, 14 October 1600, Acta Universitatis, 2 November 1600, RAL, OUL, 62, 12r–14r. 62 Acta Universitatis, 3 November 1600, RAL, OUL, 62, 14r–v. 63 “Nunc repeto ut amanter scribatis dominum Gerardum Hornkens notarium Rote ac petatis ut sicut hactenus ita nunc ad ultimam manum imponendam amice michi assistat, quod etsi alioqui facturum sciam, decet tamen ut saltem isto modo intelligat grata vobis sua officia.” Lombard to the university, 30 June 1601, 24 July 1601, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. 64 “Non dubito ut me deiiciant animo ab ulteriore prosecutione. Sed non facient tamen cum certus sum ut premisi de animo in nos pontificis et cardinalium, quod iterum repeto quia petitis ut perscribam quid sit michi spei in cause.” Lombard to the university, 30 June 1601, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. Idem to Goudt, 3 November 1601, Acta Universitatis, 30 November 1601, RAL, OUL, 62, 69v–70v. 65 “Certe deterius multo eadem res haberet nisi quod hic diutius adhuc ex voluntate Sanctisimi Domini, prout alias prescripsi herendum michi sit, ubi et ubique ad obsequia vestra paratus semper inveniar.” Lombard to the university, 19 May 1602, Acta Universitatis, 29 June 1602, RAL, OUL, 62, 95r–v.
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in between 1600 and 1603) or by the Catholic king disappeared from Lombard’s correspondence.66 Qualifications are in order. It remains a moot point whether or not the decision of the Council of Brabant in March 1600 to launch an investigation into the summons from Rome was followed up.67 Yet, with respect to benefices situated in the Habsburg Netherlands, the judicial machinery in Brussels and in the provinces still provided for a locus in which academic interests could flourish: the 1606 verdict of the Privy Council in the lawsuit of Aegidius Baius (the nephew of ) over a canonship in Saint-Amé at Douai, for instance, beefed up, via a favourable interpretation of the Placet of 1531, Louvain claims to benefices coming under the Gallican regime.68 Outside these highly disciplined, legalistic contexts in which academics felt at home, however, they were remarkably reluctant to draw their princes’ attention to their claims or to beat the constitutional drums in order to rally their friends in the Privy Council or the Council of Brabant against Roman summons. On several occasions, they avoided disturbing the relations between the archduke and Ernest of Bavaria, the prince-bishop of Liège, over several related disputes to benefices in the collegiate church of Our Lady’s at Maastricht, a Brabant-Liège condominium, and boosted (internal) pressure on the duped nominees to drop their cases “in order to avoid discord between the princes.”69
66 No letters of recommendation could be traced, after 1600, in the Négociations de Rome or in the dispatches of the nunciature. A delegation of the academics had recommended the university’s cause to Richardot before he left for the Eternal City, without any results, however. Acta Universitatis, 4 April 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 398r–v. The last reference to Sessa is in Lombard’s letter written in February 1600, in which he confirmed the arrival of arrival of archducal letters of recommendation to Sessa sent by the Law Professor Corselius. Lombard to the university, February 1600, Acta Universitatis, 9 March 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 392r. 67 “Souden geciteert zijn te compareren tot Roomen directeleck teghen die notoire privilegien des landts ende hertochdoms van Brabant ende in prejudicie vande vonnisse hier ten hoven in materie possessoir gewesen ende dat directelijk der selver die vander voorscreven universiteijt alrede zouden gedacht weesen aldaer te compareren directeleijck tegens de Blyde Incompste vande voorscreven lande van Brabant.” Minutes of the Council of Brabant, 1 March 1600, RA Anderlecht, Raad van Brabant, Griffies, 4887, 330r. 68 Acta Facultatis Artium, 15 September 1606, RAL, OUL, 714, 323. Letters of recommendation to Dasseriers and Engelbert Maes, the commissioners of the Privy Council, 26 October 1605, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 53r–v. A Motivum Juris by Gerardus Corselius in RAL, OUL, 4760. 69 Guilielmus Vande Velde commented on the specific regime under which the collegiate church of Our Lady in Maastricht fell: “Itaque si beneficium situm est in Brabantia . . . aliisve ditionibus transmosanis, . . . agendum est in cancellaria Brabantie prout etiam super beneficia S Servatii Traiecti ad Mosam iuxta donationem Philippi
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In 1604–05, support for another nominee, Stephanus Strecheus, against the papal providee Verlaye, had been initially lukewarm, as the university had forbidden the unfortunate nominee to pursue his case, or to mobilise the archducal resident in Rome in the university’s name. Another fight over apostolic, Brabantine, or episcopal jurisdiction probably was not what university men needed. They had applied the same rigour when discussing the desirability of a general confirmation of their privileges by the Archdukes after the example of Charles V and Philip II. In 1602, the university men decided to wait for a more “opportune” moment, “donec sua celsitudo alibi haereat.”70 They had very good reasons to do so. First, academics did appeal to the prince as the protector of “his” university. A lot of effort went into keeping the university town and the colleges free from garrisons, a programme that was enthusiastically taken up by a city magistrate weary of unruly soldiery within its walls. In addition, academic correspondence and minutes bear testimony to the academics’ (vain) attempts to uphold their exemption from the Aids that were granted on a yearly basis by the States of Brabant to the Archdukes in order to foot for the bill of the war effort.71 This secundi imperatoris de anno 1204 factum Hendrico 1° duci Lutharingie et Brabantie licet interim ipsa civitas indivisim spectet ad episcopum Leodiensem et ducem Brabantie et hinc ecclesia S Maria ibidem regitur iure Leodiensi.” Guilielmus Vande Velde, De nominationibus Lovaniensium, c.1630, KBR, Manuscrits, 22191, 54r. E.g., the cause of Joannes Hermanni Oppiterus, with respect to a canonship accepted by virtue of the university’s privilege of nomination; letters of Ernest of Bavaria and Carondelet, the chancellor of Liège, to the university, respectively 3 December 1601 and 26 February 1602, Acta Universitatis, 3 March 1604, RAL, OUL, 62, 84v–86v; deliberations on the answer to the prince-bishop on 9 March 1604, ibidem, 87v; ongoing troubles with the chapter of Maastricht, which refused to respect Oppiterus’ privilege de fructibus percipiendis in absentia in a letter of recommendation to the chapter, 12 October 1603, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 12r–13r; and disputes with the chapter over the right of nominees to accept benefices in ordinary months in Acta Universitatis, 23 and 25 March 1604, RAL, OUL, 62, 185v and 190v. 70 “Conclusit placere quidem privilegiorum universitatis confirmationem a principibus nostris peti sed nunc temporis importunum, et exspectandum donec sua celsitudo alibi hereat, et in tempus magis oportunum, interim preparanda in eam rem necessaria.” Acta Universitatis, 28 November 1602, RAL, OUL, 62, 112r. In November 1600, a similar proposal had been delayed until the expected confirmation in Rome had been granted: a princely charter would then be sollicitated under the guise of a placet. Acta Universitatis, 18 November 1601, RAL, OUL, 62, 15v–16v. 71 Several attestations in the 1590s in the Acta Universitatis concern delegations to trusted councillors in Brussels and the gift exchange with officials (e.g., Stephan Craesbeke, member of the Council of Brabant; Philip Maes, registrar of the States of Brabant). Recommendations to the duchess of Ceda (the Archduchess’ wet nurse) and to the Archdukes at the occasion of a visit at Louvain in Acta Universitatis, 8–10
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suggests that university men had to manage their “economy of grace’; that they had to make sure that they did not overheat their patronage networks at the Brussels court; and that they were, as a consequence, compelled to list their priorities. But there is more. Turning their Negotium Romanum into a constitutional stake in order to rally the legists and the prince’s diplomatic channels for their cause would have bolstered the status of the university as a Brabantine institution subject to Brabant laws and fiscal practice—which was exactly the straightjacket academics sought to avoid in the first years of the 17th century.72 Academics did value the virtues of identitary imprecision, but in this context, lobbying for princely support in Rome would have backfired. Second, of the approximately 600 letters in the Négociations de Rome concerning the universities of Louvain, Dole, and Douai during Albert’s reign, only one had been written between 1601 and 1604.73 With respect to the affairs of the churches in the Netherlands in general, the young Richardot was confronted with the proverbial laboriousness of curial practice, as is revealed in an answer from a desperate legate to his alarmed father, the president of the Privy Council.74 It is obvious that, after the festivities in Ferrara in which the pope had
October 1603, RAL, OUL, 62, 149r and 154v; letter of recommendation to the Archdukes, 11 November 1603, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103; thanking letters to the marquis of Havré, to Vendegies of the Council of Finances, to the treasurer of Brabant Drinckwaert, and to the archbishop of Mechlin Matthias Hovius for their support, 20 November 1603, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 19r–20r; countless references in the Acta Universitatis, 1601–1604, RAL, OUL, 62; see also, for instance, Résolutions Magistrales, 27 January 1604, SAL, Oud Archief, 305. 72 Compare, by contrast, p. 431–86. 73 It was an answer to Cardinal Terranova of the Congregation of the Index, who complained that censorship was too lax in the South Netherlands—an assessment which would become an ever recurring post in the general instructions sent to the papal nuncios of Fiandra. The Archdukes to Don Pedro de Toledo, Jean Richardot’s successor as archducal resident, in Négociations de Rome, 19 December 1603, AGR, Audience, 439, 203r. In between 1 January 1605 and 31 December 1611, c.60 letters concerning academic affairs were registered in the Négociations de Rome. Of those letters, 34 were somehow related to the University of Louvain, as opposed to 10 for Douai, and 29 for Dole. 74 “Je suis quasi honteux de vous escripre si souvent de ce peu daffaires que iai entre mains, . . . mais croijes sil vous plaict, que ce nest pas ma faulte, sed stilus curiae, ie dis la longueur quil fault que ie confesse, m’ennuije et me desplaict assez, or i’ij feraij tousiours mon debvoir, et de lindult ie ne scaij en ai que c’en serat, aijant le dataijre tant imprime a sa sainctete es clauses restrictives, qu’ie lij voijs tousiours fort opiniastre” Richardot Jr. to Richardot Sr., Négociations de Rome, 22 September 1601, AGR, Audience, 438, 409r.
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handed over a sword to Albert charging him to slay the heretics, the archduke’s Roman honeymoon was over. By the end of 1601, Richardot implored his correspondents to send him good news on the siege of Ostend, the last bulwark of the rebels in the South Netherlands. The four-year siege of “the New Troy” (1601–04), which held Catholic and Protestant Europe in its spell,75 had become Albert’s litmus test; and this court of Rome, the archducal resident did not omit to point out, had no mercy for losers, including princes.76 A few days later, he called again for “good news” from Ostend, if the archduke ever wanted to obtain his indults, and other appeals would follow during the next two years of his Roman legacy.77 This suggests that the room for manoeuvre of the Archdukes in Rome (and their gusto to support academic claims at the curia) was fairly limited until the Truce. In this scenario, Lombard’s base of support in Rome must have unravelled quickly. 5.1.3. In the shadow of the Aldobrandini. The pontiff, his cardinals, and the academics, 1598–1605 Qualifications are in order. Again, they are related to Lombard’s involvement in Irish affairs. It is not unthinkable that his favourable reception in the Eternal City aimed at weakening his affiliation with the Spanish faction. The Mattei family being long allied with the Monarchy via pensions, encomiendas, and abitos,78 the newly arrived Anglo-Irishman may actually have been welcomed by the entourage of the pontiff as a potential counterweight to the cardinal-protector’s influence on Irish policy.79 In 1600, it was Roman diplomacy that
75 With the Siege of Breda in 1625, the Siege of Ostend was one of the eye-catching events of the Guerra de Flandes, the Academy of War of Europe. Read Thomas, “De val van het nieuwe Troje.” 76 “Cette prise donnerat beaucoup de credit et reputation a Son Alteze pardeca, et noz affaijres ne sen pourront aussij que mieux porter, se gouvernant ceste court princpalement par la prosperite et le bonheur, et ceux quil accompagne, y sont les bienvenuz, et par le contre des disgraciez, on nen faict compte, ie dis mesmes iusquaux princes.” Richardot to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 8 September 1601, AGR, Audience, 438, 389r–v. 77 “J’attens a proposer de nouveau lindult avec la bonne nouvelle que iespere dOstende.” Richardot to Prats, Négociations de Rome, 15 September 1601, AGR, Audience,438, 389r–v. 78 Visceglia, “Fazioni e lotta politica,” 82. 79 Inherited affiliations such as those of the Mattei with Spain were considered the most stable and predictable “inclinations” of decision-makers. Cf. Visceglia, “Fazioni e lotta politica.”
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secured the possession of the provostship of the Cathedral of Cambrai for him, despite the opposition of the Brussels Habsburgs and their noble candidate for the job.80 One year later, Roman ambivalence towards O’Neill’s designs led to a compromise that accomodated all parties involved, including Lombard himself: in 1601, he was consecrated archbishop of Armagh and primate of Ireland by Cardinal Camillo Borghese, a creatura of the Aldobrandini pope.81 After the defeat of the Spanish-Irish coalition at Kinsale in 1603, and after the accession to the throne of James I, Lombard would align his policy with the interests of the loyalist, but nonetheless staunchly Catholic Anglo-Irish, communities in Ireland in which he had his roots; with Roman designs; and with the peace policy of the Monarquía towards the new dynasty on the English throne that had to isolate the rebels in the Low Countries. Henceforward, the archbishop of Armagh would advocate a more peaceful arrangement in which a revitalised Catholicism of a Roman-Tridentine bent could florish under a “pagan” but legitimate king under natural law. The English monarchy, for its part, allowed considerable room for manoeuvre for Lombard’s eyes and ears in Ireland, his vicar David Rothe,82 as Lombard, despite recurrent projects to reside in his diocese until 1619,83 would never leave the Eternal City. Meanwhile, the archbishop remained in close contact with the Irish diaspora in Spain, France, and in the Habsburg Netherlands. All
80 Cf. p. 147. “A yier recevi una de V.A. para su Sanctidad escritta en favor del hermano del Conde d’Essenghien, paraque se le confiera la prepositura de Cambraij, los cortisanos de Roma son mas diligentes, q’esso por q’ha mas d’un mes, que esta dada al Doctor Lombart, . . . tengo pro necessario, q’ V.A. escriva muy encarecidamente a su Sanctidad y al Card. Aldobrandini, que quando se offrecen se megantes beneficios que no los provean tan presto, mas que tengan consideracion y aguarden a las personas, q’ V.A. encomiendare, q’ d’ssa manere podra V.A. remuner algunos de sus criados.” Dublioul to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 16 April 1600, AGR, Audience, 438, 96r. 81 A discussion of Irish matters in Lombard to Richardot, president of the Privy Council in Brussels, Négociations de Rome, 6 October 1601, AGR, Audience, 438, 420r. 82 Details on Lombard’s position and writings in Silke, “Primate Lombard and James I.” He briefly returned to his previous sympathies during the Flight of the Earls to Rome in 1607. On the introduction of a restyled Catholicism, read Lotz-Heumann, Die doppelte Konfessionalisierung. More on Habsburg policy towards England from a Brussels point of view in Croft, “Brussels and London.” 83 “Finita congregatione [of the Holy Office] Illustrissimi domini Cardinales Millinus, et Verallus retulerunt, sanctissimus concedere facultates solitas archiepiscopo Armacano redituro in Hiberniam ad Septennium.” Congr. Feria V Coram Sanctissimo, 5 September 1619, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1619–1620, 124v.
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this enhanced his credibility in Rome as a councillor to the Holy See in the appointment of bishops for Ireland. A similar pattern also emerges in Lombard’s correspondence with the university and with individual academics in the course of 1600 and 1601. Archducal and Spanish support in the Eternal City dwindled as it was gradually eclipsed by the patronage of Pietro Aldobrandini, who did not conceal his interest in drawing both Lombard and the university into his orbit. This evolution should not be considered a strategic “renversement des alliances”—it was never mentioned in these terms in academic minutes or in Lombard’s reports—nor had the university’s orientation on papal patronage been unilaterally orchestrated by the entourage of the pontiff. The divine had never put his eggs in one basket. Already in his first reports from Rome, Lombard mentioned he had been welcomed warmly by the secular priests of the Congregation of the Oratory, “the congregation His Holiness was most affected to among the City’s religious communities.” They had offered him their assistance, and in return the agent of the university urged his colleagues at Louvain to write recommendations to Tomaso Bozio, Baronio’s successor as the president of the Oratory and the librarian of the Vallicella.84 It was Bozio who introduced Lombard to the learned cardinal in January 1599 and who gave him the opportunity to hand over the letter of recommendation from the university to its honorific doctorturned-cardinal. The fresh Prince of the Church had displayed his favourable disposition, assured that the university “would not lose control” over its case, and promised to deal in person with the nipote,85 who, a former student of Baronio and of Filippo Neri,86 had provided Lombard with the opportunity to kiss the feet of the pontiff without any interference from Sessa or from other members of the Spanish faction. Bozio, for his part, continued to play a heroic role in Micaultius’
84 Interestingly, no references were made to the late Gravius, who had frequented the circles of the Oratorio as well. Lombard to Sylvius, 12 December 1598 and 30 January 1599, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. 85 Lombard to Baius, fragments in Acta Universitatis, 16 February 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 306r–v. 86 Jaitner, Die Hauptinstruktionen, 1, xcvii. The relationship between the nephew and his tutor was not always characterised by piety, as Baronio was a competitor in the battle over the pope’s favour. But the first open conflict arose only in March 1599, two months after Lombard had been introduced to Baronio. Pincherle, “Baronio, Cesare,” 473.
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report to the academic senate in June 1600. When dedicating his book De iure status sive de iure divino to Clement VIII,87 the erudite, who had been granted honorary membership of the university in July 1599 after the example of Erasmus, Arias Montano, and Baronio, had asked nothing in return but the confirmation of the privileges of the University of Louvain.88 Bozio, who had intensified via Baronio his relations with the papal family,89 had revealed himself an intransigent promoter of direct papal power who may have revelled in Lombard’s uncompromising Commentarius.90 An advocate of the ordo ecclesiasticus, of ecclesiastical liberty and of the Church’s temporal and spiritual jurisdiction, he was the best proof the university could produce that a confirmation of its apostolic privileges was in the interest of the Holy See. The Roman Oratory was not marked by a well-defined membership that cultivated a specific doctrinal programme.91 It is its relative openness, combined with an organisational weakness, and the variety of religious and political programmes that could flourish in its folds, that turned the Oratorio in Papa Aldobrandini’s favourite laboratory of religious reform in Rome.92 As a consequence, it became a venue for prelates, officials, and members of the Sacred College (among whom de’ Medici, Sfondrati, the nephew of the first pope-benefactor of the Oratorio, and Colonna) who sought to deepen their religious life; to 87 Tomaso Bozio, De iure status sive de iure naturali et diuino ecclesiasticae libertatis et potestatis. Rome: Bonfadini, 1599. 88 Report of Micaultius in Acta Universitatis, 18 June 1600, RAL, OUL, 62, 1v–2v; decision to thank Bozio for his support in Acta Universitatis, 22 August 1600, RAL, OUL, 62, 3v. The decision to co-opt Bozio as a member of the university under the Faculty of Theology was taken “ob summa ipsius in eximium (. . .) Lombardum et causam dicte universitatis . . . officia” after the arrival of letters from Bozio to the university. Copy of the act of co-optation, 8 July 1599, in Acta Universitatis, 12 July 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 323r–v. Compare Lanoye, “Benito Arias Montano.” Cf. p. 568. 89 Craveri, “Bozio, Tomaso.” 90 Mastellone, “Tomaso Bozio,” 228. O’Connor, “A Justification for Foreign Intervention,” suggests that Lombard’s treatise was influenced by Bellarmino’s ecclesiological work. Because of its anti-Macchiavellian and “constitutional” character, the Commentarius merits a comparison with Bozio’s work as well. 91 Frajese, “Tendenze dell’ambiente oratoriano,” 58–59. A common sense of identity among the Oratorians was fostered by practical religious exercises and charitable initiatives, as well as by the reform of the Roman churches. Compare Quattrone, “Accounting for God.” 92 “Der Geist der katholische Reformation, der damals in Filippo Neri seinen schönsten Ausdruck fand, durchdrang den Papst so sehr, dass man gesagt hat, dieser Heilige selbst habe mit ihm gleichsam den Stuhl Petri bestiegen.” Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste, 11, 3.
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legitimise their position by displaying their piety; and to add lustre to public religious acts in the presence of the pope.93 Interestingly, the three cardinals recruited by Clement VIII among the Oratorians were courted by the academics and their agent: in 1598, Lombard had carried letters of recommendation to Cardinal Tarugi, one of Neri’s earliest companions;94 and to Baronio; in 1600, the agent implored his colleagues at Louvain to recommend their cause to Silvio Antoniano, an Oratorian and a former teacher and rector at the Sapienza university who had recently been elevated to the cardinalate.95 The university’s letter of recommendation may have functioned simultaneously as an acknowledgement of previous favours as well, Antoniano being, as the head of the Secretary of Briefs and one of the closest collaborators of the pontiff, the author of the 1599 brief of Clement VIII to the academics in which Lombard had received such a good press.96 That the university’s contacts with the Oratorio, mediated by Gravius in the beginning and by Lombard by the end of the 1590s, should not be considered an exponent of proto-Jansenist partisanship is revealed by Lombard’s suggestion to write to Bellarmino too. According to the Irishman, the cardinal was more or less obliged by public opinion in Rome to advocate the interests of the university in which he had
93 “La partecipazione alla messa, la frequentazione della Chiesa Nuova [the church of the Oratorians in Rome] o all’adorazione pubblica delle Quarantore dei gesuiti, erano atti che il collegio [the Sacred College] compiva in modo simmetrico, o piuttosto a corona, agli atti di pietà e devozione del papa.” Fattori, Clemente VIII e il Sacro Collegio, 318. 94 It remains unclear why Tarugi figures among the list of adressees of Louvain recommendations. Somehow, Louvain academics must have been in contact with him. Tarugi was a friend of Baronio and had become member, in 1595, of the Congregation for the Examination of the Bishops as well as the Congregation for the Regular Clergy. He was elevated to the cardinalate in 1596. Tarugi only surfaces in Lombard’s letter of 28 November 1598, registered in Acta Universitatis, 24 December 1598, RAL, OUL, 61, 301r, as one of the cardinals whose arrival from Ferrara he was impatiently waiting for. On Cusani († 1598), see p. 230. 95 On Antoniano and his quest to sublimate humanism in Catholic Theology, a programme that he shared with many Louvain divines, read Godman, The Saint as Censor, 78; see also Motta, Bellarmino, 106. 96 “Scriptum fuit ex mandato S. Sanctitatis ab illustrissimo cardinale Sijlvio Antoniano est vir bene literatus et humanus totus eumque de Oratorii congregatione assumptum S. Sanctitas per diversa officia promovit tandem ad purpuream et eius utitur opera in eiusmodi secretis brevibus, etiam ad reges et principes unde omnino expedire iudico, et etiam expecto ut universitas ad eum scribat quod sciam id gratissimum ipsi fore et nobis in quacumque re usui futurum.” Lombard to an unknown correspondent, 25 March 1600, extract in Acta Universitatis, 18 April 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 401r–v.
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earned his spurs, and to imitate the late Toledo, his predecessor as a former Jesuit in the divine Senate, who in Rome as much as at Louvain was remembered as a champion of the university.97 The appointment of the cardinals Borghese, Bianchetti, and Arrigoni as members of a special committee should be situated in the same context. They did indeed figure on Spanish payrolls; few “friendly” or “neutral” cardinals did not. However, they cannot be classified as members of the Spanish faction, despite Bianchetti’s later attempts to position himself more independently from the faction of the cardinal-nephew. Pundits identified them primarily with the collegio nuovo, those members of the Sacred College recruited from among social climbers in Roman officialdom or in the lower nobility who, in contrast with the old nobility in the collegio vecchio (Farnese, Colonna, Mattei), were unambiguously considered the creatures of the pontiff himself.98 Members of the Holy Office (Arrigoni and Borghese) or of the Segnatura di Grazia (Bianchetti), bodies over which the pope presided in person on a weekly basis, they had ample occasion to discuss matters in private with him.99 By honouring recommendations from the Oratorians, Baronio, and Bellarmino,100 and by installing a committee of three cardinals who belonged to the inner circuits of the Aldobrandini empire, the pontiff and the cardinal-nephew turned Lombard’s Roman mission into a vehicle to weaken his, and the university’s, association with the Spanish and Habsburg faction.
97
“Cui [= Bellarmino] grata memoria quod apud nos aliquando vixerit. Immo et hic habetur tanquam ex universitate nostra prediisset nec putetur quod occasione prioris instituti munus favebit nobis ubi gratificandi occasio occurrerit sed cogitetur potius [my italicisation] quod in toto collegio cardinalium nullus fuerit qui universitati nostre ostenderit se favere magis quam D. Toletus.” Lombard to an unknown correspondent, 25 March 1600, extract in Acta Universitatis, 18 April 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 401r–v. Letter of recommendation of the university to Bellarmino, 2 May 1600, AGREG, Fondo Tromp, Epistolae S. Roberti Bellarmini ab initio cardinalatus eius, 1, 88. 98 Fattori, Clemente VIII e il Sacro Collegio, passim. Bianchetti was the son of a Bolognese patrician and senator; Weber, Die Päpstlichen Referendare, 2, 452; on Borghese’s origins in the urban patriciates of Central and Northern Italy (i.e., Siena), the social background of most papal families in the 16th and 17th centuries, read Emich, Bürokratie und Nepotismus, 2. 99 Visceglia, “Fazioni e lotta politica,” 65–66. The detailed diaries kept by Santori (cf. p. 243) bear testimony to this practice. 100 “Acceperam iamdudum ex domino Petro Lombardo privilegia quaedam Academiae Lovaniensis in dubium revocari, et tunc quidem diligenter commendavi causam vestram illustrissimo Domino cardinali Aldobrandino, tum delectis iudicibus a sanctissimo pontifice.” Bellarmino to the university, 28 July 1600, AGREG, Fondo Tromp, Epistolae S. Roberti Bellarmini ab initio cardinalatus eius, 1, 107.
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The cardinal-nephew himself, Pietro Aldobrandini, had lobbied for the job of Louvain’s patron in Rome by the end of 1599, making public, in the presence of bishop Cuyckius and many others, his wish to support the university in all its endeavours.101 In order to express his gratitude for the 1599 papal brief to the university, Lombard had addressed Aldobrandini as the “conservator of the university”: Rome’s most powerful cardinal “had been most pleased.”102 He had fetched Aldobrandini a letter of recommendation from the great Justus Lipsius: a gesture that (suggested discretely by the nipote himself ) had struck the right notes. In 1601, Lombard managed—in the absence of tangible results in the Roman Question—to acquire another brief displaying the pope’s favour for the academics and their representative;103 in 1602, he made another coup by engaging the cardinal-nephew, after Santori’s death, as the cardinal-protector of the university.104 One year later, it was a Louvain divine whom Aldobrandini sought to recruit when his uncle wished to call another scholar versed both in theology and in philosophy to the Eternal City;105 in 1604–05, in the midst of
101 “Illustrissimus Aldobrandinus in ea promovenda adeo noster factus est ut illa que particularius novi de eius in nos voluntate nuper presente reverendissimo domino Cuyckio in convivio publico professus sit ita sibi propositum esse nostre universitati gratificari ut in hac eius causa etiam se pro ea supplicem constituerit.” Lombard to the university, 18 December 1599, Acta Universitatis, 13 January 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 379v–382r. 102 “Eum suorum privilegiorum conservatorem hunc etiam ego illi titulum detuli quod ei gratissimum fuisse et adverti tunc et interim sum expertus fovenda omnibus modis et nominatim officio scriptionis eius in nos benevolentia cuius authoritas et nunc maxima et diuturna ut apparet ea futura clarissimo Lipsio multum afficitur eiusque frequentissimam et honorificentissimam mentionem facit.” Lombard to the university, 18 December 1599, Acta Universitatis, 13 January 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 379v–382r; a minute for a letter of gratitude, dated 27 January 1600, from the university to Aldobrandini is registered in ibidem, 385r–v. 103 Registered in Pasture, “Inventaire de la Bibliothèque Barberini,” 23, dated 15 September 1601. Somehow, the document did not make it to the records preserved at Louvain. 104 The commission to write letters to Aldobrandini had been given on 29 June 1602. A replacement for Santori was never discussed in the university or faculty minutes. Acta Universitatis, 29 June 1602, RAL, OUL, 62, 95r–v. Aldobrandini to the university, 24 August 1602, Acta Universitatis, 17 September 1602, RAL, OUL, 62, 103r–104r; “quod in illius locum potissimum te delegimus in cuius clientelam academiam hanc nostram pre ceteris omnibus ecclesie Romanae cardinalibus coniiceremus . . . [universitas] iam decreto publico te in patrocinium ac protectorem peculiarem recepit, et monumentis publicis pro tali consignavit.” Acknowledgements from the university to Aldobrandini, 4 November 1602, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 1v–2r. 105 “Di questi se ne sogliono talvolta ritrovare nelle università più celebri nelle quali leggono et danno saggio di loro con particolare nome di uscire dalla mediocrità . . . onde
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the Strecheus affair, he pops up in academic minutes as the academics’ champion in Rome. In the light of his blitzcareer and the support he enjoyed at the curia, it is not surprising that the Irishman’s relations with the academics were drawn into a different format too. In the course of 1604, Lombard was no longer addressed by the Arts faculty as an agent on the university’s payroll. Instead, they appealed to their “unicus mecenas” in the capital of the world, whom the humble supplicants reluctantly disturbed in his “occupationes rebus gravibus consecratas” in order to settle an affair on which the Public Interest, and the survival of the university, depended; and in return for which he could be assured of eternal gratitude.106 In the following years, Thomas White, Lombard’s nephew who joined his uncle after completing his studies at Louvain,107 would become a directly approachable broker between the academics and their Irish patron in the Eternal City. General letters of recommendation were sent to the archbishop of Armagh, while White had to deal with more prosaic, and less honourable, aspects of the Louvain mission in Rome. In 1609, when academics sought to
mi ha ordinato di scriver a Vestra Signorìa che facci diligenza per intendere se nell’università di Lovanio . . . fosse qualch’uno di tal dottrina et sapere.” Aldobrandini to Frangipani, 1 November 1603, ed. Louant, Correspondance, 715. The nuncio’s choice was Jacobus A Castro from Amsterdam, the future successor of Cuyckius in the diocese of Roermond (1610–39). A former teacher in the pedagogy of the Pig, he had obtained his Doctorate in Divinity together with Lombard in 1594 and had taught Theology at the Praemonstratensian abbeys of Averbode and Park, a career path that was followed by several future professors of the university. A Castro’s conditions “com ‘homo non uscito mai fuori, dubitando di gente di nation’ esterna nelli paesi lontani dalla sua patria” were considered exaggerated; Frangipani to Aldobrandini, 29 November 1603, ASV, Fondo Borghese, III, 110b–c–d–g, 35r–v. “Et ha inteso [Nostro Signore] ancora le conditioni . . . si corrà un poco di tempo a deliberare.” Aldobrandini to Frangipani, 3 January 1604, ASV, Fondo Borghese, III, 40, 123r–v. The divine was never called to Rome; there is no evidence of Lombard’s involvement in the affair. 106 “Audet iterum occupationes tuas rebus gravioribus consecratas interpellare petens obnixe non gravetur Illustrissima Tua Dominatio negotii urgentis a quo bonum commune et universitatis vita pendet, curam et patrocinium suscipere promittens vicissimum se curaturam pro vice ne ingrata et immemor reperiatur deinde rogans te, Illustrissime Reverendissime domine universitatis nostre mecenatem unicum diu salvum incolumemque preservet.” Faculty of Arts to Lombard, no date, draft in Acta Facultatis Artium, 6 October 1604, RAL, OUL, 714, 224r–v. All this had not inhibited Lombard from cashing in his yearly stipend of 600 florins, 400 of which were paid by the Arts faculty. 107 Thomas White Lombard (licentiate in Theology in 1601, Catalogus baccalaureorum, ARA, OUL, 505, 46r), had followed his uncle to the Eternal City in 1602, when Lombard openly had stated that he would stay for a while in Rome “ex voluntate pontificis.” At that occasion, he had offered his services to the university. Acta Universitatis, 4 November 1602, ARA, OUL, 62, 99r.
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revive the slumbering Roman Question, the Faculty of Arts contacted White first, before reaching out to the archbishop of Armagh and to the pontiff.108 What had happened in the affair on which the survival of the university and of Catholic religion in the Low Countries depended? The writ against Stephanus Strecheus issued by Marcello Lante, the Uditore del papa, in December 1603 had been at the heart of renewed efforts to have the Roman Question solved once and for all in the course of the following year. It is probably in this context that the university engaged Sandrino, its man in the nunciature, to rally Frangipani for its cause, while recommending simultaneously the nuncio’s secretary, who was bound to return to Rome and who had been asked to deliver the university’s and the faculty’s letters of supplication, to his superior.109 Lombard received, in addition, letters to hand out to Aldobrandini, Baronio, Don Pedro de Toledo (the new archducal resident in Rome), and Joannes de Parisiis from Mons, a famigliare of Vestrio, the Datario of the uditore del papa, both of whom had been recommended by Lombard to the university.110 The agent had faith-
108 See also p. 346 and 421–22. Faculty of Arts to White, 19 February 1609, Acta Facultatis Artium, 15 February 1609, RAL, OUL, 714, 224r–v. White would refuse with reference to his status, except if he was constituted officially as the university’s agent in Rome, he was not prepared to meddle in the vicissitudes of papal bureaucracy. “Duo etiam alia virtualiter includunt, nempe ut agam sollicitatorem seu procuratorem pro ipsis, quod certe statui meo non convenit, et ut exponam futura pro tali effectu liberaliter refundenda, quod similiter nequeo prestare, quia non sum bancarius pene me habens pecunias octrosas.” White to Malderus, 18 April 1609, fragment in Acta Facultatis Artium, 18 May 1609, RAL, OUL, 714, 431. 109 Supplication of the Faculty of Arts, 29 July 1604, Acta Venerandae Facultatis Artium, 27 July 1604, RAL, OUL, 714, 197–203. Previous letters to Frangipani and Sandrino, dated 20 November 1603 (Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 21r–v), probably sought to align the nuncio and his secretary with the university’s resistance against taxation by the States of Brabant. A first letter, dated 2 November 1603, recommended the university in general terms to Sandrino and explicitly made reference to Lombard; on the same day, Lombard had been warned about Sandrino’s return to Rome in the foreseeable future. Sandrino had, via Weyms, asked in return for letters of recommendation from the university, to Cardinal Farnese, among others (reference in the university to Sandrino, 18 December 1603, ibidem, 28v–29r); to Aldobrandini; and to an unspecified auditor of the Rota (d’Ortembergh or Peña?). The two last letters, dated 2 December 1603, are registered in ibidem, 25r–26r. It should be noted that none of the recommendation letters for Sandrino (except when Lombard was involved) passed the review in the academic senate. 110 The university to Lombard, Aldobrandini, Baronio, de Parisiis, and De Toledo, 12 December 1603, Liber Dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 26v–28v. De Parisiis was a canon of Saint Peter’s in Cassel (County of Flanders) who, as Lombard pointed out, was well disposed to the university even though he had not studied at Louvain.
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fully complied with the requests from his clients in Brabant: in a letter from White to the abbot of Saint-Gertrudis, who, in his quality of conservator of the privileges, had been summoned in the wake of the Strecheus affair to appear in person before the prefects of both the Signaturae, the archbishop was said to be negotiating on a daily basis with Borghese. He had not been entirely unsuccessful: the writ against the conservator was quickly annulled, and in White’s account the favourable disposition of the pontiff, Borghese, and the other cardinals was likely to result in a confirmation of the Louvain privileges of jurisdiction and nomination.111 In the Netherlands, a diplomatic offensive was simultaneously launched towards the powers that be and resulted in the appointment of a commissioner of the Council of Brabant, via whom the academics could send instructions to the archducal legate in Rome.112 New supplications and recommendations from the Arts faculty, adjusted to Lombard’s technical suggestions, were sent to the pope and Aldobrandini in the middle of 1604. A letter from Aldobrandini, who had called the Uditore del papa on the carpet, seemed to confirm White’s optimism: Rome’s most powerful cardinal expressed his good faith in the outcome.113 By the end of the year, the academics were playing the game according to their own rules again, having revived successfully the regime of grace that sidelined regular curial offices.114 In the first months of 1605, however, bad news reached
111
“Et D. Armacanus quotidie tractat de privilegiis, eorumque sensu et explicatione cum Burghesio . . . sibi addictissimo . . . ita ut pro iustitia causae nostre, cardinalium sinceritate et affectu in nos non dubitemus de felici per dei gratiam successu.” White to the abbot of Saint-Gertrudis at Louvain, 21 August 1604, extract in Acta Universitatis, 11 October 1604, RAL, OUL, 62, 205v–206r. 112 The councillors who were visited are Houst and Assonleville of the Privy Council and the chancellor of Brabant, Nicolas Damant. The members of the delegation were Jacobus Baius, Petrus Gudelinus (a law professor and the assessor of the curia conservatorialis), and Weyms, who had been hired by the Arts faculty (Acta Facultatis Artium, 10 July 1604, RAL, OUL, 714, 196–97). Report by Baius and Weyms, Acta Universitatis, 22 July 1604, RAL, OUL, 62, 198r. 113 Lombard to the university, announcing the death of Clement VIII, 5 March 1605, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. “Ceterum cum novissimis vestris litteris certior factus essem de monitorio facto per D. Camere Auditorem conservatori vestro ipsum statim Auditorem ad me accivi, cumque eo egi, ut cum memorato conservatore vestro mitius ageretur, prout ipse Auditor michi est pollicitus, ut minime iam necesse sit eum hic Rome se sistere sed per procuratores commode omnia agi poterunt.” Aldobrandini to the university, 4 October 1604, Acta Universitatis, 30 October 1604, RAL, OUL, 62, 209v–210r. Decision to send letters of gratitude in order to thank the cardinal for his bonus affectus. 114 By the end of 1604, Sylvius, the university’s notary, was charged with writing additional letters to Borghese, Arrigoni, Sandrino, White, and Lombard. Acta Universitatis, 13 October 1604, RAL, OUL, 62, 207r–v.
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Louvain. Clement VIII, the supreme builder of bridges between God and Man, was no more. 5.1.4. “Nam Pontifices initio solent esse liberaliores.” The capriciousness of Grace in the Rome of Paul V, 1605–12 The death of Clement VIII had not undermined Lombard’s position in Rome, despite the shocks in the market of patronage an elective monarchy could bring about. One of the “Louvain cardinals” in the Sacred College, Baronio, had been among the favourites, but was blocked by the Spanish faction in two subsequent conclaves because of his pro-French stance in the controversy over the absolution of Henry IV. After the ephemeral pontificate of Leo XI de’ Medici,115 Camillo Borghese was elevated to the chair of Saint Peter as a compromise between the factions of Aldobrandini and of Montalto, the nipoti of the two previous pontificates who had lasted long enough to stabilise the respective families’ clout, via their numerous creature, in the Sacred College.116 As far as curialist politics entered the picture at Louvain, the pool of patronage the university could tap into had remained intact. Moreover, the Catholic Church was now headed by a pontiff who, a “learned man,” was “most affected to the university and to Lombard.”117 During Lombard’s first private audience, the new pontiff had expressed his inclination to confirm the university’s privileges; the return of Frangipani to Rome in a general reshuffle of the papal diplomatic personnel offered new opportunities to recommend the university’s cause; and another cardinal, Pamfili, was appointed as Borghese’s substitute in the commission charged with the exami-
115
“Nam et illustris tue gentis Medicee precipua illa laus, amoris et studii in litteras et bonas artes, . . . et Leonis decimi Clementisque Septimi, gentilium tuorum quorum eximia fuit in hoc nostrum Gijmnasium munificentia [i.e., the bulls Admonet Nos and Rationi Congruit] beata memoria spe propensioris in nos tue paterne voluntatis, nos implevit.” Congratulation letter from the university, with explicit reference to Lombard, to Leo XI, 22 April 1605, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 48v–49r. Additional letters to Lombard, Borghese, Arrigoni, and Bianchetti, 28 April 1605, ibidem, 50r–51r. 116 Visceglia, “Fazioni e lotta politica,” 77. 117 With respect to Arrigoni and Borghese, White to the abbot of Saint-Gertrudis at Louvain, 21 August 1604, extract in Acta Universitatis, 11 October 1604, RAL, OUL, 62, 205v–206r.
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nation of the privileges.118 In the same year, the academics had their privileges collected in a book dedicated to Paul V. On its frontispiece, effigies of Peter and Paul, the princes of the apostles and the patrons of Rome, emphasised the papal origin of all academic privileges, while the solemn bulls themselves bore witness to the unremitting protection of the Roman pontiffs over their most loyal bulwark across the Alps.119 The grand finale of the year 1605 was a brief of Paul V, sent to the Faculty of Arts via the papal nuncio, in which the pope expressed his paternal love and urged the poor scholars, with explicit reference to the confirmation of its privileges, to have confidence in his caritas.120 Outbursts of joy resounded in the session of the faculty’s congregation “after all the disappointments the academics had gone through in the previous years,” and “many hailed the Holy Father, wishing him a long pontificate.”121 Nothing happened, despite alarmed calls in the course of 1606 from Louvain that Lombard had to seize the moment, “pontiffs being more generous in the beginning of their pontificate, as the experience with Gregory XIII reveals.”122 The committee of cardinals never moved into action. For the enthusiasts of micro-politics, it is not difficult to explain why the academics still did not secure a confirmation of the privileges: Baronio joined his friend Gravius in the grave in June 1607;
118 Cf. Lombard to the university, 14 January 1606, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. Interestingly, the recommendation letter from the university to Pamfili, in which the latter was hailed as a patron of doctrine and letters, is dated 23 September 1605, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 53r–v, which suggests the news of Pamfili’s appointment had reached the university already via other, private, channels of communication. A letter of gratitude to the pope, over his favourable disposition to the university via Lombard, the university to Paul V, 23 September 1605, ibidem, 51v–52r. 119 It probably was an adaptation of the print of 1597 (Privilegia Academiae Lovaniensi, ab apostolica sede (. . .) concessa, Louvain: Joannes Masius, 1597, reprinted again in 1644) which may have served similar purposes. 120 Copy of the letter from the nuncio, 3 November 1605, and brief from Paul V to the Faculty of Arts, 26 September 1605, Acta Facultatis Artium, 5 November 1605, RAL, OUL, 714, 293–298. 121 Acta Facultatis Artium, 5 November 1605, RAL, OUL, 714, 298. Letters from the Arts faculty to the nuncio, Lombard and White, 15 November 1605, Acta Facultatis Artium, 6 November 1605, RAL, OUL, 714, 295–298. 122 The university to Lombard, 23 September 1605, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 52r–v. “Veremur ne forte nostri memoria excidat, et res sola consenescat. Ideoque iam plane urgendum ducimus, et urgere deinceps decrevimus, maxime tam recenti pontificatu: novos sequidem pontifices ad liberalitatem esse proniores et magni viri testimonio, et certa sub Gregorio decimo tertio experientia compertum habemus.” Faculty of Arts to Lombard, 3 August 1606, Acta Facultatis Artium, same date, RAL, OUL, 714, 321. Memorandum submitted to Sandrino, 22 September 1606, ibidem, 325.
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in the same year, Aldobrandini, who had failed to consign himself to his new role as ex-nipote, fell in disgrace and was exiled to his diocese in Ravenna. Frangipani, for his part, spent, after his return to Italy, the last years of his life far from Rome as a reformer of the churches of his diocese in the Mezzogiorno.123 Seen from this perspective, it is not surprising that the members of the Arts faculty were wondering, in 1609, to whom they should turn. Interestingly, Lombard himself was no longer an evident choice. An answering letter from White, for a start, did not bode well: after having been sounded out by the theologian Zoenius and by the Arts faculty, Lombard’s nephew wrote to the divine Malderus that he balked at offending his friends among the Liège curialists, and that the job of sollicitator did not fit his status.124 Application letters from Roman professionals arrived in Louvain, but their candidacies were not considered.125 By the end of the year, the faculty eventually decided to contact Lombard again, as the university’s former agent was likely to be commissioned by the pope with the examination of their requests anyway and was not to be offended.126 In their first letter, the artists implored him to advance their cause, “sine strepitu et irritatione adversariorum,” “because of his familiarity with His Holiness and with others who are likely to intervene”; and
123 Pincherle, “Baronio, Cesare,” 475. Fasano Guarini, “Aldobrandini, Pietro,” 112. He only returned to Rome in 1621, after the death of Paul V, whom he would follow into the grave one month later. 124 “Sunt hic quidam Leodienses mihi noti et affecti, contra quos, aut eorum patronos, non possum salvo decore tanquam privata persona procedere, neque apud cardinales cum quibus agendum valeat mea tanquam privati hominis autoritas aut assertio.” White to Malderus, 18 April 1609, extract in Acta Facultatis Artium, 18 May 1609, RAL, OUL, 714, 431. 125 Acta Facultatis Artium, 25 April and 11 June 1609, ibidem, 430 and 435. Bertrandus Vervianus, a Liège cleric who would return as an abbreviator of the nunciature of Flanders in 1615–16 (cf. ASV, Dataria Ap., Per Obitum, 15, 339r), was the agent of individual nominees in 1610 and 1611; cf. the Arts faculty to Lombard, 29 June 1610, Ven. Fac. Artium acta quaedam (. . .), RAL, OUL, 746, 31r–32r; the same applies to Joannes Jacobi Corselius/De Courcil (not in Vaes, “Curialistes belges,” or ASV, Dataria Ap., Per Obitum, 1–42); cf. Lombard to the university, 25 December 1612, ibidem, 20v–21r. Corselius was mentioned as a correspondent of Franciscus Dralantius, regent of the pedagogy of the Pig, in White to Dralantius, 26 May 1607, Correspondance échangée entre le régent du Porc F. Dralantius, la Fac. Des Arts et l’Université et leurs amis à Rome (. . .), RAL, OUL, 1114, 26v. 126 “Tamen quia reverendissimus dominus armachanus adhuc Roma agebat, visus est non negligendus, ut si forte hac in re, eius opera sua sanctitas uteretur, quod satis est verosimile, ipse a nobis neglectus nos quoque negligeret.” Minutes of a special commission charged with the Roman Question, Ven. Fac. Artium acta quaedam (. . .), 27 November 1609, RAL, OUL, 746, 1v.
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to recommend an Italian for the tasks the archbishop did not judge glamorous enough. Lombard had to be courted repeatedly via official letters from the Arts faculty, but he was eventually prodded by his academic patron, Baius, into answering the calls from Louvain.127 His letter was discussed by the Congregatio Particularis that had been charged by the faculty with the following up of the Roman Question by the end of 1609.128 The flow of letters that crossed the Alps in between 1609 and 1612 differed substantially from those in Lombard’s early days in Rome. The erudite cardinals and their learned clients had all but disappeared from Lombard’s correspondence. This applies to other specimen of the papal curia as well. Only when he judged that the path to a general pontifical declaration had been paved did he recommend writing letters to institutional allies, i.e., to cardinal-nephew Scipione Borghese, Colonna’s successor as the cardinal-protector of Fiandra, and to Aldobrandini, the protector of the university who had returned from exile in 1611.129 It is not clear whether the 1612 letters of recommendation written to Bellarmino, Arrigoni, the Datary, and two other cardinals had been drafted on Lombard’s request.130 Few names surfaced in the correspondence between Rome and Louvain in these years, those of nominees and their procurators excepted. After Lombard’s prolonged absence, duped professors and students had to be recommended to the archbishop. The rhetorical lines about the merits of the cause, which at earlier stages had figured in letters to cardinals and pontiffs, now popped up in the letters to the primate of Ireland too. The Irishman, for his part, did not need Louvain credentials anymore; instead, he indulged
127 Several unanswered letters in Ven. Fac. Artium acta quaedam (. . .), RAL, OUL, 746. “Litteris meis . . . ad R.D . . . Baijum perscripsi quod et DDVV tunc videbatur communicandum” Lombard to the Arts faculty, 3 April 1609, ibidem, 4v–5r. 128 It was composed by two regents, Franciscus Dralantius and Joannes Massen in the pedagogy of the Lily, and three professors in Philosophy: Philippus Jonnaert, Joannes Buignies and Aegidius Donneux. Its minutes were recorded separately; cf. Ven. Fac. Artium acta quaedam (. . .), 26 November 1609, RAL, OUL, 746, 1r. 129 Lombard to the Arts faculty, 1 January 1611, Ven. Fac. Artium acta quaedam (. . .), RAL, OUL, 746, 24r. The academics had already written a letter to Borghese and a supplication letter to Paul V in April 1610. Ibidem. 130 The university to Bellarmino, 14 March 1612; to Arrigoni, the Datary, and to two other cardinals [the names Borghese and Bianchetti were barred], 14 and 20 April 1612, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 92v and 97r–98r. “Mittimus his iunctas litteras ad cardinalem Arrigonium, item binas ad cardinalium aliquos quibus inscribere eas Reverendissima Tua Gratia cordebitur.” The university to Lombard, 20 April 1612, ibidem, 99r–v.
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occasionally in name-dropping when discussing his familiaritas with Maffeo Barberini, the prefect of the Signatura Justitiae.131 History seemed to repeat itself. In 1611, Lombard complained that the officials presiding over curial offices were not keen on keeping papal writs against Louvain nominees from having their due course, as their fees (and the returns of venal offices) depended on their expedition; and because papal providees were often their own ministers (or clients of them).132 As soon as he had briefed the pope, other heavyweights besieged the pontiff claiming that nominees opposing papal writs ipso facto forfeited their privileges. In March 1611, the Irishman wrote that he would stand by the academics, even though his endeavours offended many curialists.133 Other letters continued to be referred to in the university’s correspondence with the Irishman until June 1612, in which the university thanked him for the news about the imminent resolution of the affair.134 At that moment, the official correspondence between Lombard and the academics seems to have come abruptly to an end.135 Eventually, the Irishman must have backed off in the face of opposition from bureaucratic networks at the curia. Seen from a micro-political perspective, two complementary hypotheses can be formulated: either the Louvain networks, including most of the erudite, “spiritual” cardinals who populated the Corte di Roma under Clement VIII and Paul V, were no match for Liège networks.
131 I.e., the future pope, Urban VIII. “Unde cum eadem causa tractanda etiam sit in signatura Justitiae (cuius qui prefactus est Cardinalis Barberinus, magna mihi cum eo intercedit familiaritas).” Lombard to the Arts faculty, 17 April 1610, Ven. Fac. Artium acta quaedam (. . .), RAL, OUL, 746, 11v–12r. 132 Lombard to the university, 25 December 1610; “Causa huiusce rei est, quoniam officiales hic Datariae, Cancellariae, Camerae aegre omnes ferunt ut impediatur hic cursus brevium pro capienda possessione illorum nomine quibus de beneficiis hic providetur, etiamsi sint eiusmodi quae in vim privilegii nominationis sunt ibi acceptata, partim quod illi qui hic providentur sunt in ipsorum ministerio, partim quia lucrosus ipsis est liber cursus eiusmodi brevium ob propinam quae de singulis accipitur.” Lombard to the university, 1 January 1611, Ven. Fac. Artium acta quaedam (. . .), RAL, OUL, 746, 20v–21r and 24r. 133 “Non deerit securi sitis industria mea, etsi videam me inde incurrisse offensam quorundam ex iisdem officialibus.” Lombard to the university, 1 January 1611, Ven. Fac. Artium acta quaedam (. . .), RAL, OUL, 748, 27r–v. 134 “Accepimus reverendissime TG literas 5ta maij superioris datas quae spem nobis maximam faciunt negotii nostri brevi expediendi.” The university to Lombard, 8 June 1612, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 100r. 135 Lombard did turn up again as a meddler in the Roman Question as late as 1616 in his private correspondence with Jacobus Jansonius. Lombard to Jansonius, [1616], extract in RAL, OUL, 4691; but he disappeared completely in official academic records or correspondence after 1612. Deleatur: Cf. p. 348.
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Or academics are to blame themselves, squandering as they did their social capital in the Eternal City in a wide range of other issues.
5.2. Efficient grace. Grants, benefices and Augustine Inevitably, other matters of concern surfaced after the Irishman had arrived in the Eternal City and can be expected to have interfered with a quick confirmation of the privileges. Three categories can be articulated: some of these issues were both public and uncontroversial within the academic community, in the sense that they did not provoke opposition that was noticeable enough to be registered in official academic records. Other affairs were at least as public, figuring as they do in academic minutes as well as in the official correspondence with Roman protectors and with Lombard—but they were simultaneously highly controversial and need to be situated in the war between the faculties and/or between different factions over the legitimate representation of the university. A third category of affairs never made it to the public loci of decision-making and, as a consequence, never crystallised into public objects of contention—but that may have been precisely the point of keeping them away from public scrutiny. In the absence of sources, it is impossible to bring many of these secrets, which probably were discussed in Lombard’s private correspondence with his friends at Louvain, to the surface again. Some of them inevitably bounce back, however, in documents assembled by the professionals of Secrecy in the Roman Inquisition. 5.2.1. The weight of examples. About Jesuits and diocesan seminaries By their nature, references to the first category of issues are abundant in academic sources. In the course of 1599 and 1600, for instance, the university’s man in Rome was busy promoting the university’s plan, with Baronio’s support and via recommendation letters to the cardinals Santori, Antoniano, Aldobrandini, and Borromeo, to bring in a pontifical grant of a jubileum to the university town’s churches, which was expected to bring both spiritual and financial gains to the afflicted academy.136 The Society of Jesus continued to haunt academic
136 “Egi etiam privatim cum Sua Sanctitate de jubileo Lovanii concedendo omnibus qui ex quibuscumque Belgii partibus eo advenirent, et late exposui quam id
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minds: in 1600, they were allegedly plotting to set up philosophical courses at Liège; a plan that was quietly aborted in Rome by Lombard, Cuyck, and the good old Vossius.137 In 1606 and 1607, academics were alarmed by rumours that the fathers would profit from the death of Clement VIII to delve up their claims to public teaching again,138 and decided, despite reassuring news from Lombard and White, to contact Aldobrandini.139 White’s correspondence with Franciscus Dralantius, a successor of Boden on the regency of the pedagogy of the Pig, puts another central concern of 17th-century university men to the limelight: the constant need to channel new resources—grants—to university colleges in order to compensate, in the light of the inevitable decadence and corruption of all worldly matters, for the devaluation of older pious foundations. The discreet lobbying of college presidents and illustrious academics towards potential donators remain out of the reach of official records. By contrast, the implementation of wills was a matter of concern for the entire university. References to disputes related to the boom of pious foundations in the period under investigation are abundant in academic minutes.140 The most spectacular example is the one of the necessarium non tantum propter fructum spiritualem qui tot animabus inde proveniret, sed etiam propter temporale commodum et subsidium eiusdem oppidi quod pro religionis causa superioribus annis tanta fuit perpessum.” Lombard to the university, 1 June 1601, Acta Universitatis, 6 July 1601, RAL, OUL, 62, 48v–51v. 137 Cf., for instance, Lombard and Cuyck to the university, in Acta Facultatis Artium, 14 January 1600, RAL, OUL, 714, 69r–70v. The rumours about a Jesuit university at Liège dated already from 1596; cf. Leonardus Vossius to the university, 22 January 1596, UAL, OUL, 344. 138 An argument that was indeed used in the course of the 1620s: “et signamment cessant par la mort dudict Pape Clement 8e la prohibition portee par lesdicts briefs, et la Compaignie estant obligee en conscience, par la fondation [by Torrentius] dudict college de faire lesdicts lectures.” Information du different des lectures de la Philosophie au Collège de la Compagnie entre ceulx de l’université et de ladicte Compagnie l’an 1595 et 96, [after 1621], RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. 139 The university to Aldobrandini, 15 March 1607, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 79v–80r. “Cardinalis Aldobrandinus ab uno fere anno residet Ravennae.” White to Dralantius, 7 April 1607, Correspondance échangée entre le régent du Porc F. Dralantius, la Fac. Des Arts et l’Université et leurs amis à Rome (. . .), RAL, OUL, 1114, 22r. “Dominus Armacanus misit litteras universitatis inclusas suis Ravennam ad Cardinalem Aldobrandinum, insinuatque nullum subesse quod timetis periculum, nihilominus misit, ut inde colligat Cardinalis affectum universitatis et obsequium.” The same to the same, 17 May 1607, ibidem, 23r. 140 E.g., the conflict with the chapter of Saint Lambert at Liège, which was believed to transfer pious foundations to the Jesuit College of that city, Acta Universitatis, 21 October 1597, RAL, OUL, 61, 260v; and another conflict with the officialis of the diocese of Antwerp, Delrio, over two foundations for the College of Standonck at
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Milius foundation, managed by the Fuggers of Augsburg, of c.90.000 florins (or the quadruple of the Torrentius foundation) for a college to be established at Trier, Luxemburg, or Louvain. Somewhere in between 1613 and 1619, the Brabant academics eventually gained the upper hand over Jesuits and other competitors after more than 18 years (with intervals and with varying intensity) of lobbying at the courts of Munich, Madrid, Brussels, and Rome.141 While referring sporadically to this negotium in his official reports, Lombard probably corresponded more extensively on the Roman side of the affair with the ordinary professor of Medicine Thomas Fienus, who figures among his “private” correspondents and had been charged by the university to see to its interests during his stay at the court of Munich in 1600–01 as a physician to the duke of Bavaria. In the busy correspondence between Dralantius and White in 1606 and 1607, it was the legacy of Nicolaes Ackermans (Agricola), a chaplain of Antwerp Cathedral, that had been at stake. Agricola had left “his” pedagogy of the Pig a yearly rent of 800 florins—the equivalent of a capital of approximately 13,000 florins—to be divided over several grants.142 He had explicitly dedicated the share of his wealth acquired from his ecclesiastical functions to his pious foundation, transferring thus resources from the Antwerp churches to Louvain. In addition, the chaplain had conspicuously ruled out any prerogatives for recommendees of the cathedral chapter of Our Lady’s in the application procedures for his grants.143 All this may have been like a red rag to
Louvain; Acta Universitatis, 30 December 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 371v–372r. Problems related to pious foundations were a recurrent theme in the university’s correspondence recorded from 1603 onwards in Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103. 141 1613 is the official year of the foundation of the Luxemburg college. Reusens, Documents relatifs, 3, 459 sqq. Cf., for instance, Acta Universitatis, 21 November 1610, RAL, OUL, 63, 58v: “quod clerici societatis nominis Jesu multum instent in Hispaniis pro levandis pecuniis per et post mortem domini Milii relictis . . . an ne placeat scribere . . . ad reverendissimum dominum armachanum et dominum Masium suarum celsitudinum in Urbe agentem.” Lombard had already intervened a few times in the affair in the late 1590s. A prolific correspondence in Liber dictatoris, 1616–1619, RAL, OUL, 103, 173r sqq. 142 The legation itself was constituted by 16 different rents (5 on the States of Brabant; 9 on private real estate) yielding yearly revenues of in between 12 and 91 florins, including deposits with major Antwerp bankers. Agricola’s will and a survey in Summarium Bonorum Nicolai Agricolae, A.A.M., OUL, 11P, 3rd bundle, sent by Laurentius Beyerlinck, Archpriest of the Cathedral, to bishop Miraeus, 24 March 1607, ibidem. 143 A copy of Agricola’s will, dated 10 October 1605, in A.A.M., OUL, 11P, 3rd bundle.
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bishop Joannes Miraeus (1604–11), who was struggling to finance his diocesan seminary, and to his cathedral chapter. The bishop and his clergy were therefore determined to have Agricola’s will changed. This being a prerogative of the highest authorities on earth, Miraeus had obtained, in February 1606, the permission to do so from the outgoing nuncio Frangipani.144 Litigation duly ensued before the Council of Brabant, but no verdict was reached.145 During the following two years, Miraeus managed to rally Frangipani’s successors, Carafa (1606–07) and Bentivoglio (1607–15), for his cause. A member of the First Order in the States of Brabant and an acquaintance of the Brussels officials who had procured his appointment, he was also supported by court. Rome—in casu the Secretary of State, headed by Scipione Borghese— was inclined to comply with the bishop’s request, but wavered146 and specified in its instruction to Bentivoglio in 1607 that the matter was still in deliberation.147 One month later, on 21 July 1607, Borghese asked his nuncio in Flanders to stop the bishop’s agitation against the university, the Supreme Pontiff having decided that he could not comply with the latter’s request “per disgustar molti.”148 The bishop did not give up, however, and could still command enough support to keep the case on the agenda of the nunciature.149 The dispatches 144
Supplication of Miraeus to Frangipani and the nuncio’s official permission, dated 15 February 1606, to transfer Agricola’s legation to the seminary of Antwerp, signed by the auditor of the Nunciature Henricus Stravius, in A.A.M., OUL, 11P, 3rd bundle. A first letter from the university to Frangipani, announcing a delegation constituted by Weyms and Dralantius, 24 February 1606, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 57v and 59r. 145 Documents related to the trial in Fondation de huit bourses par Nicolas Ackermans (. . .): procès (. . .), RAL, OUL, 1113 and A.A.M., OUL, 11P, 1st bundle. 146 “Io faro ogni officio, e con tutto l’animo, come ho fatto anco ultimamente per il vescovo d’Anversa, accioche resti consolato, ma . . . non si è potuto negare di far soprasedere l’interesse della parte avversa.” Borghese to Carafa, 2 December 1606, ASV, Segr. di Stato, Nunz. Diverse, 201, 374r. 147 “Sarebbe l’opera buonissima, ma perchè l’università di Lovanio s’oppone, essendo il testamento a suo favore, non si è ancora determinato quì cosa alcuna” Borghese to Bentivoglio, 5 June 1607, ed. Cauchie and Maere, Recueil des instructions générales, 28–35. 148 “Mi sarà caro, che Vestra Signorìa procuri di persuadere al medesimo vescovo, che non è bene dar mala sodisfattione alla sudetta università, e che essendo già impiegata la volontà del testatore in opera pia, è servitio publico il non mutarla.” Borghese to Bentivoglio, 21 July 1607, BAV, Barberini Latini, 5919, 274v–275r. 149 Alarmed letters from the university to Arrigoni (4 May 1607), Lombard (27 March, 28 September, and 5 October 1607), and to Paul V (5 October 1607) in Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 66r, 67r–v, 70r–71v. Jansonius and Corselius were appointed as the university’s representatives to the nuncio. The university to Bentivoglio, 9 December 1607, ibidem, 71r.
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in the Négotiations de Rome as well as in the correspondence of the nunciature reflect the frenetic attempts of the Archdukes to bully the stubborn academics into a compromise, mediated by Miraeus’ superior and colleague Matthias Hovius, that would allow the bishop at least a temporary usufruct.150 Yet, Rome kept repeating that without the consent of the university no agreement would be sanctioned by the Apostolic See. Somewhere in the course of 1608, Brussels resigned itself, and the Secretary of State in Rome confined itself to recommending the Antwerp seminary, in return, to the nuncio, without reference to Agricola’s legacy.151 As a consequence, the multitudes scandalised by a mutation of a will without the agreement of its beneficiaries have to be looked after in the Eternal City, and were mobilised by Lombard and his nephew. The correspondence between Dralantius and White is interesting in several respects. First, White did not fail to spotlight Lombard as an agile lobbyist towards Cardinal Arrigoni, the cardinal subdatario, and Scipione Borghese, nor did he omit to refer to the private audiences of the archbishop with the pontiff. Informed as they were, via Lombard, about the determination of the pope not to interfere in the execution of Agricola’s will without their consent, the academics only had to keep their act together against the pressure of the princely councillors.152 Second, White’s accounts are also about the importance of channels of information both Irishmen could dispose of: it is thanks to Lombard’s friends—including Joannes de Parisiis, the canon from Cassel who had become Scipione Borghese’s secretary—; and rumours about a papal 150 “Combien que lesdicts de luniversite sij monstrent si difficiles que nous ne scavons ce quen pouvons esperer ” Archdukes to d’Ortembergh, Négociations de Rome, 29 February 1607, AGR, Audience, 443, 45v; cf. the Archdukes to the university, to the archbishop of Mechlin, to the bishop of Antwerp etcetera, 13 March 1608, A.A.M., OUL, 11P, 3rd bundle. As a matter of fact, Matthias Hovius had already intervened in the first months of the controversy; cf. the university to Hovius (with reference to a letter from Hovius to Clarius), 2 June 1606, Fondation de huit bourses par Nicolas Ackermans (. . .): procès (. . .), RAL, OUL, 1113. 151 “Veda Vestra Signoria dall’aggiunta copia il giusto desiderio delli seminaristi d’Anversa a favore de’quali scrive hora nostro signore a cotesta altezza, e se puo aiutarli, faccia ogni amorevole ufficio” Borghese to Bentivoglio, 13 September 1608, ASV, Segr. di Stato, Nunz. Diverse, 201, 496v. 152 “Preses Richardotus [of the Privy Council] cum . . . intelligeret non esse transactum, monuit videremus ne nimis essemus pertinaces. Constat nobis aulices episcopi honori consultum velle sed exempli gravitas non patitur ut cedamus, maxime cum hactenus de prono in causam nostram Sue Sanctitatis iudicio per literas certi sumus.” The university to Lombard, 14 December 1607, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 77r–v.
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brief in the Low Countries, that the university’s agents in Rome could timely put on hold a supplication submitted by the sollicitator of the bishop of Antwerp to the office de componendis in the Dataria.153 The bishop’s case had been recommended by Bellarmino and signed by a forgetful pontiff several months after Paul V had promised Lombard that he would consult him first. In return, Lombard’s nephew was convinced that there were spooks in the Pig pedagogy, his correspondence with Dralantius having become an item in the exchange of letters between the archbishop of Armagh and Miraeus.154 Third, the academics had even managed to unravel the support the bishop enjoyed in Rome from d’Ortembergh, in his quality of archducal resident; Bellarmino; and Frangipani.155 However, it is intriguing that Miraeus’ base of support in Rome was not weaker than the university’s: as a matter of fact, it was constituted by the same people. Virtually all curialists and cardinals the academics could consider “theirs” based on Lombard’s and White’s correspondence (and on the outcome of the affair) surface simultaneously as champions of the bishop’s cause complaining about the stubbornness
153 Joannes de Borja. “D. Ardmacanus apud Reverendissimum Dominum Dottenberch [d’Ortembergh] Auditorem Rote pro archiduce in hac curia agentem fuit conquestus de temeritate istius sollicitatoris Borgia quem dixit a tempore D Petri de Toledo [archducal resident in 1604–5] non exercuisse illud officium nomine Belgii.” White to Dralantius, 5 August 1606, Correspondance échangée entre le régent du Porc F. Dralantius, la Fac. Des Arts et l’Université et leurs amis à Rome (. . .), RAL, OUL, 1114, 8r. Borja was already mentioned as a “sollicitator pro rebus Belgicis” in Rome who had been employed by Richardot Jr. in between 1600 and 1603 (Lombard to Philippus Goudt, professor in the pedagogy of the Falcon, no date, fragment in Acta Universitatis, 8 February 1602, RAL, OUL, 62, 79v–80r) and by the diocese of Antwerp (see also p. 361). 154 White to Dralantius, 16 June 1607, Correspondance échangée entre le régent du Porc F. Dralantius, la Fac. Des Arts et l’Université et leurs amis à Rome (. . .), RAL, OUL, 1114, 30r. 155 Bellarmino to Miraeus, 1 May 1606, a copy in Correspondance échangée entre le régent du Porc F. Dralantius, la Fac. Des Arts et l’Université et leurs amis à Rome (. . .), RAL, OUL, 1114, 4r. The university to Bellarmino, 16 July, 26 August, and 9 September 1606, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 63r–65r; words of gratitude to d’Ortembergh, 24 November 1606, ibidem, 65r; Frangipani’s position was commented on in White to Dralantius, 24 March 1607, Correspondance échangée entre le régent du Porc F. Dralantius, la Fac. Des Arts et l’Université et leurs amis à Rome (. . .), RAL, OUL, 1114, 21r. “Sed quid faciam? Lovaniensis schola de me non malo merita, et in qua integrum septennium versatus sum, jure suo petiit, ut desisterem ab incepto, et si nollem ipsi prodesse, saltem non obessem.” Bellarmino to Miraeus, 24 November 1606, A.A.M., OUL, 11P, 3rd bundle.
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of Lovanienses in other archives.156 Even Lombard apparently felt the need to explain his position to the duped bishop, and to offer his services in all other occasions.157 The plan to let the archduke “wield his authority” and prod the academics into a compromise, may well have matured in Rome. This is not the only conundrum that needs to be solved. Dralantius managed to turn the conflict of his pedagogy with Miraeus into a public cause of Academia in its entirety, to the extent that the Agricola affair could stall the confirmation of vital privileges;158 and that this interest group did not even unravel when a reasonable compromise was being concocted by statesmen many a don may have wanted to oblige. To be sure, Dralantius was the president of one of Louvain’s biggest colleges and in that quality a major dispenser of academic patronage. His profile as a broker may actually have been raised because of the affair, furthering as he did, via White, his own and other academics’ interests either as nominees or as aspiring papal providees.159
156 Letters from Arrigoni, Bellarmino, Baronio, Borghese, d’Ortembergh, and de Parisiis to Miraeus, 1606–1608, A.A.M., OUL, 11P, 3rd bundle. 157 “Quo me pridem animo in teipsum in fratres in nepotes et familiam universam affectum nostis, perseverat ille nec minutus nec mutatus . . . si id non egissem [the university’s cause] occasionem praebuissem iustae offensionis omnibus qui noverunt, quam multum ego debeam dilecto mihi loco, et praesertim ubi causam fovet quam mihi persuadeo tam iustam et piam, ut cum de ea Sanctissimum Dominum informarem . . . subiunxerim nec videri mihi Suam Sanctitatem posse sine peccato eandem commutationem facere.” Lombard to Miraeus, 4 August 1607, A.A.M., OUL, 11P, 3rd bundle. 158 “Tum ecce nova quedam nec minor difficultas exorta est . . . que uti presenti plane indigebat auxilio; ita negotium nostrum [i.e., the Roman Question], quo minus progressus ulteriores haberet, aliquantum impediunt.” Reasons why the Roman Question had been neglected in the last years, in the Arts faculty to White, 15 February 1609, Acta Facultatis Artium, 19 February 1609, RAL, OUL, 714, 408. 159 Several letters contain lively information with respect to the negotiations over benefices in Rome, and the role of Dralantius and Thomas White as mediators between Louvain and aspiring providees for benefices in the Habsburg Netherlands. White to Dralantius, 12 May 1607, Correspondance échangée entre le régent du Porc F. Dralantius, la Fac. Des Arts et l’Université et leurs amis à Rome (. . .), RAL, OUL, 1114, 23r; “Hic est quidam sollicitator Belga Georgius Lins Episcopi Atrebatensis [Jean Richardot Jr., 1603–10] intimus qui libenter canonicatum tunc vacantem sibi procuraret sed quia intellexit Lovaniensem iam possedisse non est progressus ad supplicae presentationem.” White to Dralantius, 28 July 1607, ibidem, 34r. Other aspiring providees are mentioned in the correspondence between Dralantius and White: Jacobus Mechliniensis, an alumnus of the Pope’s College, an anonymous student of the Collegium Germanicum in Rome, both of whom negotiated with White over the Ghent canonship coveted by Dralantius (and by White’s friend Joannes de Parisiis). “De canonicatu Gandense iam intellexerit quendam Bruxellensem (. . .) a principe commendatum
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But there is more. In their memorandum to the nuncio of December 1607, academics insisted that even a temporary settlement, let alone a definitive transfer, was unacceptable. A mutation of Agricola’s will (without the consent of the beneficiaries) was not just an ill token towards other pious donators, but it was above all the “gravitas exempli” that was to be taken into consideration. The university already faced competition from bishops tapping the same resources as academics to fund their nascent diocesan seminaries.160 That both the university and the city council of Louvain felt uneasy with all this educational zeal in the wake of the Council of Mechlin is understandable.161 Following a precedent in the Agricola controversy, history could turn its back on the academics, as other bishops could be expected in the future to turn the event into a trend that was necessary and inevitable to support the religious war effort.162 As a matter of fact, Miraeus had already been doing exactly that: he had not only sounded Baronio but also fielded similar measures described in the Annales Ecclesiastici on Gregory the Great, an engaging example for all pontiffs in the early modern period; and did not omit pointing at other exempla at the University of Paris.163 It did not help that “calumnies” had been spread in Rome as well. There were, of course, the mutual recriminations of irreverence towards the Apostolic See or of particular interests jeopardising Public Interest. In addition, Miraeus had justified his endeavours by plugging them into something bigger, thus drawing the conflict into a holistic format: it was now the spirit of Trent, the university’s profile as a reservoir
obtinuisse preter omnem hic exspectationem et mentem, quia istius nulla fiebat hic mentio.” White to Dralantius, 13 October 1607, ibidem, 37r. 160 Cf. the foundation of grants in the diocesan seminary of Ghent, Roegiers, De oprichting en de beginjaren, 88; Miraeus’ diocesan seminary was supported financially by wealthy Antwerp families; cf. his memorandum to the nuncio, 1607, in A.A.M., OUL, 11P, 3rd bundle. 161 Cf., for the plans to appeal to the Council of the archdiocese of Mechlin in 1609 to found seminaries in the university rather than in Mechlin itself, Résolutions Magistrales, 7 May 1609, SAL, Oud Archief, 310, 122v. 162 “Nam hoc exemplo avertentur omnium voluntates a piis legatis vel in universitatem vel alias ecclesiae partes conferendis, . . . quodque fundaturi sint ne eodem exemplo eadem vel alia ex causa alii etiam episcopi similes commutationes tentent. Et iam constat dictae universitati esse quosdam qui destinatas pias fundationes suspendunt in eventum huius controversiae alio voluntates suas conversuri.” Memorandum of the university to Bentivoglio, 6 October 1607, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 71v–73v. 163 A fragment of the 7th volume of the Annales Ecclesiastici in A.A.M., OUL, 11P, 3rd bundle.
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of future pastors, as well as its teaching methods and programmes, that entered the game. That Miraeus insisted, in his 1607 memorandum submitted to Bentivoglio, on the good works of the Society of Jesus, which took care of the training of his 20-odd seminarians, was not likely to appease the dons, who counter-argued that seminaries produced “vulgar pastors who could administer sacraments, but who were ill-equipped to fight heresy.” Quibbling over grants even implied discussing the benefits of academic privileges of nomination: according to Miraeus, nominees balked at accepting rural rectorships and only accepted fat canonships. This argument resurfaced, deprived of its context, in the 1607 Relatio Dioecesis Antwerpiensis submitted to the Apostolic See.164 As a consequence, nominations became another exemplum of a deficient educational model and a low turnout of parish priests trained at university colleges. Because none of these distinctive programmes could convince Roman decision-makers, they sought to compromise between the justice of the academics and the needs of the bishop, just as much as princely councillors in the 1590s had sought to compromise between Jesuits and academics by siding two ritual models. However, in the absence of a clear-cut consensus on the mutual roles of university colleges or diocesan seminaries, the whole affair risked becoming an exponent of the socio-religious referent Miraeus had construed to legitimise his endeavours.165 As a consequence, a compromise could only emerge after Miraeus had been defeated in Rome as well as in Brussels. In a transaction signed by both parties in April 1608, some room was left for the bishop’s desiderata; but these were now wrapped up as a special grace granted to the bishop by the academics. In this format, accommodating the bishop was tantamount to vindicating the university’s claim to a privileged niche in the formation of parish priests.166 164
Cf. p. 32 and 212. This brief synthesis of the argument is based on the memoranda in A.A.M., OUL, 11P 1st and 3rd bundles, as well as on the documents in Fondation de huit bourses par Nicolas Ackermans (. . .): procès (. . .), RAL, OUL, 1113. 166 The participants to the negotiations had been Dralantius, the provisors of the college Joannes Paludanus STD (the rector of Saint Peter’s at Louvain) and Hercules Vanden Winckel STD (the prior of the Carthusians at Louvain); and the deputies of the university: Jacobus Baius and the professors in Law Cornelius Sylvius and Gerardus Corselius. In return for the immediate transfer of the foundation to Louvain, the bishop had not to pay back the costs; a first generation of bursaries was to be selected by the bishop among his seminarists; afterwards, the bishop’s recommendations would be taken into consideration during his lifetime (i.e., not ex officio). In return, 165
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5.2.2. The war of the faculties and the battle for the cathedrals, 1599–1603 In February 1599, a few months after Lombard’s departure for Rome, the deputation of the rector and the deans decided to “consult” the Arts faculty on the question of whether or not licentiates and doctors in Divinity, Law or Medicine had precedence over “mere philosophers” when competing with them for a faculty nomination. Taken at face value, the episode has to be situated in the recurrent tensions in this field between the philosophers and members of the higher faculties.167 However, in the late 1590s, no immediate cause was recorded in university or faculty minutes, and the matter was dropped immediately after having been raised. Picking a fresh fight over the turning upside down of academic ranking orders by the faculty’s nomination board obviously had to serve other purposes. In the same session, the deans had been deliberating on the question of whether Lombard’s mandate in Rome had to be extended: what the academics were after, was a favourable declaration of the pontiff, that nominations of the university also affected benefices in the new cathedral churches.168 Anticipating protests from the Arts faculty, which paid two-thirds of the bills arriving at a regular interval from Rome, the dons of the higher faculties had given a subtle warning to the philosophers that they were willing to reopen the case—read: to jeopardise, via the display of internal discord, a favourable outcome in the Roman Question—unless the faculty accepted the higher faculties’ decision. It did not, tried, via the committee of the four regents charged with the direction of Roman policy, to contact Vossius (who did not bother answering), sought to instruct Lombard on the “true” nature of his mission, but eventually
the regent and the provisors committed themselves to admonishing bursaries who engaged in studies in Divinity that they had to take up a pastoral care in the diocese of Antwerp rather than elsewhere. Transactio inita inter episcopum Antverpiensem et provisores ac regentem collegii Standonck de fundatione domini Nicolai Agricolae, 18 April 1608, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 78r–79r. No external mediator was mentioned. 167 Cf. p. 158–59. 168 I.e., the collegiate churches that, by virtue of Super Universas of 1559, had been upgraded to cathedrals in the diocesan capitals of the new dioceses, bar the (medieval) cathedrals of Arras, Cambrai, and Tournai. The introduction of restyled diocesan structures had been completed in the beginning of the 1570s; but the new infrastructure had collapsed in between 1577 and 1585. Cf. p. 9–11.
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could not keep the academic senate from sending another procuration to Rome.169 This new orientation of academic policy in the Eternal City was not the result of a genuine interest in legal subtleties. The immediate cause was the refusal of the cathedral chapter of Our Lady’s in Antwerp, in April 1598, to install the student in Divinity Maximilianus Van Eijnatten on his canonship in the cathedral of Antwerp, which he had accepted by virtue of a university nomination.170 One week later, the vacant canonship was conferred ordinaria potestate to Franciscus Delrio, a member of a Spanish family based in Antwerp. The son of the late Luis Delrio, one of the pivotal mediators of royal power in the 1560s and 1570s,171 Franciscus was the brother of Joannes Del Rio, diocesan judge of Antwerp, the archdeacon of the chapter, and, in Frangipani’s later reports, “il motore della lite” between the university and the Antwerp canons.172 Van Eijnatten (1574–1631), for his part, obviously was worthy of the university’s support: a son of the lord of Schoonhoven, he was related to the important Brabant van Schoore family, with branches in the Council and in the States of Brabant. He was a convictor of Gerardus Corselius, a young academic, royal professor in civil law and the president of Winckelius College, Maximilianus’ home base at Louvain.173 The deliberations in early 1599, under the rectorate of Corselius’ colleague Petrus Vermeij, over the broadening of the Legatio Romana’s scope were probably the result of Corselius’ lobbying,174 even though Van Eijnatten’s case was not referred to
169 Deliberations in Acta Facultatis Artium, 28 February and 1 March 1599, RAL, OUL, 714, 49r–v. 170 “Resolutum quod M Maximiliano ab Eynatten . . . denegabitur possessio realis capienda titulo et vigore nominationis universitatis Lovaniensis, ex quo domini non intendunt admittere dictae universitatis nominationes ad cathedrales.” Acta Capituli Antverpiensis, 10 April 1598, UAA, Kathedraalarchief, 2, 22. Only ten days earlier, a nomination of the Arts faculty in favour of Aubertus Miraeus had been successful and had resulted in Miraeus’ installation as a canon of the cathedral on 30 March 1598. Ibidem, 21. 171 Born in Bruges, died at Tienen in 1578. See Le Roy, “Del Rio,” 472–76. 172 Frangipani to Borghese, Bianchetti and Arrigoni, 24 June 1600, ed. Louant, Correspondance, 151. A third Delrio brother was Martinus Delrio, the Jesuit author who was famous for his works in Demonology. 173 Compare the strategies of Justus Lipsius, who counted among his contubernales members of the most illustrious families of the South Netherlands, among whom two relatives of Richardot himself. 174 Acta Universitatis, 16 February 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 306r–v.
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explicitly. Both Joannes Delrio and Corselius, who would succeed Vermeij as rector of the university in the Spring of 1599, would manage to keep the particular interests of their protégés on the agenda by plugging them into bigger stakes that could provide them with a base of support,175 and that, as a result, would outlive the immediate cause of the dispute. After several warnings from the Council of Brabant, Van Eijnatten would eventually be admitted to the possession of his canonship in the Summer of 1599, and he struck a deal with his opponent in March 1600.176 Yet, the controversy, which eventually became a conflict between the university and all Belgian cathedral chapters including the bishops,177 would only be resolved in 1602, being entrenched in a logic that left little room for horse-trading. As early as March 1599, academics had mobilised the Council of Brabant for their cause. Under the pressure of Everard van Schoore, Maximilianus’ uncle, they associated themselves to his nephew’s cause. Delegations left for Brussels, and Corselius seized the opportunity, after the Joyous Entry at Louvain, to recommend Van Eijnatten’s case (rather than the Roman Question) in the name of the university to the Archdukes by the end of 1599. The bishops (bar Cuyckius) and the cathedral chapters of the Mechlin Province, for their part, submitted in August 1600 a letter of supplication to the prince in the margins of the States General of the Netherlands in Ghent.178 Yet, the interpretation of a papal bull—the Sixtina of 1483—being at stake, most of the traces lead us to Rome. In their (vain) attempts to suspend the verdict of the Council of Brabant in possessorio, the Antwerp canons had referred
175 “Conclusum est ex pluralitate votorum capitulum non posse eidem annuere petitionem suam propter rationes latius deductas . . . Interim dominus archidiaconus D Joannes Delrio canonicus cavit capitulo de omni damno et interesse quod inde capitulo posset provenire.” Acta Capituli Antverpiensis, 8 June 1599, UAA, Kathedraalarchief, 2, 51. The chapter had already declared itself a party in the lawsuit before the Council of Brabant on 11 September 1598; ibidem, 25. 176 Acta Capituli Antverpiensis, 30 July 1599, UAA, Kathedraalarchief, 2, 58; on Van Eijnatten’s transactio with the chapter and with Delrio, read Zuerius to the university, from Antwerp, attested in Acta Universitatis, 22 March 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 396r–v. 177 Letter of supplication of the archbishop and bishops of Mechlin (bar Cuyckius, the bishop of Roermond) to the Archdukes, Correspondance (. . .) touchant le différend entre les évêques et l’Université de Louvain au sujet de la nomination aux bénéfices ecclésiastiques de 1593–1600, 10 August 1600, AGR, Audience, 1468/12. 178 Philippe Prats, Secretary of State in Brussels, to Ferdinand De Salinas, Maître aux requêtes of the Privy Council, 29 August 1600, Correspondance du gouvernement avec Laurent du Blioul (. . .), AGR, Audience, 1468/12.
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to the committee of cardinals recently charged by Clement VIII with the examination of the privileges.179 The cardinals being labelled by Lombard as “conservators” of the university in Rome, academics could speculate on a favourable outcome, the more so because their Irish agent made sure that they were sufficiently informed on the merits of the affair before the Antwerp supplication reached them. Camillo Borghese, for his part, would have exclaimed that the opposition of the Antwerp chapter was a disgrace, academic nominations being issued for the benefit of the churches that were affected by them.180 Not surprisingly, the procurators of the Antwerp canons—Pedro Siqura, Franciscus Hovius, and Don Andrea de Pisquiera181 —sought to rewrite the script of the theatre play that was to be staged in the Eternal City. Their strategies were threefold. First, Lombard’s reports recurrently referred to the attempts of the Antverpienses to mobilise influential
179 Lombard was to be warned at once, Acta Universitatis, 21 June 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 319v. It is in this context that the academic senate ordered Zuerius, Wamesius’ successor as the dictator of the university’s correspondence, to draft letters of recommendation to the pope; to Arrigoni, Borghese, and Bianchetti; to Baronio; and to Lombard and Bozio. Acta Universitatis, 5 July 1599, ibidem, 321r–v. 180 “Acceperunt singuli tanquam rem antea prorsus inaudita et quidem D. Borghesius stomachando contra capitulum quod opponat se privilegio quod in bonum etiam ecclesiarum quibus per nominationes providetur concessum sit a sede apostolica.” Lombard to the university, 28 August 1599, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. 181 I.e., the Spaniard Siqura, who had been informed by the auditor of the Rota Peña on Lombard’s whereabouts (while Lombard was in return informed by Peña on the activities of Siqura). “Putabam plane eum venisse a D. Pegnia Auditore Rote cum quo circa idem tempus egi pro habenda informatione omnium que in causa nostrorum privilegiorum et suppositorum tractata sunt in Rota, qui et operam suam omnem mihi obtulit in commendanda causa nostra apud ducem Sesse.” Lombard to the university, 28 August 1599, Acta Universitatis, 18 September 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 332r–335v. After Siqura’s death, Franciscus Hovius, a Belgian cleric, replaced him. “Qui ante annos aliquot in universitate nostra convictor reverendissimi Middelburgensis et dum ego in officio essem, promotus in artibus ex pedagogio Standonck.” Lombard to the university, 14 October 1600, Acta Universitatis, 2 November 1600, RAL, OUL, 62, 12r–14r. Hovius was appointed rector of Saint Walburgis in Antwerp (job talks with Servatius Sassenus, the regent of the pedagogy of the Pig (1598–1603), having been suspended) by the chapter, cf. Acta Capituli Antverpiensis, 23 October 1601, UAA, Kathedraalarchief, 2, 105. He had been replaced by Don Andrea de Pisquiera, who figured as the procurator of the Belgian bishops and chapters in Rome; “et Hispanus quidam nomine Don Andrea de Pisquiera qui nomine quasi procuratorio episcoporum et capitulorum Belgii,” Lombard to the university, 30 June 1601, Acta Universitatis, 24 July 1601, RAL, OUL, 62, 52r–v. The Pisquiera family was in the good books of the curia; cf. recommendations in his favour in Diario Santori, 20 August 1592, ASV, Arm. LII, 20, 68r.
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curialists for their cause. By the end of 1599, the university’s agent already indicated that the Antwerp faction was trying to get support from Belgian curialists and from members of the influential Spanish community in Rome; in October 1600, he was informed by Borghese that several members of the Sacred College had been approached by the Belgian bishops imploring them not to allow extending the scope of the university’s privilege of nomination.182 In 1605, in the report he drew up after the death of Clement VIII, Lombard stressed his achievements, a few years ago, notwithstanding the opposition of “the entire Belgian Church and its allies at the curia,” in the disputes over the university’s right to nominate clerics for benefices attached to Belgian cathedrals.183 In the absence of sources, it is impossible to chart the base of support the opponents could field against the academics. However, the transmission of information, via Borghese, from other members of the Sacred College or from the less influential members of the curia (Hornkens in particular) suggests that, like in the dispute over the Agricola foundation a few years later, vocal support for one party did not exclude talking to the opposite party.184 Second, Siqura had tried to circumvent the committee charged with the examination of the university’s privileges by involving other curial offices, inverting thus the strategies the academics had deployed since Lombard’s arrival in Rome. By the end of 1599, the university’s agent reported that he had thwarted an attempt of his opponents to turn “a hypothesis into a thesis” and to obtain a motu proprio declaration that academics had to stop “extending” the scope of the university’s privilege of nomination to benefices in cathedral churches.185 The legal authority of such documents being more binding than that of other 182 Lombard to the university, 14 October 1600, Acta Universitatis, 2 November 1600, RAL, OUL, 62, 12r–14r. 183 Lombard to the university, 5 March 1605, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. 184 “Qua de re cum ante plusculos dies suspicio aliqua iniecta mihi esset cum viderem eum [= Franciscus Hovius] aliquoties familiarius [my italicisation] agere etiam in palatio illustrissimi Burghesii.” Lombard to the university, 14 October 1600, Acta Universitatis, 2 November 1600, RAL, OUL, 62, 12r–14r. 185 “Videbitis . . . quam isti confidentes sint in concipiendis et proscribendis motibus propriis et quam in nos animati et duri ita ut rem quasi ab hypothesi ad thesim revocantes privilegium universitatis in eo quod precipium habet volunt declarare nullum.” Lombard to the university, 20 November 1599, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. A copy of the supplication for this motu proprio was sent by Lombard to the university and is registered in Acta Universitatis, 30 December 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 369v–371v.
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papal bulls and briefs,186 procedures required that the adversary party (i.e., Lombard) had to be informed about it and possessed the right to submit its counter-arguments to the respective referendarii charged with the preliminary examination of all supplications submitted to the Signatura Gratiae for approval.187 Despite these institutional checks, however, Lombard sought, in turn, to avoid the Signatura, whose procedures gave voting rights to (alongside friendly members of the Sacred College) 12 prelates whom the Irishman “had not in his pocket” and whose unpredictability was proverbial among curialists.188 Thanks to an intervention of Aldobrandini, the university’s agent was granted a private audience with Clement VIII, who complied with Lombard’s request. During the next session of the Signatura, the Supreme Pontiff interrupted the referendario briefing on the case, reassigned the affair to the committee of cardinals, and thus turned the thesis into a hypothesis again.189 Another attempt of Bishop De Bergis (1597–1601) in 1600 to challenge, via the Secretariat of State and the Congregation of the 186
In such formats, the pontiff declared to act “motu proprio non ad alicuius desuper nobis oblate petitionis instantiam sed ex mera deliberatione nostra et ex certa scientia ac de apostolice potestatis plenitudine.” This was a powerful defence against claims of “subreption and obreption,” i.e., the intentional, malicious, or unintentional suppression or falsification of relevant information in the petition; grounds on which, after an examination of the veritas precum, other papal letters could be annulled. Cf. Frenz, Papsturkunden, 39. 187 In casu Paulus Alberus/Alvarus, from Rome, Referendarius Utriusque Signaturae 1578–1609 (Weber, Die Päpstlichen Referendare, 2, 396). Cf. the summon of Lombard (and Hornkens) by the referendarius, copy in Acta Universitatis, 30 December 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 371v–372r. The Signatura Gratiae (cf. 262 n. 165), in contrast to the Signatura Justitiae, was presided over by the Supreme Pontiff himself (hence Signatura Sanctissimi) in the splendid Sale della Segnatura, was charged with the examination of supplications submitted to the pope as the source of all grace, either in contentious matters (e.g., for appeals against sentences against which no appeal could be launched) or “in negotiis mere gratiosis absque contradictore.” Many of its competences were absorbed, in the course of the 17th century, by the Dataria Apostolica. Del Re, La Curia Romana, 231–33. 188 “In dicta signatura . . . per suffragia itur, ita ut inter cardinales quorum precipua ad vos scripsi nomina [= the Cardinal Penitenziere Maggiore (Santori); the prefects of the Signatura Justitiae and Dei brevi (respectively Bianchetti and Antoniano), and the Datario; cf. Del Re, La Curia Romana, 232] sint votantes uti vocant duodecim alii prelati [representatives of other civil and ecclesiastic tribunals of the curia, of the Consistory, and of the Signatura Justitiae], ne contingeret experiri quod dicunt Itali la Signatura è guirco d’aventura, perveni sollicitando ut res ista . . . remitteretur ad eosdem cardinales qui deputati antea erant.” Lombard to the university, 20 November 1599, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. 189 Lombard to the university, 20 November 1599, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102.
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Council, the “extension” of university nominations to cathedral chapters seems to have yielded no results as well.190 It may well have been in this context that Aldobrandini had proclaimed himself in public as the university’s champion, that Bozio had implored the pontiff to protect the university’s interests, that the papal brief of 1599 reached Louvain, and that letters were exchanged among the academics, Lipsius, and the cardinal-nephew. Third, another factor pops up in Lombard’s correspondence that would also play an important role in the 1606–08 Agricola affair: calumny. Already in 1599, Corselius shivered at the thought of Van Eijnatten sharing the fate of Clarius, whose claims to a Tongeren canonship had only recently been declared void by the Sacra Romana Rota, and he urged Lombard to anticipate calumnies being spread in the Eternal City.191 Academic interests in the field being legally entrenched in privileges, the opponents of the Louvain claims had a tested vocabulary at their disposal to draw the conflict into a format of a battle against abusive practices, any illegitimate extension of privileges being considered in legal doctrine as “odiosus.” This argument, in tandem with the claim that such an “extension” of the university’s privilege forfeited not only the rights of ordinary collators but also those of the Apostolic See, remained central to the supplications and memoranda submitted by bishops and cathedral chapters until 1602.192 But there was more. In July 1599, Corselius, in his quality of rector of the university, had been summoned by Lante, the Uditore del papa, to appear in person before the joint cardinal-prefects of the Signaturae in order to give a formal procuration for the interpretation of the Sixtine privilege; a writ that had been issued behind Lombard’s and friendly 190 Cf. references to the dispute with the university in Status Dioecesis Antverpiensis Sanctissimo Domino pro episcopo Antverpiensi, and the accompanying letter of supplication to the pope, 1600, in ASV, Congr. Concilio, Relat. Dioec., 59A, resp. 24r and 26v. 191 Cf. p. 248–51. “Quod vereatur ne isthic res in calumnia trahatur ut factum antea in causa domini Clarii itaque statim R.T. monitam esse voluit totius rei geste ut calumniis occurrat qua poterit.” Corselius to Lombard, 26 September 1599, Acta Universitatis, 6 January 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 373r–373v. 192 “Quod si idem privilegium per Sanctitatem Vestram etiam concederetur universitati Lovaniensi, quod a predecessoribus Sanctitatis Vestrae nunquam potuit impetrari, ut nimirum liceret universitati Lovaniensi ad prebendas ecclesiarum cathedralium nominare, omnes fere sedis apostolice, et ordinariorum collationes tollerentur.” Status Dioecesis Antverpiensis Sanctissimo Domino pro episcopo Antverpiensi, 1600, in ASV, Congr. Concilio, Relat. Dioec., 59A, 26v.
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cardinals’ back in the Signatura.193 The academics had complied by commissioning Lombard with the job.194 By mere coincidence, however, the civil officer of the university town, Jean-Baptiste de Spoelbergh, had been present at Winckel College when the writ against Corselius had been handed over by the apostolic executor hired by the Antwerp chapter.195 As a consequence, the latter had been arrested on the spot and transferred to Brussels for offences against Eximiae. In his letter to Lombard, Corselius had above all been speculating on his opponents adding abusive appeals to secular judges (vindicated by the Rota in the Clarius affair) to the odious “extensio.” Calumny fared better in some Roman biotopes than in others. In 1600, Bellarmino, who had sounded out the spirit in the Sacred College at the request of the academics, reported back that no calumnies were spread among the Princes of the Church about the university.196 By the end of 1600, however, Lombard was informed by Cardinal Bianchetti that the image of the university continued to be besieged in the Signatura Gratiae by a flow of supplications complaining about academic greediness, the accumulation of incompatible benefices, and obstruction against apostolic executors. The Irishman was confident that a letter from the nuncio had given satisfaction to the pontiff, however.197 The letter, which was addressed to the cardinals of the “Louvain Committee” in Rome, had itself been wrangled over for more than a
193 “Qui omnes uno ore affimarunt se de ista citatione nihil unquam audivisse . . . Immo Sfondratus ingenue mihi fassus est citationes eiusmodi frequenter prodire ipsis inconsultis et omnino insciis.” Lombard mentioned, alongside Cardinal Giustiniani of the Signatura Gratiae (Weber, Die Päpstlichen Referendare, 2, 651), Bartholomeo Ferratino (bishop of Amerino, regent of the Chancery and referendarius since 1569; ibidem, 604). Lombard to the university, 18 September 1599, Acta Universitatis, 10 October 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 345r–v. 194 Acta Universitatis, 16 and 18 July 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 324r–v. 195 On the Spoelbergh family and its lasting relation with the academics at Louvain, see Nelissen and Verbrugge, “Met applaudissement van alle de werelt.” 196 “De calumnia vero Academiae structa a falsis fratribus nihil audivi, nisi hoc ipso tempore, quo litteras vestras accepi, quando idem dominus Petrus Lombardus simul calumniam structram et detectam significavit, ita ut mea opera necessaria non fuerit.” Bellarmino to the university, 28 July 1600, AGREG, Fondo Tromp, Epistolae S. Roberti Bellarmini ab initio cardinalatus eius, 1, 107. 197 “Verum Blanchettus addidit nonnihil male de nobis sentiri in Signatura Gratie . . . puto sufficienter a me datam satisfactionem postquam precipue adiutis litteris illustrissimi Nuncii.” Lombard to the university, 14 October 1600, Acta Universitatis, 2 November 1600, RAL, OUL, 62, 12r–14r.
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year. Already by the end of 1599, Lombard had been able to lay his hands, via his friends in papal bureaucracy, on a commission to the nuncio signed (behind his back and that of supposedly friendly cardinals in the Signatura Gratiae) on the request of the adversary party to investigate the abusive appeals to secular judges in the Netherlands. Rather than blocking the commission, the academics, warned by Lombard, turned it to their advantage and sent several delegations to the nuncio in which the university affirmed its filial obedience to the Holy See and in which it insisted that the investigations start at once in order to purify its image in Rome from charges of abuse. Documents testifying to the university’s innocence in the arrest of the papal executor were obtained from Sandrino and dispatched to Lombard. Presumably on the academics’ request, the abbots of the Premonstratensian abbeys of Park near Louvain and Saint Michael’s in Antwerp were charged with hearing witnesses during Frangipani’s stay at Liège in the first months of 1600.198 It is in this context that academic delegations to Brussels—Clarius, Zuerius, Weyms, and above all Corselius—carried letters of recommendation from the Archdukes to Sessa after the Louvain Joyous Entry and visited Jean Richardot Jr., who was planning to leave for the Eternal City. The Antwerp canons, for their part, tried to recapture the initiative by investigating, in their memorandums to the nuncio, the micro-political connections among the abbot of Park, the academics, and the Council of Brabant;199 and, second, by resuscitating the definition of the problem they had previously envisaged, i.e., the countering of odious and abusive extensions of privileges combined with the due correction of irreverent and
198 Cf. p. 255–57. Acta Universitatis, 23 and 30 January, 4 February 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 385v; “prima fronte non obvium fuisse illustrissimo domino quid hac in re magis expediret fieri quo aliorum inanes suspiciones et falsas delationes evitaret effeci tamen die hesterna desiderio vestro satisfieret sublegavit enim illustrisimus dominus examen testium reverendis dominis abbati Parcensi et Sti Michaelis Antverpiensi et eorum cuilibet.” Sandrino to the university, 6 February 1600, ibidem, 387v–388r. 199 The first protestation of the Antwerp chapter was delivered by Asbroeck, the registrar of the nuncio, on 8 March 1600 at the house of Bophorinck, councillor of Brabant, with whom the abbot of Park shared his residence in Brussels. Acta Universitatis, 6 June 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 408v. The Antwerp canons pointed at the “familiarem conversationem” of the academics with the abbot, who was not only a suppositus of the university (which he was not), but also a major employer of secular clerics from the university as lecturers in Theology in Premonstratensian abbeys in Brabant (compare A Castro’s career path, p. 341 n. 105).
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scandalous behaviour towards apostolic executors.200 Their resistance to another reading of the commission by Frangipani and by the academics backfired, however, as now they could be enrolled, in academic rhetoric, into irresponsible and disobedient calumniators whose arguments were not even worth considering.201 The nuncio’s final report in June 1600 to Borghese, Bianchetti, and Arrigoni was both the outcome of Louvain politics and a masterpiece of diplomacy, Frangipani being informed that his neutrality was put into doubt in Rome by the opponents of the university.202 While seizing the opportunity to recommend to his Roman patrons a more comprehensive role of the nunciature in the execution of papal writs in the region,203 he carefully avoided putting the respective parties involved in an awkward position and lauded the university for its willingness to cooperate instead of damning the chapter directly. His remedy was rather vague: Rome had to make up its mind quickly, as neither party was likely to abandon its claims and the flock was likely to be scandalised by endless litigation between Catholic clerics. The nuncio’s diagnosis, in contrast, left little doubt about the merits of the affair. The coalition-building of the Delrio brothers and the cathedral chapters, which had sought to involve the Apostolic See, was deprived of its credibility and put into perspective as an artefact of micro-politics set in motion by Joannes Delrio: an interpretive method that the papal representative distinctively did not apply to the university’s
200 Two supplications of the Antwerp canons to the nuncio were registered, respectively, on 8 March and 27 May 1600 (copies in Acta Universitatis, 6 June 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 406r–408v). Frangipani had issued another decree on 17 April 1600, inviting the Antverpienses to follow the example of the Louvainists by producing their witnesses. A copy of this decree in Acta Universitatis, 6 June 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 408v. 201 “Cetera omnia tam futilia et ridicula ut refutationem non mereantur.” The university to Frangipani, no date, Acta Universitatis, 6 June 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 408v. Clarius and Sylvius were sent to Brussels to hand over the letter to the nuncio. Acta Universitatis, 18 June 1600, RAL, OUL, 62, 1v–2v. 202 “Ursi particulares alias litteras in universitatis vestre favorem quas licite initio denegaverit [=Frangipani] ne suspicionem partialitatis qua eum adversa pars apud Romanos onerare conata est.” Sandrino to the university, 6 February 1600, Acta Universitatis, 7 February 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 387v–388r. 203 “Perchè facendose dalle parti simili esecutioni senza participation mia, non tanto se mostran’ animose nell” eseguirle, quanto vilmente dopo, a l’instanza del magistrato secolare, ogni esecutione rivocano.” Frangipani to Borghese, Bianchetti, and Arrigoni, 24 June 1600, ed. Louant, Correspondance, 149.
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stakes.204 Yet, Frangipani also sought to restrain Rome from further actions against the chapter; against Delrio (who was to be excused for being moved by the “forza del sangue” and was not to be reprimanded for his piety towards the Holy See);205 or against the ministers of the prince who, out of obedience to their prince rather than irreverence to the chair of Peter, had imprisoned the apostolic executor and confiscated the possessions of the Antwerp chapter.206 Because the Archdukes’ position in the Low Countries was still weak, because of the “turbamento” of the Apostolic See it would provoke in the region, and because high-ranking Brabant families were involved, it would be unwise to pick a fight over the sensitive subject of lay interference in the ecclesiastical affairs207—a programme that, moreover, would have made Frangipani’s life in Brussels rather unpleasant. That the university, which had to live with laws governed by the Reason of State “a quali difficilmente se può opporse senza perturbatione della medesima chiesa,” would have tried to offend papal authority in the region, was judged most improbable at a moment when it was submitting itself, via its agent in Rome, to the grace of the Apostolic See.208 By discouraging further investigations in an affair where proof was difficult to obtain, and distinguishing between the academic jus de non evocando and the pernicious claims of the Privy Council and the Council of Brabant,
204
“L’altro è l’interesse del provisto dal capitulo di detto canonicato litigioso, et questo è la causa che nutrisce la lite e la fomenta sotto il nome del vilipendio della Sede Apostolica, essend’ il provisto fratello dell’Ufficiale d’Anversa ch’è il motore della lite.” Frangipani to Borghese, Bianchetti, and Arrigoni, 24 June 1600, ed. Louant, Correspondance, 151. 205 “Osservato dico per il zelo che mostra dell’honore di quella Santa Sede, e iscusato per le forza del sangue col suo fratello.” Frangipani to Borghese, Bianchetti, and Arrigoni, 24 June 1600, ed. Louant, Correspondance, 151. 206 “Non trovo che l’università possa di ciò colparse, et per simile accusa del capitulo d’Anversa, qual fin’hora l’ho per falso, meritare d’esser impedita nelle sue pretentioni appresso quella Santa Sede.” Frangipani to Borghese, Bianchetti, and Arrigoni, 24 June 1600, ed. Louant, Correspondance, 152. 207 “Non ardirei farlo senz’espresso ordine di Nostro Signore per la materia se daria di turbamento alla Santa Sede, et a queste Serenissime Altezze nel pericoloso stato nel qual se trova hoggi il lor governo.” Frangipani to Borghese, Bianchetti, and Arrigoni, 24 June 1600, ed. Louant, Correspondance, 151. 208 “Che se dal tutto havessa sbandita la prudenza et la sapienza dalle scuole, non s’haria mai fatta trasportare a’ tal’ errore di offendere la Sede Apostolica, in tempo massimamente che vi tiene persona espressa per ottenerne gratia che n’aspetta.” Frangipani to Borghese, Bianchetti, and Arrigoni, 24 June 1600, ed. Louant, Correspondance, 152.
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Frangipani invited the cardinals to proceed to the examination of the privileges, in line with the wishes of his friends at Louvain. The academics were probably informed (by Sandrino?) on the content of Frangipani’s report. Already two weeks after it had been dispatched to Rome, the academic senate decided to send Clarius, who was in good standing at the nunciature, to Frangipani with an appropriate gift—a patristic treatise; and they did not hesitate to provide accommodation and funding for another famigliare of Frangipani’s who wished to study at the university.209 For Lombard, the letter did exactly what it was supposed to do: pave the path for a quick decision and keep the university’s agent from getting bogged down in a quagmire of abuses. Already in March 1600, he had written to the university that he expected a favourable declaration of the committee, with the restriction that only faculty professors or doctors would be allowed to accept benefices in cathedral churches. In his letter of 14 October 1600, he stressed that the committee would rule on the matter as soon as Arrigoni had returned to the Eternal City.210 The affair was clearly dragging on. In June 1601, the university’s agent urged his colleagues to send letters to Aldobrandini and to the Datario in which they were to emphasise the benefits of privileges that aimed to provide the Church with clerics who excelled in morals and doctrine.211 In his 1600 and 1601 correspondence, he reported at several occasions on private audiences with the pontiff in which he had been compelled to elaborate on the legal customs of the Habsburg Low Countries— customs about which he found Spanish and even Belgian curialists conspicuously ignorant.212 Because his lobbying in this field cannot be distinguished from his overall mission of having the privileges 209 Frangipani to the university, 7 August 1600, Acta Universitatis, 22 August 1600, RAL, OUL, 62, 6v. The favour concerned Lambertus Stravius and the nephew of Henricus Stravius, the auditor of the Brussels nunciature (Van der Essen, Correspondance, xlvii). Stravius, the education of whom had been entrusted by his family to the nuncio, was admitted to the college of Westphalia on a substantial grant of 100 florins yearly. 210 Cf. Lombard to the university, 25 March and 14 October 1600, Acta Universitatis, 14 April and 2 November 1600, RAL, OUL, 61, 401r–v and RAL, OUL, 62, 12r–14r. 211 “Hunc peculiariter reddentes certiorem quam sunt idonei, quam bene meriti qui per vos nominantur.” Lombard to the university, 1 June 1601, Acta Universitatis, 6 July 1601, RAL, OUL, 62, 48v–51v. 212 “Itaque in ejusmodi casibus idem hic passim sentiunt iudices et officiales etiam de nostro Belgio nescientes eius incolis concessum privilegium quod non habent
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confirmed (cf. below), jurisdictional questions continued to stall a quick resolution of the conflict with the cathedral chapters. The fact that Frangipani’s report did not lead to a swift decision, can easily be attributed to (temporary) micro-political shifts at the curia. It did not help that Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini was on a mission in France to seal the marriage of Henry IV with Maria de’ Medici together with the Treaty of Lyons, two triumphs of papal peace policy for which the nipote could claim the glory. The other nipote, Cinzio Aldobrandini, cardinal of San Giorgio in Velabro and the prefect of the Signatura Gratiae, replaced Pietro as the pontiff ’s right hand during his absence from Rome. San Giorgio had been approached by Lombard and the academics213 but proved less reliable an ally than his junior cousin. The antagonism between the two cardinal-nephews, San Giorgio being completely marginalised by the rising star of Pietro at the curia, may not have helped matters.214 However, there were more concrete, micro-political stakes that must have alienated both San Giorgio and his correspondent in Brussels, Frangipani, from the university; i.e., a conflict over a Ghent canonship between the faculty nominee Joannes Wieringhe and Antonius Clarius, a papal providee who had been recommended by San Giorgio to Frangipani.215 While the nuncio aired his frustrations about papal providees ignoring him
Hispani.” Lombard to the university, 9 October 1599, Acta Universitatis, 27 October 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 351r–354r. 213 “Rogo et ut scribatis quam citissime ad cardinalem Sancti Gregorii quod is nunc prefectus signature gratie cui proinde supplicavi ut si quam contingat exhiberi commissionem que nostram causam tangat nihil de ea transire permittatur nisi me audito.” Lombard to the university, 14 October 1600, Acta Universitatis, 2 November 1600, RAL, OUL, 62, 12r–14r. 214 Cinzio Aldobrandini (1551–1610, cardinal in 1593 together with Pietro Aldobrandini, Weber, Genealogien zur Papstgeschichte, 1, 31) was indeed the other nipote promoted to the cardinalate by Clement VIII. The two nephews competed with each other for papal favour, but in the end Pietro was victorious, according to the biographers. Fasano Guarini, “Aldobrandini, Pietro,” 108; Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste, 11, 35–41). This antagonism was a public secret, cf. the Archdukes to Richardot: “vous ferez en son endroict le mesme, . . . de tout si discretement, que ni luy [= San Giorgio] ni ledict cardinal Aldobrandino puisse prendre jalousie que vous ayez plus de confiance en lung quen laultre.” Instruction secrète, in Négociations de Rome, 15 June 1600, AGR, Audience, 438, 135r–140r. 215 Joannes Viringi, or Wieringhe, from Kampen (United Provinces), a former teacher in Philosophy (RAL, OUL, 747), was an archducal professor in Canon Law and canon of the first foundation of Saint Peter’s in Louvain (1590), Juris Utriusque Doctor (1595), and president of Saint-Anna (1596) until his death in 1607. Reusens, Documents relatifs, 3, 250.
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and then getting themselves (and him) into trouble, he predicted that the university’s privileges were so “manifesti, et in uso” because of the support of princely tribunals216 that only terrorising the university’s agent in Rome could yield the desirable effects. Papal diplomacy indeed proved impotent.217 The nuncio’s failure to deliver for his Roman patrons may have soured the cordial relationship with the academics at Louvain, to the extent that Frangipani turned to a discourse of abuse only six months after he had sought to prove the innocence of the university.218 Yet, academics had managed to offend the nuncio in person as well. Immediately before the Clarius affair, the academics had failed to “wield their authority,” on the nuncio’s request, over an academic nominee competing for an altar with Joannes Wolfsfelt, Frangipani’s chaplain.219 That it was the first grace the diplomat had ever been allowed by his Roman patrons to bestow in person on one of his famigliari was not likely to reconcile him with the academics’ legalist stance. A quarrel between faculty regents and junior doctors in Divinity over the admission to the Strict College, which had been submitted to Rome by the duped doctors, provided an excellent occasion for boosting pressure on the academics: having been charged by San Giorgio to investigate the stakes of the affair, Frangipani had signalled to the academic senate 216
Cf. p. 212. It is possible that the Faculty of Arts, on the request of Wieringhe, actively intervened to sabotage the granting of a placet. Cf. Acta Facultatis Artium, 2 January 1601, RAL, OUL, 714, 83v. Cf. p. 196. 218 “Tuttavolta giudicarà necessario risentirs’ in Roma con l’agente dell’Università di Lovanio, che mentre è a torno a Nostro Signore per la confirmation, et estesione d’i suoi privilegii, se l’estenda qui a suo modo, et l’abusa, in preiudicio di quella Santa Sede, . . . forse che con simile risentimento, mescolatovi anchora qualche terrore di non volerl’udire nel resto, se non se purga l’università con la facolta dell’arti di tal eccesso, restarà l’intruso destituto d’ogni aiuto, et il possesso del Claro sarà senza lite.” Frangipani to San Giorgio, 13 January 1601, ASV, Fondo Borghese, III, 98d.1, 7r–v. Rome would take care of it; cf. San Giorgio to Frangipani, 3 February 1601, ASV, Fondo Borghese, III, 40, 72r. 219 I.e., Viglius Breijdel, who had been provided, via a nomination of the Arts faculty and an ordinary collation by the abbot of Saint Peter’s in Ghent (cf. p. 214 n. 216), with an altar in Harnes in the diocese of Arras (Liber secundus nominationum, October 1600, RAL, OUL, 4752, 284v). “Ut authoritate vestra interposita denominatus via amicabili cum pretacto capellano nostro . . . conveniat . . . ut occursuris aliis collationibus ad nos spectantibus ipsius memores simus.” Frangipani to the university, no date, Acta Universitatis, 17 November 1600, RAL, OUL, 62, 14v. Excuses sent by the academics to Frangipani about their failure to convince the nominee to abandon his rights, 30 November 1600, regest in Louvant, Correspondance, 663. 217
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that he would also deal with the abuses committed by the Lovanienses in the wielding of their privileges of nomination, a terminology that did not bode well. In his correspondence, Frangipani did not refrain from fielding “abusi” again when sending his report, after his stay at Louvain in between 15 June and 21 July, to the Eternal City.220 The report itself has been lost. Both cases, the Viringi affair and that of the Louvain divines, as well as whatever else Frangipani had been willing to denounce in his report, were buried in the committee of three cardinals charged with the examination of the Louvain privileges.221 The return, in the Spring of 1601, of Pietro Aldobrandini, whom Lombard did not cease to recommend as the university’s best friend in Rome, probably had a hand in this. The university’s agent, for his part, did not refer to the conflict between the divines in his official correspondence with the university. For the next few months, he waited impatiently for proof from the Low Countries about whether or not university nominations had already been successful in other cathedrals, that most cathedrals of the Low Countries had previously been ecclesiae inferiores, and that the affectation of the nine graduated canonships had taken place at the occasion of their upgrading to cathedral churches. In November 1601, he urged the academics at Louvain to speed up the process of gathering proof, because he expected the pontiff would charge one of the cardinals of the committee with a quick verdict on the affair. After that, he never discussed the conflict with the cathedrals and bishops again, until the reference in his 1605 report to
220 “Tentai li giorni passati di conoscere qui la verità dell’abbusi riferiti a Nostro Signore che sono nell’accademia di Lovanio, e vedendo che fuora del luogo difficilmente ponno venir tutti a mia notitia, proposi di condurmi fin la, et penso andarvi domani a tal’efetto.” Frangipani to Aldobrandini, 15 June 1601, ASV, Fondo Borghese, III, 98d.l., 153r. Abuses in the use of pious foundations were mentioned as well; cf. Acta Universitatis, 24 June 1601, RAL, OUL, 62, 47v; a confirmation of these rumours was given by the nuncio in person on June 22d. The report was sent together with Frangipani to Aldobrandini, 13 July 1601, ASV, Fondo Borghese, III, 98d.l., 160r. 221 Wieringhe’s problem does not surface anymore in the minutes of the university or the faculty, nor in the correspondence of the nunciature. Instead, Wieringhe is mentioned as possessor pacificus of a canonship in Ghent at the occasion of his death in 1607. d’Ortembergh to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 25 August 1607, AGR, Audience, 442, 180r. Aldobrandini wrote to the nuncio that the affair of the theologians (and who knows whatever other affair Frangipani had judged necessary to deal with) would be assigned to “a committee of three cardinals,” after which nothing was heard of it anymore. Aldobrandini to Frangipani, 11 August 1601, ASV, Fondo Borghese, III, 40, 80r–v.
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a favourable “censura” he had secured sometime in 1602 or 1603, in a proverbial fight of David (himself ) against Goliath (the Belgian bishops and cathedral chapters).222 The document was not included in official academic records, nor was it discussed, in the period under investigation, in academic councils. Only one, printed, copy could be retrieved in the university archives: a sentence of the Sacra Romana Rota, dated 26 June 1602, found that the rector of the university could still appoint to benefices attached to cathedral churches that had been affected by the Louvain privileges of nomination before they were upgraded. In contrast to, say, a confirmation of the privileges, the decisio rotalis did not delve into the benefits academic nominations would bring along for the Church, but entrenched the Louvain claims in legal precedents and in the jurisprudence of the highest tribunal of Christianity.223 Lombard’s discretion about the outcome of the conflict with the cathedral chapters may well have been dictated by the troubled relations within the university, about which he must have been informed by his private correspondents. From the point of view of the Arts faculty, which had failed to mobilise Vossius again for its cause in 1599, much of the social capital Lombard had accumulated in the beginning of his mission had been squandered to stakes they did not consider a priority while the Roman Question about the faculty’s nominations to benefices in the Principality of Liège and their jurisdictional implications continued to drag on. In May 1600, the congregation of the faculty decided it would halve its financial contribution, since Lombard had started to represent “the interests of the university alone.” In 1601, the rector had to promise that an evaluation of the respective costs would be made after Lombard’s return before the Philosophers agreed to come up with their part of the funding.224 The dons of the higher faculties were obviously more interested in safekeeping their
222
Lombard to the university, 5 March 1605, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. Cf. the reasoning developed in Copia Decisionis M.CD.XLIV. Desumptae ex libro Decisionum aurearum D. Seraphini Olivarii Razzali, Sacrae Rotae Decani, Per Laurentium Vitalem Bononiensem, IUD. Conscripto et Impresso Francofurti sub Anno M.DC. XV. Decisio M.CD.XLIV. Lovanien. Juris nominandi die Mercurii 26 Junii 1602 (collation with the original by Blasius, notary of the university from 1621 onwards), Bulle Regimini Universalis de Paul V. Documents et actes y relatifs, RAL, OUL, 4684. 224 Acta Facultatis Artium, 15 July 1599 and 1 March 1600, ARA, OUL, 714, 56v–57r and 73v–74r; 24 May 1600, ibidem, 74v–75r. “Responsum est placere cum intestatione tamen solita quod facultas non intendat solvere nisi unam tertiam eo quod predictus eximius d. ibi hereat maxime gratia negocii universitatis.” 22 August 1600, ibidem, 223
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own claims in the field than those of the Faculty of Arts. As a matter of fact, they only agreed to revive the Roman Question again, and to call for a second mandate from Clement VIII to charge the cardinals of the committee with the examination of the privileges, after the victory against the Antwerp chapter before the Sacra Romana Rota. To be sure, part of this failure of the Arts faculty to set the agenda can be attributed to the institutional settings of decision-making: although the organisation in faculties and the (feeble) secrecy of deliberation allowed the philosophers to voice their opposition without being bullied into obedience by the dons in the higher faculties, they had to cope with a majority of lawyers, theologians and physicians in the academic senate. Yet, it is significant that the academic senate had become the formal centre of decision making, instead of the committee of four regents that the faculty had installed in 1598 to monitor Lombard’s activities in Rome. The contrast with the 1590s, when the university’s Roman policy had been conducted to a large extent by the VossiusBoden team and by the Arts faculty, could not be greater. Personal relations account for this shift. A Doctor in Divinity, Lombard had left the Arts faculty several years before he left for the Eternal City. His recurrent references, at least until 1602, to his return to the university make it obvious that the divine defined his priorities accordingly. Among his correspondents surfacing in academic minutes, members of the higher faculties—Baius, Malderus, Fienus, Corselius and, in 1610, the divine Joannes Schinckelius—outnumbered his former colleagues at the Arts faculty, only one of whom (Philippus Goudt) was mentioned in this capacity. Helping a promising Doctor in Law ingratiate himself with Brabantine nobility obviously must have seemed, for the time being, more urgent both for Lombard and his academic patron at Louvain, Baius, than keeping faculty nominees out of trouble. That the dispute between junior Doctors in Divinity and Regents of the Theological Faculty was shelved in Rome may well have been a result of Lombard’s doings. If the correspondence between Lombard’s nephew White and Dralantius is representative for the (lost) private correspondence of the archbishop of Armagh with (some of) the Louvain Doctors, much of the “res graviores” that held the Irishman in Rome probably never surfaced in official records anyway.
77r; Acta Universitatis, 28 February 1601, ARA, OUL, 62, 30r–v. Protests were again registered six months later, ibidem, 48v–51v.
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5.2.3. A wandering spirit. The pope, his censor, and the academics in the Congregationes de Auxiliis Divinae Gratiae (1598–1607) Enter the next paradox. Lombard’s biographers agree that the Irishman had been sent to the Eternal City as the official representative of the university, but according to them he had above all been charged with attending to the theological debates over Grace and Free Will in the Rome of Clement VIII and Paul V. To date, however, not a single piece of evidence supporting this received wisdom could be retrieved in official procurations, recommendation letters, or in university and faculty minutes. The deafening silence in the academic sources of the day on the theological debates in the Roman Congregationes de Auxiliis Divinae Gratiae (1598–1607) is surprising. Yet, scholars have good reasons to turn the Congregationes into the real reason for Lombard’s stay in Rome: he was, after all, not a legal specialist well-versed in beneficial conundrums but a divine versed in the Science of Salvation; and his activities as a censor in the Congregationes represented a quintessential moment in his career. The disputes coming under the denominator of de Auxiliis are among the most clamorous conflicts to shape early modern Catholicism. Franco Motta’s recent study of Bellarmino reveals, from a Roman point of view, how the confrontation between the theological faculty and Lessius over the relationship between Grace and Free Will at Louvain had quickly gone international.225 In the generalate and in the Collegio Romano, rumours flew that the Sorbonne would soon follow the example of the University of Douai and of the Belgian bishops in support of the University of Louvain. From Mainz, alarmed calls poured in for firm signals that the Society was not being taken over by Pelagians.226 Belgian Jesuits, for their part, had sought from the start to engage their Roman co-religionists by claiming that the teachings of the Collegio Romano itself had been dragged into controversy by the Louvain doctors, and that the head had to react if its members were under attack.227 In the 1580s and 1590s, however, this “Roman School” was a heterogeneous lot, ranging from De Toledo, who had
225
Motta, Bellarmino, 530. Thyrreus, rector of the Jesuit college at Mainz, to Bellarmino, 29 September 1588, ed. Bachelet, Bellarmin avant son cardinalat, 216–19. 227 Delange, rector of the Jesuit college at Louvain, to Acquaviva, 2 June 1587, ed. Bachelet, Bellarmin avant son cardinalat, 157–58. 226
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been an advocate of the synergy between Grace and Free Will that was central to Lessius’ thinking, to traditional Thomists who embraced the more pervasive Augustino-Thomistic notion of Grace, to thinkers such as Bellarmino, a convinced Augustinianist of a positivist bent.228 According to Motta, Jesuit experts in Rome dreaded, under the pontificate of Sixtus V, the Inquisition’s oracles as much as academics who struggled to uphold their magisterium in doctrinal affairs.229 The debates over Grace and Free Will at the turn from the 16th to the 17th century are primarily identified in scholarship with the collision between the Dominicans and the Jesuits in the heart of the Spanish Monarchy.230 In the scholarly conflicts erupting from the early 1580s onwards at the universities of Salamanca and Valladolid, positions in the field of higher education had been at stake as well. And just as much as at Louvain, purity of doctrine became a public affair, litigants competing with each other for an audience from the pulpit as much as from the cathedra.231 In addition, however, several issues with which the dogmatic debates became entangled kept them on the agenda for several decades. They included the relations among the Dominican Order, the Spanish Inquisition, the Monarchy itself, and pontiffs striving to turn the Eternal City into the centre of Catholic orthodoxy. For the young Collegio San Tommaso at the Dominican convent of the Minerva in Rome (where the congregations of the Index and of the Holy Office held their meetings), the Congregationes de Auxiliis represented an excellent opportunity to show its scholarly excellence.232 228
Ceyssens, “Bellarmin et Louvain.” See also Motta, Bellarmino, 86. Motta, Bellarmino, 507–10. This may have relieved some of the pressure for the Holy Office to reach a verdict in the slippery debates over Grace and Free Will. 230 Few authors fail to mention the Louvain episode, but the link between the two sites of conflict remains somewhat obscure. For a good analysis of the precedents, see O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 52–53. 231 Broggio, “Ordini religiosi,” 68; with respect to the public resonance of the Lessius dispute in the South Netherlands, where the Jesuits were associated with “Lutheranism” as a generic term for heresy, read Van Eijl, “La controverse Louvaniste.” It should be noted that eruptions of violence among a scandalised flock may have been overstated in the discourse used by litigants and papal nuncios (compare the role of il popolo in the dispatches of the nunciature of Flanders, Boute, “Que ceulx de Flandres se disoijent tant catholicques,” 478), yet the evidence reveals that the tools of mass communication of the Counter Reformation—sermons as well as sacramental practices—were indeed instrumentalised to settle accounts within Catholicism as well. Cf. below, pp. 390–407. 232 Broggio, “Ordini religiosi,” 82. 229
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The Jesuits, for their part, feared losing their controversial disciplinary, pastoral, and educational privileges that were central to their identity as an order but that were a thorn in the eye of other orders and of the Spanish Inquisition. At stake was also the relationship between the leadership of the Society in Rome and the periphery, which had already proved a concern in the conflicts at Louvain in the 1580s and in the 1590s. In Spain, a full-blown party of Castellanistas within the order had not digested the Romanisation of the Society, blamed the Collegio Romano for the dispersion of novelties, or sought to obtain a special status for the Castilian province, allowing the fathers to operate more efficiently in a global Monarchy.233 One book bundled together all these conflicting matters of concern. In 1588, the Portuguese Jesuit Luis de Molina published his Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis. The medium matters. Via the printing office, the synergetic notion of grace could be presented to the public for the first time in a systematic, comprehensive way, thus boosting its claim to credibility. The Concordia represented, consequently, a formidable challenge to the Augustino-Thomistic School, which held that since Adam’s fall only efficient grace (gratia efficax), conceived as an intrinsic, supranatural physic force, necessarily could orient the free will of Man towards the good. For Molina, the liberum arbitrium could only be preserved if efficient grace was not a cause but an effect of several elements combined: first, a supernatural force that could justify Man’s deeds; second, the acceptance of God’s gift; and third, God’s prevision (the scientia media) as a matchmaker of Man’s conversion to his Will in an endless combination of contingencies. In many scholarly works, this optimistic anthropology—paving the path for the “Jesuit Scientific Revolution,” the confessionalisation of jurisprudence, or in missionary practices—is contrasted with the pessimistic worldview of
233 More on the division between “papistas” and “Castellanistas” in the Spanish Society of Jesus in Martínez Millán, “Transformacion y crisis de la Compaña”; see also, with respect to the Duchy of Milan, Rurale, “Clemente VIII, i gesuiti e la controversia giurisdizionale.” The crisis within the Society of Jesus would eventually evaporate as the Spanish Monarchy itself abandoned the confrontational policy of Philip II towards the Holy See; cf. Martìnez Millan, “La trasformazione della Monarchia Hispanica.” Other studies referring to the changing relationship between local Jesuits and the Roman generalate (in casu in 17th- and 18th-century France) are Negruzzo, L’armonia contesa, and De Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, 194–95.
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“traditionalist” Augustinianism.234 Some authors have judged it more appropriate to label the synergetic model as pedagogic rather than optimistic, requiring as it did continuous edification and moral guidance on the bumpy road towards salvation.235 As a consequence, Molinism provided tools to normalise both the spiritual practices within the Society and its pastoral and educational activities towards the flock.236 For the purposes of this book, it is tempting to relate its enthusiastic embrace by Belgian Jesuits to their experience in the urbanised region on the fringes of Catholicism, where a dense network of colleges/missionary hubs quickly materialised across the country—an infrastructure of a kind the Augustinianist divines at Louvain did not dispose of.237 The historiography on the dragging conflict that ensued is prolific. The Congregationes de Auxiliis under the pontificates of Clement VIII and Paul V were an important vehicle of the historical turn in ecclesiastical sciences in the 17th and 18th centuries,238 as adherents of both positions sought to censure their opponents via the twists and tricks of innocuous historical writing before being ending up themselves on the Index. It is this tradition that has informed much of contemporary scholarship.239 The most cited examples are Jacobys Hyacinthus
234 Compare, for instance, Motta, Bellarmino, 526–28. Qualifications are in order. Seventeenth-century Augustinianism was less “traditional” than the image its champions sought to project about themselves; it had to address similar problems of human psychology and conversion (compare Baianism); and such a presentation of things reeks of a Whiggery that may well be rooted in a lack of knowledge about the relationship between Augustinianism and scientific activity; and in the equation between Augustinianism and “medieval thought.” Cf. ibidem, 609–11. 235 “Il Molinismo non è interpretabile senz’altro come una dottrina ottimistica . . . il Molinisimo non si fonda su di un’eccessiva fiducia nella natura umana che potrebbe perseguire la salvezza con le sue sole forze . . . ma sull’efficacia di una continua opera di correzione, apportata dagli insegnamenti morali e dalla pratica in genere.” Pastine, “Baronio e il Molinismo,” 240. 236 Cf. Quattrone, “Accounting for God,” 662. 237 The relationship among theology, religious practice, and infrastructure will be developed further in the next section. Cf. p. 390–407. See also the passage about “life-long learning” for parish priests and academics at Louvain, Antwerp, and SaintOmer, p. 291. It should be noted that no causal relationship is being suggested here, but rather a strong correspondence that was anything but exclusive, the Augustinian order being the second in line with a network of colleges that could match that of the Jesuits. 238 Observation of Prof. Dr Martin Stone (University of Louvain). 239 Cf. p. 217–19. The most poignant example of Ceyssens’ approach is his contrasting of Clement VIII as a theologian (which would have implied competence and a disinterested thirst for truth; cf. Serry, Historia Congregationum, 208), whose condem-
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Serry, a Dominican, and his dialectical twin, the Jesuit De Meyer. It is significant that the only thing Serry and De Meyer probably could have agreed on is the chronological table in the beginning of Serry’s work. In 1594, Clement VIII had the inquisitorial procedures against Molina in Spain and Portugal suspended and imposed silence on both parties until a decision had been reached in the Eternal City.240 The first congregation consisted of a committee of censors presided over by the cardinals Madruzzo and Arrigoni; it was installed in 1598 and produced a draft for a condemnation of the Concordia. Clement VIII complied with the requests of the Jesuits to organise friendly conferences presided over by the cardinals Madruzzo and Asculano (the cardinal-protector of the Dominicans) and by Bellarmino. After Madruzzo’s death in 1600, the congregations returned to the first format—i.e., censuring Molina’s book in the third congregation. The committee of the third congregation fielded the same censors, who, not surprisingly, confirmed the first committee’s findings after having heard the delegations of the two orders. A fourth examination resulted in a list of 20 theses of Molina’s to be condemned. In March 1602, Clement VIII started up a fifth procedure allowing the delegations of the two orders to field their arguments in the presence of the pontiff, a committee of cardinals, and the committee of censors. Three years later, however, getting the de auxiliis affair off the table still figured on the to-do list of the future pontiff in the conclaves of 1605.241 The debates were resumed in September 1605 under Paul V (sixth congregation), who ordered the preparation of a condemnation bull in 1606 by the committee of censors (seventh congregation). On 28 August 1607, the pope dissolved the congregation without condemning Molina and sent word via the Secretariate of State to his nuncios
nation bull against Molina would have been published if he had not died before it had been issued, with Paul V (a “pope-diplomat”), who suspended the Congregationes in 1607 for “political reasons” (cf. below). Ceyssens, “Le ‘Saint Augustin’ du xvii siècle,” 118. Ippolito Aldobrandini was not a divine, and it is Paul V who had a condemnation bull drafted, not Clement VIII. Another amusing example in Pastor, who bashes the Anti-Molinists as exponents of a debauched clergy blaming original sin for their moral decadence (cf. p. 377–78). Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste, 11, 514. 240 A lot of facts on the preludes to the Roman Congregationes in Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste, 11, 513 sqq. 241 Cf. Article xxix in the Summarium Capitulorum . . . jurata per cardinales in Conclavi post obitum Clementis PP Octavi mense martio 1605, denuoque iuranda per Pontificem eligendum, A.A.M., Hovius, 9.
Plate 5.2. Clement VIII: engraving from Serry’s Historia Congregationum Engraving introducing the reader to the third book of Augustinus Le Blanc
[Jacobus Hyacinthus Serry], Historiae Congregationum de Auxiliis (. . .). Louvain: Denique, 1700. Opening the grand, Council-like congregations of 1602–05, the pontiff, sided by Borghese and Arrigoni, kneels before the chair of Peter, the seat of the Holy Spirit; and is touched in return by the heavenly light of divine inspiration emitted by the Holy Spirit. The Aldobrandini Stemma is safely locked in with references to Clement VIII’s proclamation of Augustine as the ultimate authority on Grace. In the background: Acquaviva, his assistants, and the delegation of the Blackfriars. The prayer below fits neatly into the context (and into Serry’s views). [Catholic University of Louvain, Maurits Sabbe Library]
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that the representatives of both schools in their respective jurisdictions had to abstain from incriminating each other in public.242 In total, the congregations De Auxiliis had gathered in more than 200 preparatory, plenary, and intermediary sessions.243 Serry’s position can be summed up by the axiom of “Science explains Truth, Society explains Error.”244 In the beginning of the congregations, the Holy Spirit had illuminated the hearts and minds of the pontiff and the participants to the debates; report after report called, despite Jesuit “tergiversations,” for a condemnation of the Concordia; and the emergence of Truth was eventually stalled by international politics—read: the unremitting support of the Jesuits for the papacy during the Venetian Interdict (1606–07). Despite these unproductive biases, however, the Historiae Congregationum provides a helpful shortcut for the historian seeking to deploy the uncertainties of early modern divines-in-action. First, no consensus could be found over which ancient and modern authors had to be read, and about which hermeneutical principles had to be applied—amidst mutual recriminations that the adversaries had failed to read them at all.245 Second, Jesuits and Dominicans failed to agree on the definition of the problem; i.e., whether the merits of both models of divine Grace had to be assessed on an equal basis (the Jesuits, understandably), or whether it was just Molina’s book that needed verification (and condemnation), the Dominican position that, at least under Clement VIII, gained the upper hand. Mutual recriminations of “tergiversations,” “precipitation,” and “subreptition” must be situated in this context. That they surface in legal as well as theological disputes, should not surprise in a period in which the methods of truth-finding became increasingly 242 “Ha ordinato anco sua Beatitudine, ch’in tanto occorendo trattare di questa materia, non ardisca nessuno di censurare, e d’offendere in qualsivoglia modo l’altra parte, e che contrafacendo, si dia al delinquente il castigo debito, volendo, che tanto si osservi inviolabilmente.” Borghese to Bentivoglio, 15 September 1607, ASV, Segr. di Stato, Nunz. Diverse, 201, 430r. 243 Del Re, La Curia Romana, 362. 244 Compare Van Reybrouck, “Boule’s Error.” 245 Compare, in this respect, the decisio Rotalis in the Danielis affair. Molina was inspired by the Dominican Cano, who made an attempt to draw up such a hierarchy. See Stella, “Augustinisme et orthodoxie,” 170. “If all the Catholic theologians were in agreement in distinctly stating that the authority of the Fathers had to be preserved, they were much less unanimous and explicit when it came to specifying which authors ought to be considered Fathers and on what conditions their authority ought to hold sway.” Quantin, “The Fathers in xviith Century Roman Catholic Theology,” 952. On the 16th century, see Keen, “The Fathers in the Counter Reformation.”
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formalistic and merged with legal procedures.246 Third, none of the parties involved managed to definitively pin down their opponents in clear-cut roles. Neither the champions of Augustine nor the defendants of Molina balked at incriminating one another as heirs to historical heresies, respectively Pelagianism and Calvinism. The involvement of ecclesiastical history as a theological locus of authority seems to have added only to the confusion, however. Fourth, not only the definition of the problem but also the loci of decision-making were a bone of contention. For the Jesuits, who were continuously fixed in the role of defendants, the committee of censors was just another anti-Molinist club covered with favours by influential curialists, a view that confirmed itself, since its composition was never changed (except for the addition of three head-censors in 1602), and since it continued to churn out vota condemning Molina.247 The secretary of the Congregationes, for that matter, was Peña, whose loathing of the order reportedly knew few bounds.248 Due to the growing identification of the Concordia with the Society of Jesus, Bellarmino as well as Acquaviva chose to oppose a condemnation of Molina at all costs, despite their coolness about his teachings. Bellarmino, for his part, became a spokesman for Jesuit pleas to suspend the affair, or to submit it to an ecumenical council—which, due to its conciliarist connotations in papal Rome, in all likelihood amounted to the same thing.249 Momentous episodes include: the row, in 1602, over Molinist Jesuits in Alcalà defending the thesis, that it was not an article of faith that Clement VIII was the vicar of Christ;250 and Bellarmino’s banish-
246 Minnich, “The Changing Status of the Theologians.” This is reflected in the composition of the congregation from 1602 onwards as well: the board of consultors was, except for the bishops among them, almost exclusively composed by regular clerics, while the eventual decision through suffrage remained the prerogative of the cardinals. See the chronological tables in Serry, Historia Congregationum. 247 They were not the only ones who felt that they had been trapped: “de sorte quon ne scaijt encor comme ilz en sortiront, nij de semblable labijrint ou ilz se retreuvent “in materia predestinationis,” que plusieurs aultres ordres, et particulierement les dominicains disputent contre eux devant le Pape, et quelques iuges doctes personaiges, voulans les convaincre, et faijre declareer leur opinion faulse et erronne.” Richardot to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 29 June 1602, AGR, Audience, 438, 81v–82r. 248 Bellarmino’s interpretation of Peña’s intervention in Godman, The Saint as Censor, 180–81. 249 This strategy would be developed later in the 17th century by the so-called “Jansenists,” who equally claimed to be “misjudged” in Rome. 250 “Les Jesuites sont en grande peine pour avoir faict soustenir a Alcala en Espaigne a un de leurs escoliers ceste conclusion ‘Quod non sit fidei Papam Clementem Octavum esse vicarium Christi,’ laquelle bien quilz defendent per bonnes raisons [my
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ment from the curia by a wrathful pontiff in 1603.251 The appeal to a general council was linked to differences of opinion over the most opportune timing of decision-making. The Dominicans, supported by Brussels and Madrid, called for a quick resolution in Rome (which also favoured their definition of the problem and their recipes to solve it); the Jesuits and their allies suggested a reflection period. Meanwhile, the whole affair gradually became entangled with international diplomacy, with France, keen on keeping divisions within Spanish Catholicism on the agenda, throwing its lot with the Jesuits and Philip III siding with the Blackfriars. It is one of these episodes that has allowed 17thcentury pundits as well as contemporary historians to speculate on the influence of royal confessors (Jesuits in France; Blackfriars in Madrid and in Brussels) at court.252 Franco Motta has convincingly argued that, at the turn from the 16th to the 17th century, Augustinianism was mainstream in Roman palaces, generalates, and convents.253 The pope’s confessor, Cesare Baronio, was a virulent anti-Molinist who mobilised Church history for the sake of Saint Augustine.254 Clement VIII, for his part, had declared the Doctor Gratiae the ultimate authority in the debates.255 He as well as his successor, Paul V—who had participated to the congregations as a cardinal in between 1602 and 1605—had created a context in which Molina’s theses could be found heretical and in which the Apostolic See could raise its profile as the ultimate judge in doctrinal affairs. Nonetheless, amidst all the uncertainties listed above, the Roman congregations failed to gain credibility as the embodiment of universal Catholic doctrine. Each verdict on behalf of the committee of censors was followed by a Jesuit offensive launched from the periphery in the form of supplications sent by (mostly Jesuit) universities or from Christian princes. Not only was the Augustinian consensus continuously unravelled but also the dialectics between centre and periphery italicisation].” Richardot to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 29 June 1602, AGR, Audience, 438, 81v–82r. Two letters on this episode from Gabriel Vasquez, SJ, a professor at the Complutense and one of the defendants of the congruist stance, to Lessius, 2 February and 20 October 1603, UAL, Ghent (1927), 149-150. 251 Motta, Bellarmino, 604; Fattori, Clemente VIII e il Sacro Collegio, 226. 252 Cf. the contributions in Rurale, I religiosi a corte. The involvement of the Spanish nation in Rome is less unequivocal than suggested in Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 143–47; cf. Broggio, “Ordini religiosi,” 85 n. 77, and the already cited essay of Visceglia, “Vi è stata una Roma Spagnola?” 253 Motta, Bellarmino, 444–445. 254 Cf. Pastine, “Baronio e il Molinismo.” 255 Ceyssens, “le ‘Saint-Augustin’ du 17e siècle,” 118–20.
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generated by Jesuit mobilisation kept alive the fear of a crisis of infallibility. Under the pontificate of Paul V, after open discord within the committee of censors over a hard or a soft condemnation of Molina, even the cardinals leaning towards the Dominican position—Arrigoni, Bianchetti, and De Givry—called for further investigations in the last session of the Congregationes.256 In the face of all these uncertainties, the Venetian affair may well have provided an exit strategy, under the cover of papal patronage, rather than just another example of Realpolitik. The papal verdict of 1607, which imposed silence on both parties until Rome had reached its final verdict, was appropriately celebrated by Jesuits at Salamanca and Villagarcia with bullfights and fireworks.257 Time switched sides, as synergetic models of the working of divine Grace could now be realised in a cycle of credibility that encompassed pastoral practices, teaching, infrastructural investments and a boom of entries in the order across the globe. Molinism itself was ditched a few years later by Acquaviva, and Congruism became the soteriological brand within the Society. The basic notions of Congruism had been moulded by Bellarmino in the course of the Congregationes in order to find a compromise between Gratia Efficax and Free Will. Ironically, it was gravely indebted to a hero of the Louvain School from the first half of the 16th century, Ruardus Tapper.258 In Rome, it would become a strong brand among the prelates of the curia, many of whom had been educated at the Collegio Romano. Yet, Congruism would fail to appease the spirits in the ecclesiastical circuits of Catholic Europe, however, where Molinism remained a convenient battle-cry against the Society. In December 1611, the Roman Inquisition sought to get a grip on future debates by forbidding any publication on Grace and Free Will without its approval; a measure that was repeated (with equally poor results) in 1625 by Urban VIII.259 The previous paragraphs are not likely to do justice to the complex history of the Congregationes de Auxiliis Divinae Gratiae.260 Their concerns are situated elsewhere. In addition to the interest in deplo256
Motta, Bellarmino, 608. Pastor, Geschichte, 184. 258 Motta, Bellarmino, 539. Cf. Schrama, “Ruardus Tapper.” 259 An amusing case study in Repgen, “Das Hl. Offizium und der Fall Sylvius.” 260 A more comprehensive survey and a good analysis of the social context and the interests at stake in Broggio, “Ordini Religiosi.” Historians being forced to fall back on partisan literature or scholarship that is situated in an ecclesiastical and/or theological 257
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ying uncertainties and the (fallible) strategies to overcome them, they provide the historian with an opportunity to indulge in some suggestive name-dropping, a practice in which Lombard excelled in his correspondence with the academics at Louvain. As many of these names sound familiar, the episode may shed a (diffuse) light on academic policy and Lombard’s micro-political integration in the heart of Christendom. The easy part is the role of the university’s indefatigable agent/protector at the curia. Lombard was an Irishman, a doctor from a university that had gained renown as a centre of excellence in all matters pertaining to Justification, Grace, and Free Will, and a scholastic theologian261—qualities that were of use in curial circuits and to a pontiff who sought to transform the De Auxiliis affair into a touchstone of Roman magisterium in universal Christendom. After his arrival in the Autumn of 1598, the academic must have witnessed the events accompanying the first censorship procedure, and he probably worked himself into the picture during the next few years. He was mentioned by Serry as one of the two external theological advisors in a meeting organised by the pontiff in November 1601, after Peña, Borghese, and Asculano had failed to push through a doctrinal decision in favour of the Blackfriars based on the findings of the (fourth) congregation. The Irishman’s convocation may well have aimed at reassuring them, figuring as he does in Serry’s account as the author of a scathing treatise on the Concordia who tried to convince dazzled Jesuits to abandon their errors.262 His appointment as archbishop of Armagh may have served various purposes. The university’s agent was appointed the first of the three bishops presiding over the committee of censors constituted by learned members of the orders in the fifth congregation set up by Clement VIII in March 1602. This congregation had been conceived as a grand assembly presided over by the pope and assisted by an enlarged representation of the Sacred College, a format that had to silence calls for a general council. Lombard entered—maybe after having been recommended by Baronio, by Peña, or both—the congregations together
context, new research into the dozens of volumes shattered over Roman archives and libraries would be welcomed. 261 It is his scholastic background, and its recognition of natural law, that allowed him to normalise his more reconciliatory position towards the English crown after the Stuart succession. O’Connor, “A Justification of foreign Intervention.” 262 Serry, Historia Congregationum, 209–10.
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with “his” cardinal, Camillo Borghese. They joined Arrigoni (who had already been officially involved in 1598) and were later reinforced by a third sympathiser of the Thomists, Bianchetti—cardinals with whom Lombard had already gained some “familiarity” in another context. In his writings as well as in Serry’s multiple references to his activities as chief-censor during the tiresome debates, the divine figures as an indefatigable detractor of Molina as the congregation moved towards a condemnation of the Concordia and a definition along Augustinianist lines.263 After the change of pontificates of 1605, he even became a protagonist among those pressing for a swift resolution towards “his” pope, Paul V Borghese.264 The newly elected pontiff did indeed reopen the debates (albeit with a definition of the problem that was more favourable to the Jesuits); and on 9 March 1606, he ordered that a committee of censors presided over by Lombard (and meeting in Lombard’s house) had to draft a condemnation bull against Molina,265 thus honouring one of the two projects the theologian had been lobbying for: Lombard’s plea for a positive definition of the Church’s doctrine on Grace remained unanswered. Yet, Serry’s image of Lombard as a hard-line anti-Molinist weakens somewhat in this last episode. The archbishop had been isolated in the committee over his “soft” condemnation proposal; the draft presented to the pontiff eventually did not bear his signature, and internal divisions within the Sacred College fuelled by a new, and confusing, definition of a problem along Jesuit lines, did the rest. As late as 1614, in a letter addressed to Lerma, Lombard still championed a final decision on the matter under papal authority.266
263
References to his writings in these years, which are preserved in BAV, Barberini Latini, in O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 60, n. 76–78. 264 A survey and analysis of his anti-Molinist writings and of his famous supplication to Paul V (published in Serry, Historia Congregationum, appendix, ch. xii, c. 186), in which he drew on the history of Pelagianism on the British Isles and mobilised rejoicing heretics in the Low Countries for the cause of Saint Augustine, in O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 60–62. 265 Cf. Bulla authoritate Pauli V compilatae, qua quid in materia Auxiliorum divinae gratiae sub se et praedecessore suo Clemente VIII Romae controversa sentiendum respondendumque decernitur, with a list of 42 theses drawn from the Concordia for proscription, signed by all the consultors of the Congregationes De Auxiliis except for Lombard, UAL, Ghent (1958–1959), 105. 266 Lombard to Lerma, 28 January 1614, ed. Jennings, Wadding Papers, 1–2. Lombard could not suspect “that in the late 1640s Jansenism would justify divergence between a major portion of the Irish hierarchy, many of whom they [i.e., he and his generation] had handpicked, and the Holy See, in whose service they had spent their most fruitful years.” O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 47.
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The problem of the university’s involvement is more difficult to tackle, because only circumstantial evidence is available. However, it is difficult to believe that the silence on the Congregationes in official records reflects a lack of interest. Lessius had welcomed, in his correspondence with Bellarmino in the early 1590s, Molina’s Concordia as a terrible blow to the academics and their Censura.267 Many divines in the faculties of Theology and Arts must have seen things likewise. It was the Louvain Opera Omnia of Augustine that was physically positioned at the centre of the procedures presided over by Madruzzo, the cardinal to whom they had been dedicated. The academics’ interest in Catholic theology on Grace had not dwindled over the years: in the final stage of the Congregationes, Bellarmino and local fathers corresponded over a possible resurgence of “Baianism” in Belgium.268 In 1612, one year after the 1611 edict of the Holy Office, Bentivoglio had to put the Faculty of Arts on the carpet for holding public disputations over a question that was to be decided by the Apostolic See,269 amidst Jesuit fears of another highly visible row over Justification with the Louvain doctors.270 In 1613, the Faculty of Theology decided to “expurge” itself from rumours in Spain and Italy, that the Lovanienses had changed their mind “in materia de Auxiliis and gratia Christi,” and that they now defended Lessius’ position.271 The Censurae of the uni267 Lessius to Bellarmino, 12 July 1590, ed. Le Bachelet, Bellarmin avant son cardinalat, 271–74. 268 Bellarmino to Joannes Bourgeois, SJ, 25 December 1606, AGREG, Fondo Tromp, Epistolae S. Roberti Bellarmini ab initio cardinalatus eius, 3, 639. 269 Bentivoglio to the Arts faculty, 6 August 1612, Acta Facultatis Artium, 20 August 1612, RAL, OUL, 714, 520v. See also in this respect Borghese to Bentivoglio, 7 July 1612, ASV, Fondo Borghese, I, 914, 445r–v. 270 “Cogitaveramus Sanctitatem interpellare super hoc negotio, sed quoniam nihil machinantur Lovanienses contra decretum frustra hanc viam ingrederentur quare studebit RV pacifici quieteque cum illis agere, et benevolentia potius demereri meritisque, quam quamlibet alia via potius irritare.” Acquaviva to Lessius, 19 October 1613, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 3, 148r. Another example of Jesuit caution in Acquaviva to Lessius, 21 August 1610, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 1, II, 1169–70. See also, with respect to the tensions with the Douai theologians, Belgii Theologiae Professores Duaci 1613 Academici Duaci contra libros societatis, et sententia de Auxiliis, c.1613, ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia, 1408, Nr. 7, 204. 271 “Congregata facultate sub juramento in capitulo parvo Sancti Petri propositum fuit facultati, parsum esse rumorem in Hyspania, Italia et aliis partibus, et duabus epistolis gravissimorum virorum comprobatum, facultatem mutasse sententiam in materia de Auxiliis et gratia Christi, et nunc tenere contrarium eius, quod quondam tenuit in censura quam summo pontifici Romam missit, et positum fuit in deliberatione dominorum, quid in hac re, facto opus esset, presertim cum assereretur eam illam mutasse propter efficacissima arg.ta P. Laesii deliberavit facultas, esse faciendam actam, in qua se purgaret a falso rumore, et commissum est decano facultatis, ut actam
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versities of Douai and Louvain did play a role in the Congregationes de Auxiliis.272 Peña’s files in the Vatican Archives bear testimony to a vivid Roman interest in the Louvain and Douai controversies of the 1580s. They not only include several letters exchanged between Lombard and Guilielmus Estius of Douai but also letters from Filonardi, the assessor of the Holy Office, to Frangipani with the request to send all documents concerning the Controversia Lovaniensis in the archives of the nunciature to the Eternal City.273 And it is difficult to ignore the fact that Lombard’s departure coincided with the start of the Roman debates in 1598. All this suggests that Louvain was monitoring the Roman debates via Lombard, despite there being no evidence that the Irishman performed as the official representative of the university in the Congregationes alongside a Sorbonne delegation. It is relatively safe to assume, first, that the faculty dons were, above all, interested in keeping the Louvain Censura and the related claims to doctrinal authority unharmed, and, second, that Lombard did represent their interests by pushing for a quick and final solution. We can expect that it is these matters that Lombard discussed in his private correspondence with Jacobus Baius—who was profiled as the “Louvain Bañez” despite his friendship with the local Jesuits274—and Joannes Malderus, the regius professor of Thomism. In this scenario, the Louvain divines kept a low profile in Rome (and let the Dominicans do the dirty work), while being represented directly in the Congregationes by an agent they (i.e., Baius)
conciperet, et facultati approbandam presentaret.” Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 31 July 1613, RAL, OUL, 387, 38. References to “troubles in Spain” caused by the Louvainists in Acquaviva to Carolus Scribani, Provincial of Flandro-Belgica, 8 February 1614, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 3, 172r. Cf. p. 517–18. 272 Upholding the thesis that the Censura had not been condemned by the decision of Pope Paul V in 1607 was the central purpose of Serry’s Historiae Congregationum. 273 Estius to Lombard, 19 May, 28 May, 26 June 1602, and 12 June 1603, and Lombard to Estius, 26 July 1602, in Collectanea Peña, ASV, Arm. LIV, 49, 191r–196r. The letters were edited in Serry’s Historia Congregationum. “Ma le censure delle facoltà di Lovanio, l’altre d’i padri, et quelle della facoltà di Duai, appena un’anno non bastaria per . . . mandarsene copia, ch’io non conosco necessaria, dovend’essere tutt’in Roma.” Cf. the correspondence between Marcello Filonardi, advocatus fiscalis of the Holy Office, and Frangipani over the transmission of documents from the nunciature’s archives to Rome, 9 and 13 August 1603, ibidem, 8r and 10r–v. With respect to the Jesuits, see, for instance, Gabriel Vasquez (one of the Society’s experts in the Congregationes) to Lessius, 2 February 1603, UAL, Ghent (1927), 149. 274 “Jacobumque Baium, qui Bannes tamen defendebat [with respect to De Auxiliis].” Jansonius to Jacobus Gerardi, lecturer at the abbey of Averbode, 3 October 1593, ed. Ceyssens, “Jacques Jansonius,” 298.
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had sent “sine strepitu” to the curia under the cover of the Roman Question. The list of recipients of recommendation letters from the university suggests indeed that Lombard’s official mission could have been turned into a vehicle that facilitated access to members of the Sacred College involved in the De Auxiliis affair.275 In return, academics could speculate on a favourable outcome (and a belated vindication of the Censura Lovaniensis) becoming an additional argument for a confirmation of its privileges as an unremitting bastion of Roman orthodoxy. Adding Molina (and Lessius), alongside Luther, to its list of heresies condemned by the vigilant Louvain school before others had even taken notice must have appealed to Louvain Augustinianists and Thomists. Because such a configuration failed to materialise, all this remains highly uncertain. Yet, the analogy with Gravius’ mission at the beginning of the 1590s (who was officially mandated to advocate the university’s material interests but had to represent his Alma Mater as a theological expert too) is striking. It is telling that, just as much as in Gravius’ case, such matters were not discussed in official records. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, transporting theological stakes into the domain of public deliberation was apparently judged a dangerous enterprise, even though the vast majority of the philosophers and the college presidents in the academic senate were divines as well. Nor did a juridical or a medical formation exclude holding firm opinions in theological matters. The definition of theological programmes seems to have retreated within the safe boundaries of the college of Regents in Divinity. With respect to the de Auxiliis debate in 1598–1607, the silence in the sources can be, in this scenario, attributed to the loss of the minutes of the theological faculty until 1608. Nonetheless, it remains a moot point whether or not this sublime assembly did more than, say, affirm its allegiance to commonplaces of orthodoxy such as the Censura Lovaniensis, which, judging by the language used in the sources, had also become identifying stakes. For a start, there are several references to Lombard’s correspondence with individual members of the Sacra Facultas, but, to date, not a single letter to the “body theologic” in its entirety could be retrieved. It is plausible that the faculty’s policy in Rome was
275 There is a reference in Pastine, “Baronio e il Molinismo,” to the correspondence between Francesco Lamata and Baronio during the De Auxiliis affair, in which the first one would have presented himself as a Louvain Doctor. No evidence supporting this identification could be found, however.
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dictated by Lombard’s correspondents, who in turn kept it from public scrutiny even within the Sacra Facultas. This calls for qualification. In line with much of recent historiography, Franco Motta has described the University of Louvain as the embodiment of Belgian religious culture, a Catholicism that can be classified as “Northern,” “anti-scholastic,” “episcopalist,” and that distanced itself from “Latin piety.”276 While such a presentation of things is gravely indebted to the history of Jansenism and tends to downplay the heterogeneity of Belgian Catholicism, it is also an example of how the history of Jansenism has been deformed by the history of the University of Louvain.277 Yet, it seems that even the history of Louvain university has been deformed by the classical constellation between Jansenism and antiJansenism. First, little principled episcopalism heralding the ecclesiological stakes of future conflicts could be detected in the period under investigation, during which academics actively sought to engage the authority of the Holy See for their own purposes. Second, the next section will not only reveal that the so-called “Louvain School” was as much a heterogeneous lot as the so-called “Roman School” of the Society in Bellarmino’s days. It also was by no means anti-scholastic—although some faculty members definitely would have wanted it to be; and support for a “formalistic religious life—which Belgian Catholics embraced a little bit too eagerly to justify distinctions between a “Mediterranean” Catholicism and a northwestern one—came from unexpected quarters. It may be appropriate to raise the question of which Louvain school Lombard was representing at the Congregationes de Auxiliis. 5.2.4. The trial of Melchisedek. Bureaucrats of the faith in Rome and engineers of the sacred in Flanders, 1606–10 In March 1606, the outgoing nuncio of Flanders dispatched two books on the liturgy of the Eucharist to Rome. The matter concerns us here for several reasons. First, the authors of the works, a learned treatise and a collection of sermons in Latin, were (or had been) prominent university members, respectively Jacobus Jansonius and Henricus Cuyckius, bishop of Roermond since 1596.278 Second, in his accompanying letter 276
Motta, Bellarmino, 303. Cf. p. 20–21. 278 Jacobus Jansonius, Liturgica sive de sacrificiis materiati altaris libri quatuor, adiuncta in Coronidem (una cum rerum indice) Sacri Canonis quo Romana Ecclesia 277
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to Scipione Borghese, the new cardinal-nephew who had succeeded Aldobrandini in the Secretariat of State, Frangipani indicated that the books had been submitted to him by the rector of the Jesuit college in Brussels. In order not to provide the heretics with an opportunity to destroy the reputation of the university and the honour of pious men, the nuncio implored His Holiness to proceed with discretion.279 Third, not a single reference to these events and those that followed between 1606 and 1609 can be retrieved in public academic records.280 It is a well-known fact that early modern dogmatic quibblers turned to pastoral practices, as their dogmatic hobby-horses were increasingly barred from public debate. Doing so, they tried to capitalise on the increasingly orthopractic approach adopted by ecclesiastical authorities who were wary of disruptive intellectual debates.281 Lombard, for his part, an expert in the service of the Holy See, built up a reputation in problems related to the distribution of sacraments in Europe and overseas. In this quality, and as the Roman overseer of Catholic renewal in Ireland, he revealed himself to be a consistent advocate of an austere sacramental practice and of the parish as the centre of religious life.282 Some of his views may have been informed by his Belgian experiences. There, he had been a witness to recurrent conflicts that unfolded along the familiar divide between secular clerics and members of the religious orders, with the Jesuits figuring as the usual suspects of utitur expositione. Louvain: Joannes Masius, 1604; Henricus Cuyckius, De Novi Testamenti Sacrificio Sermones XX. Liège: Arnoldus de Coerswaremia, 1604. 279 “Alcune settimane sono, che nell’alligati due libri De Novi testamento sacrificio l’uno, et liturgica, sive de sacrificiis materiati altaris, l’altro, furono osservati alcuni luoghi degni di censura, quali venendomi a notitia per mezzo del padre rettore del Collegio de’ Gesuiti in questa villa, . . . acciochè Nostro Signore conoscendo veri l’errori possa con la sua singolar prudenza correggerli in modo, che il nome del Autore di vita veramente esemplare, di età grave di dottrina continoamente sana, humile, pio, stimato, et riverito da tutti, et per esso il nome poi dell’Università di Lovanio non venga l’un’ et l’altro nome in opprobrio loro tra l’eretici ch’altro non cercano ch’opprimerli in confermatione della religion lor falsa. Ma per l’altro libro De novi testamento Sacrificio, non m’è parso tentare cosa veruna, . . . lasciando a Nostro Signore il modo di emendarse l’errori, trovandosi veri quelli, ch’in detto libro notati sono.” Frangipani to Borghese, 11 March 1606, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 108, 54r–v. 280 The Acta Sacrae Facultatis Theologiae have been preserved from 1608 onwards, but they do not refer to the case, just like any reference in other public academic records is lacking. 281 Cf. p. 46–50. 282 Especially with respect to the sacrament of Penance, about which he wrote the Casus circa decretum Clementis Papae VIII de Sacramentali confessione et absolutione non facienda in absentia, which was printed (probably for polemical purposes) by the Jesuit Aegidius de Coninck in 1625. Cf. O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 63.
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the parish clergy. In the early 1590s, in the aftermath of the Louvain and Douai disputes over the synergetic soteriology of Leonardus Lessius, the Roman Generalate assembled piles of documents over the Controversia Duacensis between local Jesuits and the town’s pastors over the fathers’ right to hear confessions.283 Jesuit visitation reports and instructions from Acquaviva suggest that similar tensions existed at Louvain, where academic hierarchy, via the incorporation of the chapters of Saint Peter’s in the university, had merged with ecclesiastical hierarchy.284 In 1613, in a context that will be examined elsewhere, Douai Jesuits were willing to pick a fresh fight with the faculty over the praxeology of confession.285 And there were the endemic clashes in the Holland Mission between Jesuit missionaries and secular clerics, many of whom had been formed at the Louvain colleges.286 It should be noted that these conflicts seldom involved questions about sacramental acts themselves. In Catholic Europe, the Missale Romanum had gradually substituted most local rites in the aftermath of Trent as a touchstone of Catholic unity. As a consequence, historians familiar with the period may be tempted to respond to such skirmishes with a barely stifled yawn. They were, admittedly, plugged into the questions addressed during the De Auxiliis debates and did become something of an item in the struggle between Jansenists and anti-Jansenists in the later 17th century, with Arnauld’s book on communion figuring as the pastoral twin of Cornelius Jansenius’ Augustinus.287 Yet, they were more than just proxy wars in the heroic clashes over Justification, more than just a cover to deal once and for all with the “Jesuit anomaly.” Divines such as Jansonius, Cuyckius, and many others considered their craft an applied science, above all;
283 Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus, passim; cf. Le Bachelet, Prédestination, 62–93. Cf. the piles of documents in Controversia Lovaniensis et Duacensis, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., 72, I–II. 284 Cf. the visitation report for the Louvain college drafted in Oliverius Manareus, SJ, Notata in visitatione collegii Lovaniensis et commendata rectori, 1603, ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia, 1459, Nr. 36. 285 See p. 509–21. Cf. Ceyssens, “Griefs contre les Théologiens de Douai.” 286 A case study in Vanden Bosch, “Pionnen op een schaakbord?” On contemporary attempts of the Jesuits to compete with the secular priests via special faculties and privileges, see, for instance, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1608, 174 and 454; ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1610, 298 and 421; and Acquaviva to Arboreus, SJ (in Amsterdam) and to Flerontinus, SJ (in Brussels), 14 July 1607 and 25 October 1608, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 1, I, 1039 and 1, II, 1102r. 287 O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 20.
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the practical Science of Salvation from which the body of pastoral theologians at Louvain derived its corporate magisterium.288 Disputes over sacraments often had to address one crucial question: should the laity approach the Lord’s table (or the confessional) frequently, as the Jesuits were inclined to believe? Or was sacramental “consumerism” counterproductive, the position held by rigorists such as Lombard and many of his Louvain teachers? Such questions may seem a matter of belief (or taste) to our eyes, but they definitely were not in the 17th century, for several reasons. Interestingly, these reasons have a lot in common with the assumptions underpinning the conflict over the promotio in the 1590s. In an era obsessed with method, the answers to the question of whether sacraments were to be administered frequently or not were, first, firmly embedded in different technologies of salvation. It was spiritual exercises that made a man a Jesuit (rather than the other way around) and that literally ordered, via spiritual directors and superiors accounting in turn to Rome on the spiritual well-being of the colleges, the order founded by Ignatius of Loyola.289 As a consequence, the fathers were inclined to order the world beyond the walls of their colleges accordingly in their missionary strategies, and they tried to instill piety and devotion on the flock via a frequent sacramental practice.290 Devotion, in turn, had to introduce the faithful to a more personalised religious life via membership of religious confraternities (Jesuit sodalities, preferably) and help them to achieve Christian perfection under the individual guidance of (Jesuit) spiritual directors. This devotional cycle of piety was challenged by many secular clerics. The latter did not necessarily hold different opinions on spiritual methods and often encouraged the organisation of confraternities by religious orders or otherwise in their parishes. However, advocates of a more austere sacramental life considered confession and communion in the parish
288
Cf. p. 225. On “ordering the order” in the Society as a performative practice, read Quattrone, “Accounting for God.” 290 “In primis hoc est observandum frequentem confessionem et communionem quam verteris ecclesie consuetudini, sanctorumque patrum doctrine consentaneam esse constat, . . . Verbis sane explicari non potest, quantopere hee et simules commoditates excitent ac iuvent devotionem populi.” De cose de Lovanio. Consultatio oblata episcopo Leodiensi an permittendum sit patribus societatis utriusque sexus confessiones audire in ea parochia ubi rogatu pastorum audient confessiones, end of the 16th century, ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia, 1459, Nr. 33. 289
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church as its culmination at the end of a sacramental cycle of piety leading to Christian perfection. Seen from this perspective, the fathers were to be rebuked for putting a formalistic sacramental practice on the same level as other devotional practices.291 These differences could be overcome in practice, especially when the Civil War had reduced considerably the number of clerics available. As the economy of the South started to pick up, however, the Society’s building offensive provided the fathers with the infrastructure to withdraw from existing houses of worship—in line with instructions for the Louvain fathers in 1603—at the very moment the traditional infrastructure of the parishes started to recover.292 The Douai controversy of the 1590s was triggered by the completion of a Jesuit temple with long rows of confessionals allowing the fathers to administer sacraments separately from the secular clergy.293 For sacramental acts were just as much communal acts in which the corpus mysticum of an increasingly opaque socio-religious order was assembled as they were mediators of individual sanctification294—like the promotio, which ordered the ordo academicus in its entirety while establishing the educational achievement of individuals. In sacramental acts, the ecclesiastical hierarchy of secular clerics mystified by Louvain dons could become a unique passage point to personal and collective salvation. By performing them separately, the fathers threatened to reduce liturgical acts and the fulfillment of sacramental obligations in the parish church to venerable (yet social or historical) conventions.
291 The twin concept, devotional cycle versus sacramental cycle of salvation, has been borrowed from De Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, 200–01. From this perspective, the responsibility of the parish priest not to perform sacramental acts lightly carried a lot of weight. Compare the Brevis ac dilucida instructio minus exercitatorum pastorum et confessorum, quorum opera in hac sacerdotum raritate est necessaria Ecclesiae Belgicae, Brussels: Rutgerius Velpius, 1607, A.A.M., Hovius, 8, 7th bundle. 292 “14. Confessarii si petantur de cetero a pastoribus diebus dominicis et festis ordinariis, non eis concedantur, nisi in casu necessitatis, tum ne in templo nostro necessarii confessarii desint, tum ne ipsi pastores callide trahere studeant devotos ecclesiae nostrae ad suas ecclesias, hoc pretextu, quod ibi etiam habeant sacerdotes societatis, quod probabile est eos intendere.” Oliverius Manareus, SJ, Notata in visitatione collegii Lovaniensis et commendata rectori, 1603, ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia, 1459, Nr. 36. 293 The contrast between the (former Jesuit) church of Saint Michael’s at Louvain with the old parish church of Saint Quintin’s could not be greater, with regard not only to style but also to the number of confessionals. Observation of Prof. Dr Martin Stone (University of Louvain). 294 On the gradual evolution from the meaning of corpus mysticum as the historic body of Christ to the notion of the mystic body of the living community, read De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum. About confession, see De Certeau, La fable mystique, 117.
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This sociological approach to conflicts over sacraments seems to have gained ground throughout the 17th century. By turning them into jurisdictional conflicts between vested interest groups, the Roman Secretariat of State and its channels of intelligence in Brussels could remedy them via tested, jurisdictional agreements instead of addressing more slippery theological and pastoral conundrums.295 Following the pattern of Stollberg-Rilinger’s observations on the dynamic link between legalisation of rank conflicts and “ritual relativism,” it is not unthinkable that the litigants themselves resorted to similar definitions of the problem. Translating their stakes into social issues allowed them to stage their opponents as the representatives of particular interest, and to enroll successfully Roman authorities or other potential allies in their endemic fights without losing credibility as theological war mongerers. Discursive strategies of this type pop up in the letter of Father Wintershoven to the Brussels Secretary of State Charles Della Faille in 1618, in which clerics rallying against Jesuit missionary strategies were depicted as ennemies of Public Interest.296 Wintershoven’s letter sheds an interesting light on the multi-tiered interests that were at stake. First, it was written in the context of another conflict over the faculty’s monopoly on public teaching that, in the early 1620s, would rekindle the order’s aspirations to organise a philosophical school at Louvain (including separate promotions).297 Here, disputes over sacramental practice resurfaced in an explicitly academic context under the guise of analogy, with university men figuring, in analogy to recalcitrant parish rectors, as obstacles to Public Interest.298 In the 1590s, by contrast, sacramental practice (or the lack
295 “Le discordie fra padri Gesuiti et li sacerdoti deputati in Olanda alla cura dell’anime dall’arcivescovo Filippense [Sasbold Vosmeer] danno scandalo et causaranno gran commotione in quelle parti. . . . Si pensa qui al remedio et si dara l’ordine, che si giudicherà espediente, et quanto prima. Intanto essorti VS li sudetti a vivere in pace et a non dar’ occasione di nuove querele, perché con l’aiuto del Signore si provederà al male.” Secretariat of State to Bentivoglio, 11 April 1609, ed. Cornelissen, Romeinsche Bronnen, 128. 296 “Et que les religieux escoutent les confessions et font autres functions spiritueles est notoirement pour plus grande edificacion de leglise, et pour la consolation des fideles (. . .) quoy que les pasteurs particuliers sen sont formalisez, pour leur particulier prouffict et contentement” Joannes Baptista Wintershoven, SJ, to Charles Della Faille, 11 November 1618, Conseil d’Etat, Missives, Universités, AGR, Audience, 1948. 297 On the conflict between the Jesuits and the Sacra Facultas Theologiae in the wake of the 1617 Visitation, see p. 455–58. 298 “De tant mesmes que le privilege au faict des estudes a Louvain, qui a cause ceste opposition, est notoirement avantageuse pour luniversite, quoy que les docteurs sy opposent.” Wintershoven to Della Faille, 11 November 1618, Conseil d’Etat, Missives, Universités, AGR, Audience, 1948.
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thereof) in the pedagogies had figured prominently among Jesuit arguments to breach into the monopoly of the Arts faculty. By applying their own parameters of piety (frequent sacramental practice) to the student population, the fathers had promoted their project for academic reform into a general programme for religious reform (of a Jesuit bent).299 Second, in Wintershoven’s seemingly innocuous analogies, infrastructure bounces back as a mediator of the diverging trajectories towards individual and collective sanctification. According to him, the Louvain doctors preferred students to remain destitute of teaching (in the absence of auditories capable of absorbing their soaring numbers) over sending them to the town’s Jesuit college.300 This was to be compared to the attitude of rectors who preferred, in the absence of sufficient numbers of parish priests, to deny the faithful the consolation of sacraments rather than allow them to attend the services of the religious orders.301 A social cycle of credibility—the activities of the religious orders turned into a necessity even after the recovery of the parish infrastructure from civil war—and the pastoral cycle of Christian perfection— sacraments as tools to generate piety—were, consequently, inextricably entangled with a religious business cycle of sorts: by merely putting their sacramental models into practice in their own churches, Jesuits using their colleges as missionary hubs could trigger a demand on
299 “3. Pietatem in pedagogiis non coli quod non habeatur ubi diebus festis sacrum audiant vesperis intersunt, societatem debere per suos in pedagogiis rudimenta fidei explicare et pietatem instillare, omniumque scholarium discipulos ad sacramentorum frequentationem adducere, et per sodalitates suas in piis exercitiis fovere educareque, quorum omnium n[on] mentio in pedagogiis est.” Objectiones PP societatis contra facultatem artium Lovaniensem circa ann 1600, KBR, Manuscrits, 22187, 16–18; a copy in UAL, Ghent (1958-1959), 181. 300 “Et croij asseurement, que les docteurs de Louvain auront moings de difficulte de permectre que les estudians nentendent aucunes lectures que de trouver bon, que leur soit licite dentendre celles de la societe.” Wintershoven to Della Faille, 11 November 1618, Conseil d’Etat, Missives, Universités, AGR, Audience, 1948. On the argument of the auditories of the public schools being too small to welcome c.400 students in Divinity: “quia auditorium facultatis non capit mediam partem studiosorum ST, qui creduntur excedere numerum 400 et ex scamnorum numero ac magnitudine colligitur non posse 200 sedere, ut lectio scripto excipiant.” Summa controversiae inter societatem Jesu et Facultatem Theologicam Lovanii, 4 December 1618, Conseil d’Etat, Missives, Universités, AGR, Audience, 1948. 301 “En ayant qui aymeroyent mieulx que leurs subiects fussen plusieurs mois sans se confesser, ne pouvans satisfaire a si grand nombre, qu’ils ont.” Wintershoven to Della Faille, 11 November 1618, Conseil d’Etat, Missives, Universités, AGR, Audience, 1948.
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behalf of the population that would inevitably overburden the parish infrastructure, and that would make the fathers de facto indispensable for the Catholic counter-offensive in the Low Countries. New colleges were to be financed, among other ways, by the incorporation of ecclesiastical benefices to the detriment of the secular clergy, which in turn would trigger a sacramental demand that could only be met by the spectacular growth of the Society’s effectives in its Belgian province. In the absence of a clear-cut and visible societal order, parish shepherds wary of Jesuit activism could only try to prevent such a multiconnected cycle from putting itself into motion either by keeping the fathers from reaching out to their flock altogether or by preventing them from doing so separately, without the authorisation of local ecclesiastical hierarchy. This points up that as soon as a-priori distinctions between religion and economy are abandoned, sacred rites such as sacramental acts turn out to function simultaneously as managerial practices that reallocated resources. Ultimately, the line between spiritual exercises that guaranteed the accountability of the soul and the management practices of the Society of Jesus has proved to be particularly thin.302 It would therefore be an exaggeration to claim that in 1606 the fathers merely wanted to discredit two protagonists of the anti-Jesuit faction of the 1590s in order to reopen the negotiations over the Torrentius Foundation after the death of the (reputedly) anti-Jesuit Clement VIII. Both authors—the academic in his learned treatise, the bishop in his book of sermons—had done little to hide their rigorist sympathies. We have seen before that books, adding as they do to the systematisation (and the reification) of the models contained in them, easily became (quite literally) “books to burn” for the opponents of these models. The fathers should be forgiven for referring both both works simultaneously to the nuncio and for considering them part of a common strategy. Both works had been been published in 1604. The bishop had written a favourable censure at the end of the academic’s treatise in which he claimed to have encouraged the academic to “stabilise (sic!) his doctrine” by committing it to writing.303
302
Cfr. Quattrone, “Accounting for God.” “Ad quam conscribendam et stabiliendam doctrinam, ut ab initio susceptae huius episcopalis sarcinae eundem Autorem frequenter stimulavi, ita nunc Christianae Reipub. Eam solidis subnixam rationibus in lucem proferri [my italicisations].” Censura of Henricus Episcopus Ruraemondensis, Jansonius, Liturgica, no pagination. 303
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Even in their dedications, Jansonius and Cuyckius had coordinated their (Rome-oriented) strategies. The professor had dedicated his book to Frangipani in his own name, on behalf of the university, and of its Theological faculty.304 Appealing to the pontiff’s “solita prudenza,” the nuncio also accepted his obligations as a threefold mecenas of the Louvain school. The bishop, for his part, had appropriately dedicated his sermons to Frangipani’s superior Aldobrandini, whom he had met in Rome in 1600.305 As for the contents, the titles of the works left little doubt about their common programme, i.e., elaborating on the nature of the Eucharist as the sacrament of Sacrifice.306 At face value, theorising about Sacrifice from the cathedra and from the pulpit was a safe bet. The liturgy of Sacrifice represented one of the most elaborate parts of the Tridentine Mass. It was also a highly distinctive feature of Catholic liturgy. To make their monstrous and adulterous errors palpable, blasphemous heretics had deprived the flock from the sacerdotal authority of the shepherds by stripping the Mass of sacrificial liturgy.307 In order to do so, the iconoclasts had not flinched from destroying the altars, the stone objects in which Christ’s historic act of sacrifice was objectified. In one stroke, they had secularised the ecclesiastical benefices, mediators of an ecology in which sacerdotal authority could thrive, that had been erected together with the altars by the saints-missionaries of the Low Countries: Willibrord,
304 “Considerabam enim illa quae Sacrificii sunt, competere illi, qui in primo Sacerdotii gradu, penes nos, pius et religiosus, locum tenet summi sacerdotis . . . Illa quae Lovaniensium sunt, deberi illi, qui universitatem Lovaniensem et scholam ipsius Theologicam, favore et patrocinio Maecenas optimus semper iuvat et protegit; illa quae Jansonii sunt, illius esse, quem a primo suo in Lovanium ingressu, Jansonius in omnibus sibi promotorem et protectorem invenit.” Dedicatory letter to Frangipani in Jansonius, Liturgica, 4. 305 “Ma per l’altro libro De novi testamento Sacrificio, non m’è parso tentare cosa veruna, cosi per il nome dell’autore ch’è il vescovo di Ruremonda, come per l’altro del Signor Cardinal Aldobrandino, al quale è dedicato.” Frangipani to Borghese, 11 March 1606, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 108, 54r–v. “Enixeque rogandam, ut ad multa et praeclara sua in me merita, quibus me et isthic Romae apud Sedem Apostolicam in seculari et Iubilaeo anno existentem; et huc ad commissum mihi gregem reversum exornare dignata est, huius quoque scripti patrocinium ad cumulum adijciat.” Dedicatory letter to Aldobrandini in Cuyckius, De Novi Testamenti Sacrificio, 3r. 306 A liturgical introduction to the diffuse meaning of Sacrifice in history in Daley, “Robert Bellarmine.” 307 Cf. the first sermon Profligati in multis Belgii partibus novi testamenti sacrificii querimonia continens, simulque ostendens, Dei hostes habitos semper fuisse qui uni Deo debita sacrifica abolere conati sunt in Cuyckius, De Novi Testamenti Sacrificio, 4r–10v.
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Plechelmus, Otgerus.308 The references to ecclesiastical benefices (which Jesuits were not allowed to hold) and to the national “apostles” produced by the secular clergy can be interpreted as coded sneers at the Society and its missionary strategies in Belgium,309 amidst recurrent warnings to both authors not to take sacred communion lightly. Nonetheless, in all these respects, Cuyckius and Jansonius remained safely within the boundaries of Catholic orthodoxy. They had been granted the imprimatur by Guilielmus Fabricius, the university’s papal and archducal censor of books (Jansonius) and by Joannes De Chapeaville, the diocesan censor of Liège (Cuyckius). Yet, their writings failed to meet the more rigid tests of the experts who, on the special orders of the pope, gathered during the Summer of 1606 in the Roman Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio to expurge them from errors and ambiguities.310 It is not that the authors introduced liturgical novelties: as a matter of fact, Jansonius had included his older commentary on the canon of the Roman Mass in his book that never attracted the attention of the Roman Inquisition.311 It is the meaning and the resulting mechanics of liturgical acts that were examined in Jansonius’ treatise and in Cuyckius’ sermons. More specifically, the authors’ thesis that the liturgy of Sacrifice had to be distinguished from Consecration, and that its efficacy in specific circumstances was dependent on God’s acceptance of Man’s offer—read: on Grace—was deemed erroneous, false, hazardous, dangerous, impossible, and/or improbable by the experts of the Holy Office, including by Lombard, in the first sessions.312 Advocating a pervasive notion of Grace in dogmatic debates over Justification was of course perfectly acceptable and even mainstream at the turn of the 16th to the 17th century. Stripping the technology of salvation—the liturgical acts of the priest during Mass—of its efficacy was one step too far even for the Augustinianists in the Holy Office. 308 “Quis Missas, quis Altaria, quis beneficia in titulum erexit, nisi antiquae et Catholice fidei assertores?” Cf. the second Sermon in Cuyckius, De Novi Sacramenti Sacrificio, 14v. 309 Cf. Frijhoff, Embodied Belief, 130. 310 Borghese to Frangipani, 1 April 1606, ASV, Segr. Di Stato, Nunz. Diverse, 201, 310v. On the higher degree of formalisation and the rigidity of censorial method in Rome, read Neveu, “Censures romaines.” 311 I.e., the In Sacram Missae Canonem quo Romana utitur Ecclesia Expositio in Jansonius, Liturgica, 267–388. 312 E.g., “Reverendissimus archiepiscopus Ardmacanus (. . .) dixerunt propositionem esse falsam, temerariam et periculosam.” ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 622r–625r.
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The costs of opening a Pandora’s box of doubts about the predictability of supranatural physics in the Eucharist were simply too high in an era in which standardised sacramental practice was to become a touchstone of Catholicity, and in which the faithful were modelled into “practising Catholics” who could be managed statistically in diocesan visitation reports, status animarum, or in the litterae annuae of the Society of Jesus. In the 1596 memorandum against the Jesuits, university men (including Cuyckius and Jansonius) had normalised the ritual practices of Academia by deleting qualifications that did not fit in their “ritual management” theory. Thanks to these deletions, graduation rituals could function automatically as meaningful acts that made an unqualified academic order present and that, therefore, could not be duplicated by the Jesuits. Ten years later, it was up to Roman censors to delete the obstacles introduced by Cuyckius and Jansonius to the miracle of Christ’s presence; a miracle that was to be produced automatically by a correctly performed liturgy. During the next three years, the expurgation of the books proved to be an ordeal for censors and authors alike, engendering a flow of clarifications, and then censures of these clarifications (resulting, of course, in new clarifications) exchanged between Louvain, Roermond, and Rome.313 Frangipani’s successors, Decio Carafa and Guido Bentivoglio, managed to prod both authors into co-operation by suggesting that it was the pontiff ’s wish to preserve their honour.314 Cuyckius and Jansonius, for their part, tried to appropriate Roman authority for the future (expunged) editions of their work. Jansonius implored in his supplication to Paul V to accept a new dedication of the Liturgica as soon as it was purified from ambiguities,315 while Cuyckius warned the Supreme Pontiff against the machinations of his adversaries who had
313
Files with respect to this episode can only be retrieved in Rome: in the Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1606–1610, and ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19; as well as in the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV, Vat. Lat., 6539, 42r–49r). 314 “Et l’ho detto [to Jansonius], . . . et che la correttione venisse fatta da lui, desiderando Nostro Signore e la congregatione la conservatione et riputatione dell’honor suo.” Carafa to Arrigoni, 1 June 1606, ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 639r–v. 315 Supplication of Jansonius to Paul V, 19 September 1607, ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 649r–v; the file contains also accompanying letters of Jansonius to the cardinals (18 September 1607, ibidem, 651r–652r) and to the theologians (19 September 1607, ibidem, 650r) of the Holy Office.
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to be stopped by a timely intervention of the Apostolic See.316 In the course of 1608, however, their attempts to seize the occasion came to a halt when it became painfully clear that it was not ambiguities but the fundamentals of both books that were targeted by Roman censorship. Cuyckius could get away with deleting one out of 20 sermons and replacing it in the next edition of his work (which was never published).317 In July 1608, he bowed unconditionally to the judgement of the Holy See.318 Jansonius’ book, a systematic treatise on the subject, proved a more difficult problem to tackle. After endless negotiations between Rome and Louvain, the final verdict of the censors (that the book was of little use for Catholic religion and would only trigger scandals and confusion)319 was conveyed in diplomatic terms by the nuncio to the academic. The latter followed Cuyckius’ example and submitted himself to the oracle of the Holy Office,320 acknowledged that little was left of his book after expurgation, and agreed to withdraw the remaining copies.321
316 Cuyckius to Paul V, 30 June 1606, ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 628r–629r. 317 I.e., Sermon VIII: Sacrificium a sacramento distingui, ipsamque externi sacrificii rationem (quae praeter hostiae transmutationem, clara eius requirit oblationem) & in Cruce et Coena novissima et Missae sacrificio inveniri, in Cuyckius, De Novi Testamenti Sacrificio, 48v–58r. Cf. the Relazione of the congregation of experts, ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 622r–625r. A few other sentences were marked in other sermons; cf. the report of the session of 24 August 1607 (ibidem, 664r–v) which was sent, in line with the decision of Feria V Coram Sanctissimo of 18 October 1607 to the nuncio (ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1607, 420v). The new sermon De Missae Sacrificio Sermo 20 De vario altarium usu qui apud fideles ab exordio mundi fuit (ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 699r–704r) was examined by the cardinals Bellarmino, Asculano and De Givry (14 August 1608, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1608, 348v–349r). 318 Exemplum Epistolae D Episcopi Ruremondani ad Sanctissimum Dominum, 4 July 1608, ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 695v. 319 “Quibus etiam visum fuit magis expedire ut liber tanquam parum utilis ecclesie, et fidei suprimatur, et hoc per literas privatas significandum esse authori, ut per seipsum illum suprimere velit, iudicaverunt enim patres theologi dictum librum magis esse daturum occasionem giurgiorum et controversiarum, et scandali, quam edificationis.” Report of the unanimous decision of the theologians of the Holy Office, 27 June 1608, ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 689r. 320 “Mostrò di restar assai mortificato da quello ch’inteso da me, con tutto ciò connobbi in lui grande humiltà, e pronta dispositione d’obbedire a quello che cotesta sacra congregatione ha risoluto.” Bentivoglio to Arrigoni, 16 August 1608, ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 707r. 321 “Accennai di più d’haver trovata nell’istesso dottore la prontezza, che mi havea sempre mostrata d’obedir alla Sede Apostolica e che dalla forma della risposta che allora mi diede, m’era parso di poter creder fermamente, ch’egli fosse per lasciar’ ogni
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It is difficult to claim that Rome had been hard on the erring Lovanienses, despite (or because of) their compromising between obedience and stubbornness.322 Neither work can be retrieved on the Index of prohibited books. An alarmed letter from Lessius in 1609, that Jansonius’ book was still in circulation, did not lead to a reopening of the case.323 During the proceedings in Rome, both authors could count on the recommendations of Carafa and Bentivoglio in their letters to another “Louvain cardinal,” Arrigoni.324 The cardinals charged with the examination of the texts submitted to the Holy Office by Jansonius and Cuyckius were all reputed Augustinianists: Bellarmino, the university’s protector in the Sacred College, and the cardinals Asculano and De Givry, who had revealed themselves staunch adherents of the Augustino-Thomistic line in the Congregationes de Auxiliis.325 Bellarmino revealed himself in his correspondence with Jansonius to be “not a judge, but a patron,” calling into memory those distant Louvain days when the young academic, shivering with piety, had received the Body of Christ from his own hands.326 The indefatigable
pensiero di publicar la sua compositione.” Bentivoglio to Arrigoni, 22 October 1609, ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 719r. 322 Cuyckius’ substitute sermon is exemplary. The bishop had obviously sought to reintroduce the central argument via the back door: “agnosco errorem a Sancta Inquisitione merito notatum et reprehensum, extenuare volui opus operantis: et proinde pro eo quod scripsi, ex seipsis inefficacia, indigna et ingrata esse nostra sacrificia, scribere debuissem, ut a nobis offeruntur, talia esse. Nam ex opere operato certum est efficacia, digna et grata esse.” Cuyckius to Bentivoglio, 13 January 1609, ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 714r.; Cf. Congr. Feria V coram sanctissimo, 26 February 1609, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1609, 85. 323 “Liber D Jansonii in omnium versatur manibus, estque sparsus per totam patriam.” Extract from Lessius to Bellarmino, 11 June 1609, passed on to Filonardi, ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 716r. The nuncio was contacted in order to verify things (Congr. Feria V coram sanctissimo, 3 September 1609, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1609, 368). In Bentivoglio to Arrigoni, 22 October 1609 (ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 719r), the papal representative declared he would summon Jansonius to Brussels. 324 Arrigoni had been charged with overseeing the Suprema’s correspondence in the beginning of the pontificate of Paul V, Congr. 18 May 1605, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1605, 65v. 325 Motta, Bellarmino, 608. 326 Jansonius to Bellarmino, 9 June 1606; “vivit in memoria mea dulcis illa consuetudo, quam non brevi tempore Lovanii simul habuimus. Recordor pia colloquia, honestas deambulationes, et quam saepe, quantaque cum devotione mihi sacrificanti ministrabas, ac sacratissimum Christi corpus de manu mea suscipiebas.” Bellarmino to Jansonius, 10 August 1606, AGREG, Fondo Tromp, Epistolae S. Roberti Bellarmini ab initio cardinalatus eius, 3, resp. 578 and 586.
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Peter Lombard was granted ample occasion to intervene, as a participant to the 1606 plenary sessions as well as individually.327 Thanks to Roman discretion, the reputation of the authors remained untarnished. Jansonius’ return to the public stage of academic decision-making in these years was by no means hampered by the affair of the Liturgica, nor were his good contacts with the nunciature jeopardised. In 1611, the university don, a Dutchman himself, figured among the experts appointed by the archbishop of Mechlin to settle another conflict over pastoral strategies between the Jesuits and the apostolic vicar of the Holland Mission.328 And in 1618, the old fox felt confident enough to publish a new book in the vernacular on Sacrifice, in which he took up the role of a lawyer in an imaginary lawsuit launched by a Calvinist consistory against Melchisedek, the archetype of the sacrificial priesthood of the Old Testament.329 In contrast with the deafening silence in academic records, the Roman files contain some other surprises that qualify the comfortable constellations set forth in the introduction to this section. The Jesuits kept a remarkably low profile in the affair. As a matter of fact, Jansonius could report to Bellarmino that the Louvain teachers of the Society, Lessius and Costerus, had declared that they would not share his views but neither would they consider them eligible for hard censorship.330 Lessius, for his part, even performed as a broker between the Roman cardinal and the embattled academic.331 In his 1606 letter 327 Cf., for instance, the Congr. Feria IV of 12 March 1608, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1608, 109r–v. 328 Bentivoglio to Borghese, 15 October–5 November 1611, BAV, Barberini Latini, 6805, 170r and 207r–208r. 329 Jacobus Jansonius, ’T Proces van Melchisedech. By Aenspraecke, Antwoorde, Replijcke ende Duplijcke. Gheinstrueert, ghefurniseert ende instaet ghestelt, by Heer ende Meester Jacobus Jansonius, Deken van S. Peeters Kercke te Loven, ende Professeur der H. Schrifturen inde Universiteijt aldaer. Louvain: Gerardus Rivius, 1618. The book had previously been examined by Joannes de Gouda of the Society of Jesus on the commission of the Flemish nunciature and had received the imprimatur of the apostolic nuncio Ascanio Gesualdo (1615–17). Interestingly, the archducal privilege for the edition of this popularisation had been granted in 1604, which suggests that it had originally been designed as a third component of the offensive in favour of Sacrifice concocted by Jansonius and Cuyckius. 330 Jansonius to Bellarmino, 9 June 1606, AGREG, Fondo Tromp, Epistolae S. Roberti Bellarmini ab initio cardinalatus eius, 3, 578. 331 “P Leonardus de societate Iesu, praelegit mihi litteras dignationis vestrae 19 maii preteriti istius scriptas, in quibus se charitas v. mei adhuc, inter tot negotia et post tanti temporis intervallum, memorem et benevolum esse declarat.” Jansonius to Bellarmino, 9 June 1606, AGREG, Fondo Tromp, Epistolae S. Roberti Bellarmini ab initio
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to Paul V, Cuyckius had not referred to the Society of Jesus as the origin of his troubles. The files of the Holy Office and the dispatches of the nunciature reveal that it had not been the Louvain Jesuits332 but the Faculty of Theology that had first confronted Jansonius with his errors,333 despite the protestations of both authors (and of Fabricius) that they represented the traditional teaching of the Louvain school.334 As a matter of fact, Roman censors had used a censure of the Louvain Faculty of Divinity on Jansonius’ book as the basis for their own work.335 In this context, it is not surprising that Cuyckius sought to personalise his adversaries: his target was nobody else than Jacobus Baius, the university’s archducal professor of Catechism and, as Cuyck did not fail to point out in his letter of supplication to Paul V, the nephew of the notorious Michael Baius, whose teachings had been condemned at several occasions by the pontiff ’s predecessors.336
cardinalatus eius, 3, 578. Bellarmino did not hesitate to stage Lessius as Jansonius’ friend: “Eam vero pietatem postea mirum in modum auctam, teque ex religiosissimo iuvene in senem perfectissimum evasisse, quod ex litteris P Leonardi Lessii cognovi, mirifice gaudeo.” Bellarmino to Jansonius, 10 August 1606, ibidem, 586. He also pleaded to keep Lessius’ name secret when sounding out Jansonius on the question of whether or not his books had, in fact, been withdrawn from circulation, “a cio non naschino inimicitie fra il dottor Jansonio, et li Gesuiti, massime che hora sono amici, et in particolare il P Leonardo è amico del dottor Jansonio.” Bellarmino to Filonardi, 4 September 1609, ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 717r. 332 As opposed to Ceyssens, “Jansonius (Jacques),” col. 472. 333 “Et esaminandose dalla facoltà l’articoli da me communicatigli con tutta l’opra insieme vi trovò altri luoghi degni d’emenda, che per purgarse della suspicion non concoress’anch essa in tali errori, . . . mando adesso col libro a Vestra Signorìa Illustrissima l’articoli communicati da me all’autore con la sua risposta nel foglio alligato notato A., et l’articoli communicatigli dalla facultà Theologica con la lor risposta nell’altro foglio notato B.” Frangipani to Borghese, 11 March 1606, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 108, 54r–v. 334 “Illam constanter sustinui partem, quam Magister Noster Cornelius Reyneri Goudani D. Petri apud nos Decanus, et Universitatis Cancellarius, publice et privatim affirmabat et etiamnum affirmat se ab eximio viro Magistro Nostro Ruardo Tapper praeceptore ac praedecessore suo accepisse, et se in scholis nostris, quod ipsemet audivi, semper sustinuisse.” Jansonius, Liturgica, 2. “Qui ut plerisque scholasticis doctoribus (inter quos Scotus, Gabriel, Eckus, Clitovaeus, Ruardus, Sotus, Canus et alii qui a consecratione oblationem actione distinguunt) satis est consentaneus.” Censura of Fabricius, ibidem, no pagination. 335 Cf. Articuli ex liturgica D Jansonii excerpti, et de humanitate illustrissimi et reverendissimi domini Octavii Frangipani Archiepiscopi et Nuncii Apostolici, eidem transmissi, ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 614r–615r. 336 “Haec ipsa vellicari nunc audio ab uno Lovaniensi, doctore Theologo Jacobo Baijo, illius Michaelis Baij ex fratri nepote, cuius olim a Pio Quinto pontifice plures damnati sunt articuli, et inter alios ille, quod missae sacrificium non alia ratione sacri-
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Cuyckius had good reasons to single out Baius. In between the publication of the books in 1604 and their notification to the Inquisition in 1606, Baius had published an elaborate treatise on the Eucharist himself.337 The book, which had received Fabricius’ imprimatur, was dedicated not to a Roman heavyweight but to one of the great heroes among the Catholic bishops of the day: the future saint François de Sales, the exiled bishop of Geneva who, by re-Catholicising the northwestern part of the Duchy of Savoye, sought to encircle the capital of Calvinism; he was also a correspondent of Baius in his capacity as provisor of the twin colleges of Savoye at Annécy and Louvain.338 In his dedicatory letter, Baius did not spend many words instilling a mystical piety on the sacerdotal order in the wake of scholastic debates on Sacrifice; instead, he wished to provide his alumni of the Collegium Sabaudiae with a concise compilation of Catholic doctrine on “the Sacrament and the Sacrifice (sic!) of the Eucharist” that would help them to combat the heretics upon their return to their fatherland339—a programme that could address similar concerns in the Low Countries. In 1593, Jansonius had taken a dim view of Baius’ reputation as the Louvain Bañez without properly understanding the latter’s doctrine on Justification;340 in 1605, Baius returned the favour and adopted the opposite position on Sacrifice as an act, since the New Covenant efficax in se, which culminated in the consecration.341 In addition, Jansonius’ competitor by no means embraced the rigor that traditionally is ascribed to the Louvain School: instead, he
ficium esset, quam generali illa, qua omne opus bonum, quod fit ut Sanctae Societati Deo inhaereatur: etsi hunc articulum, suum esse aut a se doctum fuisse, idem ille Michael Baius constantissime semper negaverit.” Cuyckius to Paul V, 30 June 1606, ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 628r–629r. 337 Jacobus Baius, De venerabili Eucharistiae sacramento et sacrificio libri III. Louvain: Gerardus Rivius, 1605. Second and 3rd editions appeared, respectively, in 1612 and 1625, ten years after Baius’ death in October 1614. 338 Several letters exchanged between Baius and De Sales, who declared himself “fort heureux, de vivre en vostre amitié” (Sales to Baius, 16 April 1610), in “Lettres inédites.” They concern the management of resources in the Collegium Sabaudie and the recommendation of students. 339 Baius, De venerabili Eucharistiae sacramento, i–iii (no pagination). 340 “Assero tibi bona fide Lensaeum hanc rationem ita probasse, ut dixerit aliam qua uti solemus sustineri non posse, et Bannes [= the dominican Bañez] qui eam tradit, Jacobumque Baium, qui Bannes tamen defendebat, rem non intelligere.” Jansonius to Gerardi, 3 October 1593, ed. Ceyssens, “Jacques Jansonius,” 298. 341 Cf. Lib. III, cap. xv, In qua missae parte Sacrificium Eucharistiae consistat, Baius, De Venerabili Eucharistiae Sacramento.
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strongly advocated frequent sacramental practice for clerics and laymen alike.342 One can only speculate on Baius’ merits and interests in the affair, but they must have been many. His intellectual and religious stakes are obvious, but they seem to have been interwoven with other concerns, involving a projected Jesuit college, his own plans to entrench the Baius dynasty in the university, and Jansonius’ return to the public stage of academic decision-making, which had been Baius’ playground in the previous decade. It can therefore be expected that Baius was one of the pivotal figures in rallying a majority in the Strict College against Jansonius343 and that he had, consequently, influenced indirectly the Roman procedures. As a matter of fact, Lombard probably did not perform that much as a broker for Jansonius; instead, he may have acted on behalf of Baius and his partisans. References to an exchange of letters between Jansonius (or Cuyckius) and the archbishop of Armagh in these years are inexistent. By contrast, a letter of 26 October 1606, signed by Baius and the university’s two archducal professors of Thomism, Malderus and Clarius, implored the Irishman to inform them about the verdict of the Apostolic See on Jansonius’ book (and on their own censura of it) “in order to help them preserving the honour and the orthodoxy of the Louvain School.”344 In the middle of 1607, the pope would eventually grant permission to Lombard to brief the faculty, after the latter had received another letter complaining that Jansonius had bluntly refused to keep his colleagues informed.345 All this feeds the conclusion that Lombard once more 342 “Cum enim in hoc mysterio praecipium lateat Christianae religionis fomentum, si ex tepore aut fastidio rarius hoc Sacramentum frequentetur, languescit pietas, facileque inutilem perdit fidem, qui non exercet charitatem.” Cf. Lib. II, cap. xix De Frequenti Communione, Baius, De Venerabili Eucharistiae Sacramento; see also cap. xxii of Lib. II, Frequens communio non solis ecclesiasticis, sed et laicis suadenda. 343 It can be expected that Guilielmus Fabricius adopted a neutral position, having given the Imprimatur to the two books published in 1604 and 1605. Jacobus A Castro had written an epigram to Jansonius’ Liturgica. 344 The letter contains also many references relevant to the debate itself, as well as to the previous correspondence on the subject between of the Theology faculty and Lombard. Cf. Baius, Malderus, and Clarius to Lombard, 27 October 1606, ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 633r–v. 345 Feria V Coram Sanctissimo, 16 August 1607, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1607, 377r. “Qua de caussa cum id maxime scholam nostram ac professionem concernat, nec tamen a domino Janssonio obtinere possimus obnixe illustrissimam tuam Gratiam rogamus ut vel per te, vel sedis apostolice aut Sancti Officii consensu secreto etiam nobis et sine strepitu insinuetur primo tempore apostolicum in hoc argumento judicium.” The Faculty of Theology to Lombard, 20 July 1607, ACDF, SO, Censura Librorum, 1570–1606, Nr. 19, 641r.
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acted as a Baius man in the first place, although this does not entail that he necessarily shared his views in every respect. Last but not least, the affair brings deep divisions within the Louvain Faculty of Theology to the forefront; divisions that call for a thorough revision of the received wisdom that Louvain propagated a Catholicism of a Baianist and anti-Scholastic bent. In the 1590s, only a generalised stabilitas doctrinae, underpinned by common graduation ceremonies, could become a common ground for opposition against the Jesuits; in the 1630s, the Augustinus of Cornelius Jansenius can be considered an attack on the Thomistic faction within the university as much as it had to settle accounts with synergetic models of Justification cultivated by the fathers of the Society. In between these two episodes, the affair of the Liturgica suggests that conflicts between Thomists and Positivists within the Louvain school cannot be explained away as exceptions to a general rule. In 1611, a request of the Blackfriar De Torres to celebrate a Mass in honour of Saint Thomas in the name of the faculty (rather than under the auspices of the Dominican Order) was not discussed, on the grounds that such novelties had to be paired by similar requests in favour of Saint Augustine.346 Both in writings and in practice, attempts to instil meaning on the Eucharist could be highly controversial even within the academic microcosm at Louvain. Yet, despite all these contradictions, academics could nonetheless unite in the public celebration of the Eucharist in their college chapels or in the parish churches of the university town.
5.3. “Stilus Curiae, Je dis la longueur qu’il faut.” The machinery of abuse, 1600–05 and 1607–12347 Let us return to an issue on which, for a change, academics could find consensus: the Roman Question. In light of the previous paragraphs, it seems relatively safe to conclude that university men themselves were largely responsible for a confirmation of their privileges failing to occur: because other priorities arised in the networks controlling
346
Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 4 March 1611, RAL, OUL, 387, 19. “mais croijes sil vous plaict, que ce nest pas ma faulte, sed stilus curiae, ie dis la longueur quil fault que ie confesse, m’ennuije et me desplaict assez.” Richardot Jr. to Richardot, President of the Privy Council, Négociations de Rome, 22 September 1601, AGR, Audience, 438, 409r. Cf. p. 333. 347
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the communication lines with the Eternal City, both Clement VIII and Paul V could perform as benign pontiffs by satisfying new demands pouring in from Louvain, while yielding to the pressure of much stronger curialist networks not to honour academic claims to benefices situated in the Principality of Liège. This explanation needs to be verified along lines similar to those developed with respect to the other matters of concern that linked the colleges in the Brabant university town with sumptuous Roman palaces between 1598 and 1612, that is, by investigating real politics rather than sticking to Realpolitik. For, despite Lombard’s failure in the Roman Question and the resulting perception in the pedagogies, he had not been idle in defending the interests of the Arts faculty at the curia. Judging by his correspondence, he did more than work through the Who is Who of Baroque Rome. In fact, Lombard’s first audiences with Clement VIII and Paul V had been not that pleasant. During his first meeting with Papa Aldobrandini, in the beginning of 1599, the Irishman had been amiably scolded for the abuses the pope recalled, as a former auditor of the Rota, had been committed by benefice-hunting Lovanienses.348 In this context, the installation of a committee charged with the examination of the privileges was above all therapeutic. Just as much as in the conflict with the Antwerp chapter, abuse seems to have followed the privileged as a shadow: in 1605, when Camillo Borghese was elevated to Peter’s chair, the former “Louvain cardinal” had benignly accepted both the letter of supplication of the Arts faculty and the printed collection of privileges dedicated to him. Yet, Papa Borghese went pontifical as well, confronting his Irish client with the abuses of Louvain nominees he had witnessed himself as a former uditore del papa— abuses the academics, warned by Lombard, sought to neutralise by installing a committee that had to see to the drafting of new, purifying statutes.349 “Abuses” being committed by the privileged, but articulated 348 I.e., until his promotion to the cardinalate by Pope Sixtus V in 1586. Borromeo, “Clemente VIII,” 260; Weber, Genealogien zur Papstgeschichte, 1, 31. Auditors of the Rota resigned their offices when promoted to the cardinlate. “Dum orarem Sua Sanctitas sermonem aliquando interposuit, . . . et inter alia pertulit quodam de abusibus quos ut inquit etiam ipse dum auditor esset Rote commissos animadvertit per nostros et nominatim ut dicebat per conservatores privilegiorum.” Lombard to the university, 7 April 1599, Acta Universitatis, 8 May 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 313v–314r. 349 “Qui et hoc michi dum causam commendarem expresse dixit opportere istich cavere ne per nominatos committantur eiusmodi abusus, qui posthac possint dare occasionem novarum turbarum.” Lombard to the university, 17 September 1605, RAL, OUL, 62, 255r–256r. The 1605 committee was composed by Joannes Clarius, Jacobus
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by their opponents, it is appropriate to chart the opposition against the Louvain claims until 1612. Already in 1599, Lombard had been warned by Camillo Borghese and by Bianchetti, a privileged informant because of his position in the Signatura Gratiae, about a Liège counter-attack.350 Interestingly, the most vocal opposition Lombard met in Rome in his first year was not situated in curial circuits, in sharp contrast to the situation in the decade between 1588 and 1598. Faced with Lovanienses covered with papal favours, the adversaries of a confirmation of the privileges transformed themselves for the first time into a full-blown party that identified itself as the representative of Public Interest and capitalised on the diplomatical channels of Ernest of Bavaria and his representative in Rome, Carondelet.351 The letter of supplication transmitted to Ernest, in the name of the Liège mayors, not surprisingly interpreted “Public Interest” differently than the models fielded, via Frangipani, by the Liège churches in the visitation report of 1600.352 In it, patrician families portrayed, via their mayors, a national Church (rather than as an aristocratic one) under threat and enrolled their prince as the natural protector of the land’s privileges against claims of “foreign” academics.353 Cardinal Bianchetti, who had briefed Lombard on the content of the letter of supplication so that the Irishman could intimidate Carondelet three months later with letters of recommendation
Baius, Stephanus Weijms, Gerardus Corselius and Thomas Fienus. The receptor and the dean of the Arts faculty were delegated as well, with the explicit order to inform the congregation of the Veneranda Facultas on the proceedings. Cf. Acta Universitatis, 18 September 1605, ibidem, 257r and Acta Facultatis Artium, 30 September 1605, RAL, OUL, 714, 283–87. The drafting of new statutes is documented in the faculty minutes of the end of 1605 and the beginning of 1606. 350 Lombard to the university, 20 November 1599, Acta Universitatis, 30 December 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 198. 351 Carondelet was the chancellor of the Principality and acted simultaneously as the agent of the chapter of Saint-Lambert, which represented the clergy in the Principality’s States Assembly. 352 Cf. p. 255–57. 353 “Tertio concludunt supplicando suo principi ut is agat ne privilegium nostrum nominandi extendatur ad patriam Leodiensem aut saltem non aliter quam ut soli nativi eiusdem patrie possint ibi nominari quandoquidem ii non permittantur nominari in ditionibus nostri principis.” Paraphrase of the letter of supplication from the Liège “consules” Georgius Goswinus and Bernardus a Tollet to Ernest of Bavaria, in Lombard to the university, 20 November 1599, Acta Universitatis, 30 December 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 367r–368v.
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from the Archdukes, did not seem to lose much sleep over “discriminated” Leodienses.354 Yet, this may have been just another example of Roman double speech. The dispatches of the nunciature of Cologne in fact reveal that conflict between Rome and the Liège Church occurred recurrently between 1598 and 1612. At the end of 1602, for instance, Ernest of Bavaria informed Clement VIII about complaints aired by the States of Liège that apostolic executions deprived too many clerics of their benefices without verification of the rights of papal providees, resulting in the proverbial tide of lawsuits. The political elites of the Principality having called for the introduction of a placet on all papal administrative acts, the prince-bishop urged the Holy See to remedy the situation.355 Threats to imitate the pernicious administrative and legal practices of the Habsburg Netherlands were aired again in 1611 by the States of Liège and coincided with renewed attempts of the Arts faculty to find, via Lombard, a solution to the Roman Question.356 In this context, proposals of the Privy Council of Liège in 1604 to appoint the prince-bishop of Liège as general apostolic executor of all acts issued by the Uditore del papa against abusive Lovanienses were part of a grand strategy, or were considered as such by Roman policy-makers.357 Such a move may have addressed the problems related to the Roman
354 “Sed ita istud retulit [in postremo colloquio Cardinalis Blanchettus] ut facile animadverterem non magni apud eum fuisse ponderis.” Lombard to the university, 28 August 1599, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. 355 Respectively 4 February and 16 November 1602, regests in Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 164 and 171. 356 Daris, Histoire du diocèse et de la principauté de Liège pendant le XVIIe siècle, 518. Compare the subtle warning “habent enim exemplum a vicinis ubi non licet ulla mandata apostolica exequi absque senatus laici permissu” in Status Dioecesis Leodiensis, Congr. 6 February 1591, ASV, Congr. Concilio, Relat. Dioec., 445, 2nd bundle. 357 I.e., in the midst of the Strecheus affair (cf. p. 342–43), which had important diplomatical dimensions. “Et sententias que passim per Marcellum Lantes CA Auditorem contra Lovanienses pronunciantur exequi pontifex curaret per ipsummet Ernestum principem Leodiensem quod hactenus prelati Leodienses non fuerunt ausi exequi metu Cancellariae Brabantie id intrepide ac validiori manu princeps ipse Leodiensis perficeret antedictam Cancellariam non veriturus . . . sed quia videbant talem derogationem [to the privileges and constitutions of Brabant] non ferendam saltem a concilio Brabantie vel Aula si talis derogatio indeterminata esset constituerunt curae et in hoc singulis talibus commissionibus adhiberetur moderamen quo oculos vestros, si possent, velarent videlicet hoc non obstantibus ex quibus hac vice duntaxat derogamus illis alias in suo rubore permansuris.” Political programmes articulated in the Liège Privy Council summed up by an anonymous informant (“qui ei scripsit has noluit sciri nomen quia Leodii in dignitate constitutus et ex revelatione posset magnum preiudicium a Leodiensibus pati”) at Liège to Strecheus, no date, fragment
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Question (from a Liège point of view) and had to address the fears of Liège prelates for retaliation on behalf of the Council of Brabant. In practice, however, it was also tantamount to introducing the placet under the guise of apostolic authority, as the absentee prince-bishop was likely to delegate the examination of Roman provisions to his councillors at Liège. In this context, Roman circuits were probably reluctant to whip up nationalist sentiment by sanctioning the claims of a “foreign” university. Yet, we have seen in the previous chapters that the Lovanienses were particularly reluctant to accept Liège benefices that had become vacant in ordinary months, which raises new questions about the interests that were at stake and the interest groups that materialised around them. The insight that conflicts generate interest groups rather than the other way around may be helpful here. The biographies of Oranus and others suggest that the academics’ opponents did not belong to a distinct group but were entangled in different, often overlapping, networks that could take different forms and engage in shifting alliances.358 Power elites represented in the States or in the Privy Council of the Principality, while posing as the watchdogs of Public Interest against Roman intrusions, were also relatives, correspondents, patrons, or friends of Liège bureaucratic networks in Rome.359 Because of this hybridism, it may not have mattered that much, for clerics accessing alternatively or simultaneously local and Roman niches in the clerical job market, whether or not academic nominees only accepted benefices in apostolic months. Foreign graduates roaming the local beneficial stock could bundle the stakes of shifting collectives bickering over a wide range of other issues, including benefices. This configuration probably was tactical in most circumstances, with “universalists” capitalising on their routine clashes with “nationalists” in order to block academic competitors in Rome. The 1599 episode suggests that strategic alliances could materialise as well, when Liège clerics at
in Acta Facultatis Artium, 10 November 1604, RAL, OUL, 714, 226–27. Strecheus was awarded the substantial sum of 20 florins by the Arts faculty for this information. 358 Compare the configuration of an interest group out of a loose conglomeration of scholars in the conflict between academics and Jesuits in the 1590s, p. 299–301. 359 This suggests that the relationship between decision-makers in the Principality of Liège and in the Roman curia was not necessarily determined by an underlying “field of tension,” just like recent historiography has abandoned the traditional dichotomy between representative and princely institutions. Cf. Bulst, “Rulers, Representative Institutions, and their Members.”
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the curia felt temporarily outmanoeuvred by regimes of favour put in place by the academics.360 That is not all, however, for after 1599, a Liège national Church no longer played a role in Lombard’s correspondence. By then, bureaucratical circuits, personified in academic sources by the uditore del papa Marcello Lante, had quickly recovered the terrain they seem to have lost. Papal orders to suspend all summons of university members until a decision had been reached had only a temporary effect. In March 1600, two new papal writs reached the university town.361 By the end of that year, Lombard urged the academics, via Goudt, to write to Aldobrandini at once, as several more papal briefs were being implemented.362 And indeed in 1601 A Fraxinis, a young professor in the pedagogy of the Lily, got word from his procurator in Rome that his acceptation of a canonship in Tongeren was under threat despite the precautions taken by Lombard;363 Samuel Loyaerts, a regent of the Faculty of Divinity, was blocked by Guilielmus Du Fayn, an official of the Dataria Apostolica and a cleric of the diocese of Liège;364 almost simultaneously, Hornkens, Lombard’s faithful notary, had to be mobilised to keep an eye on the lawsuit launched by another member of the De Blocquerie family against Laurentius Zoenius, the regent of the Falcon pedagogy.365 In fact, 1603 turned out to be another
360 The death of Oranus may have played a role in this. Lombard to the university, 28 August 1599, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. As a matter of fact, the letter of supplication of the Liège patricians contained the same arguments as those aired by Liège curialists, including the irreverence of academic nominees for ordinary ànd apostolic jurisdiction. 361 I.e., against Guilielmus Fechius, a teacher in Philosophy, and Joannes Audax, a student in Divinity. Acta Facultatis Artium, 1 March 1600, RAL, OUL, 714, 73v–74r. 362 Lombard to Goudt, no date, attested in Acta Universitatis, 13 October 1600, RAL, OUL, 62, 12r. 363 Lombard had been warned by Vossius: “et nominatim sum monitus hoc ipso die a domino doctore Vossio disponendum esse ne occasione prebende cuiusdam Tongrensis que elapso mense apostolico septembri vacavit ex isto eodem capite nova oriatur querela.” Lombard to the university, 14 October 1600, Acta Universitatis, 2 November 1600, RAL, OUL, 62, 12r–14r. 364 Brief from Clement VIII, providing Guilielmus Du Fayn, cleric from the diocese of Liège, with a canonship in Maastricht, 12 August 1600, regest in Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 144; another provision of Du Fayn in 1606 is registered in ASV, Dataria Ap., Per Obitum, 15, 106v. 365 Lombard to the university, 30 June 1601, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. Zoenius may have corresponded directly with Lombard on the matter, as his case had never been discussed previously in academic minutes. On 1 July 1600, a papal brief had been issued in favour of Robertus De Blocquerie, cleric from Liège, for an altar in the parish church of Peer vacant by the death of Jacobus Peranus (an abbreviator
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annus horribilis, as a client of Jacobus Jansonius was summoned to Rome after having accepted a benefice in the Principality of Liège; a few months later, Carolus Hugo, a student in Divinity, was drawn into a drawn-out legal dispute over a canonship in Thorn by Edmond van Oeteren, a student of the Collegium Germanicum in Rome and a protégé of Ernest of Bavaria, who had managed to obtain a papal provision several months after Hugo’s acceptation.366 This trick was repeated by Petrus Verlaye, a rector of Liège in good books at the Dataria Apostolica thanks to the presence in Rome of his relatives.367 The bachelor in Divinity he had been competing with for an altar in Saint Lambert’s cathedral, Stephanus Strecheus, would become the object of the academics’ renewed efforts in the last two years of the pontificate of Clement VIII to have the Roman Question resolved once and for all. To Lombard’s despair, Liège procurators in Rome started to apply, from 1601 onwards, the same strategy to benefices in Cambrésis.368 of the Apostolic Chancery at least until 1595; cf. Dessart et al. Inventaire analytique, 86). Brief of Clement VIII to the officialis Dullaert and to the deacon of Saint-Denis at Liège, 1 July 1600, regest in ibidem, 141. De Blocquerie was well acquainted with Roman procedures, as he had already been provided with a benefice in Saint-Trond. Ibidem, 292. 366 Brief from Clement VIII to Joannes Dullaert, diocesan officialis, and Nicolas Dave, canon of Saint Lambert’s 17 May 1603, regest in Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 177. Van Oeteren studied at the Collegio Germanico between 1599 and 1603; cf. the list of Germaniker in Schmidt, Das Kollegium Germanikum, 281. A letter of recommendation from Ernest of Bavaria (18 April 1600) is registered in Pasture, “Inventaire du Fonds Borghese,” 176. In 1603 as well as in 1605, Hugo and his procurators in Rome had to push for additional litterae inhibitoriales against Van Oeteren in the academic senate; cf. Acta Universitatis, respectively 24 June 1603 and 16 June 1605, RAL, OUL, 62, 137v–138r and 245r. 367 More precisely in the books of the Dataria Apostolica: Verlaye had already obtained a canonship of the Small Table (one of the two smaller chapters alongside the cathedral chapter) in Saint Lambert’s a few months before. Brief from Clement VIII to the cantors of Saint-Jean-l’Evangeliste and Saint Paul’s at Liège, 31 August 1602, regest in Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 170. On Henricus Verlaye, cf. Thomas White to the abbot of Saint Gertrudis, 21 August 1604, Acta Facultatis Artium, 5 October 1604, 714, 220–222 (“dicam ergo ab ultimo congressu cum Verlaij, nebulunculus ille accepta a fratre suo pro quo beneficium . . . surreptitie obtinuit informationem”); and the mandate for a resignation in manibus pontificis by Arnold Soumagne, which mentions Henricus Verlaye alongside Sublindius and another cleric as residents in Rome, March 1601, regest in Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 154; papal provisions in his favour in ibidem, 124 and 133. His activities in Rome were not specified, however. Provisions in favour of Henricus and a third family member, Paulus Verlaye, resp. 1604 and 1608, in ASV, Dataria Ap., Per Obitum, 13 and 18, 105v and 154v. 368 “Sed et idem procurator (est autem Leodiensis) tentavit molestiam exhibere domino Francisco Paludano [the former regent of the Castle who had left the
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It is in this context that Bianchetti had warned Lombard, during the latter’s inquiries into the moves of the Antwerp procurators, about “abuses” surfacing in petitions to the Signatura. First, nominees seizing benefices that were coveted by papal providees became immediately earmarked, in the revamped clauses to papal briefs and in bureaucratic procedures in Rome, as intrusi abusing their privileges. Second, substance was added to the claim that nominations benefitted not the poor but the opulent, and that academics passed on their nominations to third parties, at a moment when Frangipani turned a cold shoulder on the academics; when (his coverage of ) the Viringi affair caused some frowning in Rome; and when Aldobrandini was replaced by his grumpy cousin Cinzio as the supervisor of the Secretariat of State. In this configuration, the dispute over a Maastricht canonship between Samuel Loyaerts, a don of the Theology Faculty who already held the rectorship of Saint-Michael’s at Louvain, and Du Fayn must have been considered a gift from heaven by Roman curialists, containing, as it did, all the necessary ingredients to concoct an archetypical abuse: greediness and cumulation; the turning of sacred offices into vile merchandise; and appeals to secular judges. While Lombard was trying to focus on the general question of the confirmation of the privileges and briefed the pontiff during his private audiences on the legal customs of the Netherlands—which poor academics were forced to abide with—the Loyaerts affair would draw him back to putting the legal troubles of individual nominees right. In his reports of June 1601, Loyaert’s opponent Du Fayn emerges as a man who could command considerable support among the referendarii of the Signatura, as well as with higher and lower officials of the Dataria and the Auditorate of the Apostolic Chamber; officials on whom Lombard, as a consequence, could not rely.369 The
university to reside on his canonship at Cambrai Cathedral] . . . uno quod is sub pretextu privilegii nominationum nostrarum contra formam ipsius privilegii intrusus fuerit in prebendam Cameracensem, altero quod non erat tamen expectandum ut in partibus iusticia administraretur contra ejusmodi abusum ideoque necesse esse ut hic in Rota etiam ista committatur causa, quod ne obtineret cum id intellexi, me opposui.” Lombard to the university, 30 June 1601, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. 369 “Quo cum referendario retulissemus, is adhuc peregebat alium intervenisse cui nihil negare posset . . . atque cum viderem minus esse voluntarium non iudicavi expedire eo uti proponente ne autem contingeret rursum eiusmodi interponi impedimentum.” Lombard to the university, 1 June 1601, Acta Universitatis, 6 July 1601, RAL, OUL, 62, 48v–51v. “Ex quo difficultas ista orta ex causa nominationis eximii D Samuelis quod eius occasione viderentur, sibi habere patrocinantem subdatarium et
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canonship in question had been granted by the pontiff himself, “ex speciali favore” rather than through the machinery of papal bureaucracy, and ahead of multiple recommendations of other candidates by their respective patrons, including San Giorgio himself and the apostolic nuncios of Flanders and of Cologne.370 On top of that, in February 1601, the Roman Congregation of the Council—which had probably been involved by Du Fayn’s friends—had found that academics could indeed apply for several nominations but were barred from cumulating incompatible benefices. For now, the university’s agent was forced to lobby, in order to get Loyaerts off the hook, for an additional declaration that this ruling applied to their possession; not to an acceptation after which the academic could resign the benefice of his choice.371 In the first half of 1602, Lombard and his correspondents at Louvain tried to convince Loyaerts to abandon his claims and to accept a generous offer from the datario, who had promised to compensate the divine if he resigned his canonship and who would take care of the archducal resident372 if constitutionalists in Brussels (who had ruled in favour of Loyaerts in possessorio) would raise objections.373
inferiores quosdam officiales presertim notarios tribunalis auditoris Camere.” Lombard to the university, 30 June 1601, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. 370 Lombard to Baius, 4 August 1601, fragment in Acta Universitatis, 29 August 1601, RAL, OUL, 62, 56r. 371 “Lovaniensis: Congregatio Concilii censuit intelligendam esse de pluribus beneficiis alias non incompatibiles.” Congr. 22 February 1601, ASV, Congr. Concilio, Libri Decret., 9, 127r. “Quod illius decreti de quo alias scripsi a Congregatione Concilii, scilicet clausulam an nostro privilegio de acceptandis toties quoties usque ad taxam in eo expressam illigendam in compatibilibus nondum sit secundum moderamen quod petii, ut scilicet in incompatibilibus servetur dispositio iuris communis que non impedit acceptationem eorum sed retentionem . . . pendet ex istius cause exitu ut videlicet virtute illius decreti excludatur dominus Samuel etsi nunc pretendat se velle resignare pastoratum.” Lombard to Goudt, no date, extract in Acta Universitatis, 8 February 1602, RAL, OUL, 62, 79v–80r. 372 I.e., the unfortunate Richardot, who was struggling to reach a deal with the datario over an indult for the Archdukes (and the benefice-hungry power elites). “Et de lindult ie ne scaij en ai qu’en serat, aijant le dataijre tant imprime a sa sainctete es clauses restrictives, qu’ie lij voijs tousiours fort opinastre.” Richardot to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 22 September 1601, AGR, Audience, 438, 409r. 373 “Ut, etiamsi opus sit interposita auctoritate universitatis, inducatur dominus Samuel ut mittat procuratorium ad resignandum pro compensatione beneficiorum pacificorum . . . vel, si non putet sibi per aulam licere illum nominare, absolute procuratores constituat ad resignandum et acceptandum dominum Gerardum Horkens notarium Rote et Joannem Borgiam . . . opposui [to the Datario] fore difficultatem ex parte aule etsi D Samuel consentiat: illius explanationem suscepit ille se curam.” Lombard to Goudt, no date, fragment in Acta Universitatis, 8 February 1602, RAL, OUL, 62, 79r–80r.
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Nonetheless, academics, via Baius, failed to “wield their authority” once more: Loyaerts had refused to abandon his claims, probably because he was obliged himself by a “transactio” referred to in Lombard’s correspondence.374 Sometime in the first half of 1602, the don did pass on the Maastricht canonship he had obtained via academic privileges to a third party.375 This was widespread practice. Many Liège curialists used their prerogatives to privatise the papal system of provisions in a similar way, and the “transaction” offered by the Datario was, in fact, comparable to Loyaerts’ deal. In the given circumstances, however, the privileged academic had moved like a bull in a china shop. His colleagues and Lombard were trapped in a situation in which they had to clean up their act and to withdraw their support. In July 1602, Loyaerts’ impudence led to the confiscation of his canonship in favour of Du Fayn by the chapter on the explicit orders of Clement VIII and of Aldobrandini himself.376 The third type of abusive practice—of which the Loyaerts affair could have become an exemplum as well377—is related to the recurrent appeals to secular judges squashing Roman summons by virtue of Eximiae, in tandem with the (threat of) confiscation of the real estate of Liège ecclesiastical institutions in the Duchy of Brabant if they failed to comply with the Council’s directives. The difficulties of Stephanus Strecheus were not just the object of renewed academic mobilisation and intensified networking strategies in 1604–05; they can also be called exemplary for the procedures that shaped the conflicts between academic nominees and Roman curialists in the period under investigation. Both Strecheus and the abbot of Saint-Gertrudis, the (apostolic) conservator of the privileges and the first instance to issue litterae inhibitoriales against competitors for Liège benefices, were thrice summoned, in 1603 and 1604, to the tribunal of Marcello Lante. After the
374
“Quod si id recuset [i.e., the transaction proposed by the Datario] aut forte se non posse iam acceptare pretendat ob transactionem istam aliam, . . . (quo tamen nollem res veniret).” Lombard to the university, 19 May 1602, RAL, OUL, 62, 79v–80r. On the attempts of the academics, via Baius, to persuade Loyaerts to abandon his claims, cf. Acta Universitatis, 29 June 1602, RAL, OUL, 62, 95r–v. 375 I.e., to Philippus Loots, who cannot be identified as a member of the academic staff. 376 Brief of Clement VIII to Garzadoro, 8 July 1602, regest in Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique, 169; Aldobrandini to Garzadoro, 13 July 1602, regest in ibidem, 169. 377 It was atypical, from a legal point of view, as the Council of Brabant also ruled in Maastricht, a Liège-Brabant condominium, and as a consequence could reach a verdict in possessorio in favour of Loyaerts.
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apostolic executor of the Verlaye brothers had been imprisoned, the Uditore del Papa had even directly appealed to the pontiff in order to confine the nominee to prison too, his authority and that of the Apostolic See being at stake.378 In this context, it is not surprising that Lombard himself had to warn the academics repeatedly that few curialists favoured their cause and that many obstructed it; second, that the Lovanienses were generally associated in Rome with abuses committed under the guise of privilege,379 a view that had become the position of the Secretariat of State and of a Flanders nunciature that was manned largely by Liège curialists or their relatives. The practices of Louvain nominees figured in the general instructions to the new nuncio Carafa and to his successor as exempla of the pernicious legal habits of a region that had only recently returned to the fold of the Church of the Apostles; an area in which lay interference in ecclesiastical affairs, the seed of heresy, and irreverence towards the Holy See were to be closely monitored by the papal representative in Brussels.380 History seemed to repeat itself in the beginning of the pontificate of Paul V: the academics were showered with favours, including the papal brief to the Arts faculty and another suspension of all Roman procedures against nominees until the committee of cardinals, now reinforced by Cardinal Pamfili, had reached its verdict. The move proved, once more, to be temporary: already in 1607, Sebastianus Hustinus, a bachelor in Divinity who had been peaceful possessor of an altar in a Liège parish church for three years, found himself deprived of his benefice following a Roman sentence in a lawsuit he had even never been informed about but that involved several old acquaintances of the academics.381 In 1608, another competitor of a faculty nominee for a rectorship in the diocese in Liège had appealed to Rome with reference to his appointment per viam concursus.382 One year later, Henricus Rampen, a future regent of the Faculty of Divinity, 378
Cf. p. 267 n. 186. “Decet tamen ut saltem isto modo intelligat [= Hornkens] grata vobis sua officia, que eiusmodi certe, ut cum ex iis qui ex partibus istis in Curia hac versantur, plurimos habeat causa nostra adversarios plerosque parum faventes.” Lombard to the university, 30 June 1601, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. 380 Cf. p. 210. 381 His adversary was Julius Monterensis (not in Vaes, “Les curialistes belges,” or Dessart et al., Inventaire analytique), with Guilielmus Fayn as an interested party and Robertus De Blocquerie as procurator. Acta Universitatis, 13 October 1607, RAL, OUL, 62, 317r. 382 Acta Facultatis Artium, 27 June 1608, RAL, OUL, 714, 377r. 379
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and Nicolaus Slins, a student in that faculty, also appealed to the academic senate.383 In 1610, Aegidius Donneux, a professor in Philosophy, and Joannes Bonhomius, a student of the College of Liège, were summoned to the Eternal City.384 By the end of that year, Lombard would report on the difficulties of Gisbertus Beranus, a student of Jansonius’ who had got in trouble because of an altar in Bilzen.385 Six months later, Joannes A Fraxinis, former professor in Philosophy and canon of Tongeren, was harassed by no less a person than Aegidius Ursinus De Vivariis, who, under the wings of his uncle Lambertus Ursinus, had made a promising career at the curia and who did not flinch from intimidating A Fraxinis’ procurator.386 The canon would decide, by the end of 1611, to look after his affairs at the curia himself.387 383 STD in 1606, professor of Humanities and Philosophy in the pedagogy of the Lily since 1597, faculty member until 1607 (Acta Facultatis Artium, 4 October 1607, RAL, OUL, 714, 368); his adversary was Stephanus de Salmis, revisor of supplications in the Dataria Apostolica (cf. ASV, Dataria Ap., Per Obitum, 17, 94v; several other De Salmises are registered as curialists as well in the Per Obitum list) for a benefice in Saint-Paul in Liège; no acceptation of Rampen was registered. Several briefs providing De Salmis, with (other) benefices in Hansotte and Forgeur, Inventaire analytique, 35 and 52. Slins’ adversary was, again, Guilielmus Du Fayn, (not in Hansotte and Forgeur, Inventaire analytique), for an altar in Saint-Materne in Liège. Cf. the state of affairs in the Faculty of Arts to White, 19 February 1609, Acta Facultatis Artium, 15 February 1609, RAL, OUL, 714, 408. 384 Aegidius Donneux’ competitor for an altar in the collegiate church of Huy was Henricus de Salmis, brother of Stephanus de Salmis, Rampen’s opponent. Both were canons of Saint-Paul in Liège; Stephanus at least from 1629 onwards. Hansotte and Forgeur, Inventaire analytique, 235, n.2. The altar accepted by Bonhomius (or Humanus) in Saint-Martin in Liège was challenged by Guilielmus Jamart, a curialist who had been present in Rome for several years (ASV, Dataria Ap, Per Obitum, 17, 85v. Several other Jamarts appear in Hansotte and Forgeur, Inventaire analytique, five of them pop up in the sample based on the Per Obitum list. 385 Lombard to the Faculty of Arts, 25 December 1610, Ven. Fac. Artium acta quaedam (. . .), RAL, OUL, 746, 20v–21v. Beranus had his own contacts in Rome (his friend Hubertus Horeus) and had his own sollicitator, Joannes Jacobus Corselius (cf. p. 346 n. 125), which explains why the faculty was informed via Lombard. 386 De Vivariis had succeeded Sublindius as Revisor of Supplications for the Empire in the Signatura in 1609, a position he held until 1618. On De Vivariis’ brilliant later career, as referendarius utriusque signaturae (Weber, Die Päpstlichen Referendare, 3, 955), subdatario, and auditor under the Barberini pontificate, see Vaes, “Les curialistes belges,” 107. “Cumque inter cetera metuat [= A Fraxinis] ne procurator per eum ad negotium Romae curandum constitutus (cui Bertrando Verviano nomen est) adversarii potentiam veritus, rem strenue gerere reformidet.” Faculty of Arts to Lombard, 29 June 1611, Ven. Fac. Artium acta quaedam (. . .), RAL, OUL, 746, 31r–32r. Vervianus was the procurator of Aegidius Donneux as well. Faculty of Arts to Lombard, 14 May 1610, ibidem, 15r–v. 387 Acta Facultatis Artium, 3 October 1611, RAL, OUL, 714, 501r. Eventually he reached an agreement with De Vivariis; cf. Consensus, 16 June 1612, Hansotte and Forgeur, Inventaire analytique, 79.
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A Fraxinis’ departure for Rome can be considered the prelude to a new episode in the Roman Question, which shall be discussed in the next chapters. In addition, however, it seems to mirror a tactical shift in academic policy, in line with Lombard’s calls not to give offence anymore. First, Roman curialists did not make a distinction between causae privatae and the causa communis, holding not just nominees but also the authorities granting nominations responsible for what they considered abusive practices and appeals to secular judges.388 Academics must have felt compelled to play the game according to the curialists’ rules in the second episode of the Roman Question (1609–12): no new stalemates between the Apostolic Chamber and the tribunal of the conservator of the privileges were discussed in university or faculty minutes; nor did academic authorities grant litterae inhibitoriales and other legal instruments to duped nominees in the Principality of Liège. The defence of individual nominees had become the reserve of professional sollicitatores in Rome. This suggests that academics, for tactical reasons, had temporarily put their claims to jurisdictional autonomy on hold. Second, the programme of acquiring a highly visible confirmation of the privileges—a remedy academics had applied throughout the 16th century and in the first phase of the Roman Question under Clement VIII—was abandoned in favour of a more technical solution that mirrored the strategies of the late Oranus and his friends. Already in 1605, Lombard had suggested that another confirmation would soon be obsolete because of the faculties that were granted to each new Uditore.389 Oranus’ clause, in Lombard’s view, had now to be matched by a general declaration of the pontiff that he did not wish to annul the Louvain privileges, a declaration that consequently had to be translated into a clause inserted in every single papal
388 “Nam haec curia tota sic intelligit privilegium, ut sicut obligat nominatos ad habendum conditiones in ipso requisitas: sic et nominantem ad non nominandum aliquem, nisi in quo et quando sciunt habere istas conditiones.” Lombard to the Arts faculty, 25 December 1610, Ven. Fac. Artium acta quaedam (. . .), RAL, OUL, 746, 20v–21v. 389 “Itaque cum precipua difficultas sit et semper fuerit in causa tractus nec diuturnum ac proinde nec desideratum vobis eius usum allatura esset simplex confirmatio, manente preiudicio in hac curia semel facto, quod per facultates Auditoris Camere quando contingit eas esse posteriores, illi derogetur, q(uia) tunc quoties mutatur auditor toties oporteret istius privilegii confirmationem revocari.” Lombard to the university, 5 March 1605, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102.
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provision.390 Though the academics, briefed by the university’s law specialists, reverently begged to differ,391 the archbishop of Armagh went along with this project nonetheless, with remarkable results. Before his letter had arrived at Louvain, the Irishman had already obtained such a public declaration from the pontiff during the session of the Signatura Gratiae in which the affair of Gisbertus Beranus had been on the table.392 We can only speculate on the outcome of Lombard’s activities, which, at least in his capacity as official agent of the university, abruptly came to a halt sometime in 1612. Yet, it is relatively safe to conclude that his low-profile “Roman solution” did not require the building-up and mobilisation of broad networks in the Sacred College characteristic of the strategies deployed in the pontificate of Clement VIII. In return, no mobilisation of a “national Liège Church” against Lovanienses “covered with favour” was recorded. Now curialists sought to approach the pontiff directly, via their patrons and superiors instead of via the routine of papal bureaucracy, in order to block the insertion of the pope’s declaration in the list of clauses that were routinely attached to the relevant papal bulls. All this sheds a new light on Lombard’s activities in Rome. As papal bureaucracy bounced back, the university’s agent was forced to settle so-called “causae privatae” (in opposition to the “causa communis”) of individual nominees who got into trouble. It is in this context that several data emerge about the (reportedly meagre) support he enjoyed
390 “Tamen dum contingit exequutionem eiusmodi fieri contra particulares personas eiusdem universitatis et facultatis, et ea quomodocumque sic facta, officiales huius curiae permittuntur ulterius procedere, ut maxime stante decisione Rotae facta priusquam huc venirem [= Decisio Rotalis against Danielis, p. 251] quod clausula in eiusmodi brevibus addi solita, quae et ipsa nonnisi recens est, de eiiciendis omnibus praeterquam a papamet provisis [= Oranus’ clause, p. 264] comprehendat alios omnes provisos, etiamsi per privilegium a papa sive sede apostolica emanans, etiam universitati ipsi et facultati, privilegium suum redditi inutile et onerosam. Neque hoc possit aliter evitari, nisi Sua Sanctitas declaret, quod licet eiusmodi brevia, etiam cum ista clausula expediantur, propter alios, quos ex alio quocumque titulo intrudi contingit, tamen nolle se ut eadem clausula comprehendat provisos virtute vestri privilegii.” Lombard to the Arts faculty, 3 April 1610, Ven. Fac. Artium acta quaedam (. . .), RAL, OUL, 746, 4v–5r. 391 “Quod se ei declarationi adiici possit confirmatio aliqua privilegii tractus, ne nominati nostri in prima instantia alibi quam coram conservatore nostro in ius trahi possint, secundum tenorem privilegiorum nostrorum apostolicorum, id etiam plane optaremus.” Arts faculty to Lombard, 1 May 1610, Ven. Fac. Artium acta quaedam (. . .), RAL, OUL, 746, 10v–11r. 392 Lombard to the Arts faculty, 17 April 1610, Ven. Fac. Artium acta quaedam (. . .), RAL, OUL, 746, 11v–12r.
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among the lower strata of curialist officialdom with figures such as Vestrio, Joannes de Parisiis, Hornkens, the procurators of individual nominees, and others, and about the opponents to the Louvain claims, who in Lombard’s account, were in good standing with the notaries of the Auditorate. These, in turn, processed the information submitted to them into the clear-cut abuses that ended up on Lante’s desk and that resulted in new writs and threats of excommunication against academic nominees or even against the conservator of the privileges. The qualification of “clear-cut” has to be taken quite literally in this context: in one of his letters, Lombard reported on Liège procurators cutting away from their supplications the fact that the intrusi were academic nominees. Thus, curialists could make papal bureaucracy function automatically in their favour, without the annoying interference of committees of cardinals.393 A great deal of his (and White’s) private and public correspondence with the academics was, as a consequence, largely dedicated to his constant pacing up and down between curial offices in order to inform this or that official about new developments, to intercept cursores carrying the documents submitted by secretive opponents, to suspend new writs or lawsuits before the dreaded Sacra Romana Rota, to stall fresh supplications submitted to the Signatura, and to gather information about the moves of adversaries from the few bureaucrats who could be trusted. The streamlined action of papal bureaucracy induced the Irishman to articulate a strategy of a monolithic curialist party to keep him from settling the causa communis—in which he was confident about the favourable “inclinations” of the pope and the cardinals of the committee—by raising new and embarrassing causae privatae time and again.394 It was these affairs that Lombard, archbishop
393 “Quibus officiis non obstantibus adversarii qui notarios [of the Auditorate of the Apostolic Chamber] gratia faventes sibi, immo, et cooperantes habent, nec adversantem locumtenentem, in diversis causis obrepserunt Sue Sanctitati hac arte sive fraude porrecto libello supplici, in quo questi cum intruso sibi negotium esse remedium solent implorare, tacentes prorsus quem intrusum vocant esse nominatum Lovaniensem, quod experti sint, ubi huiusmodi aliquid exprimunt aut iudicant libellum remitti ad predictos cardinales, itaque libello qui sic conceptus, remisso iuxta ordinarium stylum ad locumtenentem impetrant ejusmodi monitoria, qualia tum istich, tum alibi etiam in diversis ipsius Italie locis, turbas generant.” General report of Lombard to the university, 5 March 1605, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. 394 “Hec, quam me fatigent et affligant facile potestis intelligere, immo ad hunc finem ita cumulari non dubito ut me deiiciant animo ab ulteriore prosecutione. Sed non facient tamen cum certus sum ut premisi de animo in nos pontificis et cardinalium,
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of Armagh since 1601, judged dishonourable and sought to delegate to his nephew Thomas White. In the Roman Question, the regime of grace installed by Clement VIII and re-enacted by Paul V seems to have allowed the Irishman to act as a fireman in specific cases. It kept him in Rome, for his own benefit and that of the Holy See. And it may have informed his attempts, in 1609–12, to find a Rome-oriented solution to the Roman Question. His plan was aborted by curialist opposition and probably by academics themselves, who would turn to other solutions from 1612 onwards. All this means, however, that after more than a decade of intensive networking in curialist circuits, academics had not got one step closer to a confirmation of their privileges.
5.4. The unbearable lightness of networks In the course of the 1590s, Vossius had written to his correspondents at Louvain that “in this Court of Rome, one does not only need to have justice on his side, but also the backing of powerful protectors.” Much of the evidence in the previous chapters seems to support this statement: in a face-to-face society, policy was—on the local level, on the level of the state, and in the heart of Christendom—moulded not by political programmes or ideology but by social networks of patrons, brokers, clients, kinsmen, and friends. In this scenario, the academic agenda was determined by clientelist networks vying with each other over the definition of the university’s interests in order to safeguard their private stakes: those of individual nominees struggling to secure their possession of a benefice; of powerful college presidents seeking to expand their patronage resources at the expense of Jesuits or bishops; or of divines facing a loss of symbolical crédit towards their clients due to Roman censorship.
quod iterum repeto quia petitis ut perscribam quid sit michi spei in causa.” Lombard to the university, 30 June 1601, Correspondance, RAL, OUL, 102. “Proxima quam scripsi septimana egi cum Sanctissimo Domino et quidem prolixe de rebus nostris conquestus . . . propter oppositionem per quosdam in hac Curia factam, que, licet non nisi contra particulares quosdam ex nostris directe instituta, nihilominus communis etiam cause expeditionem retardaret, presertim quia que in particularium causis objecta precipue hic offenderet(ur), ea in universitatis accusationem ab adversariis passim iactarentur.” Lombard to the university, 1 June 1601, Acta Universitatis, 6 July 1601, RAL, OUL, 62, 48v–52v.
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That these interpersonal relations could not be investigated systematically can be attributed to the type of sources that, in the absence of archives comparable to those of the Valbelle (Kettering) or the Borghese (Reinhard and his students), constitute the backbone of this book: public records that were designed to cover up the brutal struggle for influence of clientelist factions via a corporatist rhetoric of checks and balances. Throughout much of the first decade of the 17th century, it is Jacobus Baius who emerges the head of an academic dynasty as well as “the face of the university”: he participated in nearly all academic delegations to Brussels and frequently used his privileged contacts with Lombard to steer the university’s Roman policy, which entailed promoting his own interests and those of other academics such as Dralantius, Corselius, Malderus, and Clarius. External relations were frequently drawn into a personal format as well. Delegates to Brussels officials or nuncios were not chosen at random. They were personally involved in the affairs that needed to be recommended, and/or into the favour of the grandees honoured with a visit. The interests of the princes of the Church in allowing the university to enrol them as protectors were poorly commented on. To be sure, the recommendation of requests pouring in from the periphery—and preferably successful ones—was central to their self image and figures prominently in the manuals and treatises on the cardinalate.395 Yet, academic clientelism adopted more specific forms. At several occasions, but especially between 1598 and 1600, the university’s affiliation with the Habsburg cause and with the “Spanish faction” in Rome gained strength—a relationship that was carefully nurtured in a narrative that highlighted the entanglement of the university’s fate with the dynasty’s. Dynastic and hereditary loyalties were invoked in order to oblige cardinals as the “natural protectors” of the university: towards the Colonna, descendants of Martin V, in 1596 as well as in 1599; towards the unfortunate Leo XI de’ Medici in 1605, the successor to Leo X and Clement VII, who had granted the university its privileges; and towards Aldobrandini in 1607, as the nephew of the pontiff who
395 On the “habitus” of a cardinal as a transmittor of requests in early modern Rome as it was prescribed in treatises on the cardinalate, read Visceglia, “Fazioni e lotta politica,” 65; more elaborately in “L’immagine del cardinale nei trattati della fine del Cinquecento,” in Fattori, Clemente VIII e il Sacro Collegio, 263 sqq.
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had blocked the Jesuit offensive against the university. Needless to say, all potential patrons were enrolled as patrons of letters, science, and poor scholars. The court of Rome proved to be a particularly hospitable environment for learned men in the period under investigation. The two Louvain delegates sent to the heart of Christendom in the 1590s established durable contacts with the unprecedented concentration of learned cardinals in the Sacred College: experts of repute such as Santori, Toledo, Arrigoni, Bellarmino, Baronio, and Antoniano—trained divines, historians, and/or philologists who owed their cardinal’s hat to their scholarly qualifications, and who had risen to prominence first as consultors, afterwards as cardinals of the Holy Office and/or the Index.396 In this time interval, academic networking strategies and the dedicated attempts of the papacy to catch up with the famous schools of Theology in northwestern Europe became something of an item. In order to defend their honour and the privileges that came with it, university men could capitalise on a Roman policy that aimed to turn the Eternal City into the intellectual centre of the Catholicism: as an educational hub for Rome-oriented ecclesiastical elites around the globe397 and the ultimate oracle of Catholic orthodoxy that could hold in check other players (e.g., universities) with comparable claims to magisterium. It is largely via these circuits that academics could rely on immediate channels of communication with Clement VIII and Paul V and that they could mount vocal opposition, in the 1590s as well as in the Agricola affair, to alternative views transmitted by the Brussels power elites to the Eternal City. Drawn into the orbit of the Aldobrandini, academics also got acquainted with other members of the Collegio Nuovo who performed as technocrats in the service of the Holy See, and with a wide range of officials whose intelligence proved vital. Although curia officials recurrently blocked or ignored academic requests, the Lovanienses were relatively successful in keeping their grievances on the pontiff ’s desk—nothing less,398 but nothing more.
396 Cf. Godman, The Saint as Censor, 51; the list of names is not drawn from Lombard’s or Vossius’ correspondence, but is Godman’s; cf. ibidem, 180. Experts such as Vossius and Bozio, just as much as Gravius and Lombard themselves, were involved in these circuits as well. 397 A good survey in Broggio, “L’Urbs e il mondo.” 398 On the fiction of the immediate relation between a merciful prince and his agonising subjects, most cases being in practice delegated to a wide range of intermediary figures such as referendaries or congregations, read Fosi, “Suppliche e lettere.”
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This feeds the conclusion that university men failed to convert their social capital in Rome into corporatist capital at home via a confirmation of the privileges, both because of the unprincipled shifting of priorities by competing clientelist factions at Louvain and because networks at the curia were much stronger than theirs. Or to put it more bluntly: the evidence is compelling enough to conclude that the elaborate analysis of religious and political programmes in the middle sections could have been disposed with. That is exactly the point. In the first section of this chapter, matters of concern were relegated to the second division, and omnipresent social networks were put in the limelight. In consequence, Verflechtung inevitably imposed itself as the compelling logic behind the dynamics of decision-making, in academic councils as much as in Roman corridors. The following sections, in contrast, suggest that the paradigm does not work that smoothly without these deletions. This is not to say that the evidence in the sources does not confirm the model. Familiaritas was a central concept in Lombard’s official correspondence with the university, and his Regime of Grace did favour, to an extent, academic interests in Rome. Lombard’s discourse is comparable to the one used in treatises on patronage or instructions to princely ambassadors, whose authors fretted over the hereditary or national inclinations, the clientelist affiliations, or the background of this or that (Roman) heavyweight in order to control the possible outcome of decision-making.399 Just as much as contemporary historians, early modern pundits tried to uncover a political “system” in order to instil at least some coherence and predictability on decision-making, the merits of political programmes remaining highly uncertain at the Corte di Roma where, “ob mutatione rerum,” nothing could be taken for granted. Conversely, the evidence indicates that the pontiff and his entourage did not discourage “politological” interpretations of this type, bolstering as they did the confidence of petitioners that the curia was a venue for their concerns; that it functioned according to objective, although often hidden rules; and that they could learn to master the methods to manipulate it. Lombard’s discourse therefore was prescriptive as much as it was descriptive. It is not surprising that
399 A comparative analysis of treatises, mirrors for the cardinal-nephew or for cardinals in general, and instructions to princely ambassadors in Visceglia, “Fazioni e lotta politica.”
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the sources reflect a political culture of Verflechtung. The Irishman’s letters were supposed to do just that: put in place a Regime of Grace in which academic interests, via Lombard’s incontournable brokerage, could flourish. The Agricola affair may provide an extreme example, but it also represents one of the rare occasions in which the correspondence of the two bickering parties has been preserved. There, Roman bigwigs favoured the bishop of Antwerp, hoped to capitalise on the authority of the archduke to find a compromise satisfying both parties, and nonetheless turned up in Lombard’s and White’s letters as unconditional (or converted) supporters of the university’s righteous claims. The conflict over the validity of university nominations in the new cathedrals outlived its micro-political stakes; and the role of micro-politics was also dubious in its outcome. This is because the “censura” to which Lombard vaguely referred in his 1605 report to the university after the death of Clement VIII and which he conspicuously staged as his own great victory, was a full-blown Rota Decision. Intelligence on the affair being highly contradictory and confusing, the pontiff and his cardinals had decided that its merits had to be sorted out by legal concepts and precedents, not by patrons and brokers. It cannot be denied that the theological struggles the university was remotely or immediately involved in—but that were not commented on in Lombard’s official correspondence—provided the university and its agent with many opportunities to strengthen their bonds with prominent protectors at the curia they hoped to capitalise on in the future. Yet, it requires a lot of additional work to reduce the theological wrangling over the definition of the relation between Grace and Free Will to micro-political constellations. This job has already been done, for that matter, by early modern authors such as Serry, whose interests in vilifying their opponents as slaves of private interest were many. Studying these hermeneutical practices may be, from the historian’s point of view, more appropriate than simply repeating them. Lombard’s reporting on the Roman Question is underpinned by similar reductions. First, the Irishman failed to mention that charging a special committee of cardinals with the examination of the university’s privileges was not an unambiguous expression of papal favour. Under the Aldobrandini pontificate, committees of this type were installed on a regular basis. Early modern pundits pointed at the dedicated policy of Clement VIII to reduce the Consistory of Cardinals to a body that rubber-stamped decisions taken elsewhere, thus ruling out
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adventurous voting procedures in the Consistory as well as possibly embarrassing stalemates between this body and the pontiff. In addition, particular commissions kept the influence of the Collegio vecchio at bay, and provided an institutional framework for members of the Collegio nuovo to shape an independent papal policy that could resist to the pressure of national factions.400 Such expressions of papal absolutism were also fuelled from below. Santori’s diaries bear testimony to Fattori’s findings, that cardinals themselves sought to marginalise the Consistory. It is in the Diario Santori that Borghese, Bianchetti, and Arrigoni surface time and again as the pope’s most prominent technocrats, and Santori’s trusted experts.401 On top of that, Lombard’s endeavours to have the conflict with the Antwerp canons reassigned to “his” cardinals indicates that it was also in the petitioners’ interests to avoid unmanageable (or “unfamiliar”) voting colleges—in this case the Signatura Gratiae—whose decisions were annoyingly hard to predict but which could nonetheless destroy months or years of painstaking negotiations. Enter the profile of the so-called “Louvain cardinals.” Each brought his own expertise with Louvain abuses to the committee: Borghese as a former Uditore del papa; Arrigoni and Bianchetti as former auditors of the Rota. Bianchetti was the auditor who had presided, back in 1596, over the disastrous verdict against Clarius.402 Papa Aldobrandini had judged the affair of the privileges important enough to create a context in which the academics could make their point and in which both curialist and Habsburg factions were sidelined—nothing less, nothing more. Second, Lombard’s anthropomorphic approach to the opposition he met merits closer investigation. In official reports to the academic senate, it was a clear-cut faction of curialists with widespread clientelist ramifications that strategically kept him pacing up and down between curial
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Cf. Fattori, Clemente VIII e il Sacro Collegio, 325. They were the three cardinals mentioned as candidates for the job of general Inquisitor in the first audience granted to Santori after the 1596 creation; cf. Diario Santori, 6 June 1596, ASV, Arm. LII, 21, 187r. 402 Cf. Coram R.P.D. Blanchetto Leodiensis canonicatus (11 March 1596) on the dispute between Clarius and De Blocquerie, copied in Acta Universitatis, 18 September 1599, RAL, OUL, 61, 355v–356v. “Tra i novi proporati [= 2nd round of creations of cardinals by Clement VIII, 1596] i più intimamente legati alla casa degli Aldobrandini e al servizio al papa erano Bandini, Borghese, Bianchetti, et Arrigoni, immessi immediatamente nelle congregazioni cardinalizie.” Fattori, Clemente VIII e il Sacro Collegio, 94. 401
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offices.403 However, reducing the Roman Question to a drawn-out conflict between two clusters of networks or “factions” is going one step too far. For the academics’ opponents, it must have been largely sufficient to let the machinery of papal bureaucracy do its job independently from papal interventions—which is exactly what bureaucracies were supposed to do. As a result, much of the “networking” on the Liège side may have consisted in professional sollicitatores passing on tips to their colleagues on “best practice” for the benefit of their clients. Bureaucratic practice slipped into policy documents when the Louvainists started to figure in the general instructions to the nuncios Carafa and Bentivoglio as archetypical violators of ecclesiastical liberty in legal conflicts opposing academic and papal candidates for office—a definition of the problem in which a grand curialist faction did not (have to) enter the picture.404 Only at two moments did Liège clerics transform into an interest group: in 1599, when the Lovanienses were “covered with favours” and a national Liège Church correspondingly had to be protected from greedy foreigners; and in 1610–11, when Lombard’s attempts to seek a bureaucratic solution ironically forced the Liège curialists to come out of the closet as an interested party. The third argument is more fundamental: from the previous remarks, we may deduce that the power of clientelist networks, weak or strong, was highly orchestrated. In addition, it was also localised: Lombard’s name-dropping may have awed his Louvain audience, which kept paying his bills, but it obviously failed to produce results in Rome. This did not prevent academics (or modern historians) from verifying the strength of the Irishman’s networks: if Lombard was successful, his networks were strong enough; his failures (in the Roman Question) exposed his weaknesses as a broker. This way of putting things, however, exposes the weakness of the paradigm of Mikropolitik: in the chronology of events, powerful net-
403 Compare the presentation of things in “[16 October 1604] consilium captum a Leodiensibus ut pontifex deroget privilegiis non generaliter sed in singulis actibus super quo facultas scribit preter consilii sanctioris item ad fiscalem et ad procuratorem generalem,” anamnese of the Roman Question, 1613 or later, Bulle Regimini Universalis de Paul V. Documents et actes y relatifs, RAL, OUL, 4684. 404 “Il Consiglio Privato pretende certo antico possesso di conoscere anco le cause ecclesiastiche quando si litiga tra due provisti, uno de’quali habbia la sua provisione de la Sede Apostolica et l’altro da chi conferisce in virtù del’indulto, come fa l’Università di Lovanio.” Instrituttione per Monsignor Decio Caraffa, 1606, ed. Cauchie and Maere, Recueil des instructions générales, 9–26.
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works and political success emerge more or less at the same time. From the historian’s viewpoint, turning them respectively into causes and effects is tautological. Or to put it more bluntly: even if scholars would spend years in disparate archives to chart kinship, friendships, or clientelist bonds and stumbled on the most compelling evidence, the power of Liège micro-political networks in Rome would only be measurable against the outcome of the affairs in which they were involved, which suggests networks and their leverage over policy are synonyms rather than causes and effects. Making micro-political networks function properly, as the prime mover behind decision-making, calls for a lot of reductive work before, during, and (for historians as much as for Lombard) even after the process of decision-making. In all the cases that have been investigated in this and the previous chapters, colliding interest groups (Jesuits and secular clerics, diocesan shepherds and Louvain college presidents, academics and canons of the new cathedral chapters, Dominicans and Jesuits, the Jansonius-Cuyckius team against the “Baianists”) were involved in far-reaching politics of reality in order to impose their logic on each other, to determine the institutional settings in which decisions had to be reached, and to fix opponents and allies in recognisable roles that fitted neatly in their script. Chains of actors could take the form of a micro-political combination in which powerful cardinals protected poor scholars via brokers with whom they were personally in touch, but they could also perform as a routine papal bureaucracy or as a familiar macro-political constellation larded with conflict, a repertoire that will swing into action in the following chapters. In light of these politics of reality, it is hard to avoid the question of the credibility of political programmes. It is, after all, not fair to dismiss the theories of early modern actors aired in their memorandums, in papal bulls, or in princely charters as irrelevant rhetoric and then to suggest that early modern politics was essentially a face-to-face business. Take the Roman Question. Both academics and curialists were trying to plug their stakes into something bigger. The definition of the problem in academic supplications to the pontiff, bolstered by a variety of commonplaces drawn from Scripture and from other authoritative texts, can be synthesised as follows: its opponents were powerful, rich, and blinded by private interests; the conservation of the privileges, by contrast, guaranteed the university’s survival and Catholic restoration in Belgium. Their confirmation could not not be in the interests of the Apostolic See; therefore, institutional settings that could keep at
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bay curialist interest—the Congregatio Germanica or Lombard’s committee of cardinals—had to be engineered in order to prepare such a grand gesture of papal plenitude of power. Yet, such a configuration never materialised, being continuously dismantled, as it was, by the university’s opponents. These spread the word that the poor scholars were in fact opulent; that the Roman Question was the result of lay interference in Church affairs; that academic claims were irreconcilable with the universal jurisdiction of the papal prince, and that vested interest was, by consequence, to be looked after on the academic side. While university men relied on members of the Sacred College, their opponents could turn to tested bureaucratic practice, which routinely churned out abuses committed by academics. In this configuration, the fading of the causa communis fuelled the causae privatae in which curialists felt at home, and vice versa. As a matter of fact, academics were probably even compelled, from 1609 onwards, to accept the legal rules set by Liège curialists both on a strategic and a tactical level. This, in tandem with a long record of abuses and the impotence of the academics to get their act together in the Roman Question, further mined their credibility. In this context, no configuration emerged in between 1588 and 1612 in which the successor to the Prince of the Apostles could assert his tremendous power in a solemn papal bull reducing the university’s enemies to silence. This calls for qualification. In the previous chapters, power, although omnipresent, has barely played a role. The collapse of Realpolitik as a feature of early modern decision-making may fuel the conclusion that power did not even enter the picture: as a matter of fact, both Clement VIII and Paul V chose not to wield power, which in this case favoured the curialists. Putting things this way, power seems a fiction—a conclusion that is immediately contradicted, however, by the tremendous manifestations of power in the long history of mankind in general and in the history of universities in particular. It is, after all, swathes of power that have made early modern academics, just as much as historians believe that universities were the plaything of the great of the earth (or in heaven). Their respective reasons to interpret things likewise need to be investigated. In order to address the conundrum of power, we will turn, in the next chapter, to an episode in which overwhelming power became a tangible reality: the visitation or reform of the University of Louvain in between 1607–17.
CHAPTER SIX
THE BRABANT UNIVERSITY. ACADEMICS AND REFORM 1607–171
In the previous chapters, we have stumbled recurrently on writings that were to be committed to the flames. Understandably, the authors themselves figure rarely, if ever, among those seeking to reduce the fruit of their labour to ashes.2 Yet, sometime in 1602, a document was submitted to Clement VIII that explicitly implored the Holy Father to burn it immediately. The pontiff refused to do so, and the text has survived amidst the piles of manuscripts in the Biblioteca Angelica, to date a haven for scholars, old books, and magnificent cardinals’ busts. It would continue to haunt its author, stalling, in effect, his beatification as Doctor of the Church until well into the 20th century. Only in 1930 did Pope Pius XI elevate Bellarmino to the honour of the altars, among other reasons, because this hapless piece of writing was frowned on for centuries by experts charged with the examination of his life. The document had been written in the heat of the De Auxiliis debate, aimed at discouraging the pontiff from reaching a verdict; and it probably had earned the cardinal his one-way ticket to Capua in 1603. In it, theological arguments were interlaced with historical examples of pontiffs behaving like autocrats who had brought harm upon themselves and on infallibility. Among them figured the embarrassing episode of the erroneous Sixtine Vulgate. After the death of Sixtus V, Catholic authorities had been struggling to withdraw the copies from circulation before the heretics, always eager to deal a blow to the authority of the Apostolic See, could lay their foul hands on them. Bellarmino’s argument is baffling. A grand theorist of Rome’s primacy sought to contain papal power in order to enhance it. Delving into the Arcana Ecclesiae, he articulated a notion of power that differs
1 This chapter is a reworked version of my paper “Academics in Action” in History of Universities. 2 Admittedly, Bourdieu has called his book Homo Academicus “un livre à brûler.” The idea is tempting, but the author can be suspected of seeking to enhance the reality of his models rather than physically eliminating them.
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significantly from the conventional grand theories of might and right he had been advocating as a theologian and a controversialist. In his 1602 memorandum, popes who ruled alone, using their theoretical power and beefed up by the treatises on papal theocracy of Bellarmino and others, were powerless; pontiffs who involved in practice the entire Church in decisions that concerned universal Catholicism were, in effect, powerful. On top of these apparent contradictions, the cardinal—who hardly could be suspected of conciliarist sympathies— did not wish this practical power to become a concept on par with theoretical power, imploring the pope, as he did, to burn the document at once.3 Judging by contemporary scholarship, however, it does not matter that the document survived. For it is the latter’s theoretical concept of power to which most historians and other students of the body politic routinely turn. To be sure, making power more practicable in historical accounts has implied distributing it over different position holders of all ranks and file, and chopping it up in symbolic, cultural, economic, or political forms of power specific to distinct yet interacting social environments. Basically, however, most scholars share the assumption that power can be capitalised and accumulated over time by specific individuals or institutions, leading, in political history, to the exponential growth of state power in the early modern period, to the detriment of other organisations and individuals. As a result, a clear division emerges between the powerful and the powerless; losers and winners; and the geographical epicentre of power and its periphery.4 More specifically, the concept of power as accumulated capital has been enthusiastically embraced by university historians researching the encroachment of the absolutist state on autonomous and international learned corporations. In this scenario, little ink needs to be spilled over the staunch attachment of academics to their all-but-useless privileges. The privileges of nomination constituted a symbolic compensation for the submission of the academic world to the state. By allowing and supporting harmless, and increasingly shallow, corporatist expressions of academic identity, the entourage of the prince in return covered up the domination of the state over the intellectual
3 4
An elaborate analysis of this text in Motta, Bellarmino, 582 sqq. This analysis draws on Latour, “The Powers of Association.”
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traditions that legitimised its policy, as well as over the schools that furnished it with civil officers or church ministers.5 The Roman Question would indeed become entangled, in the second decade of the 17th century, with an affair that has long been considered a textbook case of state intervention in the academic field. The famous Visitatio of 1617, a comprehensive statutory reform of academic life at Louvain under the authority of the Archdukes, was, together with a simultaneous Reformatio of academic tribunals and contemporary measures to reform the sister institutions at Dole and at Douai, a quintessential exemplum of the growth of state power. The text, the first organic law in the Low Countries imposed on reluctant academics by a secular prince, would remain the constitution of the university until 1797. The new regulations would also apply to the University of Douai, which makes the Visitatio a unique example in early modern Europe of the homogenisation foisted by the state upon institutions of higher learning.6 As a consequence, historians of the Old University consider the Visitatio a milestone. Nonetheless, recent scholarship on academic reform in the archducal period is, to date, gravely indebted to the outdated work of Van Waefelghem and Elias.7 The latter’s nearly exclusive focus on the jurisdictional struggle between Rome and the robins of the Privy Council in Brussels concerning the overlordship in academic affairs has reduced the whole episode to two moments. First he focuses on the circumstances of the appointment of two commissioners charged with an inspection—the visitation—of the university in 1607. From there, his attention jumps to the final promulgation of their findings in the Visitatio in 1617, causing a diplomatic conflict with the Holy See. In the decade separating these two moments, nothing seems to have happened at all, which then allows for speculation about academic filibustering against loathed state laws for a decade.
5 This would be the result of an analysis on the lines set in Bourdieu, Homo Academicus. 6 “It is unique in the history of early modern universities that two institutions of higher education—even when they were situated in the same country—were considered as identical by the central government and that until 1667 official university legislation was applied to both universities equally.” De Ridder-Symoens, “The Place of the University of Douai,” 26. 7 Roegiers and Vandermeersch, “Les archiducs et l’université de Louvain,” which is largely based on Van Waefelghem, “La Visite de l’Université de Louvain,” Elias, Kerk en staat, 268–87, and Claeys-Bouuaert, L’ancienne Université de Louvain, 7–11.
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This account is a telling example of the problematic way in which the relationship between the university and power is traditionally discussed. If academics had not obeyed, state power would have been inexistent or faltering; because they did, it was rampant. Putting it this way, however, the power of a single agent (i.e., the prince) and the corresponding activities of multitudes (academics implementing the prince’s orders) are synonyms. Introducing a causal relationship between power and obedience, which is a basic practice in all accounts that are based on the notion of power as a capital of sorts, is by consequence tautological. The charters of 1617 and the appearance of princely power on the stage are the outcome of the previous decade, a decade in which a great many problems had to be settled through negotiations between academics and their environment that have completely escaped the analysis of older and recent scholarship of the Visitatio. Reform was not imposed on university men by “the action of the state”; it was negotiated by academics seeking to assemble the body politic around their cause. This brings us back to Bellarmino’s argument in 1601: power in action is a collective phenomenon, the result of energies that are being bundled on the spot rather than an invisible hand that had been gathering strength for centuries. The advantages of multiplying the actors involved rather than reducing them are many: there will be no need for metaphysical beings such as “power” or “capital’; the analysis will not get bogged down in the unresolved conundrum of how the capitalisation of power actually takes place; and it is not necessary to go back to the Stone Age in order to explain how all that power had been accumulated in order to be available in sufficient quantities in 1617 (as opposed to, say, in the 1590s). That all this work of assembling the body politic was eventually attributed to the authority of individuals such as the Archdukes or the pope calls for an explanation, not reification. My argument consists of three parts, each of which ties up with the approach developed in the previous chapters. First, the context in which the visitation process took place was not self-evident. It had to be configured, and academics played their part in that process. Second, their motives to do so will be elucidated. The decade at hand was clearly a very interesting time in the accommodation of the interests of academics to those of the power elites, and vice versa. Even if there is no evidence that the project of reform was born in Louvain corridors, academics definitely succeeded in recuperating the whole operation. At the same time, the interpretation and translation
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of the interests of close to 2,000 individuals implied, third, delegation and representation by a number of individuals, and this, of course, affected the course of events. This small minority did not operate as a more or less homogeneous institutional group or a social class. It was not even limited to an academic elite as such. In the bottom-up approach that follows, institutional or sociological frontiers become very fluid. Behind the “Action of the State,” we should be looking for the “State in action.”
6.1. The configuration of a context The reasons why the university had to be reformed, why reform ultimately resulted in a formal codification of old as well as new university statutes, and why external commissioners acting with “higher” authority were involved are far from self-evident. They form part of the negotiations; they are not determined by so-called “pure facts” preceding them. A context had to be first created. Starting with the question of the legitimisation of the visitation, the statements of the contemporaries must be considered. In this respect, the narratio of the 1617 charter gives, in addition to general considerations about the importance of learning for realms and subjects, an immediate reason for the codification of the university statutes. The university, it says, had been flourishing before the rebellion, but had somehow lost its way in the turmoil of civil war.8 Historians have adopted and elaborated this argument, pointing to the numerous calamities that befell the university during the last quarter of that glorious 16th century. Moreover, the decision had been taken in 1607 after several warnings had been issued from both the Archdukes and the papal nuncio to a university that was clearly unable to reform itself. Not only was the Brabant Alma Mater in a financially tight spot but also disorder and gross negligence were rampant within its ranks. Historians and contemporaries agreed that these problems could be resolved only by the Visitatio of 1617. But was the university in ruins in 1617, or even in 1607, and was a visitation truly necessary? The answer to both questions was, apparently, affirmative at the beginning of the 17th century. An agreement had been reached among all parties—academics, empirical “facts”
8
OPB, 326.
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(ruinous colleges, unpaid scholarships, thriving heretic universities), princes, and papal nuncios—that the university was in bad shape. But perhaps the reason for inspection was not only the ruinous state of the university. Rather, it was in ruins because it needed a visitation—and all the opportunities coming with it. Therefore, circumstances other than just an essential “ruinous state” as a “pure,” empirical reality have to be considered in order to explain why an inspection was ordered and why it eventually resulted in the charter of 1617. Reality was less equivocal than suggested by the preamble of the charter of 1617 and, more radically, by the historians of the 19th and 20th centuries. To start with the irregularities, the warnings from Brussels in 1602 and 1604 denounced the escalating student violence in the town, which might be attributed to the inadequacy of the academic police forces— nothing less, nothing more.9 We have seen that the nuncio’s visit to the university in 1601, another “foreboding” of the visitation, had to mend an isolated conflict over membership of the Strict College. In the report of 1607, various interpretations emerged—except when it came to the insufficiency of the budgets and the remuneration of the academic staff.10 And these questions were not answered in the charters of 1617. The explanations given in the preamble of the 1617 charters are not mere rhetoric. It is difficult to overestimate the desolation of the South Netherlands in the 1580s and 1590s. As the university depended on the influx of human and material resources from its hinterland, civil war certainly affected its daily life, even after the clash of arms had moved away from Louvain. By the end of the 16th century, however, the academics had already given a different depiction of their situation in the conflict with the Jesuits.11 The revival of the university was, by then, a fact for the spokesmen of the university, and it can be easily
9
Facts in Camerlynckx, “L’université de Louvain,” 42–43; Elias, Kerk en staat, 269. For the Louvain case, see Vandenghoer, De rectorale rechtbank. 10 The irregularities in the Faculty of Medicine, often quoted by historians (and extrapolated to other faculties), were also mentioned by some respondents, but only one professor of Medicine was proved “guilty.” An edition of the report of 1607 is available in Van Waefelghem, “La Visite,” 107–16, 209–16, 265–315. Another idle professor, in Law, had to be warned twice by the City Council. Résolutions Magistrales, 7 December 1610, SAL, Oud Archief, 311, 50r and 24 May 1619, SAL, Oud Archief, 313, 31r. 11 For instance RAL, OUL, 61, Acta Universitatis, draft of a letter to be sent to friends of the university (congregation of 24 March 1596). There are also the pleas, in the same month, of the Faculty of Arts to the nuncio and to the Archdukes, then
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confirmed by industrious historians pointing out the steadily growing numbers of students in the Arts faculty between 1597 and 1613.12 In his Relazione di Fiandra of 1613, the papal nuncio described the University of Louvain already as far more prosperous, intellectually as well as materially, than Douai,13 while most of the thorny issues treated in the text of the Visitatio still needed to be dealt with. This could be ascribed to the improved situation of the South Netherlands in general rather than to an incomplete reform process. At the end of 1613, the city of Louvain declared in the States of Brabant that the university, its major source of wealth, was flourishing as much as ever.14 Both testimonies, the nuncio’s as well as that of the city, are based on personal experiences—and both are also contextual. The statement of the town, for instance, had to convince the other members of the States that the attempts of the Jesuits to found a university in the neighbouring Principality of Liège must be countered.15 Yet, there is no reason to treat the reality evoked in the charter of 1617 any differently. Arguments based on empirical facts could have been mobilised; tested strategies could have been developed to neutralise the attempts of reform “from outside.” After all, university men had been capable, in the 1590s, of stalling another reform project that had been cheered by the Privy Council.16 In 1607–17, leading academics did not fight on the barricades for their autonomy. Nor did they openly repudiate the description of their situation as problematic. They were, on the contrary, quite cooperative during the whole process. We can
governor general of the Netherlands (Ibidem, 169v–170r and 183r). Compare the arguments in 1583, in Claeys-Bouuaert, L’ancienne Université de Louvain, 130. 12 See the lists of promoti of the Arts faculty, RAL, OUL, 713–14. The low point was the period between 1581 and 1584, when the annual number of new licentiati was never more than ten. In 1608, in contrast, the sources attest for 181 promoti—an average number in 17th-century Louvain. 13 “L’università di Lovanio è antichissima, e si conserva tuttora in molta riputatione. L’università di Duai . . . è di gran lunga inferiore a quella di Lovanio nel concorso degli scolari, nell’eminenza degli professori, e nella fondatione di molti collegii, da i quali vien nobilitata grandemente l’università di Lovanio.” Bentivoglio to Borghese, 1613, ASV, Fondo Borghese, I, 269–272, 61v. 14 Opinion of the first member of Louvain on the Aids of 1613, Résolutions des Etats de Brabant, SAL, Oud Archief, 1709, 407r. 15 Cf. p. 509–21. 16 “Hominum quorundam aemulorum, imo invidiorum, qui nescio quibus insidiis, pietatis et reformationis praetextu, illorum enim verbis utar, conantur praeclara hac nostra instituta evertere.” Oration held at Saint Anne’s day at the pedagogy of the Pig, 1595, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. Cf. p. 298.
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state, therefore, that university men were all too ready to accept the (moderate) assessment of the 1617 charter, that something was rotten in the state of Denmark. They might even have suggested the diagnosis and the remedy themselves. And “reform” was a familiar, manageable word, linked to a wide range of promising connotations and, therefore, easily amenable to serving various causes. The whole Catholic world was regrouping under the banner of “reform” to wage war on heresy. The second building block of a context for reform concerned authority and its instruments. The assertion in the 1617 charter that the initiators of the whole enterprise were the Archdukes themselves, and under their authority, iuncta apostolica authoritate, must be taken seriously. From his viewpoint (and from the viewpoint of the legists in Brussels), the archduke was, for obvious reasons, the primum movens behind the visitation. He was a great prince as well as the protector of his “daughter,” the university, following the example of his imperial and royal predecessors. The papal nuncio, Decio Carafa, had very good reasons for claiming the glory too.17 But all parties, robins, nuncios, and academics, implicitly agreed at least upon one thing: reform had not been initiated in the university itself. Meanwhile, by 1607 the sources already suggest that, with the visitation, a service was rendered to the academics and that the latter were given ample occasion to determine themselves what this service should be. The very first attestation of the commissioners’ activity concerned their request to hand over to the princes a written defence against the apparently bad reputation of the institution.18 Princely authority worked as an external consulting bureau, whose involvement had to “restore confidence” in the academic corporations. At the same time, academics were always involved when any agenda was drawn up. Lists of subjects to be discussed had to be composed by the faculties.19 In 1609, the academics were asked to foot the bill of the proceedings in Louvain; one year later, the university showed its gratitude—which was explicitly part of the deal—by offering gifts to the commissioners for their efforts.20 On several occasions, in Louvain as well as in
17
Carafa to Borghese, 2 June 1607, in ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 100, 135r. Acta Facultatis Artium, 23 July 1607, RAL, OUL, 714, 362. 19 Acta Universitatis, 4 August 1607, RAL, OUL, 62, 309r. An edition in Reusens, Documents relatifs, 1, 575–76. 20 Acta Universitatis, 8 April 1609, RAL, OUL, 63, 14v–15r; ibidem, 29 May 1610, 48v. 18
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Douai, which was to benefit from similar attention later, the prince was thanked for the paternal affection he showed towards his universities by having them “reformed.”21 It is evident that the tool of reform must be considered in the broader context of legal history. The whole project was formally permitted by the academic senate as an ecclesiastical visitation with reference to the Tridentine decrees.22 However, similarities to another legal instrument of power, the codification of customary law by princely councils, are striking. The 1531 Eeuwig Edict of Charles V had ordered the codification and homologation of local legislation in the Netherlands. Next to Roman law, the codification and interpretation of customary law enabled the robins in Brussels to integrate (and dominate) the more than 600 legal systems in the Netherlands.23 Under the Archdukes, another Perpetual Edict of 12 July 1611 triggered the next round of this “codification wave.”24 Yet, codification was rarely a story of imposition from above, but rather one of bargaining and negotiation. Initiatives were taken by local elites to use the resources of “the prince,” the source of all grace and justice, for their own purposes. Thus they contributed, from below, to the staging of state power.25 For instance, the city of Louvain started negotiations in 1616 with the central councils in Brussels to have its customs homologated, and in 1617 even sought to speed up the process by making codification a condition of their consent to the Aids.26 Learned corporations submitted similar requests to their prince. In 1613, the University of Dole sent a “formal” deputy to obtain a reformatio from the Archdukes.27 In return, the legists in Brussels seized the opportunity to bring more homogeneity to academic households. Academics anticipated and capitalised on this thrift for homogeneity. The deputy from Dole passed through Louvain
21
Cf. the report of the visitation of Douai. A.A.Pa., R.VII, 77, 1r. Acta Universitatis, 2 August 1607, RAL, OUL, 62, 308v–309r. 23 De Schepper and Cauchies “Legal Tools,” 260. 24 Martyn, “Het recht ten tijde van de aartshertogen,” 249–54. 25 “Alongside justice—from which law was derived and developed as a source in itself—grace, finances, and war, the law deserves to be categorised more than is usually the case, as one of the great resources of the ‘modern state’.” Deschepper and Cauchies, “Legal Tools,” 266. On the political culture of bargaining under the Archdukes, see Van Honacker, “The Archdukes and Their Subjects,” 241–47. 26 Opinion of the Fourth Member, 11 April 1617, Résolutions des Etats de Brabant, SAL, Oud Archief, 1710. Ibidem, 1717 and the Résolutions Magistrales, SAL, Oud Archief, 312–313. 27 Acta Universitatis, 20 April 1613, RAL, OUL, 63, 111r. 22
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before going to Brussels in order to be inspired by the organisation and financing of academic life there. In the beginning of the 1620s, the Louvain Law faculties pressed charges against their competitors in Douai for not living up to the statutes of the (Louvain) Visitatio of 1617.28 During the visitation process in Louvain, recurrent references were made to the course of things in Douai in order to protect the university’s competitive edge. In 1624, however, eight years after the formal appointment of the abbot of Park as princely visitator of the Flemish University, a Douai version had not yet been enacted.29 Academics in Douai had adopted exactly the same strategies as their colleagues in Louvain, using their commissioner as a transmittor of their desiderata to the prince; hence probably the delay.30 The example of Dole shows how faltering negotiations could result in an overt crisis of authority. The delegate from Dole mentioned in the Louvain Acta Universitatis had apparently been sent not by the (student) university as a whole but by the college of teachers. The student body was manifestly kept out of the negotiations, which led to an overt repudiation of the reform measures and even to an exodus from the Dole studium.31 Students very different from those in Louvain and Douai seem to have boycotted for a while the princely edicts of 1616–18 that had been negotiated with the college of teachers alone. These edicts had attempted the transformation of the Dole student university according to the Bolognese model into a Magisteruniversität such as Louvain and Douai.32 The numerous
28 Correspondence among the Privy Council in Brussels, the magistrate of Louvain, and the Law faculties in Louvain and Douai, 1622, in Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281. 29 Letters from the magistrate of Douai and the Faculty of Medicine to the Privy Council, 1624, Université de Douai 1584–1698, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1285. 30 A similar report, and appeals from academics to his mediation in Brussels, in A.A.Pa., R.VII, 77, Miscellanea, 1r–85r. A decree was prepared, but it is not clear whether it was actually enacted after 1624. 31 See the correspondence among the Infanta (as governess of the Netherlands and Burgundy), the Spanish king, the parliament of Burgundy, and the rector and professors of the University of Dole, September 1622 and 10 May 1624, in Université de Dole 1607–1687, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1284; Beaune and D’Arbaumont, Les universités de Franche-Comté, lv. 32 It might be unfair to reduce the reforms of the Dole studium to a successful “professorial coup” that transformed a student university into a teachers’ university like Douai and Louvain. The literature on the University of Dole, which would be transferred to Besançon in 1691, is paltry. See, in addition to Beaune and D’Arbaumont, Les Universités de Franche-Comté, Theurot, “L’Université de Dole,” 25–44.
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foreigners and nobles at the Dole studium, mostly senior Law students, were apparently less easy to represent than their colleagues in the clerical bastions of the Netherlands. The third component of a context for reform was, consequently, the persons charged with the task. The arguments developed in the previous paragraphs in particular, and the prevailing political culture of bargaining in general, make it very unlikely that academics did not have an important say in all stages of the negotiations. This hypothesis becomes a thesis when dealing with the third question: who actually had to do the job? The 1617 charter solemnly declares that in 1607 the Archdukes had chosen Joannes Drusius, abbot of Park near Louvain, and Stephan Van Craesbeke, member of the Council of Brabant, as commissioners of the visitation. Afterwards, Rome had provided them with apostolic authority.33 However, the charter does not explain why Craesbeke and Drusius were chosen. There had been other candidates, too. Another commission—consisting of Richardot, Assonleville (respectively the president and a prominent member of the Privy Council), and Nicolas Damant, chancellor of Brabant—had previously been charged with the task but had never started. Good reasons for this move have been speculated on in recent historiography. Assonleville died in April 1607;34 Richardot and Damant, occupying the highest offices in the Netherlands, obviously had other things on their minds.35 This may be very relevant for the share that had implicitly been assigned to Assonleville.36 Historians tried to explain these choices by pointing out the mixed composition of the eventual commission, which consisted of an ecclesiastic and a layman.37 But if this was the ultimate, compelling reason, one wonders why, exactly, Drusius, the “ecclesiastic element,” was sent in 1616 to Douai for a similar visitation, the Flemish university being, in contrast to its Brabantine counterpart, an exclusively royal foundation. More recently, historians have insisted on the “Brabanticity”
33
OPB, 326. Roegiers and Vandermeersch, “Les archiducs et l’université de Louvain,” 288. 35 Minute of a letter from the abbot of Park to the papal nuncio, second half of 1617, in A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xxiv. 36 Compare Assonleville’s involvement in the Jesuit affair of the 1590s: “Intelligimus hic ampl. dominum Assonlevillium nescio quid offensionem concepisse propter impetratum apostolicum brevem adversus philosophicum Societatis hic erectum gymnasium.” Cuyckius to Prats, 6 February 1596, RAL, Collèges Jésuites, Louvain, 12. 37 Van Waefelghem, “La Visite,” 6. 34
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of the university.38 Drusius, as the abbot of the Premonstratensian abbey of Park, was an ex officio member of the States. Craesbeke was a member of the Council of Brabant, another typical hybrid of the circles around the dynasty and the regional and local power elites in the States.39 The sovereign Council of the Duchy had, indeed, often claimed jurisdiction over the university.40 Contemporary historiography has a point here, although “Brabanticity” was never invoked before the conflict of 1617 with the nuncio, when the Privy Council presented the duke of Brabant as the ultimate authority in academic affairs.41 This legal representation therefore cries out for a context in which we can grasp its merits in 1607. Owing to the selective attention to the “great moments” in the works of Elias and Van Waefelghem, historians have continued to consider the visitation an operation imposed by the authorities on a reluctant academic community. The latter’s point of view, and that of third parties, was not considered relevant. A “Brabanticity” of the university may have indeed interested the negotiating partners, but not because of some legal representations derived from macro-historical constellations and, therefore, beyond redefinition in the specific circumstances of 1607. Juridical texts and “common sense” connotations allowing for a “Brabanticity” of the university could have been mobilised to seduce, for instance, the States of Brabant to join the party, but for different reasons. The States were, in the first place, supposed to pay a salary raise to the teaching staff, a raise that had successfully been presented as a central issue in academic reform. When it came to satisfying their financial needs, university men probably had no objections to drawing a Brabantine card, as they already had done throughout the 16th century for similar reasons. The appointment of commissioners from its midst might have facilitated this bargain with regional power elites. If one insists on invoking a “Brabanticity” of the university and if sources can be mobilised for it, it should be stated differently. Members of the Brabant power elites were not so much commissioned with the visitation because the university was “Brabantine”;
38
Vandermeersch and Roegiers, “Les archidus et l’université de Louvain,” 288. Cf. Bulst, “Rulers, Representative Institutions, and their Members,” 41–58. 40 On the Brabanticity of the university, see Roegiers, “De Brabanticiteit van de Leuvense Universiteit,” 411–34. 41 Elias, Kerk en staat, 278–79. The preamble of the Visitatio is silent on the issue. OPB, 326. 39
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its Brabanticity was bolstered because representatives of the Brabant power elites were charged with its visitation. Furthermore, Craesbeke and Drusius had more than the Brabantine string in their bow. Both commissioners belonged to, or at least were in touch with, the circle of decision-makers in Brussels. They probably even intensified their contacts with them, as a convenient result of their activities as visitators of the university. Drusius had direct access to the prince; at least, academics from Louvain and Douai who wrote to him assumed that he had.42 Instead of coming up with legal legitimisations not even invoked by contemporaries, one should follow Craesbeke and Drusius in what they actually did. From the academic perspective, they were, first of all, the university’s men, not the commissioners of the pope, the nuncio, the States, or of anyone else. This would probably have been the case for Assonleville, too. He had been an acquaintance of the university as well, as numerous delegations from Louvain had appealed to him for support in the struggle for the academic privileges of nomination in the 1590s. His position was not necessarily unique. He was not the only robin in Brussels who maintained cordial relations with academic circles. Nevertheless, his reputation in Louvain as “one of the most important councillors” of the prince43 must have increased considerably his crédit as a negotiation partner. Craesbeke shows many similarities to Assonleville in this respect. He was, as a doctor in utroque, indeed a former professor of Law of the university, well versed in academic affairs, and acquainted with the people with whom he would have to deal. Like Assonleville, he had regularly been solicited by the university as go-between for the defence of contested academic privileges or for a warranty from the quartering of troops in university buildings. He could count on the same signs of gratitude from the academics as Assonleville.44 As for the abbot of Park, the successor to the prelate who had been a focus of one of the papal briefs against the Jesuits in the 1590s, his relationship with the academic community prior to 1607 is poorly
42 Van Waefelghem suggests that the prince consulted him regularly on ecclesiastical matters. “La Visite,” 6. 43 “Consiliarius ex primis suarum Celsitudinum”; cf. Acta Universitatis, 28 June 1604, RAL, OUL, 62, 196v. There are numerous other attestations on his position in Brussels in these notules. 44 For instance Acta Facultatis Artium, 1588, RAL, OUL, 713, 259v–260r, and 1604, RAL, OUL, 714, 184; Acta Universitatis, 1591 and 1594, RAL, OUL, 60, 239v–240r and 373r; 1597, RAL, OUL, 61, 255r; 1604, RAL, OUL, 62, 187v and 191r.
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documented. He was an alumnus of the Faculty of Theology; he was approachable as abbot of Park, ex officio one of the titular apostolic conservators of the university’s privileges and one of the two provisors of Craendonck College. It is unlikely that this close neighbour of the university—the abbey is situated at the gates of Louvain—was not in touch with the academics. Unlike Craesbeke, his functioning in academic networks is well documented from 1607 onwards. In 1614, the Faculty of Arts considered him her most important advocate in Brussels.45 The same conclusion is suggested by the Varia de Universitate Lovaniensi in the abbey of Park as well as by university and faculty minutes. The reason for this warm relationship is obvious. The commissioners’ credibility (and their future careers as mediators) depended substantially on the good will of the academics to cooperate with them. As suggested above, competitive channels of communication with Brussels, at court and in the councils, existed and could easily be manipulated by academics to discredit, if necessary, the commissioners in the eyes of the prince. It is not surprising that these men almost naturally became the university’s spokesmen in place of rigid reformers dispatched by a distant government. This marriage of convenience had been arranged at least partially by academics. An incomplete minute of a letter by Drusius to the papal nuncio in 1617 provides invaluable information. In his draft, the abbot tried to explain why things had been done the way they had.46 In the context of the 1617 conflict between Rome and Brussels, he reconstructed (his part in) the appointment and authorisation of the commissioners in 1607. According to him, it was due to his objections, when asked to be a princely commissioner, that the archduke decided to involve the Holy See, notwithstanding the arguments of President Richardot.47 This implies that Drusius and Craesbeke had been sounded out before the nuncio, Decio Carafa, was asked by the archduke to designate two Visitors. In his letter of 2 June 1607 to Cardinal Borghese, Carafa mentioned the archduke’s request to have the University of Louvain inspected. The nuncio, he reported, had delegated the task to a few persons fit for the job. Carafa proudly stated
45 Résolutions Magistrales, 18 December 1609, SAL, Oud Archief, 311, 10r; Acta Facultatis Artium, 3 March 1614, RAL, OUL, 715, 10v. 46 The abbot’s letter is mentioned in a letter from the nuncio to Borghese, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 113, 275r. 47 A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xxiv.
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that, thanks to his intervention, all possible affirmations of princely authority over a university subjected immediately to the Holy See had been repudiated. During his diplomatic activities, he had relied, he said, on the advice of a certain Jacobus Jansonius.48 We will meet Jansonius again in the next sections. For our purpose here, it is important to note that he played an important role in the appointment by the nuncio of commissioners who had already been solicited by the decision-makers in Brussels. This implies that Jansonius had been informed about, if not involved in, the very first stage of the decision-making and that he fully approved of the outcome. Otherwise he would have suggested other inspectors to Carafa, who remained ignorant of the previous appointments, or at least pretended to be towards his Roman patrons. In this light, it is interesting that Richardot did not turn to a less recalcitrant candidate prepared to proceed without Roman authorisation. It suggests that the president’s room for manoeuvre was restricted by the desiderata of a third party: the university. An alliance had been forged to create a context for reform among parts of the legal traditions of society in general and the university in particular, people who could speak for other people without being discredited immediately, and a selection of empirical facts. The university had serious problems that could be resolved only by an overall review of her statutes accomplished by Craesbeke and Drusius, two commissioners acceptable to all parties, albeit for different reasons. At all stages of the negotiations, academics were almost certainly involved. This leads inevitably to the question of why this whole context had been set up.
6.2. Academics and reform As suggested above, the charters of 1617—a reform of university and faculty statutes and another of the academic tribunals—were not the immediate result of the investigations performed by Drusius and Craesbeke in August and September 1607. The interrogation of the 28 academics had led to an uneven report in 1607, while the 1617 charters were evidently normative texts. Moreover, important issues 48 “E per indrizzar bene il negocio mi sono servito dell’opra, e conseglio del Signor Giansonio lettor in Lovania huomo cosi in lettere, che in bontà molto eminente.” ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 100, 135r.
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raised in 1607 were not necessarily dealt with in the texts promulgated ten years later, and vice versa. The decade separating both “great moments” is crucial for an understanding of the constellation in which these sacred texts were fabricated. To explain why a context for reform had to be created, this section will deal with the interests at stake during the decade under investigation and will explore who determined the university’s interests. Because these interests largely exceeded the matters dealt with in the legislative documents of 1617, the financial needs of Academia have to be examined as well. 6.2.1. “Quoniam dignus est operarius mercede sua.” Academics and the dross of the earth A first request, drafted in 1607 before the inspection tour of Drusius and Craesbeke, echoed the repeated pleas of Louvain academics in the second half of the 16th century to improve their financial situation.49 Under the imperial and royal predecessors of the Archdukes, the road to Court had already proved auspicious for Louvain, Douai, and Dole. And their new rulers did not disappoint them. In the early 17th century, the dynasty focussed considerable efforts on the resuscitation of college life, on the subsidising of the teaching staff, and on the preservation of the academic corporation’s “corporatist nucleus,”50 in particular, as we will see, the academic privileges that gave access to ecclesiastical benefices. These differentiated actions reflect the diffuse distribution of financial resources, typical for early modern universities, over various institutions at different levels, i.e., the covering universitas, colleges, foundations, chairs, and faculties. Tridentine decrees stressing the importance of an adequately formed clergy to fight Protestantism became powerful allies as a new wave of resident colleges, mostly for theologians, was added to the already existing institutions.51 Material resources were assured by levying pensions on rich abbeys, obtained through princely brokerage in the jungle of the Roman curia—another feature in the financing of universities in early modern Europe. The financial needs of the king’s colleges for the
49
Reusens, Documents relatifs, 1, 576–77. This concept was introduced during the Colloquium in Bern, 19–23 September 2001, on Finanzierung von Universität und Wissenschaft in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. 51 Vandermeersch and Roegiers, “Les archiducs et l’université de Louvain,” 289. 50
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training of priests in Louvain and Douai, both founded by Philip II, were the object of intense diplomatic activity in Rome between 1604 and 1621. The Louvain foundation, for instance, obtained a pension that equalled or even surpassed the total sum of the subsidies granted by the prince and the States combined to the teaching staff from 1612 onwards. The concentration of sometimes very substantial economic, and therefore human, resources in colleges with reference to conciliar decrees created new opportunities for academics who claimed to embody the “Tridentine spirit.” This “class” of academic clerics could also rely on the system of ecclesiastical benefices to provide for a decent income. This elite among the Louvain professors, however, was to benefit from direct government financing from the beginning of the 17th century onwards, an evolution that was to be framed a few years later in the context of the visitation process. Again, the similarity with the universities of Dole and Douai is striking. The Archdukes and their entourage had appeared to be incontournable as mediators in the Eternal City, using their incomparable resources for the sake of their universities. As typical brokers they managed, via their residents in Rome and their secretaries of state, to redirect resources from the monastic infrastructure in their lands to their universities. What started as regular, princely subsidies, probably sometime in the 1590s, quickly shifted, at least partially, to perpetual pensions on monastic goods.52 It is significant that, even after this switch, Louvain academics still referred to these subsidies as the “princely donation,” which compensated for the academics’ loss of fiscal immunity from taxation by the States of Brabant in the first years of the 1600s. The same States had been involved in university financing as well. They were already paying subsidies to the professors in the Law faculties and to Justus Lipsius in 1601.53 By then, the salaries 52 “Une pension perpetuele . . . en benefice de noz seminaires de bons pasteurs et au parfaict des dotz des professeurs de noz universitez de Louvain et de Douai a la descharge de nostre domaine.” Albert to his resident in Rome, Négociations de Rome, 3 September 1604, AGR, Audience, 439, 323r–v. These are probably the subsidies referred to by the Privy Council and the nuncio in the 1617 quarrel about the jurisdiction over the university; cf. Elias, Kerk en staat, 278–79. 53 See the financial report of Vanneij, stewart of the States of Brabant, Actes concernant les Etats de Brabant, 1600, SAL, Oud Archief, 1797. In another report composed on 29 January 1611, the ordinary as well as extraordinary or royal professors and the professors of Medicine are mentioned as beneficiaries of the States’ subsidies; cf. Actes divers concernant l’université, SAL, Oud Archief, 3958. They date back to allowances promised in the 1560s; cf. Claeys-Bouuaert, Contribution à l’histoire économique, 56, 68–71.
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varied from around the level of a master mason’s annual income to three times that amount.54 Before 1607 teachers’ salaries in the higher faculties in Louvain were, therefore, already a mix of prebends or allowances provided by the city and of subsidies from the prince or the Provincial States. But during the following years, the States quintupled their subsidies to this teaching staff.55 Following the 1607 report, the city magistrate of Louvain decided in 1609 to support the academics’ requests, after a favourable answer from the First and Second States (the nobility and the clergy) to a memorandum handed over by the professors in Law and Medicine.56 Three years and several joint delegations of academics and townsmen later, salaries of all teachers in Law and Medicine and of the three archducal professors in Theology increased by 150 to 200 per cent. Academics certainly had good reasons to beg for a salary raise. They probably felt that their income had decreased compared to, say, the nominal incomes of craftsmen and city clerks that had quadrupled or even quintupled throughout the 16th century. But at the same time, salaries were often only a part of revenues brought together from different sources such as their emoluments, their share in the income of the faculty, their administrative functions in the university, in the faculties and in the colleges, and ecclesiastical benefices in Louvain or elsewhere.57 In harsh times, this combination of private and corporate finances worked both ways. College presidents, for instance, faced a considerable loss of honour, credit, and power if they 54 Calculations based on Van Uytven, Stadsfinanciën, 70 and 578. The professors in the university with the highest salaries, among whom Justus Lipsius, received 500 or 600 florins in 1600, compared with 200 florins earned by an average craftsman. Cf. A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xxiv, 2nd bundle. Salaries in Douai, as mentioned in the reports on appointment procedures sent by the provisors of the university to the Privy Council (Université de Douai 1584–1698, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1285) and requests to the abbot of Park (A.A.Pa., R.VII., 77, 70r) were, at least nominally, considerably lower. 55 Résolutions magistrales, October 1610, SAL, Oud Archief, 311, 42v; and the documents cited in notes 62 and 63. A sum of 3,600 florins was to be paid annually from the Extraordinary Aids, in addition to the 900 florins that had been paid by the States from at least 1601 and the so-called donatio principis. In 1609, the 4,500 florins promised to university men amounted to nearly 2 per cent of the Extraordinary Aids voted by the States. Cortte recollectie vande opinien vande vier hooftsteden van Brabant, 7 July 1609, in SAL, Oud Archief, 1708. 56 Résolutions magistrales, 12 December 1609, SAL, Oud Archief, 311, 9r. The mediation of the prince is apparent in Actes concernant les Etats de Brabant, 29 January 1611, SAL, Oud Archief, 1801. 57 Roegiers, “Professorencarrières,” 235.
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failed to protect their colleges from decay. But improved economic circumstances, thanks to the Twelve Years Truce, had a positive impact on the financial situation of pious foundations and colleges. The question of whether this salary raise was “truly necessary” is therefore not only irresolvable; it is also irrelevant. What is important is that the payment of “decent” salaries, necessary “to uphold one’s state,” was presented and accepted once more in these years as a conditio sine qua non for a thriving university. This link apparently worked well in Douai and Dole, too. In 1614, at the request of the academics in Douai, the archduke repeatedly asked the Provincial States of Artois, Hainault, and Walloon Flanders (the Stewardships of Orchies, Douai, and Lille) to follow the example of their Brabantine counterpart. Their lack of enthusiasm forced the archduke to recommence negotiations in Rome in 1616, after the academics there had used their new broker—the abbot of Park—to draw attention again to their financial needs.58 Such choices, however, were not self-evident when, for instance, the Jesuit Order successfully took over one German university after another and propagated its own model of financing in the numerous colleges for the humanities erected by the Society in the Netherlands.59 In the visitation process, laymen and a majority of secular clerics could interest policymakers in the Catholic Low Countries more than the members of an international order60—but we have seen that, in the 1590s, not every implication the academics linked to their identity as secular clerics was honoured by these policy-makers. In between 1618 and 1625, a similar “misunderstanding” had to be cleared up. By then, a new text had become an important part of academic coalition building. It is, consequently, necessary to look into that text first.
58 The University of Douai to the abbot of Park, 19 November 1616, in Miscellanea. Visite de l’Université de Douai par Drusius 1616, A.A.Pa., R.VII, 77, 71. The archduke to the States of Artois, Hainault, and of Lille, Douai, and Orchies, 1 March 1614, in Université de Douai 1584–1698, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1285. Négociations de Rome, 1617–1623, AGR, Audience, 451–459. Similar policies for the dotation of the University of Dole were adopted in 1616. Their outcome remains unclear. 59 Jesuit colleges were not free, of course. See Müller, “Zur Finanzierung.” 60 This was possible thanks to a large supply of benefices that was not vindicated by nobles (cf. infra). Cf., by analogy, the reactions of the Roman families to the elevation of members of the orders (or foreigners), who did not fit in “their picture,” i.e., their “sistema di famiglie,” to the cardinalate, in Ago, Carriere e clientele, 175.
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6.2.2. “Laudabiles dicte universitatis consuetudines The subsidies from the States were paid from 1612 onwards. The abbot of Park and the city of Louvain, members of the States, functioned as the cerberus of the academics when other representatives seemed to establish their priorities wrongly.61 At the same time, both were commissioned in 1620 by the representatives to warn their protégés, the Louvain professors of Theology, Law, and Medicine, to observe meticulously the text of the Visitatio or to risk losing their subsidies from the States. They had good reasons to do so. Eleven years previously, back in 1609, the States had reacted positively to the requests of the doctors in Law and Medicine, “provided that regulations were drawn up which the university’s professors had to comply with.”62 The link between the report of 1607 and the charters of the Visitatio of 1617 was forged in 1609, when the States attached conditions to their financial involvement in academic affairs. It is tempting to interpret the whole affair, therefore, as horse trading. Society offered “proper remuneration” to academics unable to observe “their obligations.” Thus norms linked to an emerging social role of “the academic” had to be imposed on them by a higher authority who was able to penalise them, too, if they misbehaved. This probably reflected the self-image of the States of Brabant after they had been informed (by the city of Louvain, by the abbot of Park, and by Craesbeke, etc.) about the deplorable state of the university, and after “they” had decided that there was only one way to cope with it. Moreover, it fits with this assessment that the Visitatio of 1617 was, in fact, a moderate codification of “practices that, at least informally, were a theoretical or practical reality.”63 According to historical tradition, the essence of the Visitatio consisted in the intervention of the State as the ultimate authority in academic affairs, not in its content as such. In order to prove this statement, one might point, for instance, to the mandate the Archdukes gave to Drusius and
61 On payments, see the Specifications (. . .), 30 May 1612, in Varia Statuum Brabantie, A.A.Pa., R.VII., 72, 133r–v; and recurrent pleas by the prelates and the nobles to subtract the sum to be paid to the professors from the Extraordinary Aids, in the Résolutions des Etats de Brabant and the Actes concernant les Etats de Brabant, SAL, Oud Archief, respectively 1709 and 1803. 62 Opinion of prelates and nobles on the Aids, 1609, in Résolutions Magistrales, SAL, Oud Archief, 311, 9r. 63 Vandenghoer, De rectorale rechtbank, 21–44.
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Craesbeke in 1607 to examine “whether the laudable statutes, foundations and customs of the university were observed.”64 But if one examines what actually happened in the years 1607–17, one gets a different picture of the “laudabiles consuetudines” of academia. In correspondence, official acts, and minutes of academic and city councils, the “theoretical or practical realities” of the academics do not appear as clear and evident at all. It is possible that in some cases the “inveterate practices,” as the university or the faculty boards represented them, were not that controversial within the circles that participated in the negotiations. The stipulations on the courses of study in the faculties of Law and the schools of the theologians apparently were not, as far as the (absence of ) sources allow us to conclude, the issue of noisy polemics.65 But the files in the series Varia de Universitate Lovaniensi do not consist only of lists of statutes to be subscribed to by a benign archduke; indeed, the archives of the abbey of Park hide the dusty remnants of heavy polemics, vehement attacks, and bitter defences. In this light, it is striking that in all the cases in which academics were at odds with the outside world over their laudabiles consuetudines, they somehow won. Whether university men quarrelled with the city over academic criminal jurisdiction or the criteria for membership of the university, whether such quarrels concerned the reform of academic tribunals in the separate charter of the Reformatio Curiarum or the ceremonial prerogatives of the university’s chancellor and vice-chancellor, the outcome in the 1617 charters largely reflected their point of view. Indeed, they often drafted the charters themselves. Two intriguing cases may suffice as illustration. The first case concerns the relationship with the city of Louvain and its nomination policy. From the 15th century onwards, the magistrate had appointed the ordinary professors in the higher faculties, a procedure not uncommon in the later medieval universities founded in the Empire. The city of Louvain considered itself the initiator behind the foundation of the university and, as in Douai, local elites made serious financial contributions to the studium they hosted.66 In the Flemish
64
Copy of this letter in Acta Universitatis, 2 August 1607, RAL, OUL, 62, 306v. As far as we know, they were drafted by two or three academics, but no protests were forthcoming. Sylvius and Jansonius to the abbot of Park, respectively 13 May 1616, in Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII, 60, 325r, and June 1617 (?), A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xiii, 2nd bundle. 66 Cf. Nelissen, De stichtingsbul. 65
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university, the college of distributors and provisors, a mixed committee of academics and town officials, apparently kept possible quarrels over appointments behind closed doors.67 At Louvain, and in the smaller sister university in Dole, the reforms of 1617 and 1616–18, respectively, deeply affected the appointment procedures and, therefore, the strategies aspiring teachers had to develop in order to obtain a chair. In Burgundy, a team of royal, later archducal, distributors recruited the staff of the university.68 A first reform in the 1570s had already subjected their decisions to parliamentary supervision. Simultaneously, the dean and two senior members of the faculty were added to the committee. Therefore, from an academic point of view, this assembly showed some similarities with the mixed college of distributors in Douai. The settlement seemed to suit the university men in 1616, as they protested, in vain, against the institution of a public concours69 that introduced a new partner into the negotiations: an audience of notables and students that could repudiate the committee in the eyes of “Brussels.”70 In 1625, the States of Brabant proposed in vain the application of similar procedures in Louvain.71 In the Brabant Alma Mater, things were different. In most cases between 1588 and 1625, the Privy Council asked for the advice of the respective faculty boards when appointing royal, later archducal, professors in the faculties of Law and Theology, still a minority of the Louvain staff.72 The city of Louvain, which controlled the recruitment of the bulk of professors in the higher faculties, did not feel obliged to consult an “official” body of academics. Sometimes city councillors and their protégés risked open confrontations with academics and networks whose desiderata were neglected. Historians have traditionally sided, implicitly or explicitly, with their academic predecessors of the
67 Promotions were made on seniority. Cf. reports on five vacancies in the higher faculties 1611 and 1621 in Université de Douai 1584–1698, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1285. 68 These were recruited in the environment of Parliament. Cf. Université de Dole 1607–1687, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1284. 69 Beaune and D’Arbaumont, Les universités de Franche-Comté, p. lxiii and lxxviii– lxxix. 70 A 1618 letter by 19 law students of the University of Dole to the Privy Council in Brussels fulminated against the jury’s decision. Université de Dole 1607–1687, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1284. 71 Résolutions Magistrales, 2 January 1625, SAL, Oud Archief, 315, 75r. 72 That is, in the appointment procedures in 1588–1625. See Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281, except for the appointment of Thomas Stapleton. Ibidem.
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Ancien Régime, translating these controversies into battles between the universal logic of scientific criteria wielded by the university and the favouritism of a shortsighted city.73 Were “corruption” and “favouritism” rampant? Matrimonial strategies deployed by academics aspiring to chairs in the faculties of Law and Medicine indeed were occasionally invoked by those who opposed the magistrate’s choices.74 They found an eager audience in Brussels. In the 1617 charter and in letters from the Privy Council to the city magistrate from 1597 onwards, references are made to common interest, the bonum publicum, which had to prevail together with the honour of the university when the city appointed apt teachers in the higher faculties. This common interest had to be preserved through the involvement of the faculty boards, the stricta collegia. According to the 1617 charter, the boards always had to give their advice first.75 It gave the honourable faculty regents the opportunity to define among “peers” the meaning of “public interest” as the situation demanded. Sometime before 1617, faculty boards had managed to align themselves with “common interest” in the eyes of policymakers in Brussels, public interest’s watchdogs—or stepmothers?—par excellence. By mobilising the bonum publicum and thus by reinforcing the link with central power elites, they imposed themselves on the city and on aspirant colleagues as partners in the negotiations. Academics could claim to be the driving force behind this move. Their wish for greater involvement of the faculty boards was already clear in 1610, on the occasion of another conflict with the city concerning the access to the board of the Faculty of Theology. This ended in defeat for the town as well. In contrast to the situation in the other higher faculties, ordinary professors in Theology, who were appointed by the city, did not automatically become members of the faculty board in the beginning of the 17th century. The affluence of new, royal professors in the 16th century had threatened the position of the faculty members, the “shareholders” of the faculty’s income. The faculties of Law, when facing the same problem, had simply blocked access to their strictum collegium
73
Camerlynckx, “L’université,” 51. This interpretation has survived until today. Cf. a letter from Drusius to Trevigi, the physician of the Archdukes, 2 May 1620, Correspondance d’André Trévisius, AGR, Audience, 1462. 75 This settlement did not arrest the emergence of a Louvain “caste” of professors and academic office holders. See Roegiers, in “Professorencarrières,” 227–40. Louvain never became a real Familienuniversität after the German model. 74
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for the royal, later archducal, professors in Canon and Civil Law. For various reasons, the theologians chose to co-opt not more than eight doctors to their collegium strictum, regardless of their membership on the teaching staff. Those excluded, especially the teachers, naturally disliked the arrangement. A first riot in 1601—probably linked with the revival of academic life and income—had already called for the intervention of the nuncio.76 Nine years later, two ordinary professors, excluded from the honours and benefits of the regency, appealed to the city as the defender of its asserted rights over the faculty board of Theology. Throughout the discussions on that matter, a scandalised city council was faced with the theologians’ claim to be heard during all appointment procedures.77 The result was four years of litigation between town and gown, in spite of the mediation offered by Craesbeke and Drusius. In the end, the archduke enacted the faculty’s proposal for a compromise—one that did not put serious restraints on academic practices.78 The Visitatio of 1617 does not mention this agreement. While access to the stricta collegia of Medicine and Law was meticulously elaborated, the articles concerning the regents of Theology remained vague about the composition of their strict college. The city council, at the same time, became more restricted. If its candidates were not to lose their share of the subsidies from the States and the prince, the magistrate had to ask for the advice of the respective faculties. Through the Visitatio of 1617, academics in Louvain successfully created or reinforced links between
76 The rebellious theologians’ request has been edited in Louant, Correspondance, 666. It is this intervention—in addition to internal competition for prerogatives in the use of the Arts’ nomination privileges (cf. minutes of the Academic Senate, 24 June, 1601, RAL, OUL, 62, 47v)—that historians interpreted as prompting the visitation. However, it remained without practical effect. Cf. a declaration in the 1607 report, Van Waefelghem, “La Visite,” 265. Cf. p. 371–72. 77 The minutes mention similar moves made by the members of the Law faculties. Résolutions Magistrales, 28 September and 7 December 1610, SAL, Oud Archief, 311, 41r and 50r. 78 Only two out of the five ordinary professors, to be chosen by the faculty, had to be admitted to the circle of faculty regents. The city’s attempts to install seniority as a criterium for access to the faculty board was refuted. Cf. Résolutions Magistrales, 1610–1614, SAL, Oud Archief, 311–12; opinion of the city of Louvain on the Aids, 26 October 1611, Résolutions des Etats de Brabant, SAL, Oud Archief, 1709, 188r, Decret de l’archiduc Albert d’après laquel deux des cinq professeurs, nommés par la ville à la facult” de théologie, seront de droit membres de l’étroit conseil de la faculté, 19 June 1614, SAL, Oud Archief, 3995. De Jongh, L’ancienne Faculté de Théologie, 71 n.1.
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public interest, decent salaries for disciplined professors—laymen and secular clerics alike—and influential faculty boards.79 The second case shows how university men, through the Visitatio of 1617, confronted their major competitors, the Jesuits, with their claims. The evidence in the previous chapters reduces the surprise, that in all three universities of the Netherlands and Burgundy academic reform was somehow related to the question of which role was to be attributed to the self-styled storm-troopers of Catholicism, especially in an area crowded with other groups claiming this status for themselves. From the academic point of view, reform offered new opportunities to block the way of the Jesuits “once and for all.” Their success, however, varied greatly, despite contingent alliances between the sister institutions, as well as their numerous references to each other to seduce the robins in Brussels. At Dole, academics were forced into an uneasy union with the local Jesuit college in 1618. In return, attempts were made to resuscitate a languishing theological faculty as a stronghold for the secular clergy. Two years later, however, Dole professors appealed to Louvain in the quarrel with the Jesuits over graduation ceremonies. In Douai, Jesuits had occupied, through their flourishing colleges d’Anchin and, since 1616, de Marchiennes, an important position in the Arts faculty from the second half of the 16th century. Their aspirations led to serious conflicts with the secular clerics on the faculty board of the Arts and in the Faculty of Theology. Therefore, from 1616 onwards, leading academics from Douai tried to turn the tide through the new communication lines established with Brussels by Drusius’ visitation. Jesuits, who organised education in two of the three colleges of the Arts faculty, were never consulted throughout the process. Interestingly, the Jesuits were not even mentioned once in the Louvain Visitatio of 1617. That may have been exactly the point. In the absence of evidence, we can only speculate on the reasons why the visitation had been launched exactly in 1606–07. Yet, it may be relevant that academics had been fretting, in that same time interval, over a resuscitation of
79 OPB, 338. The advice of the respective faculty boards was not binding, but their moral standing in Brussels was high: “. . . ce que croions vous ne ferez difficulte daccomplir prenant esgard aulx liberalitez dont avons [= the prince] use vers ladicte universite.” The Privy Council to the city, 2 May 1620, Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281.
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the Society’s plan to implement Torrentius’ will after the death of Clement VIII. It was in this context that the academics had reached out to Aldobrandini, their cardinal-protector and the nipote of the late Clement VIII.80 The advantages of academic reform via a formal visitation were considerable: it excluded the fathers, who, like their Douai co-religionists, had no seat on the faculty boards; it made one of the major arguments (or pretexts, depending on your viewpoint) for a Jesuit philosophical school obsolete, and by consequence the visitation prevented in an innocuous way that Jesuits and academic reform became something of an item again. Seen from this perspective, it is not surprising that the promulgation of the Visitatio of the University of Louvain in 1617 led to new confrontations between academics and the Society. In 1618, the fathers’ suspicion was aroused by a statute in the Visitatio that stipulated that all secular clerics studying theology could present themselves for examination and graduation only if they produced testimonies of attendance at the three daily public lectures organised by the faculty in the University Hall, within a fixed period. The regular clerics could continue to follow lectures from their teachers, in their own colleges in Louvain, if these were incorporated (which was not the case of the local Jesuit college).81 Louvain Jesuits mobilised Rome and Brussels to ensure that the order’s asserted rights to teach and to confer degrees were not annihilated by the Visitatio. The public chairs in Theology in their college in Louvain attracted a great number of students aspiring to a career in the secular clergy as well.82 This is also true of their thriving college in Antwerp and the public chair in Douai. There, a sentence of the Privy Council in 1614 had declared the order’s chair a valid alternative to the public lectures organised by the faculty. Answers from Brussels and Rome were favourable to the Louvain Jesuits in 1618: the Visitatio of 1617 did not annul the solemn papal bulls granted to the Society in the previous century.83
80
Cf. p. 350 and 423–24. OPB, 331. 82 “Escrivez moy vostre desseign, s’il vous plaist, et, en cas qu’il demeure à Louvain, s’il entendra les Jesuistes, ou bien les lessons des Halles.” Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, 18 May 1617, concerning the training of the addressee’s nephew, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 12; see also 24. 83 Letter from the Privy Council to the Archdukes, 13 October 1618, in Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281, and the correspondence between the 81
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Plate 6.1. Hallae Lovanienses The Louvain Halls, a building that epitomises the history of the university town. After the foundation of the Theology Faculty in 1432 by Pope Eugenius IV, the town freed part of the Drapery Hall, built in the 14th century during Louvain’s high tide as an industrial centre, in order to serve as an auditory for the new faculty. The other higher faculties would acquire classrooms in the building as well, which also hosted the Tribunal of the Rector, the university’s wine and beer cellar, and, until 1914, the Central Library. A synonym for the university’s public schools until the French Revolution, “the Halls” currently refers to the central administration of the Catholic University of Louvain housed in them. Engraving in Gramaye, Joannes Baptista, Antiquitates illustrissimi ducatus Brabantiae (. . .). Brussels: Joannes Momartius, 1610. [Catholic University of Louvain, Central Library]
The Louvain theologians, however, begged to differ. From the beginning they had used the Visitatio, confirmed by Brussels and by Rome, as a tool to unravel the “Jesuit anomaly.” The academics knew what they were doing: they were the ones who had drafted the stipulations in question; they had made suggestions to a willing abbot on how their claims could be transformed into norms. In their correspondence with their broker, they had referred openly to the Society; they had anticipated possible “tergiversations” by the Jesuits; they had shivered at the
nuncio and Cardinal Borghese, the Secretary of State, 25 August 1618, in ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 108r–v.
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mere thought of a settlement like the one made in Douai in 1614.84 The whole affair resulted in a protracted confrontation between Louvain, which introduced an international dimension in the 1620s by mobilising the Spanish universities, and an equally international Jesuit Order. Ultimately, the Louvainists triumphed, annihilating the Society’s hopes of integration into the academic field in the Netherlands. The dynamics involved in these conflicts go beyond the questions that are at stake here, but in view of the evidence in general and the two cases discussed here in particular, it is clear that the text composed in 1617 could only be perceived by the academics as largely drafted by themselves, and for themselves, before being conveniently canonised by the highest authorities in the realm and in Christendom. In other words, if one sticks to the familiar juxtaposition of “the university” and “the state,” one should wonder who imposed the visitation upon whom. 6.2.3. “Saniores dicunt. . . .” Academic oligarchies and reform But “who was who” in Academia? So far I have deliberately used labels such as “the university” or “academics.” But “the university” was not heard at all. There was never a migration of more than 1,000 university members to Brussels or to the abbey of Park to air, as “one man,” the desiderata of the universitas rectoris, doctorum et scholarium. Its interests were always translated by representatives who could speak in her name. In a Magisteruniversität such as Louvain, these representatives were doctors, teachers, and college presidents—those members of the academic community able to avoid or rein in criticisms through the niche they had constructed in the academic market of knowledge, degrees, scholarships, benefices, recommendations, and offices. The Visitatio of 1617 was, therefore, not a turning point, pregnant with meaning, in the concentration of power in the hands of an “academic aristocracy.” Nevertheless, from an institutional point of view, academic reform did bundle the university’s resources in the hands of the academic oligarchs, the negotiators of reform, through their visibility, their crédit, and, therefore, their power.
84 Jansonius to Drusius, 8 April 1615 and 15 March 1617, A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xiii.
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Because our sources focus on the top of the academic hierarchy, we can only speculate on students’ reactions to some aspects of reform that affected them directly. In short, they hardly ever entered the picture themselves; someone else always spoke for them. In addition, because of their heterogeneous social backgrounds, their diverse relationships with their teachers, and their diverging expectations, it is impossible to treat them as a single group. In all cases, straightforward repudiation of academic reform by students of the higher faculties was anticipated by the attempts of Louvain academics to have the same rules, especially concerning the requirements for examination and graduation, imposed on the sister university in Douai. Homogeneity was a must for academics in Louvain, who on several occasions mentioned the Douai example, rather than an invention of “rationalists” in the Privy Council. Leading academics explicitly wanted to prevent students from protesting with their feet and migrating to Douai. This question might have been more pressing in the faculties of Medicine and Law, as recriminations of the latter against the jurists from Douai in 1624 seem to suggest. It is significant that the attempts of the faculty board of Theology to monopolise teaching through the Visitatio did not provoke an exodus on the part of their students to Douai, where the public chair of the Jesuits was a legitimate road to graduation. A possible loss of students, or open contestation, was not anticipated, despite the apparent popularity of the Jesuit courses. It is plausible that most students had not asked for the faculty’s policy regarding the Jesuits. Macro-historical hypotheses about the social composition of Louvain student populations might furnish a tentative explanation for this relative compliance of students in theology.85 Their colleagues in law and medicine often belonged to higher social classes, only a minority of whom relied on scholarships and participated in college life. The mobility of the latter was, therefore, greater. The social and cultural environment in which theologians passed their years in Louvain was very different. Scholarships, residence in colleges, and ecclesiastical benefices likely enhanced strategies much more focused on their academic patrons. Regents in Theology might have felt quite secure as every year, students from Douai joined the Louvain schools, partly seduced by privileges of nomination that the Flemish university
85
Tentative outlines in Roegiers and Lamberts, Louvain University, 46.
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lacked. At the same time, however, many parents, encouraged by the fathers’ education of their children at the numerous Jesuit colleges, regretted the Order’s absence from the Arts faculty in Louvain. They sent their children to the famous Collège d’Anchin in Douai, which counted far more pupils than the average Louvain Pedagogy led by secular clerics.86 The proposition that one cannot consider the body of students as one group holds for the academic staff as well. In the ranks of teachers and college presidents, some were “more equal” than others. The list of 28 respondents for the 1607 report, for instance, excluded the populous Faculty of Arts, which had more than 40 members and at least 20 teachers87—a number that equalled or even surpassed the total number of public teachers in the other faculties. Except for the regents of three pedagogies, the dean, and the faculty’s receiver, they were not heard. Philosophers and professors in the humanities, often students of the professors in the higher faculties, did not get the opportunity to meddle in the affairs of theologians, jurists, and physicians either, while the latter were generally asked to comment on their colleagues in the other higher faculties as well as on the Faculty of Arts. At the same time, the numerical dominance of the theologians among the respondents, who tended to be interrogated more thoroughly, reenacted the cognitive hierarchies of the time as well. In the summary composed by Drusius and Craesbeke, diverging opinions consequently were squeezed together under denominators such as “the majority,” “a considerable number,” or the “saniores.” Such a qualification indicates that, from the start, the commissioners had a clear idea of whom they should listen to—and it seems that they were never forced to revisit their views. The visitation offered opportunities not only to realise claims towards the outside world but also to settle accounts within the walls of the university. Academic Darwinism was already rampant in the
86 Numerous requests of admittance to studies in Louvain and dispensations for the use of Louvain privileges can be found in the university and faculty minutes. For the Jesuit collège d’Anchin, impressive numbers (for 1600) in De Ridder-Symoens, “Lines of Contact,” 27. According to Father Poncelet, the collège d’Anchin in 1597 could have sheltered slightly more students than the entire Louvain Faculty of Arts. 87 There were 16 official professors in philosophy in the Faculty of Arts. But many grammar students attended the schools of the Arts as well, and in a request (29 November 1622) to the Privy Council, four teachers in the humanities, out of one pedagogy, are mentioned. Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281.
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17th century, as those who were prosperous received more through the charters of 1617. Subsidies from the States and the prince largely passed by the “small fry” in the Faculty of Arts—who, in turn, would be compensated by princely support in the Roman Question. Within the faculty’s ranks however, the professors in the humanities challenged in vain the prerogatives of the philosophers in the faculty’s privilege of nomination, prerogatives that were once more ratified by the “inspection” of the faculty’s statutes in 1615. The philosophers had to give up something too, however. The Arts faculty’s professors, at the bottom of the academic hierarchy, had to accept new statutes favouring members of the higher faculties and their protégés in exchange for support in Rome. Within the higher faculties, reform ultimately reinforced the power positions regents tried to establish by the limitation of, and the control over, access to faculty boards. Similar policies were pursued in the faculties of Law. There the archducal professors repeatedly tried, in vain, to break into the college of doctors occupied by the ordinary professors. The Visitatio of 1617 sealed the triumph of the strict colleges of Law and Theology. The composition of the college of doctors In Utroque remained fixed at a certain number and was attached to the six ordinary chairs; the theologians were free to admit or exclude from their board whomsoever they wished. In 1619, the regents of both Law faculties successfully used their newly acquired negotiation position, in the appointment procedures to ordinary and extraordinary chairs, to silence the three archducal professors, all of who at the time were applying for the vacancy in the strict college.88 As the boards were charged with admittance to doctoral degrees, they became the necessary passage points for an advanced academic career. The visitation process, generally speaking, streamlined academic hierarchies in favour of those who were already at the top and, therefore, the most closely involved negotiation partners of the central power elites and their mediators, the abbot of Park and Craesbeke. Thus a small minority of academic dons could hope to become more than ever a power hub, while bolstering, through the visitation process, their role as mediators of academic patronage—a notion that may have appealed to their negotiation partners in Brussels, hierarchical
88 Advice of the Strict College of the law faculties, in Résolutions Magistrales, 17 and 19 June 1619, SAL, Oud Archief, 313, 34r and 35r.
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frameworks having passed the test as swift and reliable devices for an orderly management of the community. Indeed, the right men in the right places had had their say in the redaction of the 1617 charters. Nevertheless, in the Faculty of Medicine, new chairs were created and newcomers were introduced in the strict college against the will of the “established” professors. The reorganisation of this faculty shows clearly that the right men were not always to be found within the walls of the university. Historical actors negotiating the visitation seemed to have bothered less about institutional boundaries or hierarchies than did later historians.
6.3. Friends of friends. The abbot, the academic, and the court physician Browsing through minutes, requests, indictments, pleas, petitions, and correspondence, one does not encounter a class of the “dominant” crushing the “dominated,” as depicted by Bourdieu. In the end, the never-ending game of delegation, translation, interessement, and enrolment was played by individual actors within that minority— agents who were not bound by institutional frontiers but who were parts of networks transcending the fictitious gap between reified entities such as “the state” or “the university.” Institutions, titles, and legal representations were often important agents in these networks, but not their essence. Some work has already been done on the channels of communication created by Justus Lipsius and Erycius Puteanus, who were probably occasional and important brokers in academic networking but who did not participate in “official,” “institutional” academic life.89 Another interesting figure to be studied is the enigmatic fray Iñigo de Brizuela, the confessor of the archduke who was considered by Bentivoglio as the “tribunale supremo” of Belgium.90 The nuncio’s successors, Gesualdo and Morra, would consider Brizuela as their most important informant in academic affairs.91 A former teacher at 89 90
Cf. Van Houdt, “Justus Lipsius and the Archdukes,” 405–32. Relatione di Fiandra (. . .), 6 April 1613, in ASV, Fondo Borghese, I, 269–272,
41v. 91 “Andai a trovare il padre Confessore di Sua Altezza, co’l quale solamente havea il mio predecessore parlato di questo negocio.” Morra to Borghese, 9 September 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 137, 56–59bis.
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the Minerva in Rome, this Dominican was considered by the Jesuits as their most influential adversary in their struggle against the academics; as the university’s man at court,92 a role which he would resume after Albert’s death in 1621 as a prominent member of the Consejo de Flandes y de Borgoña in Madrid. Other lines of contact with the centres of decision-making might have been active, too, but it is impossible to grasp the totality of academic networking in Brussels, just as much as in Rome. Here, I will limit myself to a “triumvirate” that emerges as crucial from the sources I have used, and that seems to have become a common transmittor for various other interests and interest groups within the university. The first member of that triumvirate was the abbot of Park. His colleague Craesbeke apparently was never a challenge to the abbot’s position. Drusius became one of the prince’s major channels of intelligence in academic affairs and an important broker for university men in Louvain as well as in Douai. His career as the servant of princes and popes, however, depended on academics and on other individuals with connections at court. To ensure their support, the abbot had forged an alliance with two figures who could, to a certain extent, control the lines of communication from Louvain to the prince. Sources are not abundant, because the abbot regularly commuted between Brussels and his abbey near Louvain and was, therefore, physically accessible. Nevertheless, snatches of correspondence in the archives of Park permit insight into the man’s actions, especially from 1615 onwards, when the visitation process gained momentum. From these documents, it is Jacobus Jansonius who emerges as the abbot’s confidant within the university. We have seen that the don used his contacts with the nuncio to act as a partner in the first stages of the negotiations in 1607—and to perform, meanwhile, as an obedient son of the Apostolic See, an image that may have been useful in his dealings with the congregation of the Holy Inquisition around that time. To date, studies dedicated to Jansonius have focused on his intellectual life, as an adherent of Augustinian doctrine or as the “precursor” of Jansenism—the spiritual link between Michael Baius
92
On the court as an institution of government, see Molas Ribalta, “The Impact of Central Institutions,” 36–38.
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and Cornelius Jansenius.93 Within the scope of this story, through fragments of letters and through attestations in the minutes of university and faculty councils, he appears as the face of the University of Louvain in the second decade of the 17th century, an academic oligarch without equal. In addition to being the senior doctor of the Strict faculty, the president of the Pope’s College and one of the major headhunters of the university, his offices in the local church as deacon of Saint-Peter’s in Louvain from 1614 onwards—a position previously occupied by Baius—gave him a say as provisor ex officio in his own right, as well as in several other colleges in Louvain. Consequently, he had many resources at his disposal to promote the academic career of his or his friends’ clients. As the president of one of the major colleges in Louvain, he had, moreover, the infrastructure to host princes and nuncios.94 He was a regular visitor at court, presenting himself as the university’s agent during the reign of Albert without being officially commissioned by his Alma Mater.95 His crédit must have been considerable outside the university as well. He was a close friend of Matthias Hovius, archbishop of Mechlin, indeed one of the cornerstones in rebuilding the latter’s diocese after the civil war. As one of Hovius’ 11 rural deans of Christianity, he may have had some influence in the administration of the local and regional church. In return, he acted as Hovius’ intermediary with the university.96 A Dutchman, he had been a fellow student of Vosmeer, the apostolic vicar of the provinces in the North. This, as well as the influx of students to the Louvain colleges for the formation of the Dutch clergy, provided him with channels of intelligence of special
93 See Ceyssens, “Jacques Jansonius et l’augustinisme,” 282–92, and “Autour de Jacques Jansonius,” 358–97. 94 The prince stayed in his college in 1599; cf. Résolutions Magistrales, 3 March 1599, in SAL, Oud Archief, 305. The nuncio probably stayed at Jansonius’ college during his notorious visit in April 1601. Acta Universitatis, RAL, OUL, 62, 36r. The steady “transhumance” of notables of the South Netherlands to the new sanctuary in Scherpenheuvel, promoted by the Archdukes and thus the place to be for members of the power elites, often passed through Louvain—which may have benefitted academics such as Jansonius as well. Cf. the numerous allusions on the university’s gift exchange with influential pilgrims in the Acta, RAL, OUL, 62–64. 95 Jansonius to the Infanta Isabella, by then governess of the Netherlands, in Négociations de Rome, 10 August 1623, AGR, Audience, 459, 287r. 96 Examples of Jansonius as Hovius’ man in Louvain in 1600, Acta Universitatis, RAL, OUL, 62, 18r, 1609, ibidem, RAL, OUL, 64, 13r–14r. He surfaces regularly in Harline and Put, A Bishop’s Tale.
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interest to the papal nuncio in Brussels. In return, he was able to successfully influence the appointment of Vosmeer’s successor.97 He actively intervened in the struggle between the secular clerics and his old foes, the Jesuits, and he appears now and then as the nuncio’s informant on academic affairs as well. He certainly was—in the words of his biographers—pious, devout, and humble. In his day, all good academics, and theologians in particular, were supposed to be. But le bon vieillard, as Cornelius Jansenius nicknamed his benign patron,98 was powerful above all, an academic don without equals, during much of the second decade of the 17th century. It is in this sense that one should revisit Ceyssens’ description of the man as “un personnage attachant, un réprésentant accompli de l’époque de la réforme catholique dans l’Europe du Nord.”99 Jansonius became the spokesman of the academic community in Louvain during the visitation. He used his contacts with the nuncio to act as a partner in the first stages of the negotiations in 1607. From then on, he appeared at nearly every important stage of the visitation process. A telling example of “Jansonius in action” is offered by his (key) role as the theologians’ deputy to Brussels in the quarrel over control of access to the faculty board between 1610 and 1614.100 In this struggle, he became the embodiment of the “bonum publicum,” and he simultaneously thwarted the dynastic policy of Jacobus Baius, his competitor for the legacy of the great Michael Baius. Jansonius had already foiled Baius’ first attempt in 1609 to have his nephew, Aegidius, appointed by the city to an ordinary chair that had become vacant after the death of Goudanus, the former deacon of Saint Peter’s. In trying to advance the career of his nephew, Jacobus only imitated his pious uncle Michael, who had failed, at the end of his life, to have his nephew appointed as his successor on the royal chair of Scripture.
97 “Animum adieceram ad Philippum Rovenium quem etiam D. Guido [Bentivoglio, papal nuncio] suae Sanctitati commendavit et ab ipsa confirmationem sedente Paulo Quinto obtinuit, . . . Quam opinionem ego concepi ex frequenti ac continua communicatione cum D. Sasbout aliisque discipulis nostris qui in illis locis degebant.” Jansonius to the Infanta, Négociations de Rome, 10 August 1623, AGR, Audience, 459, 287v. 98 “Le bon vieillard” was Jansenius’ code for Jacobus Jansonius in his letters to Saint-Cyran. See Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 218. 99 Ceyssens, “Autour de Jacques Jansonius,” 361. 100 Résolutions Magistrales, 1610–1613, SAL, Oud Archief, 311, 41r, 58v–117r, 203r– 214r.
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Plate 6.2. Portrait Jacobus Jansonius from Amsterdam, Regius Professor of Scripture Portrait of Jacobus Jansonius (1547–1625), Professor Regius of Scripture, in academic attire. The inscription on the left may have been added at a later date: Eximivs D.M.N. / Iacobvs Ians / sonivs Amste / ledamensis. Obiit / Ao 1625- / die 30a Ivlii: / AEtatis: 78. The device Vigilantia fits Jansonius well: as a college president responsible for the conduct of the students in Divinity entrusted to him; as a counter-reformatory zealot who had witnessed the breakdown of public and religious order; and as the university’s watchdog par excellence against Jesuit machinations. Beginning of the 17th century, anonymous, oil on panel. [Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht]
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Concentrated in the Baius college after Jacobus’ death, the legacy of the “Baianides” would become an important operating base for the Baius family, which remained present in the university until deep in the 17th century—more than a century after Michael had entered the world of Academia.101 But the city council could not be interested by the strategies of the clan from Ath: they wiped off Baius’ ode on the merits of his family,102 and they provided Paludanus, who was recommended by Hovius and Jansonius, with the prebend and the chair in question, recommending meanwhile Schinckelius, a native Louvainist, for the presidency of Arras College. Fortunately, the provisors of this college happened to be, indeed, Jansonius and Paludanus, in their roles, respectively, of senior doctor and pleban of Saint Peter’s103—an alliance which had many advantages, because the pleban of Saint Peter’s was the collator of many grants as well. Aegidius was appointed by the city to Paludanus’ previous chair and the “small prebend” remunerating it; he displayed his gratitude by treating the magistrate with a theatre play performed by his students of Vaulx College;104 and he was one of the two ordinary professors who had competed, in 1610, with the Dominican De Torres for the regency. The resulting conflict with the city, consequently, was probably not a conflict between “the Faculty of Theology” and “the city magistrate” from the very start. Rather, it became one, after Jacobus Baius had rallied the city magistrate for his nephew’s cause and Jansonius, in return, managed to mobilise “public interest” in order to safekeep the power of the peers and, linked with it, to prevent the Baius clan from extending its sway over the faculty
101 Cf, for instance, alongside Aegidius himself, Jacobus II Baius, another nephew of Jacobus, who made a career as professor in Law; as well as several presidents of Louvain colleges. 102 “Ende de vrs. De Baij comparens heeft een lang verhael gedaen vanden meriten van hem sijnen oom ende andere vrienden, neffens d’universiteit ende stadt, vande fundatie die hij alreede gemaeckt heeft mede oick vanden meriten van synen voirs. neve, naementlich doer de directie van het collegie van vaulx, en in recompense van alle de selve diensteijde, de lesse ende prebende begeert voer de selve sijns neve.” Résolutions Magistrales, 18 December 1609, SAL, Oud Archief, 311, 10r. 103 “Dat hij den voirs. Schenckelium soude voer gerecommandeert houden tot het presidentschappe van t’collegie van Atrecht, staende tot collatie van heere Jansonius ende den pastoir.” Résolutions Magistrales, 18 December 1609, SAL, Oud Archief, 311, 10r. 104 Résolutions magistrales, 10 February 1610, SAL, Oud Archief, 311, 14r.
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board of Theology.105 Aegidius did eventually become regent of the faculty—as the successor of his uncle, who died in 1614. In 1614–15, three other theologians were admitted, at least two of whom (Wiggers and Schinckelius) can be qualified, up to a certain extent, as linked with Jansonius. In this episode, De Torres became Jansonius’ ally and was appointed officially as the second commissioner of the faculty in the lawsuit against the city in 1612 as a substitute for Malderus, who had left the university after his promotion to bishop of Antwerp.106 De Torres, not only a Dominican but also a Spaniard, was of course one of the most convincing arguments the Louvainists could produce in their attempts to interest Brizuela in the advancement of academic affairs, and he may well have owed his appointment as a regent to the Archdukes’ confessor. In this context, Jansonius, the “champion of the secular clergy,” would adjust his strategies. The appointment of De Torres to Malderus’ chair in Thomism was rejected by the faculty or, more precisely, by Jansonius,107 who had more reason to reassert his ideas about the tasks of secular and regular clerics because he may have had very concrete plans with Malderus’ chair.108 But there was little opposition against the installation of an extraordinary archducal chair in Thomism
105 “Cumque primo loco deliberasset dominus Bayus deliberavit, et proferens suam sententiam dicessit, dicens, quod si illa deliberatio non placeret, placebat ei, quidquid facultas deliberaret in hac re, et quia erat festinus, discessit, facultas autem, tunc uniformiter deliberavit, esse standum medio oblato a domino Jansonio et P Torres, et quod illa erat ultima resolutio sua.” Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 1 August 1613, RAL, OUL, 387, 39. 106 “Atque rogavit [= the faculty] MD Torres, qui commissionem [= of defending the faculty’s interests against the city] suscepit contradicente tamen et non consentiente domino nostro Baio.” Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 22 March 1622, RAL, OUL, 387, 27. 107 “Ad requisitionem eximii domini Jansonii proposuit decanus facultatis an quandoquidem publica fama esset hoc agi ut ex. dominus Torres obtineat professionem scholasticam domini Malderi designati episcopi Antverpiensis . . . aberat Torres.” Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 27 and 30 July 1611, RAL, OUL, 387, 20. Cf. Jansonius to Prats, Secretary of State, 7 June 1611, Conseil d’Etat, Missives, Universités, AGR, Audience, 1948. 108 Wiggers, the new professor regius in Thomism, was a client of Jansonius: “His auspiciis arenam deinde ingreditur Theologicam, assumptus in alumnum collegii pontificii a Jacobo Jansonio, viro eximio, qui hunc discipulum suum, tum ob singulares ingenii dotes, quas in eo observabat, tum ob vita morumque integritatem atque indefessum in studiis presertim sacris laborem, unice carum et familiarem habuit.” Bax, Historia Universitatis Lovaniensis, KBR, Manuscrits, 22172 395.
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for the Blackfriar.109 De Torres was allowed to teach publicly, and his excellent relationship with the other faculty members is reflected in the permission to perform as the tutor of secular clerics. Next to being a privileged transmittor of academic views to the confessor, among others against the Jesuits,110 the Blackfriar would, moreover, render excellent services to the faculty by reasserting the Censura Lovaniensis when rumours in Spain and Italy that the Louvain school had withdrawn its condemnation of Lessius had to be enervated at once.111 De Torres would perform on the side of the academics in other affairs as well, but as soon as he had returned to Spain in 1615, Jansonius was charged by the faculty to suppress his extraordinary chair “tanquam minime necessaria.”112 Despite the opposition of the Blackfriars and of Brizuela, his endeavours eventually were successful, maybe thanks to the intervention of the abbot of Park.113 Jansonius was responsible in the Visitatio for the statutes concerning the chancellor of the university, a function that was linked to the office of provost of Saint-Peter’s. As newly appointed deacon of Saint Peter’s in 1614, he put an end to the incessant ceremonial conflicts of the previous deacon—Jacobus Baius—with the university’s titular chancellor Georg of Austria, the First Prelate of Brabant; and an important member of court who regularly had provided academic delegations with direct access to the prince. By abandoning the claims of 109 Again via a “Roman pension.” For instance, Bentivoglio to Borghese, 21 January 1612, BAV, Barberini Latini, 6806, 24r. Torres was already in the Netherlands from 1607 onwards: “que S.A. tiene cargados 470 florin de pension sobre la abbadia de Santa Gertrudes de Lovaina, y ne que la volunta de S.A. . . . que se represente a Su Sanctidad que por a q’il studio floresca sera necess° por lo meno per algunos annos traher a este convento regente farostero como en efito ja ha venido uno de espana.” Note in the Négociations de Rome, c.27 October 1607, AGR, Audience, 442, 218r. 110 Cf. p. 269. 111 Cf. p. 387 and p. 517–18. It was De Torres who drew up this text (and probably used his contacts in Spain to divulge it), cf. Serry, Historia Congregationum, appendices, 307. 112 Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 20 November 1615, RAL, OUL, 387, 62. Correspondence in Le monopole d’enseignement public (. . .) contre l’Ordre de Saint-Dominique, 1615–1713, RAL, OUL, 398. 113 “Auditum est Lovanii confessarium S.C. ex hispaniis adventurum, si non advenisse; velim per presentem latorem M.N. Wigghers mihi significare ne gravemini, an expedire iudicetis ut facultas per libellum ab omnibus et singulis signatum exponat S.C. causas ob quas non debeat et non possit nova professio B. Thome in scholis nostris pro dominicanis institui, idque ante reditum an mox a reditu confessarii quia cum facultas ab uno anno desuper audita sit, et saltem dilationem obtinuerit metuo quod iudicium ipsis secundum non requiret.” Jansonius to the abbot of Park, 19 January 1617, A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xiii.
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his predecessor (Baius), Jansonius avoided compromising his position in Brussels and in the faculty board in Louvain, and losing credibility. Baius’ interests had been many, using as he did his status in the local church, which was to be upheld by ceremonial prerogatives, as a means to reorganise hierarchies within Academia. In his (contested) capacity of chancellor of the university and as a deacon of Saint Peter’s, he claimed the right to vote and to speak first in the faculty board, before the faculty’s dean and the senior doctor. It is, therefore, not surprising that the statutes inserted in the main charter of 1617 were Jansonius’ work; in return, his friend in Park helped him out of trouble with an enraged collegiate chapter (including several theologians) that did not want to yield to pressure from Brussels.114 He was also the one who briefed the abbot of Park on the remuneration of the professors in Philosophy, on the requirements for academic degrees in Theology, on the necessity of new chairs in the Faculty of Medicine, and on the need to rein in the number of promotions in the faculties of Law. In light of his activities described in the previous chapters, it will not come as a shock to learn that it was Jansonius who drew up, despite his friendship with Lessius, the stipulation that sought to prevent the Jesuits from teaching once and for all. In the end, one wonders if he did not write the entire 1617 Visitatio.115 His ability to become, and to remain, incontournable in the second decade of the 17th century was fragile, however. When regents of the Law faculties were at each other’s throats over the admittance of two applicants for the degree of doctor in utroque, Jansonius apparently sided with the losers, i.e., those who opposed the admittance of the new doctors. The theologian had successfully mobilised his contacts in Brussels, and the prince was inclined to accept his vision, thanks to the encouragement of third parties.116 Nevertheless, the two promovendi obtained their degrees the very same year. A threatening letter from the jurist Cornelius Sylvius (Bosmans), who backed the applicants, to
114 I.e., as far as the title of chancellor was concerned; as opposed to the ceremonial prerogatives of the dean within the faculty itself. “De eo quod circa titulum cancellarii in scriptis suggessi, velim nihil tractari cum Wigghers, nisi vobis aliter videatur.” Jansonius to Drusius, 19 January 1617, A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xiii. 115 Note by the abbot, 15 March 1615, Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII., 60; letters from Jansonius to the abbot of Park, 22 March 1615, ibidem, 244r– v; 2 and 8 April 1615, in A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xiii, 1616, see next note; 1617, A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xiii (5 letters). 116 Cf. Jansonius to the abbot of Park, A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xiii.
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the abbot of Park might have had something to do with it. The professor, after Corselius’ appointment to the Great Council of Mechlin in 1616 the occupant of a cluster of legal functions at the level of university administration,117 warned the abbot that if Jansonius continued to meddle in the affairs of “his” faculty, he would “sketch a picture of him in front of the prince as it had never been sketched before.”118 In other words, Bosmans threatened to ruin the image the archduke had of his opponent as the university’s “natural” representative, and that seems to have been enough to make Jansonius concede. Throughout this affair, the lawyer, a layman originating from Louvain, was able to bolster his ties with his patron, the baron of nearby Wezemaal. An important Brabant noble and a member of the States, the baron wanted to advance the career of one of the promovendi, the son of another of his clients.119 Obviously other networks, hardly visible in our sources, materialised in the Louvain corridors, and even Jansonius had to take them into account if he wanted to keep up appearances as the public face of the university. The third triumvir could not rely on an “official” status to meddle in the affairs of Academia, but he did not need one either. Andrea Trevigi—“Doctor Andreas,” as his friends in Louvain called him— was the personal physician of a sickly archduke. During the frequent purgative treatments that the Source of all Justice and Grace had to undergo, Trevigi had ample occasion to recommend people, to convey his view on things, and to air his suggestions. Accredited for his “potestas de [sua] principum familiaritate” by academics,120 he owed his power, as Jansonius to a certain extent also did, to his intelligence channels.121 This physician of Italian descent has never been studied thoroughly, and despite hundreds of letters to and from Trevigi in the
117 I.e., Dictator of letters; Advocatus Fiscalis of the university and Assessor of the conservator of the Privileges. Cf. Reusens, Documents relatifs, 1, 316, 319, 544, 548. 118 Cornelius Bosmans to Drusius, 13 May 1616, in Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII, 60, 325r. 119 Franciscus Sassenus to Andreas Trevigi, 5 January 1618, Correspondance d’André Trévisius, AGR, Audience, 1462. 120 Cf. the recommendation letter from Guignet, professor in Dole, to Trevigi, 14 February 1612, in Correspondance d’André Trévisius, AGR, Audience, 1462, 12th bundle. 121 Marc Jacobs drew my attention to the central function of information and its strategic translation as an element of exchange in social networks in general and in those of court physicians in particular. Trevigi was also signaled out by Roegiers and Vandermeersch, “Les archiducs et l’université de Louvain,” 288.
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fund Audience of the archives in Brussels, he remains an enigma. He was not mentioned in Bentivoglio’s Who’s Who of 1613,122 but the man was interesting enough to count princes and members of the highest nobility in Europe among his correspondents. He was also involved in a lively correspondence with academics from Louvain and Dole. He had been the one—or, at least, academics thought he was—who saved the chairs of Theology in the Burgundian university for the sake of the secular clergy. A strong Augustinianist, he shared with his academic clients in Louvain and Dole a profound antipathy for the fathers of the Society.123 Dole’s academics relied on him to obtain the incorporation of prebends into the chairs of Theology and Canon Law. He also tried to reform the Dole Faculty of Medicine through the foundation of new chairs.124 It is unclear when Trevigi established relations with academics in Louvain. In 1606, he appears for the first time as an acquaintance of the circles in Louvain, Justus Lipsius and the jurist Philippus Zuerius among them.125 Doctor Andreas appears again in 1612 when interfering in the Faculty of Medicine, which he held in low esteem.126 He was the initiator behind the introduction of new chairs—and the appointment of his protégés in the Strict College—in spite of the opposition of the established professors.127 He destroyed the empire of Thomas Fienus, one of the two ordinary professors in Medicine whom Trevigi secretly accused of monopolising the faculty’s resources. Trevigi had the opportunity to do so, having imposed himself as a partner in the reform of the medical faculty. In 1617, Fienus’ final attempt to distribute the new posts among his clients failed owing to the secret actions
122 Cf. his already cited Relatione di Fiandra, ASV, Fondo Borghese, I, 269–272, 18r–88r. 123 The only available study on Trevigi is the one of Bertolotti, Andrea Trevigi. 124 About one-third of the letters to and from academics concern this university. Letters from 1612 onwards, to 1625. Correspondance d’André Trévisius, AGR, Audience, 1462 and 1463. 125 Cf. the rough draft of Trevigi’s answer to the letter of an unknown applicant (Fienus?), 6 April 1606. In 1617, he asks his client Franciscus Sassenus to greet Puteanus (and Jansonius) on his behalf. Trevigi to Sassenus, 11 April 1617. Correspondance d’André Trévisius, AGR, Audience, 1462, resp. 10th and 16th bundle. 126 Trevigi (?) to an unknown correspondent, 6 April 1717, Correspondance d’André Trévisius, AGR, Audience, 1462. 127 Trevigi, 13 October 1612, to an unknown correspondent; his answer to the recommendation of Sassenus by another unknown correspondent (Jansonius?), 6 April 1617, Correspondance d’André Trévisius, AGR, Audience, 1462. Jansonius backed the whole operation; see his letter, 4 April 1616, to Trevigi, ibidem.
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of Trevigi in Brussels and of his contacts at Louvain. Towards the end of 1617, after the publication of the charters, the professor got wind of the ill dispositions of Trevigi when he discovered that the physician had defamed him at court. In a bitter letter of 5 January 1618, the aggrieved academic demanded rehabilitation from a man whom he had, in his own words, considered, treated, and honoured as a friend and a patron. A few weeks later, Trevigi may have given his opponent the coup de grâce when he asked his ally in Louvain, Jansonius, to reveal his break with Fienus among the venerable doctors of the university.128 It is significant that two of the three protégés of Fienus who could be identified started to correspond with the Italian in the very same year. Fienus himself resumed contact in November 1618. Doctor Andreas was not to be ignored. Trevigi, however, did more than just turn the Louvain Faculty of Medicine upside down. Here, as in Dole, he agitated against the Jesuit Order. He intervened in the crises of 1613, 1618, and 1625. He supported nominees of the Arts faculty for contested benefices and was rewarded for it when performing as an intermediary in conflicts between mighty patrons at court and academic prebend hunters. He interfered in the affairs of Louvain colleges and instructed the prince how the charter should be drawn up.129 The bulk of his correspondence with Louvain academics in the first quarter of the 17th century dates from the years 1619–21, when several academics appealed to him for appointments to chairs in Medicine and in the Law faculties, and for arbitration in renewed quarrels between the archducal and the ordinary professors in Law. Drusius, Jansonius, and Trevigi, apparently the appointment commission of the university behind the scenes, consulted each other on different matters, discussed strategies, exchanged recommendations, and commented on each other’s clients. They behaved like partners in a triumvirate, although other links surface occasionally in their correspondence. Trevigi lacked the institutional tools of the abbot, who had been commissioned by the prince and was
128 Trevigi to Jansonius (cf. a letter of Sassenus a few days later), 28 January 1618, in Correspondance d’André Trévisius, AGR, Audience, 1462. 129 “Habui S.C. decrevisse acta reformandae universitatis Lovaniensis carta pergamena in modum Placarti describi debere.” Trevigi to Drusius, 7 April 1617, Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII., 59, 1r. Letters on the college of Standonck, 1616, in Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII., 60, 252r, 262r, 307r and 315r; A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xiii, 2nd bundle, and in Correspondance d’André Trévisius, AGR, Audience, 1462.
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appointed superintendent of the university from 1617 onward, or the academic status of Jansonius. He largely compensated for it by doing what he did—providing the academics one of the most direct links to the prince one could dream of—or rather by being who he could be considering his crédit in leading academic circles. This reading is incomplete, tentative, and daring. It is based on a few dozen letters, subtle references in minutes of faculty councils, sporadic scrabbles on pieces of paper. Other archives may reveal new elements, and overlapping or even competing networks are likely to surface. But at least these snatches of correspondence allow us to grasp how things were done before power could move into action. In moments of negotiation, institutional boundaries fade, the distinction between “official” and “informal” channels collapse, role patterns suddenly become negotiable. People do not appear to live in the institutions (social as well as legal), but seem to live with them. In the continuous game of information, translation, and representation described in the previous paragraphs, reified entities such as “the state,” “the university,” “the Privy Council,” or “the Church” and the “fields of tension” between them lose their meaning.
6.4. “Se bene sono dotti, sono nondimeno inesperti e di poca prudenza.” The 1617 affair In 1615, signals from Brussels indicated that the prince, or those around him, was becoming increasingly impatient. Drusius was charged to round off his activities and bring the paperwork to Brussels for a review by the Privy Council on his next visit to the capital.130 Nevertheless, the negotiations in the abbey of Park continued for two years. The work of the Privy Council seems to have been largely
130 “Que vous y employez en tout diligence , et nous apportez vostre besoignee par escrit a vostre prochaine venue en ceste ville pour le tout veu et examine en nostre conseil prive, y pouvoir mettre la derniere main, et proceder a lexecution dune reformation tant necessaire au bien et advancement de ladicte universite.” Letter from the Privy Council to the Abbot of Park, 24 April 1615, in Université de Louvain 1556– 1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281.
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limited to lumping together fragments of texts drafted in Louvain.131 The final charters, the Visitatio as well as the Reformatio Curiarum, were enacted by the Archdukes on 8 April 1617. In June, the abbot and Craesbeke came to Louvain for their solemn promulgation.132 It was the beginning of a very confused period: the second great moment that has so far attracted the attention of historians, coinciding with the conflict between the papal nuncio and the Privy Council. Academics started to revolt against the publication of the charters, invoking the university’s direct dependence from the Holy See. They argued that this legal representation had not been sufficiently expressed by the sober juncta imprimis apostolica autoritate. They demanded an ultimate review of the text, “edited” in Brussels, before publication; they asked for clarifications; they appealed to the nuncio. If we believe Van Waefelghem and Elias, the decadent professors had already used every opportunity to make trouble.133 Now, out of “sheer opportunism,” they invoked the direct submission of the university to the Holy See in an attempt to block a reform of their autonomous corporation by the secular authorities. The result was another major confrontation between Church and State, or rather between “Rome” and “the Privy Council.” The university was tossed to and fro between the two powers. In the end, it reluctantly accepted the publication of the charter as it was in September 1617, while the nuncio, who believed that the case was “sleeping,”134 was overtaken by events. The curia tried to resolve the problem by sending a papal brief in which the Louvain academics were ordered to observe, under papal authority, the prince’s legislation. Historians have stressed that this brief was not requested, and that the Privy Council or the Council of Brabant did not dispense the princely placet necessary for the validity of Roman graces, sentences, and legislation in the Netherlands. But the problem had, for the time being, been solved, and the parties could prepare themselves
131 That is, except for the reformatio curiarum, one of the two charters, on which the sources remain silent. 132 Acta Universitatis, 19 June 1617, RAL, OUL, 64, 43v–44r. 133 Van Waefelghem, “La Visite,” 92. No examples are given, however. For a detailed chronology, see ibid., 90–106. 134 “Ma che per adesso il negotio dormiva, et che non era bene andarlo risvegliando senza occasione.” Morra to Borghese, 30 September 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 137, 113r.
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for the next battle. The Visitatio of 1617, historiography concludes, engendered two centuries of conflict over the ultimate authority in the affairs in academia. Qualifications are in order. First, it is awkward to describe the Louvain opposition to a publication of the Visitatio under archducal authority alone as an excuse for recalcitrant academics to block reform. This way of representing things was, admittedly, passed on by the Archdukes to their resident in Rome. Those immediately surrounding the archduke, for instance the secretary of state corresponding with the resident in Rome, probably took this version for granted. From their point of view the Archdukes had indeed put the entire visitation process in motion. Academics with second thoughts, therefore, could easily be neutralised by the Privy Council as representatives of private interests. It was, as a matter of fact, probably the only acceptable translation of the Louvain objections the robins in Brussels could find when briefing their prince. Archduke Albert’s perception of his interests diverged at times from the legal translations the Privy Council made of them. Like similar institutions elsewhere in Europe, the Council had, through the ages, “gone out of court” and cultivated its own (legalist) culture.135 Roman circles were in these days even convinced that the legists claimed precedence over the prince himself.136 Albert, as a Catholic prince, probably was not particularly keen on diplomatic troubles with a papal curia whose support and patronage he badly needed. The robins’ translations of academic opposition were unquestioningly accepted by the historians of the first half of the 20th century, because this view of things suited marvellously their picture of an absolutist state imposing laws on freedom-loving academics. In light of the evidence in the previous sections, the Louvain reaction to the plans of the policy makers in Brussels was indeed determined by a concern for Roman reactions to a publication of the Visitatio 135 An example of the courtier’s view can be found in secretary of state Della Faille’s letter, to Philip Maes, resident in Rome: “vous pouvant ausurplus bien asseurer que rien sij est passe en prejudice de lauthorite du St Siege chose bien esloignee comme vous scavez de lintention du maistre . . . mais comme vous scavez a semblables gens [= the academics] ne mancquent des inventions pour soubs ombre que lauthorite du Sa Sainctete ij seroit interesse empescher la reformation quij estoit bien requise.” Négociations de Rome, 16 December 1617, AGR, Audience, 451, 315r. 136 “Ma per essere tenacissimi quei consiglieri nel mantenere et difendere tutto che passa sotto nome d’indulto et uso antico o di privilegii del paese, a i quali pretendono che i principi istessi non possano contravenire.” Borghese to Sanseverino, instructions, 2 June 1619, ed. Cauchie and Maere, Recueil des instructions générales, 78.
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without sufficient reference to papal jurisdiction. Leading academics did not want to obstruct the publication as such. Jansonius himself, who can hardly be suspected of having opposed a text that, with some exaggeration, he wrote himself, was sent to Drusius and Craesbeke to explain to them the academic point of view. At the same time, others were delegated to the nuncio.137 The dons were obviously not willing to put their connections with Brussels to the test. They used all the channels at their disposal to persuade the prince that they did not want to obstruct the promulgation as such but simply wanted to have a few articles clarified; that is, the article concerning papal authority as well as the few stipulations that the Privy Council had added to the text without first consulting the academics.138 When, after a break in the summer, decision-makers in Brussels seemed determined to persevere with the promulgation of the Visitatio, academics again courted the nuncio. They did so, however, in the utmost secrecy in order not to rouse the prince’s anger.139 But the Privy Council and its president, Engelbert Maes, proved to be less compliant than president Richardot had been back in 1607. Jansonius, briefed by a friend in the Privy Council, was annoyed by the renewed actions undertaken by the nuncio, whom he considered totally ignorant in academic matters. Academics apparently became rather pragmatic about their claim to be Rome’s daughter if their relations with their protector next door, who was briefed by the Privy Council, were at risk. Moreover, the answers from Brussels to the other objections of the university were more than satisfying.140 And the academics certainly did not want to put their Visitatio on the line. In his letter of 30 August 1617, Jansonius gave his friend in Park room to act as his conscience dictated, and to soothe 137 “Ne si forsan eo [the papal nuncio] inscio et quasi preterito eiusmodi publicatio fieret, universitas in aliquam disgratiam sedis apostolice incurrere posset.” Acta Universitatis, 24 June 1617, RAL, OUL, 64, 45v–46r. 138 Acta Universitatis, 26 July 1617, RAL, OUL, 64, 54v–55r. “universitatem nullo modo velle refragari, prout nec unquam hactenus refragari voluit aut intendit publicationi visitationis, sed paratum se esse eam admittere ea forma, qua ab initio fuit concepta et deputatis universitatis exhibita.” 28 July 1617, ibidem, 54v. 139 Gesualdo to Borghese, 19 August 1617, ed. Van Meerbeeck, Correspondance des nonces Gesualdo, Morra, Sanseverino, 526–28. 140 Roegiers, “Was de Oude Universiteit Leuven een Rijksuniversiteit?” 551, suggests that this was the main motive for the Louvainists’ opposition, who indeed never meddled again in the conflict between the nuncio and the Privy Council, except to provide the nuncio with legal documents for his case. I would suggest considering both arguments equally. The silence of university men in the following months may have been strategic, as they opted to keep a low profile.
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the nuncio later on, in order to avoid more delay and difficulties.141 Five days later, the university got a letter from the Privy Council as well as from the abbot of Park announcing the solemn publication of the Visitatio and the Reformatio curiarum. The university conceded without noteworthy resistance, and on the morning of 5 September 1617, the charters were finally promulgated. The aftermath of 5 September brings us to a second argument. The 1617 conflict between the Privy Council and the nuncio may have been more than just another episode in the “eternal battle” between “Church” and “State.” Indeed, the nuncio tried to save apostolic jurisdiction over the university after the publication of the charters without a “decent” allusion to Roman authority. Indeed, the Privy Council refused to give a repeat performance of the act of promulgation in order to make this time a more explicit reference to apostolic authority.142 The robins were hiding behind a prince who was, according to them, not willing to revoke the publication of the charter. They were probably right to do so, “veu quordinairement les grans princes revocquent mal voluntiers une chose ja faicte.”143 At the same time, however, a solution had to be found. An open crisis would provoke serious troubles in Rome as well as in Brussels, with consequences for the careers of the robins as well as of the nuncio. The following events can, therefore, hardly be described as a tough confrontation that ended in a de facto defeat of the “Roman party” that gave the signal for two centuries of renewed conflicts between “Church” and “State,” as historiography wants it. Instead, a subtle game of seduction by both negotiation partners unfolds before our eyes. Eventually, the 1617 quarrel resulted in a moving love affair, echoing in mutual declarations of affection between the legists, represented by Engelbert Maes, the Privy Council’s Commissioner for the University William Steenhuysen, and the Brabant chancellor Peck, and Rome—with the nuncio as matchmaker. Maes was not only the president of the Privy Council of the Archdukes. Like his predecessor Richardot, he was the central figure in networks that still await thorough research but certainly were not
141 142
Jansonius to Drusius, 30 August 1617, A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xiii. Morra to Borghese, 23 September 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 113, 136r–
137r. 143 Reflection made by Philip Maes, the archduke’s resident, Négociations de Rome, 24 August 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 207r.
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limited to the circles of the legists in Brussels.144 Engelbert’s brother Philip, the Registrar of the States of Brabant, had left for Rome in 1610 to promote the interests of the Archdukes as their resident until 1618. Consequently, as had been the case with Richardot, Engelbert Maes’ networks had ties that extended well into the papal curia, the major centre of patronage of his time. Historians have so far neglected this interest in Roman patronage shown by the power elites in Brussels in general, and by the robins of the central councils in particular. Nevertheless, it was probably not without importance in the 1617 affair, as it may have played a role in the construction of a context of conflict. Maes had been identified as an important opponent of the nuncio’s from the very start. Thus demonstrating his influence, he may have attempted to increase his attractiveness as a client in the eyes of a potential patron.145 This hypothesis calls, of course, for firm proof. But there are very good reasons to consider Roman patronage an important element in the negotiations leading to the eventual solution of the 1617 crisis. In the dispatches of the nunciature at the end of 1617 and the beginning of 1618, Maes gradually went through a real metamorphosis. From a fierce defender of the Archdukes’ interests, as he saw them, he gradually became—if we may believe the papal representative in Brussels—a devoted client whose attachment to the Holy See was beyond doubt. The nuncio gave his new ally all the credit he could.146 In December, Peck as well as Maes again expressed their affection for the Holy See, while in February 1618, the president regretted his ill and, in his opinion, unjust, reputation in Rome as a troublemaker.147 In the meantime, the nuncio had successfully set up a construction in which the cardinal nipote wrote letters to his representative wherein he
144
Cf., for instance the strategies of the Richardot family, in Vanhoutte, “Van robins tot très grand nobles.” 145 Successive nuncios were instructed to maintain warm relations with the ministers of the Archdukes. See Cauchie and Maere, Recueil des instructions générales. 146 “Et con queste, et altre parole molte amorevoli invero, et affettuose mi fece larga fede della buona sua voluntà, onde io credo al sicuro, . . . per la buona voluntà, anche di questo presidente (dal quale sin’hora ho più raggioni di lodarmi, che dolermi).” Morra to Borghese, 23 September 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 137, 136r–137r. 147 “Poiche pochi giorni avanti egli si era doluto meco per essergli stato scritto di Roma, che colà si era inteso, ch’egli qui si opponesse, e si mostrasse poco favorevole a gli interessi, e ragioni di cotesta Santa Sede contro ogni verità.” Morra to Borghese, 3 February 1618, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 112, 73r.
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lauded the president as well as the chancellor of Brabant.148 Through these letters, the Italian diplomat signified to both politicians his own favourable dispositions as a broker as well as those of the cardinal as a promising patron in order to promote the cause of the Holy See in the Netherlands.149 Maes and Peck, from their side, had good reason to keep up appearances at the curia. Peck may have had in mind the future of his natural son. As a cleric, the latter depended on a papal provision to obtain a prebend; as a bastard, he needed papal dispensations to hold ecclesiastical office.150 Maes’ timing was perfect, as his brother, the resident, was bitterly disappointed by his patrons in Brussels when he wanted to provide his son with a priory in Burgundy via papal provision.151 Uncle Engelbert apparently could not intervene without endangering his position, but he was definitely involved. In the end, the Roman connections of the Maes family had to do the dirty work for them by recommending their cause to the Archdukes. In November, the nuncio received orders from Rome to promote the case of the resident’s son. A direct link between these cases and the 1617 affair of the Louvain Visitatio was, admittedly, never explicitly made by the contemporaries, and the affair certainly requires further investigation.152 But it is evident that robins such as Maes and Peck, key figures in Netherlandish politics, were more than just the faithful servants of the dynasty. Like Richardot before them, they were seekers and, in Maes’ case, even brokers of Roman patronage alike. Meanwhile, the legists in Brussels suddenly proved to be very cooperative in the further dispatch of the affair of the Visitatio too. In November, upon the arrival of the papal brief in Brussels, the nuncio still feared serious difficulties. Two months later, while the mutual 148
Morra to Borghese, 23 December 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 113, 395r. “Come già l’ha veduta con questa lettera di Vestra Signorìa Illustrissima risponsiva a quella, che io le havevo scritta intorno alla persona del Signor Presidente, che perciò è rimasto molto sodisfatto, e spero di cavar’ alcun frutto da queste lettere per servitio della Sede Apostolica.” Morra to Borghese, 3 Februari 1618, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 112, 73r. 150 Sanseverino to Borghese, 15 August 1620, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 98, 307r–v. 151 Bitter words in the letter from Philip Maes to De Fritema, Secretary of State, Négociations de Rome, 20 May 1617, AGR, Audience, 451, 198r. 152 The Négociations or family papers, if preserved, might reveal more. Borghese to Morra, 10 November 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 38v; Morra to Borghese, 2 December 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 113, 354r; Borghese to Morra, 16 December 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 48v–49r. Concerning Steenhuysen, cf. Sanseverino to Ludovisi, 1 May 1621, BAV, Barberini Latini, 113r. 149
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courting between Rome and Maes reached its peak, the president signified that he would not oppose a papal brief ordering the observance of the Visitatio under apostolic authority. Finally the nuncio felt secure enough to send his brief to the university.153 Academics once more put the nuncio’s “gran patienza, e flemma” to the test when they submitted the brief to the Council of Brabant in order to obtain a princely placet on it, as this move would postulate once more the rights of the prince. But in the end, the nuncio had his way; the university sent an official acknowledgement to the papal representative and a placet was never dispatched.154 He could not foresee that 18th-century politicians and modern historians would use that argument against him. As for the third argument, it would be wrong to treat the outcome of the affair as an armistice. There is no indication that contemporaries looked at the 1617 brief as a temporary solution, a strategic retreat of both parties. “Rome” and “Brussels” were satisfied. The nuncio was satisfied. He had found a way out of the deadlock without giving in and had been offered, at the same time, ample occasion to display his cunning and zeal in his letters to his Roman patrons. Engelbert Maes probably was satisfied too. He had not put his prince before the choice between, first, losing honour and therefore credit for revoking one of his doings and, second, risking an escalating conflict with a pontiff who stood by his rights. Moreover, his personal relations with Rome were intact, if not better than before, and his nephew’s affair was well under way. Leading academics and their abbot had reasons to be satisfied as well. Their attempts during the past decade to improve their situation through the visitation process had not been undone; moreover, their adherence to, and their relations with, their benefactors in Rome as well as in Brussels had not incurred lasting damage. Nobody planned to rake up the quarrel later on, “when the time was ripe.” In this context, a definition of the 1617 settlement as an armistice can only reflect a teleological interpretation of the past. The Visitatio was not an inevitable source of troubles for the centuries to follow and, as a text, has no essential meaning of its own. Words on a charter need people willing to translate them in specific constellations in order
153 Morra to Borghese, respectively 11 November 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 113, 309r, and 20 January 1618, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 112, 30r. 154 Morra to Borghese, respectively 10 February 1618, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 112, 72r–v; 17 February 1618, ibidem, 114r; and 24 February 1618, ibidem, 132r.
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to gain a significance, just as people need legal representations of reality negotiated with dusty charters to construct their worlds. If the Visitatio was often invoked later on to prove the rights of this or that party, its meaning in those cases must be looked for in the specific situation, not in the events in 1617 which should reveal the ultimate, “essential” meaning of a mute piece of parchment. The Visitatio was not a “milestone” for centuries to come; rather, the centuries to come would make a milestone out of the Visitatio.
6.5. The performativity of power In a recent article on the financial crisis of the University of Louvain at the end of the 16th century, Diederik Lanoye rightly contends that, in spite of all the bargaining, the Visitatio of 1617 eventually introduced a princely model of academic life.155 That was the point of the academics themselves: eventually it was the archduke, the Supreme Pontiff, or both, who had initiated, conducted, and completed a comprehensive reform of the university. Even Jansonius did not claim authorship when explaining to his friend Hovius, at one of the archbishop’s famous midday meals in 1618,156 why he opposed the claims of the Jesuits: one of the “ghost-writers” of the Visitatio, he bluntly stated that it was the prince and the pope, to whom the academics owed their obedience, who had decided that students had to attend the faculty’s public lectures in order to be admitted to graduation in Divinity.157 Yet, it is hard to determine what, exactly, constituted this intrinsically princely character of academic reform. The visitation of 1607–17
155
Lanoye and Vandermeersch, “The University of Louvain,” 107. On Hovius’ midday meals, whose guests were carefully recorded in his diary, read Harline and Put, A Bishop’s Tale, passim. 157 “Dominus Jansonius mihi narravit quaenam dixerit illi Hispano quem ad eum miseram, nimirum quod fundamentum universitatis quo non vult admittere quod Jesuitae doceant in ordine ad promotionem ad magisterium est quia reformatio seu visitatio que a biennio aut circiter in universitate facta est, requiri ut theologi visitent tres lectiones, nimirum duas a Carolo fundatas, et tertiam a Philippo eius filio et quod Pontifex Paulus Quintus hanc Visitationem approbavit.” Registrum actorum reverendissimi et illustrissimi archiepiscopi Mechliniensis coeptum Kal. Novembris anni 1617, 12 October 1618, A.A.M., Mechliniensia, 10, 59r. “Presertim quia iactabant ab ipso in confirmatione [by Paul V] reformationis universitatis privilegiis societatis derogatum esse.” Muzio Vitelleschi (1563–1645), general of the Society of Jesus since 1615, to Scribani, 1 September 1619, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 3, 496. 156
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introduced a reform of higher education after a princely model because all participants (and historians, albeit for other reasons) had high stakes in it being a princely model; in it being the exponent of a Public Interest that defied time, context, and particular interest. Seen from this perspective, the qualification eventually can better be understood in chronological terms. The hiding of the tedious petite histoire of lobbying, the messy networking, and the struggle over delegation, representation, and definition of Academia’s interests that preceded the solemn enactment of the Visitatio and the Reformatio curiarum in 1617 did not (just) aim at covering underlying social practices with the cloak of Christian charity. Hiding all this, either tactically or strategically, was a practice that aimed to close the Box of Pandora we have cautiously re-opened in this chapter, in order to turn the text into a trustworthy instrument that could draw the laudabiles consuetudines of Academia into the eternal logic of the bonum commune. It is this purification work that Bellarmino had in mind for his 1602 essay, in which he had shortly unveiled the machinery behind papal might, because he did not wish to qualify the plenitude of power of the Apostolic See. Judging by evaluations of the Visitatio in scholarship as an example of brutal or mild absolutism encroaching on the academic field, Jansonius and his partners had been quite successful in tidying up the messy laboratory of power. The accumulation of power as an explanatory scheme in the history of universities, the history of state building, and the history of the papacy in the period of the “Second Roman Centralisation” is to be abandoned in favour of “the power of associations,” in which “power in action” is an achievement of a multitude of actors wondering how to act as one.158 The translation of academic interests into those of their negotiation partners entailed, to start with, the withdrawal from sight of controversial stakes the Visitatio had to realise. Jansonius was convinced that the fundamentum universitatis required the absence of the Jesuits from the scenery of public teaching; but such wordings did not slip into the text of the Visitatio itself, where the old fox’s views were formalised into dry conditions for graduation in Theology. As a matter of fact, the concept of Fundamentum Universitatis was already a generalisation itself, just as stabilitas doctrinae had been in
158
In this context, see Latour, “The Powers of Association.”
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the 1590s.159 Towards his friend Hovius, Jansonius was more talkative, however. During the Mechlin table talks, he did not flinch from involving the topos of Jesuit Macchiavellism (a convincing one to the archbishop, who had had his own issues with the Society),160 and freely questioned the fathers’ devotional models; models that covered the sacraments with ridicule and that, as a consequence, disqualified them as teachers of future pastoral theologians.161 Yet, in order to keep the coalition around academic reform from disintegrating, a balance had to be maintained between the appropriation of policies for highly distinctive, controversial programmes; and the corresponding generalisation of these programmes into broadly supported policies. This had been a highly successful enterprise until 1617, when a configuration crystallised in which a clear and evident cause (Public Interest harmed by the university’s decay) triggered a logical and inevitable effect (reformatio). This configuration, however, was not only highly orchestrated, and it also was situated in time and context. It unravelled already in 1618 in the conflict with the Society: former participants (the Archdukes, the members of the Privy Council, and the Visitatio itself, which was substituted by precedent in the following legal procedures) started to withdraw from, and disturbing factors (Jesuits and their papal bulls) could not be integrated in, the plot of 1617, a configuration in which academics had successfully managed to position themselves as the unique passage point to dynastic and religious restoration. The previous paragraphs are not a plea to invert the relationship between the centres and the peripheries of power. Instead, they suggest that the opposition between the two poles needs to be abandoned
159 This applies also to the label “novorum istorum dogmatum defensatores et propagatores,” with which the Jesuits were treated by their Douai colleagues, a negative benchmark that aimed at uniting the Douai theologians against the fathers. The Douai Faculty of Theology to Drusius, c.1620, Miscellanea. Visite de l’université de Douai par Drusius, A.A.Pa., R. VII, 77, 25r–26r. 160 On the struggle over the patronage over the young Saint Jan Berchmans, whom Hovius had “discovered” and whom the Jesuits consequently stole from him, as well as on the Jesuit college’s competition at Mechlin with the archdiocesan educational infrastructure, read Harline and Put, A Bishop’s Tale, passim. On the topos of Jesuit Macchiavellism, read Callewier, “Anti-jezuïtisme,” 36. 161 “Item Jesuitae in omnibus pollitice agant et tollant poenitentiam vindicativam peccatorum.” Registrum actorum reverendissimi et illustrissimi archiepiscopi Mechliniensis coeptum Kal. Novembris anni 1617, 12 October 1618, A.A.M., Mechliniensia, 10, 59r.
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as a research device. Obedient academics and a powerful prince mutually reinforced each other’s roles, just as university men were trying to perform as Rome’s obedient daughter and sought to fix the pope in the role of an benign pontiff in the process. What happened in September 1617 was not merely a dramatic performance of princely authority that had to compensate for the centre’s weakness with respect to supposedly real circuits of power that operated at Louvain.162 Princely power, localised at the court of Brussels or in the Privy Council and other governmental bodies, was anything but symbolic, as academics at Louvain would experience throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. The point is not that academics could not possibly be sidelined (some of them, such as Fienus and Baius, were, in fact, sidelined between 1607 and 1617) but that arcane forces such as the crushing power of Absolutism that reduce them to mere passivity will not do as an explanation. Performative power must be devised on the spot, in the laboratory of public interest, with all means—tested commonplaces (reformatio) or exempla, institutions (the Privy Council, the States of Brabant), legal tools (codification/visitation), other repertoires for collective action (friendship, clienteles, kinship)—before it can swing into action. Power is bundled by a chain of mediators seeking to accommodate or homogenise their heterogeneous interests. This applies to the powerful at Louvain as well. It is difficult to deny that Jansonius was a powerful don. In line with Bellarmino’s argument, however, this does not explain his sway over academic affairs in the second decade of the 17th century. The positions he held—an academic patron without equal as president of the Pope’s College, deacon of Saint Peter’s, the senior doctor in the Strict College of Faculty Regents, a provisor of several colleges, and collator of dozens of grants—somewhat reduce the surprise. That was exactly the point of devising hierarchies and putting position-holders in place: Jansonius and his friends did not have to reinvent the world all over again to know who was in charge, and to whom they could turn. Yet, his predecessor Baius’ travails in the conflict over ceremonial prerogatives or with respect to the appointment of his nephew indicate that positions could be held to the test and were continuously renegotiated. Jansonius’ profile as the face of the university in Brussels was equally fragile. People such
162 Compare the review of scholarship advocating the primacy of “micro-historical,” “concrete” configurations over macro-historical ones in Revel, “présentation.”
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as the Law professor Sylvius could tap into other, competing channels of communication or even into a repertoire of internal discord if the don did not live up to their expectations—a problem that Drusius and Craesbeke had to deal with as well. A powerful Jansonius was, in other words, the creature of multiple actors who sought to nudge him into action as “the face of the university” for their own purposes and who continuously tested his performance accordingly. Conversely, Jansonius’ ability to perform in this quality was also generated by the tested format of a formal visitation, which allowed the homogenisation of a wide range of heterogeneous interests under the common denominator of statutory reform. The constellations that Jansonius and the academics stumbled into were not the underlying, fundamental fields of tension often invoked in much scholarship on state-building and Church-State relations. The outcome of the clash between the nuncio and the Privy Council suggests that such recognisable formats of conflict were not so rigid that they could not be converted into opportunities to attract, for instance, papal patronage. In the next chapter, where the ongoing negotiations over the Roman Question will be heeded again, this hypothesis of conflict as a political repertoire that could be tapped by actors seeking to unite the body politic for their causes, rather than as the exponent of underlying constellations, will become a thesis. Now that we have delved deeply into the Arcana Imperii, it is time to trace the coming into place of a context in which academic interests could become a unique passage point for papal authority in the Low Countries as well, after they had become just that for religious and dynastic restoration.
CHAPTER SEVEN
RONDO VENEZIANO. ACADEMICS AND THE PAPAL PRINCE (1612–22)
There is another argument not to dismiss the university’s opposition in 1617 as just another proxy war against princely absolutism. Academics had good reason to portray themselves as the champions of the papacy. In the first half of 1617, no fewer than three delegations of the university and the States of Brabant to the nuncio had expressed their gratitude to the Holy See for its benign intervention in the Negotium Romanum.1 For on 1 December 1616, three decades after Danielis had been summoned by Orazio Borghese, his brother, Pope Paul V, had, by virtue of the plenitude of power, confirmed academic prerogatives in the clerical job market. The bull Regimini Universalis Ecclesiae of 1616 was the last grand nomination bull figuring in the 18th-century editions of academic privileges.2 Amended in 1673 by a papal brief of Clement X,3 it would remain in force until the French Revolution. In light of the evidence in the previous chapters, the representation of the 1617 conflict as a typical exemplum of academic opportunism is flawed. There simply was no single legal definition of the university that provided university men with sufficient legal tools to frame their multi-tied interests. This hybridism also applies to Regimini itself. The bull would often, yet not exclusively, be referred to by the academics in the next two centuries as the Pauline Concordat.4 Seen from this perspective, it was in effect a treaty among the Archdukes, in their quality
1
Gesualdo to Borghese, 21 January, 17 February, and 10 June 1617, in ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 113, respectively 26r, 54r, and 180r. The nuncio was treated again, with reference to the “Question,” by the university and the city at the occasion of his visit to Louvain in August 1617. Cf. Acta Universitatis, 3 August 1617, RAL, OUL, 64, 55v–56r. 2 Privilegia, 154–79; the original bull is preserved in UAL, OUL, 76. 3 On this episode, read Ceyssens, “L’université de Louvain et la suspension de son privilège.” 4 E.g., the title in the printed version: “Indultum seu concordatum Paulinum conferendi beneficia in Civitate, Patria, et tota dioecesi Leodiensi. Item Ampliatio utriusque privilegii nominandi quoad taxam, et appositio motus proprii ad Bullam principalem.” Privilegia, 154.
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of sovereign princes and natural protectors of the university, the States of Brabant, as the warden of the land’s privileges, the academics, and the papal prince.5 Not surprisingly, the preamble to Regimini tells a very different story. Great popes such as Paul V, who under the pressure of renewed studies in ecclesiastical history had to live up to the example set at Canossa by Gregory VII, did not compromise with princes who owed them filial obedience. From their point of view, Regimini was a privilege granted by virtue of papal grace. In it, the Archdukes were the first among a series of pious supplicants—the States of Brabant, the University of Louvain, and the Faculty of Arts—duly prostrating themselves at the feet of the pontiff and imploring him to remedy their ailments. At this stage, humble academics had ceased to figure as proverbial violators of ecclesiastical liberty in the general instructions to the nuncios of Flanders and were lauded instead for their “solita pietà, et osservanza” towards the Holy See.6 An alternative view was aired by Philip Maes, lord of Rodegem and archducal resident in Rome, during the 1617 row between the papal nuncio and his brother, the president of the Privy Council. He scolded the academics for their ingratitude to the prince, who (via his agent at the curia) had dissolved the Gordian knot of the Negotium Romanum for them.7 The resident’s outcry not only made the (Brussels interpretation of the) entanglement between academic reform and archducal commitment in Rome explicit. It also bears testimony to how the Roman Question became a matter of diplomacy from 1612 onwards. Until then, Brabanticity as a legal repertoire had been routinely applied in the causae privatae of individual nominees, with the Council of Brabant blocking violations of Eximiae in their favour. After 1612,
5 E.g., the university to the Archdukes, 7 Janauary 1617, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 173r–174v. 6 Cf. Instruttione per Mons. Morra arcivescovo d’Otranto (. . .), 27 June 1617, ed. Cauchie and Maere, Recueil des instructions générales, 71. Scathing comments on the academics’ nasty legal practices in beneficialibus had already disappeared from the instructions to Morra’s predecessor Gesualdo as well; cf. Instrituttione per Monsignor Gesualdo (. . .), 23 October 1615, ed. Cauchie and Maere, Recueil des instructions générales, 38–56. This is probably to be ascribed to Bentivoglio’s influence. 7 “Je suis fort esbahij dentendre ce que mescripvez par vostre lettre derniere du 9e de ce mois de luniversite de Lovain, que si ainsi est, comme je croij, ilz nont raison se formalizer contre les ordres du prince, et seroit une ingratitude trop grande, veu mesmes ce que naguerres aij icij obtenu de la part de Son Alteze a prouffict de ladicte universite.” Maes to Della Faille, Négociations de Rome, 30 November 1617, AGR, Audience, 451, 250r.
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“diplomatisation” seems to have gone hand in hand with a more systematic “Brabanticisation” of the Roman Question itself. In a triumphant letter of November 1616, Maes had also qualified the States of Brabant as being obliged to the prince.8 The Duchy’s power elites represented in the States, for their part, could claim the promulgation of Regimini their achievement. Maes was on their payroll; his son had been allowed to succeed him as Registrar of the States;9 and Maes himself probably owed his prestigious assignment to their lobbying.10 It is time to reap the benefits of the bottom-up approach developed in the previous chapters. We do not have to sort out which of these accounts is actually true, nor do we have to add another version. Instead, we can limit ourselves to tracing how academics and their negotiation partners put into place a configuration in which each of these stories, depositories of multiple and overlapping concerns, could become true. The constellation staged in the preamble to Regimini was, despite its recognisable format and the highly effective causality it generated, the outcome of meandering negotiations that disappeared under the cloak of papal or princely power. Yet, the road to power proved particularly bumpy in this particular case. The argument, which will be developed on chronological lines, consists of four parts. First, the systematic involvement of princely mediation from 1612 onwards provides for a poor explanation for the reversal of the academics’ fortunes in the Roman Question. Even within the paradigm of micro-politics, such a position will prove difficult to uphold. Second, the analysis of the different legal solutions discussed in the years preceding Regimini reveals that the constitutional turn in academic policy from 1612 onwards cannot be considered a purely discursive strategy in tune with the legalistic political culture of the South Netherlands. It was instrumental in attracting support from the Archdukes and from
8
Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 26 November 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 244r. 9 “Dat bijde Staeten geproponeert is, vanden ouden grefier Maes, te continueren sijn pension van iiiic siaers voer de drij iaeren dat sijne legatie dueren sal te Roomen dan dat dheern alsdair (. . .) den voirs. greffier eene vereeringhe te doene van eene somme van xiic teens, ende in deliberatie gestelt sijnde, oft dheeren hun dairtoe willen vueghen, is geseght jae.” Résolutions magistrales, 3 June 1611, SAL, Oud Archief, 311, 72r. It was Hovius’ initiative, cf. Actes concernant les Etats de Brabant, 18 May 1611, SAL, Oud Archief, 1802. 10 Apart from Rome, the Archdukes had a permanent representation at London and Paris. The other courts were serviced by special diplomatic missions with definite assignments. Thomas, “Andromeda Unbound,” 7.
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the States of Brabant, but it simultaneously rekindled the old programme of a highly visible confirmation of the privileges. This was not just a symbolic stake, safeguarding as it did the performative power of legal practices in which the ordo academicus became a tangible reality. And, third, this political culture itself had to be kept functioning at great cost and by all means, which disqualifies it as an unproblematic prime mover of academic success in 1616. It was mediated by a repertoire of conflict that figured as an alternative to the Regime of Grace in the previous decades. After having explored how interest groups materialised in conflicts, the academics’ “Venetian Concert” in 1615–16 allows us, in turn, to trace the efforts going into the configuration of conflicts. These erupted almost automatically in ChurchState constellations typical for early modern Belgium, but the analysis will confirm the hypothesis in the previous chapter, that such conflicts had a highly performative, even ingenious quality. Paradoxically, this episode allowed the university to become Rome’s daughter again;11 the champion of papal primacy against cowardly attacks from the heretics. The fourth argument is that academics were not just under the spell of power but also sought, under the guise of “solita pietà, e osservanza,” to translate the papacy’s ecclesiological programmes into academic programmes. These four arguments will feed the conclusion that it is not just Realpolitik (in the form of princely power and papal patronage) that tilted the balance in favour of the academics, but real politics.
7.1. “Si portano male questi Lovaniesi e troppo si usurpano, mentre vogliono anco in casa d’altri mettere leggi.” The diplomatisation of academic interests, 1612–14 The last document, dated 12 April 1612, in the Acta Quaedam Particularia of the committee charged in 1609 with the Roman Question, is a copy of a letter from the Archdukes to their resident ordering him
11 “Universitas Lovaniensis ut devotissima et obedientissima Sedis Apostolicae filia memorque se ab ea benignissime semper, paternoque affectu habitam esse, secuti authoritatem eius perpetuo studio, doctrinamque sua et scriptis tuita est, et propagavit, ita presidium omne suum semper in eadem Sancta Sede constituit, ad eiusque velut benignissime matris sinum confugit.” Preamble to a supplication of the university to Paul V, 16 September 1616, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 164r–165r.
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to support the academic cause at the curia.12 The agent whom Maes was requested to provide his assistance to, was Joannes A Fraxinis, the teacher in Philosophy who had left for Rome in order to monitor his lawsuit over a Tongeren canonship against the powerful Aegidius De Vivariis, the future subdatario of Pope Urban VIII (1623–44). The Arts faculty, for its part, had seized the occasion to put A Fraxinis on its payroll as its agent in Rome.13 It is telling that his job also consisted in assessing Lombard’s activities: by 1612, the Irishman had obviously forfeited his credibility as a broker of academic interests in the heart of Christendom, at least among members of the Arts faculty. After more than a decade in which the academics had used direct channels of communication with the Holy See, via Lombard and other learned men, the Roman Question surfaced for the first time since 1599–1600 in the diplomatic dispatches of the Court of Brussels. It is tempting, then, to ascribe the academics’ success in 1616 to the prince’s diplomatic heft in the Eternal City and to consider the Roman Question a vehicle for the diplomatisation of relations between Rome and Catholic states. In this section, it will become clear that invoking micropolitics as the driving force of events would expose in a brutal way the paradigm’s tautological flavour, even though archducal diplomacy was not entirely unsuccessful in other areas. 7.1.1. Academics and Roman micro-politics in northwestern Europe The diplomatisation of academic interests from 1612 onwards is also a product of the sources. From that year until 1615, the Roman Question almost disappeared from the agenda of academic boards. The minutes of academic councils are now replaced by diplomatic dispatches in
12 “Et desirant quicelle universite soit maintenue, en tout ses droicts et preeminences nous vous ordonnons de donner a leur agent a leffect que dessus toute l’adresse et assistence requise en ladicte poursuite, tant vers sa sainctete quaultres ses ministres.” The archduke to Maes, 7 April 1612, Ven. Fac. Artium acta quaedam (. . .), RAL, OUL, 746, 37r. 13 I.e., in exchange for a yearly fee of 300 florins. Financial aspects in Acta Facultatis Artium, 6 December 1612, RAL, OUL, 714, 526r and ibidem, 1 September 1614, RAL, OUL, 715, 20r–23v; Acta Universitatis, 29 November 1612, RAL, OUL, 63, 98v–99r. At least from 1614 onwards, the costs of the Roman Question were paid out of the joint tax on wine and beer levied by the university and the city: “dat de penningen noodich tot het vervolch vande questien tegen de scoole van Luijdich [cf. p. 509–21], ende van het privilegien van nominatie souden gelicht ende genomen worden uuijtte middelen der stadt ende universiteijt gemeijn.” Contract between the university and the city, Acta Universitatis, 24 August 1614, RAL, OUL, 63, 162r.
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Brussels and Roman archives as the documentary backbone of this story. There are two reasons for this shift. First, it is not unthinkable that private correspondence between university dons and Roman grandees was not interrupted. After the death of Jacobus Baius in October 1614, it was Jansonius who sporadically pops up as Lombard’s correspondent—in the affair of the privileges, in another, unspecified, public cause, and in the management of human resources at Louvain destined for the Irish missions.14 Yet, such letters rarely, if ever, make it to official records. Second, in the second half of 1611, the Arts faculty had replaced its committee for the privileges with one single commissioner, Carolus Robaulx, a professor in Philosophy and a colleague of A Fraxinis in the pedagogy of the Lily. Robaulx, who had been offered nominations to prestigious churches in return,15 only pops up in academic minutes when renegotiating the terms of his financial agreement with the Arts faculty.16 The special committee had kept separate records of its activities in the Acta quaedam particularia; Robaulx’ papers were lost. A Fraxinis, for his part, was only mentioned once as an official correspondent of the faculty, when imploring his colleagues to write to the pontiff, Bellarmino, and the resident.17 After April 1612, the official correspondence on behalf of the university and the faculty with members of the Sacred College (and with Lombard) seems to have come abruptly to a halt.
14
Cf. Lombard to Jansonius (extract), 1616, copy in RAL, OUL, 4691; in which the archbishop comments on his advice to Louvain deputies in Rome and on his own lobbying towards the Datario and the cardinals charged with the examination of the university’s privileges. The letter seems to be part of a sequel of lost letters. See also Jansonius acting on Lombard’s behalf in Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 1 October 1618, RAL, OUL, 389, 90. Until the foundation of the Irish pastoral college, the Pope’s College was an important hub of Irish missionaries at Louvain; cf. recommendation letters from Jansonius of Irish alumni of the Pope’s College to Edmund Dungan OFM, 10 July 1622, ed. Jennings, Wadding Papers, 76; recommendation of the Irish Franciscans in Jansonius to Della Faille, 15 April 1624, ed. Jennings, Louvain Papers, 73. 15 Contract with Robaulx in Acta Facultatis Artium, 13 February 1612, RAL, OUL, 714, 512r. 16 Cf., for instance, Acta Facultatis Artium, 6 December 1612 and 7 February 1613, RAL, OUL, 714, 526r and 530r–v. For the contract cf. RAL, OUL, 4683. Concerning his ambitions in the clerical job market, see the faculty minutes of 20 September 1613, ibidem, 549r. Robaulx indeed accepted a canonship in Cambrai by virtue of a nomination of the Faculty of Arts after 1612, Liber secundus nominationum, 5 April 1613 and 8 October 1614, RAL, OUL, 4752, 377v. 17 The letter was not copied in the faculty minutes, which only contain a letter of supplication sent to the pope. Acta Facultatis Artium, 28 June 1613, RAL, OUL, 714, 544v–545r.
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This sheds an interesting light on A Fraxinis’ and Robaulx’ activities. The interests of the former to leave for the Eternal City were obvious. His case may well have been exemplary for academic nominees adjusting, at least tactically, to Roman legal practices since 1609–10. This seems to be confirmed by Robaulx’ stakes in the affair: he had been granted a nomination burdening the collations of the provost of Tongeren and was therefore an interested party when applying for the job of faculty commissioner in 1611. That litigation with a papal providee ensued18 can be deduced from the fact that Robaulx obtained a second nomination to a canonship at Cambrai Cathedral in his capacity as litigiosus and that the faculty granted him additional subsidies in 1613 because he had not been able to secure peaceful possession of either of them.19 Yet, not a single reference to his legal troubles could be retrieved in academic minutes. Other faculty nominees must have shared his fate. Despite complaints in 1614 about systematic legal harassment in Liège,20 deliberations with respect to individual cases that had caused so much embarrassment in 1588–1609 were not recorded until A Fraxinis’ return to Louvain in 1614. Pulling the evidence together, it is tempting to conclude that the Robaulx-A Fraxinis team was, above all, involved in the monitoring of causae privatae that, probably, were now settled before Roman tribunals. Thanks to their activities, the causae privatae were (literally) hidden from view. This allowed the archducal resident to figure, in his letters to the Brussels Secretaries of State and to the Archdukes, as a grand protagonist in the causa communis between 1612 and 1614— and to express his disdain for the hapless Lombard.21 Maes reportedly had already offered his services to the academics before his departure 18 Nicolaus Le Clerc, a cleric from Toul, was granted the same benefice in Rome. Brief of Paul V to the Uditore and to the deans of Saint-Paul and Saint-Martin in Liège, 27 March 1612, regest in Hansotte and Forgeur, Inventaire analytique, 77. 19 Cf. the dispatches of the Cologne nunciature: “S’è veduto e riferito a Nostro Signore . . . la controversia del canonicato de Tongri tra’l provisto Apostolico et il nominato dall’università di Lovanio, et s’è veduta anco la copia della provisione fatta sopra di ciò dal conseglio di Brabantia, la quale non è la prima che sia uscita da quel conseglio in altre occasioni simili, pretendendo d’haver privilegii dalla Sede Apostolica di non poter esser tirati fuora della loro università.” Borghese to Albergati, 12 October 1613, ed. Reinhard, Nuntius Antonio Albergati, 843–44. 20 “Quicumque ibidem nominantur, communiter habeant lites pro sua nominatione,” in Acta Universitatis, 30 August 1614, RAL, OUL, 63, 164v. 21 “Cest merveille qu’ayant ceulx de ladicte universite au mesme temps envoye icij tout expres un docteur en theologie, maintenant archevesque d’Armacan, il a laisse couler tant des anneez, sans an avoir quelque resolution.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 10 November 1612, AGR, Audience, 447, 240v.
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to Rome,22 in exchange for compliance in the event of competition between academic nominees and family members he hoped to cover with papal provisions.23 Yet, it is only in 1612 that the resident could be nudged into action by the Archdukes, and by statesmen such as Prats, the archduke’s Secretary of State for Roman affairs.24 In his answering letter to the Archdukes, Maes stated that he had deliberately abstained from intervening in the affair, it being “not without difficulties” and “all too important” to get involved without explicit orders.25 In May 1612, however, academics were confident that the archduke would not need much prodding if another university delegation left for Brussels, after they had experienced that the “power and the crafts of the Liège faction in Rome” could not be overcome without princely backing.26 The timing is significant. It is only after the financial needs of the doctors of the higher faculties had been secured, that the small fry of the Arts faculty, which had failed to obtain subsidies for the staff of the pedagogies, got access to the prince. From then onwards, the philosophers could rely on the channels of communication of the dons in the higher faculties to keep their interests on the agenda; channels of communication that were being empowered during the visitation process. In this context, it is not surprising that the philosophers tried to avoid
22 Cf. Acta Universitatis, 24 August 1610, RAL, OUL, 63, 54r. “Dat die vanden universiteijt genoeg geresolueert sijn eene vereeringhe te doen aenden greffier Maes, ende hem te recommanderen de saicken vande stadt ende universiteijt te Roomen.” Résolutions magistrales, 25 August 1610, SAL, Oud Archief, 311, 37v. 23 Cf. Acta Facultatis Artium, 18 September 1610, RAL, OUL, 714, 765. 24 Cf. Prats’ recommendation in his own name in 1615, Prats to Maes, Négociatons de Rome, 8 August 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 309r. 25 “Mais comme il n’est sans difficulte en aulcuns des poinctz, aussy pour estre de consideration, je me suis tousiours excuse tant qu’ay pou, jusques a ce que jeusse ordre et commandement expres de vostre Alteze.” Maes to Archduke Albert, Négociations de Rome, 28 April 1612, AGR, Audience, 447, 77r. 26 “Ut videlicet eorum intercessione conserventur privilegia que per eorum maiores sunt impetrata, quod etiam facile facturos principes non dubitatur, hinc consultum omnino iudicat solemnem universitatis nomine legationem Bruxellam seu ad principes instituere, ut ab iis dicta interventio serio impetretur.” Supplication of the Faculty of Arts to the university, Acta Universitatis, 11 May 1612, RAL, OUL, 63, 90v–91r. “Veneranda facultas artium . . . deprehendit etiam ex iudicio eorum qui negotium istud in Urbe, Universitatis, et facultatis nomine hactenus tractarunt nihil obtinendum aut non nisi difficillime propter potentiam et varias artes Leodiensium, qui in curia Romana agunt, etiamsi pontificis benevolentiam et pronum judicium in causam sollicitandam suscipiunt.” Acta Universitatis, 11 May 1612, RAL, OUL, 63, 90v–91r.
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confrontation with the dons of the higher faculties “ne facultas incidat hoc tempore in controversiam contra universitatem.”27 There are, at first sight, solid arguments for attributing a decisive weight to the intervention of princely circuits in the final resolution of the Roman Question in the second decade of the 17th century, a period of peace in which the Archdukes could turn their attention to the consolidation of the dynasty’s position in the obedient provinces. The Twelve Years’ Truce indeed resurfaced in academic discourse towards Cardinal Scipione Borghese and other members of the Sacred College as an additional argument to confirm Louvain’s privileges: as the military danger posed previously by the rebels was replaced by a spiritual one due to free movement and reviving commercial contacts, academics sought to raise the profile of the university as the spiritual bastion defending the House of Israel.28 That Brussels policymakers shared their appreciation of the Truce as a prolongation of the war through other means resonates in the exponential increase of diplomatic dispatches in favour of the universities of Dole, Douai, or Louvain in the Négociations de Rome. This turn in archducal policy went hand in hand with the economic revival of the South, the bulk of these letters being related to the re-allocation of monastic resources to university (or Jesuit) colleges. More specifically, the affair of the privileges provided for an excellent occasion for the Archdukes to reassert their authority as sovereign princes, “nomement es pays dembas, quij estoient fort curieux a lobservation de leur vieux droictz, previleges et coustumes,”29 via a Flemish-Burgundian (or Brabantine) representative in Rome who acted independently from the Monarchy’s embassy at Piazza di Spagna. In this scenario, the appointment of the all-powerful Scipione Borghese,
27 Cf. a decision to put the prerogatives of faculty nominees over university nominees temporarily on hold, in Acta Facultatis Artium, 20 August 1613, RAL, OUL, 714, 546v. 28 “Haeretici enim (. . .) successibus suis iam elati, et extortis per eos conditionibus ecclesie catholicae parum aequis, per commercia quae libera iam cum orthodoxis habent, in non parum periculum adducunt Belgicam Ecclesiam, omnius viribus laborantes ut virus suum latius, latiusque spargant, quibus necesse est opponi viros doctrina omni instructos, qui retundant eorum impetus, et pro muro sint domui Israel.” The university to Borghese, 15 April 1611, Ven. Fac. Artium acta quaedam (. . .), RAL, OUL, 746, 28v–30r. 29 Report on a conversation with Acquaviva, Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 14 December 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 315v–317v.
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the nipote of Paul V, to the protectorship of Flanders should be situated in the attempts of the Archdukes to display their sovereignty both in international politics and in home affairs.30 Recent scholarship has abandoned older views of the Archdukes as mere pawns on a Spanish chessboard, with Albert and his Brussels entourage recurrently overtaking the initiative during the peace negotiations in 1598–1604 and 1607–09, and the archduke, in his quality of a prince of the Empire, being deeply involved in Central-European affairs.31 Seen from this perspective, the notion of “corrispondenza” in Bentivoglio’s Relazione di Fiandra of 1613 describes more aptly the relations between Madrid, Brussels, and the other courts of Europe than the discussions over whether archducal sovereignty was a fact or a fiction.32 In the general instructions as well as in diplomatic dispatches, the nunciature of Flanders emerges as an important crossroads of intelligence for the nuncios in the Empire just as much as for their colleagues in Madrid and Paris, with the papal diplomats in Brussels figuring as key brokers of the peace policy of the Holy See.33 Nonetheless, Philip III (and the Dutch rebels) had always considered the Cession of 1598 a sleight of hand. Archducal sovereignty aimed not at abandoning but at strengthening the Spanish position in northwestern Europe, in line with other projects aired in Madrid throughout the 16th and the 17th centuries to pass off the Low Countries to third parties.34 In 1612 it had become evident that the Habsburg Netherlands would eventually return to the fold of the Monarquía after Albert’s death. In Bentivoglio’s Relazione di Fiandra, the Archdukes were depicted as “mere depositaries” of the Spanish King.35 It remains a
30 Cf. Duerloo, “Soevereiniteit en symbolisch kapitaal onder de Aartshertogen.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Vlaams-Nederlandse Vereniging voor Nieuwe Geschiedenis, University of Ghent, 2 April 2004. 31 Cf., respectively, Allen, Philip III and the Pax Hispanica, 203–33, Croft, “Brussels and London,” and Da Costa Kaufmann, “Archduke Albert as an Austrian Habsburg.” 32 Relatione di Fiandra fatta dall’Arcivescovo di Rhodi Nuntio della Santità di Nostro Signore Papa Paolo Quinto (. . .) inviata all’illustrissimo cardinal Borghese nipote di S. Santità, 6 April 1613, ASV, Fondo Borghese, I, 269–272, 18r–88r. 33 Cf. Boute, “Que ceulx de Flandres se disoijent tant catholicques,” 462. 34 On the more than 20 schemes discussed in Madrid in between 1539 and 1691, several proposed during the “Sovereign” reign of the Archdukes, and their strategic significance for Spanish international policy, read Valladares, “Decid adiòs a Flandes.” 35 “I negotii del Re di Spagna (. . .) dipendono da gli arciduchi in due modi: l’uno per esser l’Arciduca generale di questo essercito di Sua Maestà, l’altro perche le Altezze
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moot point how all this affected the chains of people who embodied this triangular relationship between Spain, its northernmost outpost, and Rome. From the 1960s and the 1970s onwards, the economic and cultural reintegration of Flandes in the Italo-Iberian world in the 17th century, embodied in a prolific diaspora of merchants, skilled craftsmen, and artists from the South Netherlands in the gateway cities of the Mediterranean, has attracted a fair amount of scholarly attention.36 The political reintegration of the Low Countries in this triangular relationship, in contrast, has benefitted only to a limited extent from scholarly interest in the “new political history.”37 It is telling that a chapter on the Low Countries is notable for its non-existence in Mikropolitik. The Court of Brussels did function as a passage point for the ItaloIberian market of patronage for the military, as is suggested by the large number of recommendation letters in Roman and Brussels archives for Spanish and Italian nobles wishing to serve in the Army of Flanders. The general instructions dispatched by the Secretariat of State in Rome to the new nuncios mention the omnipresence of influential Spanish ministers at the Court of Brussels, in line with Bentivoglio’s comments on the subject in his Relazione di Fiandra.38 Yet, the household of the Archdukes, initially exclusively populated by Spaniards and Italians, gradually became a venue for the elites of the Low Countries as vacancies had to be filled.39 This has fuelled the hypothesis that the Court of Brussels partly transformed into a machinery of patronage and integration towards regional power elites via appointments to court positions.
loro son considerate doppo, ch’è riuscito sterile il lor matrimonio non tanto come prencipi, quanto come depositarii, per cosi dire, di questi stati.” Relatione di Fiandra (. . .), 6 April 1613, ASV, Fondo Borghese, I, 269–272, 18r–88r. 36 E.g., Stols, De Spaanse Brabanders, Baetens, De nazomer van Antwerpens welvaart, and Brulez, Marchands flamands à Vénise. 37 Flashbacks with respect to the micro-political relations between Madrid and Brussels in Esteban Estríngana, Madrid y Bruselas, passim. 38 “Et la medesima buona intelligenza gioverà di haver con gli altri ministri forastieri, che dal marchese Spinola in poi sono tutti Spagnuoli.” Istruttione per Monsignor Gesualdo (. . .), 23 October 1615, ed. Giordano, Le istruzioni generali di Paolo V, 1004. Compare “Per la mescolanza di tante nazioni, che d’ordinario per occasion dell’esercito si veggono qui in Brusselles. Che in questa parte senza dubio la Corte di Fiandra prevale ad ogn’altro d’Europa.” Relatione di Fiandra, 6 April 1613, ASV, Fondo Borghese, I, 269–272, 33r–36r. A cutting-edge assessment of the “Spanish faction” at the Brussels Court in Thomas, “La corte de los archiduques.” 39 Lanoye, “Structure and Composition,” 108.
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Where these groups tangled with each other,40 did they contrariwise function as “parties” avant-la-lettre, or did they do all that alternatively? In this scenario, appointments to the Archdukes’ Roman legation must have been the object of fierce competition. Appointments of sitting curialists in 1605 and 1618 may have aimed at easing tensions between the two rivalling factions in Brussels.41 The long legacy of the “Burgundian” Philip Maes (1610–18), with one son serving at the court of Brussels,42 one in the Brabant States, and another appointed in 1615 as a cameriere d’honore of Paul V,43 reflected, then, the transformation of the Brussels Court into a means of accomodating local elites during the Truce. To which extent would this evolution have influenced academic successes in Brussels and Rome? Not much, probably. First, there is no evidence that a partial “Burgundicisation” of the Brussels Court during the Truce redirected academic channels of communication to the prince. In the visitation process as well as in other affairs pending at the Court of Brussels, their most trusted contacts at court were, alongside Drusius, invariably a mixture of members of the Councils and foreigners such as Brizuela, Georg of Austria, and Trevigi. Enter academic gift-exchange via the so-called munusculum academicum, a donation of a variable quantity of wine by an official delegation of the university to visitors of quality.44 These donations, despite their routine occurrence, cannot be dismissed as merely symbolic gifts: half of the proposals in academic minutes to salute visitors to the university town with pomp and circumstance were motivated by affairs pending at Court, in the
40 Compare, for instance, the findings of Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 130–31, on Italian clients of the Monarchy, with the small proportion of Belgian nobles in Fernández Izquierdo, “Los Flamencos en las órdenes militares españolas.” 41 I.e., Jean Richardot, Jr. (Flemish-Burgundian, 1600–03), Don Pedro de Toledo (Capellano mayor of the archducal chapel and Grande of Spain, 1604–05), Herman d’Ortembergh (curialist, imperial circuits, 1606–10), Philip Maes (Flemish-Burgundian, 1610–18), and Juan Bautista Vives (Spaniard, curialist, 1618–33). Cf. Goemans, “Het Belgische gezantschap te Rome.” 42 Cf. Négociations de Rome, 1614, AGR, Audience, 449. 43 “Nostro Signore ha ricevuto per suo cameriere d’honore un figlio dell’ambasciattore di Fiandra.” Avvisi di Roma, September 1615, BAV, Urbinates Latini, 1083, 490r. 44 About 75 per cent of the 264 salutationes registered in between 1588 and 1625 were ordered by the university in its entirety; one-fifth were ordered by the Arts faculty with the Sacra Facultas Theologiae recording (from 1608 onwards) a number of salutations in its own name as well. Several joint salutations by the university and the town were also recorded. See also p. 464 n. 94.
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Councils, or in the States. Alongside nuncios, high Church dignitaries and princely councillors continued to provide, after 1609, the bulk of persons of quality thus received at Louvain;45 the proportion of courtiers and high nobles, by contrast, remained relatively small. This (rough) picture, combined with the evidence in the previous chapters, does not allow us to conclude that a more “Burgundian” Court had opened a window of opportunity. More generally, recent historiography has nuanced the functionalist notion of “the European court” as a streamlined tool of princely patronage.46 The Court was definitely an important centre of decision-making, but the role of Brussels micropolitics in the Roman Question cannot be considered decisive. This accounts for archducal influence in Rome as well. First, the archducal residents—to Maes’s great despair, they never obtained the title of full ambassadors47—had to keep a low profile in the “Grand Theatre of European Politics,” a matter that was explicitly dealt with in the general and secret instructions to Philip Maes in 1610.48 Their official status seems not more fanciful than that of Laurens Dublioul, who, like other agents of the respective constituencies of the Monarchy in Rome, had operated until 1600 under the aegis of the king’s ambassador. The first archducal resident, Richardot, was to be introduced by the duke of Sessa during his first audience with the pope, had to offer the ambassador his services, and had to avoid or even to ignore any source of discord.49 The instructions to Philip Maes equally left
45
This gift-exchange (from which the Archdukes and other sovereign princes were excluded) engaged above all the nuncios (c.20 entries); high Church dignitaries who often had a seat in the States of Brabant (c.80 entries), and princely councillors (c.70 entries). See also p. 464 n. 94. 46 Princely households were probably too small to integrate power elites in a significant way, in addition to the fact that their composition more often than not escaped the prince’s control. Dean, “Le corti,” 428–30. 47 Négociations de Rome, 1614–1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 48v, 182v; 184r; 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 111r. 48 “Il ne sera que bien faict dexcuser de visiter souvent les Ambassadeurs des roijs et princes, . . . et fuyr de vous rencontrer avecq eulx aux eglises, et aultres lieux publicques, afin deschever les contentions pour preceder et choses semblables . . . en quoij nentendez comprendre les ambassadeurs de lempereur, nij dEspagne, lesquels vous debvez honnorer, et traicter avecq eulx differamment quavecq les aultres.” Instruction pour . . . Messire Philippe Maes (. . .), in Négociations de Rome, 25 September 1610, AGR, Audience, 445, 194r–198r. See also Instruction pour . . . Monseigneur Jehan Richardot, in Négociations de Rome, 15 June 1600, AGR, Audience, 438, 133v. 49 “Vous ordonnons de vous regler et gouverner selon que le ducq de Sessa . . . vous conseillera et quayez a vous addresser a luy, . . . nous vous ordonnons que si par longue practique, vous appercevies que du coste dudict ambassadeur fut procede de quelque
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little doubt on the attitude to be maintained towards his Spanish colleague. The prince’s conspicuous reluctance to enact grandeur in Rome became explicit in a summary of Maes’ report of 1614. There, the archducal resident insisted on the necessity of maintaining broad networks at the Curia via the introduction of archducal créatures in the Sacred College after the example of other great princes, and via the distribution of pensions and favours to cardinals and ministers of the Dataria and the Cancellaria Apostolica.50 The comments drafted by the Brussels Secretariat of State pointed out dryly that His Highness had never granted pensions to curialists (!) “et ainsij ne sij encline elle pas encores”; moreover, the appointment of the nipote as protector of Flanders should suffice. This leads us to the second argument. The pontiff ’s nephew, the new protector of Flanders, could hardly be mistaken for a “national” cardinal of the Netherlands or for an archducal créature. His appointment could, in other words, not be mistaken for a challenge to Spanish views on the political status of the Netherlands in a cheff du monde the Monarchy considered its own backyard.51 A telling example is the career of d’Ortembergh. Appointed by the Archdukes to the bishopric of Arras in 1610, the curialist from Guelders emerged one of the favourites, recommended by the emperor, for a cardinal’s hat just before his return to Belgium. It is only at this stage that a recently arrived Maes could prod his princes in Brussels into backing their former servant in Rome too.52 In this context, it may be significant
froideur en ce que nous concerne, (combien ne le pouvons ainsi croire), que vous le dissimulez doulcement et avecq discretion, sans que luy se puist appercevoir que vous en ayez quelque umbraige ou resentiment.” Instruction pour . . . Monseigneur Jehan Richardot, in Négociations de Rome, 15 June 1600, AGR, Audience, 438, 135r. 50 Poincts et articles de ce que le chevalier maes at aprins en Cour de Rome (. . .), in Négociations de Rome, 20 August 1614, AGR, Audience, 449, 194r–111r. 51 d’Ortembergh had been congratulated in a conspicuous manner by the marquis of Aytona, the ambassador of the Catholic king, on the appointment of Cardinal Borghese: “En somme lelection de V.AA. (. . .) selon le jugement dung chascun fort approuvee, mesmes des ministres d’Espaigne, et en particulier du Marquis d’Aytone ambassadeur Catholicque, lequel me disoit, que sil eust pense que le cardinal Borghese eust voulu accepter aulcune protection, quil eusse aussi faict tomber es mains dicelles la protection du Royaulme de Naples.” d’Ortembergh to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 11 August 1611, AGR, Audience, 443, 210v. 52 “Il debvoit bientost partir vers sa residence, au contraire le bruict court icij par toutte la ville, qua ceste promotion premiere de cardinaulx, il doibt estre du nombre suyvant les lettres quen sa recommandation auroit escript sa majeste imperiale, et si me sont aulcuns ministres de cette court venuz demander, sy vostre Alteze avoit faict
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that the orchestrated gift-exchange of letters in academic sources is much less prominent in the dispatches of the archducal residents. This does not exclude the possibility that micro-political relations between Brussels and Rome sidelined official representatives; conversely, the latter did not report on their own micro-political activities. All this remains highly inconclusive, in the absence of an in-depth investigation of archducal foreign policy. Yet, princely involvement alone will not suffice as an explanation for the unravelling of the Roman Question 1616. Real politics will have to fill in the gap left by Realpolitik. 7.1.2. “Il a voulu dabundant ouir encoires partie adversaire.” Academic interests at the court of the new Gregory VII As soon as Maes had raised the affair of the privileges during an audience with the pope between 24 April and 5 May 1612, a familiar stalemate emerged. Paul V had displayed his willingness to confirm the university’s privileges, but his pontificating about abuses did not bode well.53 Maes immediately started to negotiate with the datario, who had been assigned to him as his contact person, “pour liquider les difficultez.” In his letter of the end of June, the legate was moderately optimistic, “bien quil tarde a lordinaire de ceste court spirituelle.”54 Three weeks later, however, curialist longueur was no longer the main obstacle: the curia itself rallied around the rights of the Holy See—“estant ung poinct fort plausible a tous princes souverains”— and against abuses committed by the Louvainists, arguments that, in Maes’ view, were just pretexts to serve their own interests. It seems, Maes added in cipher, that “they” preferred the pontiff to do nothing at all.55
le mesme, le succes nous fera saige de ce que sera.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 14 May 1611, AGR, Audience, 446, 110r–111v. 53 “Quelle desiroit bien confirmer leur previleiges, com’avoyent faict ses predecesseurs, mais poinct leur bailler dadvantaige où des aultres, comme pretendoyent ceulx de ladicte universite, voires quilz abusoyent de leursdicts privileges.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 5 May 1612, AGR, Audience, 447, 82r. 54 Maes to Prats, Négociations de Rome, 30 June 1612, AGR, Audience, 447, 123r. Several letters mentioning the Louvain question were exchanged between Rome and Brussels during these two months. 55 “A la confirmation des privileges de celle de Lovain, je rencontre aussy grande contradiction de ces curialistes, com’ilz lappellent, lesquelz informent tellement le pape et son dattaire, a leur prouffit et advantaige, soubz pretext qu’il y vat de lauthorite de Sa Sainctete (estant ung poinct fort plausible a tous princes souverains) . . . et
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The resident would be proven right. When, by the end of 1612, satisfaction had been given by Maes, who probably had been briefed via A Fraxinis by Robaulx, to the datario and the latter had submitted his report to the pope, the legate’s attempts to obtain a quick verdict failed, as the pope, a former uditore of the Apostolic Chamber and a self-declared expert on the Louvain abuses, wished to consult members of the Sacred College first.56 A few weeks later, Maes drew a sobering picture of the state of affairs: the datario, Marcaurelio Maraldi, was “obstine en son opinion” with respect to the jurisdictional aspects of the affair and would later be identified as Louvain’s most fierce opponent.57 The pontiff followed Maraldi’s line of reasoning “pour luy estre favorable et avantageuse”; for similar reasons, the cardinals who had been charged with the affair, Orazio Lancelotti and Giangarzia Millino, were not to be trusted either.58 Fretting over a suitable context in which a favourable verdict could be reached, the resident turned down the possibility of appealing to the Rota, even though this plan had originated in the university itself.59 When pondering the possibility of seeking legal counsel in Rome, Maes found all lawyers were “partie en cause.” In the beginning of January 1613, he sent a proposal for a settlement that, to his opinion, would solve the matter once and for all.60 Six months later, another “expédient” reached Brussels. At
ceneantmoings sembloit que lon vouloit daultre coste quicelle demeureroit avecq les bras croisez sans rien faire [Italicisation = cipher].” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 21 July 1612, AGR, Audience, 447, 136r. 56 “Sa sainctete y trouve a redire et veult derechieff mectre laffaire en deliberation des cardinaulx, pour estre de grande importance, comme il dict, mesmes qu’ayant ce poinct este traicte au temps de feu le Pape Clement 8 et prins mains de sadicte sainctete lors auditore della camera, n’auroyent parties jamais sceu accorder.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 10 November 1612, AGR, Audience, 447, 240v. 57 “Le mesme debvoir feraij je vers son dataire, Monsignore Maraldi, qui est celluij qui plus en ceste matiere semble contraire.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 18 May 1612, AGR, Audience, 448, 116r. 58 “Et pour mesme raison je crains, ne facent bonne relation les cardinaulx Mellini et Lanceloto.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 14 November 1612, AGR, Audience, 447, 242r. 59 “Selon quaij advise par une de mes precedentes, de mectre laffaire en deliberation de la Rote, ne scaij aussij . . . sil est conseille bien que ceulx de ladicte universite ont donne ceste charge a leurdict agent, car a vraij dire, ilz me sont aussij suspects et crains semblablement, que ceteris paribus et indubio ilz seront plustost pour le pape, quen faveur de ladicte universite, et silz viennent a faire quelque decision contraire, ce serat ung preiudice pour jamais.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 14 November 1612, AGR, Audience, 447, 242r. 60 “Cependant traictant souvent avecq leur agent avons trouve ung aultre expedient que semble . . . feroijt cesser toute poursuicte en ceste court et estre assez practicable.”
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that stage, Maes had been informed by Cardinal Lancelotti that a confirmation of the privileges in their present form was unlikely.61 The contrast with the situation under Clement’s pontificate is striking. The Aldobrandini pope had created a context in which academic interest could flourish. Lombard had never questioned the favourable disposition of the pontiff and “his” congregation of cardinals towards the university. Maes, by contrast, would never retract his utterances on the ill disposition of Millino and Lancelotti, and this until the end of the affair in 1616. Unlike the committee of cardinals set up in 1599, the spokesmen assigned to Maes in 1612 were not supposed to chat “familiariter” with advocates of Louvain’s cause. Take the position of Marcaurelio Maraldi. Appointed to the top job of the Dataria in 1611, he followed the example of his predecessor, an opponent ex officio of the university’s claims.62 The fact that Maraldi was not on the archduke’s payroll did not facilitate things.63 Dealings with former datarios (notably Arrigoni in 1605–07) had been (a bit) less cumbersome for Maes’ predecessors De Toledo and d’Ortembergh64—but then, pensions on rich abbeys had been on the table, not privileges that reeked of abuse and that shunned curialist interest. Lancelotti’s position, for his part, was barely commented on in the sources. Created in 1611, the cardinal shared with Millino a history as a Rota judge and was, as a result, one of the pope’s experts when it came to settling jurisdictional conundrums. In that quality, he figured together with Millino as a
Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 5 January 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 1r. 61 “Vue que ja le cardinal Lanceloti (qui est commiz avecq ledict Sr. Mellini) ma dict ouvertement ne se pouoir faire ce que pretendoijt ladicte universite quoad privilegium fori en prejudice de lauthorite competant a l’auditeur della Camera, et que le pape estoijt en possession contraire selon quil disoijt scavoir tresbien, pour avoir este aultrefoijs auditeur de Rote, que pourtant ferions mieulx de demander quelque aultre nouveau privilegie, que dinsister en nous premieres demandes, suyvant quoij avons icij trouve quelque second expedient auquel quand sa sainctete se vouldroijt conformer (com aulcuns semblent donner espoir) ladicte universite (a ce que jentens) sen contenteroijt.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 27 July 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 186r. 62 Cf. p. 348. 63 Cf. the notes in the margins of the 1614 report: “mais pour le regard du dataire, et aultres . . ., Son Altèze nentand quelle obligation elle ait duser de liberalitez et recognoissances en leur endroict, attendu quelle ne les employe jamais.” Poincts et articles de ce que le chevalier maes at aprins en Cour de Rome, in Négociations de Rome, 20 August 1614, AGR, Audience, 449, 194r–211r. 64 Cf., on the pensions for the archducal seminaries at Louvain and Douai, d’Ortembergh to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 2 July 1605, AGR, Audience, 440, 92r–v.
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member of the committee monitoring jurisdictional conflicts between Rome and another troublesome Habsburg dominion, the Duchy of Milan.65 Enter Giangarzia Millino. A nuncio to the court of Madrid elevated to cardinal just before his return to the Eternal City in 1607, Millino was not only well versed in the affairs of Spain and Spanish Italy, but had earned his spurs as a papal legate to the Empire in 1608 as well.66 In that year, the cardinal had brokered a compromise in a conflict between the Liège secondary clergy and its bishop, and after his return continued to figure in the dispatches of the Cologne nunciature as the Roman contact man of a quarrelsome Liège clergy.67 Nor was he a stranger to Maes, who found him far from “affectionez” in another academic affair. Already in the first decade of the 17th century, the Franciscans and the Jesuits of Besançon had sought to capitalise on that city’s status as an imperial enclave within archducal Burgundy to organise courses more academico, to the detriment of the “ancient and famous” University of Dole. Negotiations had been resumed since 1607, but resulted, thanks to the intervention of Trevigi68 and others, in a papal brief against the Besançon fathers in 1611.69 In 1612, however, the Jesuit cause gained momentum thanks to letters of recommendation from a newly elected emperor70 and the support mustered by the (imperial) city of Besançon at the Imperial Diet of 1613.71 This had created circumstances in which the pope could recant earlier concessions, the Jesuits and their general Acquaviva being, in Maes’ view, recipients of papal favour.72 In this episode, Millino’s tough stance had
65
Cf. Zunckel, “Come la testa dell’Idra,” esp. 352–53. Cf. Reinhard, “Kardinal Millino als Sachverständiger der Kurie.” 67 See the many references to letters (Amalteo to Borghese) concerning Millino and the secondary clergy of the diocese, 1608–10, in Samerski, Atilio Amalteo. 68 “Vos ne indormite iis, quae cum Jesuitis sunt, negotiis, cum enim indutias concedere putantur, tunc minus otiosi sunt, quam cum nihil agunt.” Trevigi to the University of Dole, 1612, Correspondance d’André Trévisius, AGR, Audience, 1462. 69 Cf. a copy of the Brief, 17 June 1611, ASR, Paesi Stranieri: Francia e Belgio, 3, 17th bundle. 70 Thomas, “Chronologie,” 13. Albert had discretely, but in vain, attempted to haul in the imperial crown too. 71 “Je scaij de bonne part qua la derniere diete imperiale lon a traicte bien particulierement ce faict en faveur desdicts de Besançon.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 1 February 1614, AGR, Audience, 449, 40r. 72 “Mais je la [= His Holiness] treuve quelque peu inclinee en faveur des peres de la societe y ayants colliege, et leur (. . .) general [= Acquaviva] est fort bien voulu vers sadicte sainctete.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 21 July 1612, AGR, Audience, 447, 136r–137r. 66
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contrasted sharply with the more accommodating tone of the other cardinal charged with the affair, the cardinal of Sant’Eusebio73—who, tellingly, had not been charged with the Louvain affair. Related to the Borghese family, Millino was also the secretary of the Holy Office, member of the congregations De Vescovi e Regolari and Riti, and prefect of the Index and the Congregation of the Council—congregations that, under the pontificate of Paul V, can be considered the operation rooms of religious renewal conducted (and appropriated) by the papacy in Catholic Europe.74 In short, Millino occupied a position specific to this pontificate: that of a second nipote of sorts for religious and ecclesiastical affairs, with the function of the cardinal-nephew being limited to the expansion and management of the family’s clientelist capital; and, to a lesser extent, to the affairs of the States of the Church and international politics.75 Add the deafening silence on Scipione Borghese’s side: the cardinalprotector of Flanders was never mentioned as Louvain’s champion in between 1612 and 1616, and had even bluntly refused to intervene in the Dole controversy.76 The diplomatisation of academic interests via princely channels of communication was, in other words, successfully countered in Rome, where negotiations over the confirmation of the privileges were withdrawn from the realm of international politics (Borghese) and redirected to the loci of decision-making that shaped the papacy’s religious policy (Millino). In several respects, Roman strategies mirrored the policy of Clement VIII in Lombard’s days, but now few attempts were made by the entourage of the pontiff to woo the university. It did not help that in 1611, while A Fraxinis was packing his bags, tensions between curialists and the “national Liège Church” intensified again,77 and that the prince-bishop had dispatched a letter
73 Ferdinando Taverna, “Et il vat bien que le cardinal de St Eusebe se monstre tout affectionne envers nous, et noz affaires, comme porte ladicte vostre, et don temps en temps et len vous debvez le mercier,” Archduke to Maes, Négociations de Rome, 7 September 1612, AGR, Audience, 447, 179r. 74 Cf. Fattori, “Vos Romani,” 1–33. 75 Emich, Bürokratie und Nepotismus, 248–55. 76 “L’on dict aussi que sadicte majeste [= the emperor] ou bien son ambassadeur auroit icij faict plusieurs presents regales [italicisation = cipher] qui souvent font des grands effects; le cardinal Borghese se professe protecteur si bien de la germanie, que de flandres.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 23 February 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 21r. 77 Daris, Histoire du diocèse et de la principauté de Liège pendant le XVIe siècle, 522.
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in his name to the Eternal City in 1612 imploring the pontiff to exclude academic nominees from Liège benefice markets altogether.78 Enter the endless lamentations of the Roman curia over the violations of ecclesiastical liberty (including jurisdictional instruments similar to the placet) in the Italian constituents of the Monarquía and the pressing need to keep the Iberian clergy from appealing to secular judges—concerns that had featured prominently in the general instructions to the nuncios of Madrid, including those who had been dispatched to Millino back in 1605.79 All this indicates that, in contrast with Maes’ presentation of things, the Roman Question cannot be reduced to the interests in benefices of curialists. By translating their legal conflicts with academic nominees into a clash between secular judges and apostolic tribunals, the pope’s men provided their overlord with a cause whose merits were many: for a change, the Holy See could count on the support of a national Church rather than being opposed by one, the Liège clergy being, despite its internal divisions, unified in its attempt to keep “foreigners” out of one of the richest job markets of Christianity. If Rome wished to set an example towards Habsburg ruled areas—and some of Maes’ lively reports of the audiences with the pontiff suggest this was indeed the case80—then taking on the Brussels Archdukes was probably the safest bet. On top of all that, all these aims could be achieved by doing nothing. By biding his time until dreadful abuses had been corrected,81 Paul V, hailed as
78
See Pasture, “Inventaire du Fonds Borghese,” 176, with reference to Fondo Borghese, III, 112c–d, 172 r. Cf. p. 410–12. 79 Giordano, “Aspetti di politica ecclesiastica,” 255–56. 80 “Que es jours passez il me dict, que lesdicts de Louvain abusoient grandement de leur previleges, vostre alteze faisoit que luy plaisoit en matieres beneficiaires, et sadicte Sainctete conformoit la plus part.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 21 July 1612, AGR, Audience, 447, 136r–137r. E.g., with respect to the problems originating from the payment of the Annates for recently appointed bishops: “ij passoient dune part et daultre de longs et grandz discours, insistant tousiours sa sainctete nij avoir aulcun previlege, statut ou coustume, pour longes anees elle fust, que puisse prejudicier au Saint Siege, soubz le pretext desquelz neantmoings on alloit journellement impietant sur ses droicts, et jurisdictions, bien audehors de ce que lon faisoit aux aultres paijs, estatz et provinces.” Maes to Prats, Négociations de Rome, 25 November 1617, AGR, Audience, 451, 295r. 81 “Respondoijt estre fort bien informe des merites de ceste universite quil mectroijt en deliberation ses demandes et feroijt tout ce quelle pourroijt pour la favoriser et donner quelque satisfaction a vostre Alteze, declairant aultrefois vouloir confirmer ses privileges tels quelle auroijt mais ne pouvoir approuver les exces et abus”; “Car quoij que le pape dict (comme tousiours) le vouloir faire, toutefoijs jespere peu, soubz pretext des abuz et excess, quil dict se commectre par ceulx de ladicte universite, ainsi
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the new Gregory VII by the late Baronio at the conclave electing him, could plug his own line of conduct into the policy of his predecessors since Trent. This policy, which was legally entrenched in the jurisdictional bull In Coena Domini, was central to the self-understanding of the early modern papacy and interwove hierarchy, discipline, and the freedom of the Church with each other.82 Maes and A Fraxinis continued, throughout 1613, to promote the affair of the privileges.83 In July 1613, the pontiff decided to have the case reported by Millino and Lancelotti to the Consistory. It is in this state of affairs that Maes, on Lancelotti’s suggestion, sent a second draft to the academics for a new privilege that would substitute the old ones. The resident insisted that academics and their friends in the Privy Council had to make up their minds quickly, in order to prevent the pope from reaching a nefarious verdict in the meantime, which would only add to the difficulties “veu quordinairement les grans princes revocquent mal voluntiers une chose ja faicte.”84 Both proposals played an important role in academic mobilisation, with the inevitable Jansonius participating to several delegations to Brussels. After the Privy Council, instructed on the merits of the affair by the academic delegation of January 161385 and by a legal treatise drafted
informe des ministres de ceste court, pour par mesme pretext croistre leur authorite et jurisdiction.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 1 June and 13 July 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 126r and 171r. 82 “Me dist, quil ne desiroit rien plus . . . mais que daultre costel come chieff de leglise il estoit oblige a defendre et conserver les droicts et autorite du Saint Siege.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 9 September 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 289r–v. Compare Giordano, “Aspetti di politica ecclesiastica,” 256. See also Wright, The Early Modern Papacy, 146 sqq. 83 “Et depuis baille charge a leur agent ou procureur, affin que journellement il les iroijt sollicitant pour la depesche.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 8 June 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 133r. 84 Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 24 August 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 207r. 85 The delegation included the faculty’s commissioner Robaulx, the pensionary of the city of Louvain Fannius, the primary professor in Medicine Gerardus Villeers, and Jansonius. Information was obtained through a letter from “Brussels” (not specified) to Sylvius. Villeers, in his capacity as court physician, was probably an expert in mobilising his contacts at court. Acta Facultatis Artium, 29 January 1613, RAL, OUL, 714, 526v. Briefing by Jansonius on their activities in Brussels in Acta Universitatis, 3 February 1613, RAL, OUL, 63, 106r–v. A letter of supplication was a few days later submitted to the prince by Robaulx, who was informed via the channel Villeers-Prats that it had been transmitted immediately to the Privy Council. Report by Villeers, 16 February 1613, ibidem, 107v–108r; by Robaulx in the faculty minutes, 7 February 1613, RAL, OUL, 714, 530r–v.
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by Corselius,86 had joined the university men in their opposition to a new privilege (cf. below), it was the turn of the official representative of Paul V, Guido Bentivoglio, to intervene with Borghese and with the pontiff in favour of the university, and in favour of a confirmation of the privileges as they were.87 It was paired with a letter from the archduke himself, in which the prince reverently asked the pope to neglect the ill advice of his ministers.88 The answer would excel in benevolence as well: the pontiff wished to favour prince and university—as soon as its abuses and excesses had been remedied.89 Maes had been proved right, when advising to display more assertiveness, after the example of other great princes.90 After this, Rome remained silent. Little progress was made when the academics, sometime in June 1613, eventually resigned themselves to the second proposal for a new privilege.91 By the end of that year, Maes got the Arts faculty’s consent to negotiate a new privilege that would replace the old one.92 In the meantime, the resident had been confronted with curialist “Stoicism” when pushing, in vain, for a suspension of papal briefs against Louvain nominees.93 On top of that, the 86
Acta Facultatis Artium, 14 March 1613, RAL, OUL, 714, 532r–v. “Sarebbe al sicuro di pregiudizio alle cose ecclesiastiche et alla autorità della Sede Apostolica in queste provincie tutto quello, che si facesse contro i detti privileggi, et in pregiuditio dell’Università di Lovanio, ch’è il maggior sostegno c’habbia havuto, et c’habbia in questi paesi la religion cattolica.” Bentivoglio to Borghese, 6 April 1613, BAV, Barberini Latini, 6808, 140r–v. 88 “Ut gratum mihi exstitit litteris legati mei fieri certiorem de prona sanctitatis tuae voluntate in universitatem studii mei Lovaniensis, ita molestum fuit intelligere curiae vestrae ministres aliquot non ita propenso erga eam videri affectu, in causa ubi de fori privilegio quaestio est.” Négociations de Rome, 14 April 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 81r–v. 89 “Che la mente di S. B. è di conservare i privileggi, perche la detta Università si contenga dentro i termini di essa, et non si eccedano.” Borghese to Bentivoglio, 27 April 1613, ASV, Fondo Borghese, I, 914, 564r–v. 90 “Et quen tout cas veullans escripre debvroijt la lettre sonner plus clair et avecq plus grand resentiment vue lhumeur du pape [italicisation = cipher] et dont aultres princes se sont trouvez bien.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 15 May 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 121r. 91 The address “Illustrissime et reverendissime domine” on the text summarising the faculty’s point of view suggests that a prelate (Drusius?) had been involved in the deliberations. Négociations de Rome, 20 September 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 235r–v. 92 Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 9 September 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 289r–v. 93 The Louvain request as such could not be traced, but Maes’ allusions are clear enough:. “car quant a la evocation, que font les curialistes a charge des denomez de 87
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entourage of the pontiff had proved itself particularly unwilling to help university men shed their abuses. A request from the Arts faculty in the beginning of 1613 to examine its statutes and to charge Bentivoglio with an investigation into the abuses of which it was accused in Rome, had fallen on deaf ears94—which feeds the hypothesis, that, in addition to Liège curialists, circles shaping the religious policy of the Holy See were interested in keeping the affair in limbo. In the middle of 1614, when A Fraxinis returned to Louvain and Maes briefly visited the Low Countries, no results could be produced. In sharp contrast with this poor record, however, the next section will reveal that archducal diplomacy had been more successful in wooing other ecclesiastical princes. 7.1.3. “Je ne scaij en quoij avons tant offense nos peres.” Louvain academics and Liège Jesuits, 1613–14 In the Summer of 1612, the plans of the Society to organise philosophical courses in its Louvain college aroused suspicion in the Arts faculty, which feared attendance would not be limited to Jesuit novices.95 Another major conflict would indeed weigh on the academic agenda in Rome, Brussels, and Liège in 1613–14. Yet, it was not the Louvain college that now figured as the Jesuit educational hub-to-be. As university men had dug in their heels, the Society had simply relocated its project across the border and installed a philosophical school at Liège, where the academics and their friends could not reach them—but where potential students from Habsburg lands could. That more had to come from it resonates in a warning from Acquaviva to his co-religionists not to introduce a chair in Divinity before the school (and the dust) had settled down.96 Everything seemed to fit: the new institution could
ladicte universite, par breffs apostolicques, maintiegnent fort et ferme les ministres de ceste court, en competer le droict a sa Sainctete et consecutivement a son Auditeur de la Camera . . . en cela sont stoicques.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 12 October 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 260r. 94 Supplication sent by the university to the pope, in Acta Facultatis Artium, 28 June 1613, RAL, OUL, 714, 544v–545r. It is at this occasion that A Fraxinis suggested to involve Bellarmino. Cf. p. 492. 95 Acta Universitatis, 1 August 1612, RAL, OUL, 63, 93r. 96 Acquaviva to Franciscus Flerontinus, SJ, rector of Liège, 23 August 1613, ARSI, Gall.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 1, I, 55.
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not thwart the activities of the other “Jesuit” university in the region, Douai being situated at the other extremity of the new Jesuit province of Gallo-Belgica. It would forever wipe out competition from the Augustinians at Liège and, hopefully, from the Collegium Leodiense at Louvain. Not only the consent of the order’s superiors was assured: heavyweights such as De Chapeaville, the diocese’s Vicar General, and De Blocquerie, the chancellor of the Principality, had embraced the initiative;97 the nuncio of Cologne Albergati, who was touring the area to reform its reportedly “barbaric” clergy, was among its earliest supporters;98 and the diocese’s primary and secondary clergy were in too, just as much as the magistrate of Liège. As the occasion demanded, the enterprise had been the initiative of the recently elected Prince-Bishop Ferdinand of Bavaria himself. In July 1613, letters of supplication from the city of Liège to the pontiff were honoured with a pontifical declaration that Rome would not allow the new institution to be suppressed.99 At the opening ceremony in the presence of Albergati, the fathers seemingly had resolved their “Louvain Question.” They could not have been more wrong. The news had reached Louvain before 13 August 1613, when Robaulx was attested as the faculty’s commissioner for Roman and Jesuit Questions.100 A delegation from the university asked for assistance from the town council,101 which promised it would rally its partners in the States.102 Brussels statesmen emerged as the university’s supporters too.103 On 6 October
97 Cf. the memorandum signed by the Provincial and his councillors and submitted to Acquaviva in 1613 (Acquaviva’s fiat followed in his letter of 15 June 1613, ARSI, Gall.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 1, I, 44) and the official act testifying the support of the Cathedral Chapter, 19 September 1613, ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia, 1452. 98 Albergati to Borghese, 16 June 1613, ed. Reinhard, Nuntius Antonio Albergati, 809. 99 A copy of this supplication in ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia, 1452. Cf. Paul V to the burgomasters and the council of Liège, 27 July 1613, regest in Hansotte and Forgeur, Inventaire analytique, 91. 100 Acta Facultatis Artium, 13 August 1613, RAL, OUL, 714, 546r–v. 101 Jansonius, Corselius, Fienus, and Massen, the regent of the pedagogy of the Lily. Résolutions magistrales, 13 August 1613, SAL, Oud Archief, 311, 214r. 102 Acta Universitatis, 8 September 1613, RAL, OUL, 63, 123r–v. 103 Salutatio with donation of wine to Engelbert Maes, member of the Privy Council, Jean-Baptiste Maes, fiscal of the Council of Brabant, and the confessors of the Archdukes “quorum opere et favore universitas plerumque Bruxelle opus habet,” Acta Universitatis, 22 January 1614, RAL, OUL, 63, 135r. Compare Bentivoglio “in action”: “che in effetto il confessore [Brizuela] non solo non ha fatto officio alcuno contro i Gesuiti, ma ne’anche ha havuto niuna partecipatione del negotio, il quale sin da
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1613, a delegation reported back to the academic senate that the archduke, whose reputation as a sovereign prince was at stake,104 seriously considered retaliation by suspending (on the suggestion of the academics) the courses at the Jesuit college in Douai.105 Despite Maes’ concerns about the pontiff ’s favourable disposition towards the Society, archducal diplomacy secured, in addition, a policy of non-intervention on behalf of the Holy See.106 Once more, Rome bided its time in order to sound out the weaknesses of both parties.107 While the academics got their act together, support for (and among) the Jesuits dwindled. In Rome, Maes sought to keep Acquaviva from coming out in support of the Liège Jesuits, with conspicuous references to Belgian hostility to “novelties” as well as to the order’s recent expulsion from France and from the Republic of Venice.108 It is not surprising that, under the circumstances, other colleges of both the Flemish and the Walloon provinces of the Society began to keep their distance. Meanwhile, the coalition with the cathedral chapter had unravelled after scathing arguments about the local clergy’s principio fu da Sua Altezza rimesso ai consiglieri Masio e Pecchio.” Bentivoglio to Borghese, 18 January 1614, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 99, 24r. 104 “Pareva, che Sua Altezza fu particolarmente alterata, perche i padri havessero presa quella risolutione, senza communicarla prima in alcun modo con l’Altezza Sua.” Bentivoglio to Borghese, 18 January 1614, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 99, 24r; “et come prince souverain il estoit tenu a maintenir et defendre”. Report of a conversation with Acquaviva, Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 14 December 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 315v. 105 Delegation of Jansonius and Robaulx. Acta Universitatis, 13 September; 6 October 1613, RAL, OUL, 63, 125r and 126r. The decree was never executed; cf. Prats to Maes, Négociations de Rome, 11 January 1614, AGR, Audience, 449, 9r. 106 “Come ilz ont grande part en ceste court, tant vers la personne de sa sainctete, que de plusieurs cardinaulx, je ne peulx rien asseurer.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 12 October 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 260r. Acquaviva expressed his hopes in a letter to Flerontinus, 23 November 1613, ARSI, Gall.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 1, I, 75. On the audience with the pontiff, cf. Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 9 November 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 289r–v. 107 “E’piaciuto molto a Nostro Signore il pensiero . . . intorno al erigere lo studio in Liegi, cioè che non si faccia per hora altra dichiaratione . . . ma che prima si veda dove si potranno battere le difficoltà promosse dai Lovaniesi.” Borghese to Albergati, 30 November 1613, ed. Reinhard, Nuntius Antonio Albergati, 856–57. Fears expressed in Prats to Maes, Négociations de Rome, 11 January 1614, AGR, Audience, 449, 9r. 108 “Se souvenant le mesme general de ce que aultrefois seroit passe au reguardt de la compagnie de Jesus au royaulme de France et en lestat de Venetiens se trouvoit en paine et confessoit estre du mesme advis, que moy et son intention estre telle priant aultre fois en ceste conformite vouloir escripre a Vostre Altèze.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 14 December 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 315v–317v.
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Plate 7.1. The Archdukes Albert of Austria and Isabella Clara Eugenia: copperplate The Archdukes Albert of Austria and Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, as Dukes of Brabant. The text below refers to the role of Albert as Perseus liberating the Andromeda Belgica from the “Batavian Hydra”. Copperplate, 17th century. [Catholic University of Louvain, Central Library]
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“durezza, e barbarie” in Jesuit memorandums to the Archdukes had leaked out.109 All this resulted in a complete reversal of the Jesuits’ fortunes: the courses at the Liège college having been suspended already by November 1613, the Society’s lobbyists and Roman diplomacy now had to concentrate on soothing the carefully staged anger of the archduke, and on removing the danger of closure to the college of Anchin.110 This made it impossible to negotiate a deal in favour of the Liège college, but also redeemed a frustrated Albergati to the background in favour of his colleague Bentivoglio, who faithfully transmitted the Brussels view on things to the Secretariat of State in Rome. The fathers’ hopes were definitively dashed when, in March 1614, a delegation from the States of Brabant, the city of Louvain, and the university to the prince-bishop111 obtained the suspension of courses “after the academic method” in the diocesan seminary, where the Jesuit chairs in philosophy had been transferred to; and the substitution of Jesuit teachers by secular clerics.112 The reasons for going briefly into this episode are many.113 In the long term, it reduces the surprise that this densely populated and highly urbanised region hosted comparatively few institutions of higher learning. The position of Louvain and Douai was comparable to that of Oxbridge. While sovereign provinces in the Dutch Republic rushed to
109 “In questo mezzo il clero primario e secondario si è unito insieme per far un giudicio iniuriarum contro gli gesuiti, sotto pretesto che habbino in un memoriale mandato all’archiduca detto che questo clero è inimico di riforme et di disciplina ecclesiastica, e che perciò deve esser instrutto nelle lettere per levarli questa durezza e barbarie.” Albergati to Borghese, 10 January 1614, ed. Reinhard, Nuntius Antonio Albergati, 886. 110 Cf. Borghese to Bentivoglio, 21 December 1613, ASV, Fondo Borghese, I, 914, 657v–659v. 111 The delegation was headed by Jansonius, assisted by Robaulx. Alongside the registrar of the States (Maes Jr.) and Drusius, abbot of Park, visitator and representative of the first Order, the nobility of Brabant was represented by the baron of Wezemaal, the third Order by the mayor of Brussels; the city of Louvain delegated Fannius, who seems to have been the intermediary between the city and the university, and Loonbeeck. Résolutions magistrales, 8 March 1614, SAL, Oud Archief, 312, 25v. 112 “S’è dunque convenuto fra il detto principe, e l’Università, che le predette lettioni debbano intendersi instituite per il seminario episcopale di Liege, et che, oltre gli alunni, sianno ammessi ad ascoltarle solamente i poveri della diocese. Che i professori habbian’ ad esser secolari, e che non possan legger’altro, che logica, e fisica, secondo il methodo di Titelmanno [= as opposed to more academico].” Bentivoglio to Borghese, 22 March 1614, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 136, 68r. Cf. the briefing by Robaulx, Acta Facultatis Artium, 3 April 1614, RAL, OUL, 715, 10v. 113 More facts (and arguments for Jesuit claims), in Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus, 231–51.
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found their own universities in the late 16th and in the 17th centuries, academics in the South managed to rein in, via their contacts with central authorities, the proliferation of academic institutions and teaching even beyond the borders of the Habsburg Netherlands. Thus, they managed to keep the Society of Jesus from developing its colleges into full-blown universities, or from reducing existing faculties of Divinity to mere dispensers of academic degrees to students from French-style, “aggregated” Jesuit colleges or diocesan seminaries.114 In the short term, the Liège affair cannot be seen distinctly from a wide range of accounts that were being settled between universities and Jesuits in archducal territories. Attempts of the Douai faculties of Arts and Theology in 1613 and 1614 to capitalise on princely “disgusto” with the Jesuits failed,115 as the project to force the fathers back into a common promotion for graduates in Philosophy sparked little enthusiasm in Brussels. Requests to revise the placet granted to the Society’s privileges in 1584 in order to push the Jesuit public chair in Divinity to the margins of the educational field backfired.116 By February 1614, a compromise had been found in the conflict between the University of Dole and the Jesuits of Besançon.117 The latters’ strategies, supplying higher education in an imperial enclave in the midst of archducal territories, may have inspired the Liège fathers. In this case, however,
114 In the 18th century, the United Provinces were, after Scotland (3.3 universities/every million inhabitants), the second highest ranking area on the list (2.4), Spain (2.0), the Empire, Italy and Switzerland (1.1–1.4), and France (0.9) do better than the average of 0.8 universities for every million inhabitants in Europe in its entirety and for the Scandinavian countries. The Austrian Netherlands (0.3 after the loss of Douai in 1667), England, Wales, and Ireland (0.2) are at the tail end, except for European Russia (0.1). See Frijhoff, “Patterns,” 78. 115 Both universities sought to coordinate their actions, cf. the university to the University of Douai, 22 November 1613, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 105v–106v. Cf. p. 455–58. 116 The Douai faculty to the Louvain faculty, paraphrase and deliberations in the Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 16 February 1614, RAL, OUL, 387, 44; supplication of the Louvain faculty to the Privy Council, 18 February 1614, Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281. Cf. p. 457. Bartholomeus Lintermans, professor in Theology in Douai, to Jansonius, attestation and deliberations in Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 22 and 26 September 1614, RAL, OUL, 387, 48. The faculty decided that Jansonius had to obtain in Brussels a declaration that the Louvain faculty was exempt from the Privy Council’s sentence. Jansonius’ informants must have counselled him more restraint, as the plan was not carried out and the visitation of the university was turned into an occasion to settle accounts with the Society. 117 The archduke to Maes, Négociations de Rome, 21 February 1614, AGR, Audience, 449, 50r, was the last letter in which the conflict with the Jesuits of Besançon was mentioned.
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the order was allowed to teach Philosophy and Theology in its Dole college. This seems to have resulted, judging by Trevigi’s intervention in 1618,118 in the temporary disappearance of the two chairs of the theological faculty occupied by secular clerics.119 It would be a terrible mistake to interpret the archduke’s stance in the Liège affair as the beginning of a backlash against the Jesuit order, a lesson academics at Dole and Douai had to learn the hard way. Seen from this perspective, the Liège plot did not unfold in a vacuum, being plugged as it was into the programme of academic reform at Louvain and elsewhere. The names of delegates sent by the university to Brussels and Liège, and of protectors who had to be approached at court sound familiar: Jansonius, assisted by Robaulx, took the centre stage again in academic minutes as well as in Bentivoglio’s reports, where the don figured as the nuncio’s privileged informant and the “principale” of the university.120 Allies at court included Drusius, Trevigi, the confessors of the Archdukes, and the Secretary of State Prats, people who provided the academics with direct access to the prince at other occasions as well.121 It is not just a matter of the individuals and their respective bases of support that were involved, however. Obviously, academics would have had a hard time explaining to the Archdukes’ ministers why the Jesuits were not allowed to teach Philosophy or Theology at all. For now, the concern that the Liège
118 “Et quia in lectionis Theologice restitutione . . . precipuus fuisti intercessor, aut, ut aiunt patres iesuitas, advocatus, ad te etiam distributorum literae diriguntur, ut eas ipsemet suae serenissimae celsitudini offerri non graveris.” Dorenet, professor in Dole, to Trevigi, 6 December 1618, Correspondance d’André Trévisius, AGR, Audience, 1462. 119 “Quoij nonobstant lesdicts peres de la compaignie de Jesus auroient desseigner instituer comm’ilz ont faict des le mois de novembre dernier . . . en leur college dudict Dôle.” Request from the theologians Gay and Clerc to the Archdukes for the continuation of their salaries until their death, in spite of the desertion of the students to the Jesuit college, 7 February 1615, Université de Dôle 1607–1687, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1284. 120 “Io dal principale dei suoi deputati, ch’è stato il dottor Jansonio, ho havuta relatione delle cose predette.” Bentivoglio to Borghese, 22 March 1614, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 136, 68r. 121 At one of Jansonius’ triumphant briefings on the Brussels negociations, the university’s patrons happened to be in town: “salutandos dominos confessarios suarum celsitudinum necnon dominum secretarium Prats et dominum Andream sue celsitudinis medicum cum propina singulis facienda aliquot geltarum vini Rhenensis.” Acta Universitatis, 6 September 1613, RAL, OUL, 63, 122v; Résolutions magistrales, same date, SAL, Oud Archief, 311, 221v. Cf. thanking letters from the university to Prats, [1613], Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 108v–109r.
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college would become a competitor because of its vicinity, and that competition would reduce the benefits expected from the visitation, united academics and princely ministers in their opposition. In this context, it is telling that academics made considerable efforts, which included sending an envoy to Cologne and contacting the Parisian Alma Mater, to turn their territorial claims into privileges that needed protection from the country’s constitutional wardens.122 Next, there is the observation that, in the absence of a firm legal basis for such claims, other privileges had to fill in the gap. The Jesuit initiative at Liège was not perceived just as the first step towards establishing a full-blown university with the right to confer academic degrees; according to anonymous Louvain intelligence at Liège,123 the fathers and local patricians were plotting to take over the Arts faculty’s privilege of nomination in the prince-bishopric as well.124 Such a prospect must have appealed to Liège patricians, who struggled to secure benefices for their offspring in competition with nobles and academics, and who probably preferred Jesuits who could not claim ecclesiastical benefices for themselves125 over secular clerics in a distant university town. Yet, there is no evidence that support for such plans was gathering. For our purposes, it is important to note that the privileges of nomination were introduced either by the academics or by their opponents, as a means to redefine or to negotiate the university’s role in higher education, notably when its territorial claims came under scrutiny. For that matter, the correlation between Jesuit teaching and 122 Credentials for Massen, the regent of the pedagogy of the Lily, on a special mission, to the rector and the University of Cologne, 2 September 1613, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 104v. “Intellexistis ex D. Licentiato Massen nullum in archivis coloniensium repertum esse documentum, quod de aliqua locorum distantia in erigendis universitatibus, mentionem faciat, sed eius universitatis erectionem privilegiaque ei concessa ad Parisiensem sese referre” Cornelius Sylvius to the university, 17 September 1613, Acta Universitatis, 18 September 1613, RAL, OUL, 63, 124v. See also the university to the rector and University of Paris, 18 September 1613, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 108r–v. 123 Cf. Extraict de lettre de certain personage de Liege (no author, no addressee), Négociations de Rome, 17 September 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 236r. 124 “De ce quilz pretendent non seulement denseigneur et faire profession publicque en la ville de Liege de la Philosophie et Theologie, mais aussij de donner le degre de magistere, et avoir previlege de nomination aux benefices vacants en prejudice de luniversite de Louvain.” Report of a conversation with Acquaviva, Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 14 December 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 315v–317v. 125 At least not directly; cf. confirmations of incorporations of benefices, monasteries and canonships into the Liège Jesuit college, 1592 and 1596, ASR, Paesi Stranieri: Francia e Belgio, 6, 53th bundle.
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Louvain privileges only surfaced in the Négociations de Rome, where it was, above all, used against the Liège fathers in the order’s Roman headquarters. The plans of the fathers with Louvain’s privileges, real or not, gave a voice to academics seeking to convince Roman, Brussels, and Liège audiences that Loyola’s “appassionati” were claiming a position that was not theirs. Correspondingly, rumours of this type forced supporters to turn a cold shoulder on the Liège fathers. In the beginning of 1614, Albergati blamed them for their precipitation, thus conveniently excusing Roman phlegm.126 And much of the pressure on the Liège Jesuits to yield was mounted by their Belgian and Roman co-religionists.127 Thus, academics managed once more to exploit the vulnerability of the Liège Jesuits as members of an international ordering. Simultaneously, they experimented themselves with the mobilisation of an international ordo academicus against the Society. Squeals from the Belgian Jesuits about the storm unleashed on them in Spain in the wake of the Liège affair seem to herald the university’s (and Cornelius Jansenius’) Spanish campaign in the 1620s against the fathers.128 Tellingly, no traces of this could be retrieved in academic sources. Jesuit intelligence identifying the Blackfriars Brizuela and De Torres as Louvain’s supporters in Spain inevitably raises questions about Jansonius’ involvement.129 Lists of grievances submitted by the Douai Jesuits to their Roman generalate reveal that the debates merged with a fresh round
126 “Li gesuiti dovevano pian piano et a poco poco introdurre un anno una lettione della logica, un altro un’altra, e così, per spacio di quattro o cinque anni, come cosa fatta, non havrebbe havuto difficoltà, ma il far il moto tanto gagliardo, senza disporre prima la natura, suol alle volte abbatere la complessione.” Albergati to Borghese, 10 January 1614, ed. Reinhard, Nuntius Antonio Albergati, 886. 127 Cf. references to a “seditious spirit” and adequate disciplinary measures to be applied in the Liège college in Acquaviva to Joannes Herennius, SJ, Provincial of Gallo-Belgica, 1 February 1614, ARSI, Gall.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 1, I, 90. In an earlier letter, 25 January 1614, to Ferdinand of Bavaria, Acquaviva disowned plans about the secession of a Jesuit Liège province from the Provincia Gallo-Belgica, ibidem, 89–90. See also Acquaviva to Herennius, 8 March 1614, ibidem, 99. 128 Cf. Acquaviva to Saillot in Brussels, to Lessius and Viron in Louvain, and to Scribani in Antwerp, 1 March 1614, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 3, 176–78; Acquaviva to Flerontinus, 8 March 1614, ARSI, Gall.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 1, I, 98. 129 “Porro Lovanienses dicuntur nondum quiescere, sed aliquid in Hispania contra societatem moliri, freti favore Reverendissimi confessarii principis, et doctoris Torres, professoris Theologiae Lovanii.” Turbatio societati ab academia Lovaniensi creata (. . .) et ad voluntatem serenissimi archiducis Alberti a professoribus societatis intermissum, beginning of 1614, ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia, 1459, Nr. 29.
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of quarrels over sacramental practice and Catholic soteriology.130 The Spanish dimension suggests that the Liège conflict provided Louvain divines with an excellent opportunity to pick, via De Torres, a fresh fight over Justification as well, the episode coinciding with renewed vigour among Louvain theologians to affirm their teachings in Spain and Italy.131 Humbled Belgian fathers sought refuge with the archduke in order to rehabilitate themselves at the court of Madrid.132 Crossing the borders implied that academics too had to draw on diplomatic channels of communication, for the favourable outcome of the Liège affair was not the work of one, but of two princes. For the Roman Secretariat of State, it involved two papal nuncios transmitting conflicting views. While Albergati, who needed local support for his grand visitation tour, saw the Jesuit affair as just another cause of deep resentment with elites and prince-bishop about Brabantine jurisdictional and political interferences,133 his colleague at the post of Flanders watered down tensions between the princely courts of Brussels and Liège-Cologne. While Albergati sought to discredit Bentivoglio and proposed to send a special papal legate to allievate the tensions between both realms,134 his Roman patrons attuned their policy of non-intervention to the diplomatic concert unfolding in Bentivoglio’s letters. In a comprehensive report of March 1614, Bentivoglio ennervated Albergati’s allegations, referred to age-old concordats granting the Council of Brabant competence in possessorio and the right to resort to penal procedures against Liège subjects, and even managed to put Louvain appeals to the Council, by virtue
130 Ceyssens, “Griefs contre les théologiens de Douai,” cf. p. 391–92. See also Belgii Theologiae Professores Duaci 1613 Academici Duaci contra libros societatis, et sententia de Auxiliis in ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia, 1408, Nr. 7. 131 Cf. p. 387–88. 132 “Cum archiducem societatis benevolentie redditum, patrocinium etiam suum in Hispania si opus fuerit addixisse intellexerint: informavimus preterea in Hispania eos, quos informasse oportuit de toto negotio.” Acquaviva to Flerontinus, 18 March 1614, ARSI, Gall.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 1, I, 98. 133 E.g., Albergati to Borghese, 10 January 1614, ed. Reinhard, Nuntius Antonio Albergati, 886. “Gli ministri Brabantini dell’arciduca Alberto hano fatto e vanno facendo alla giornata tanti aggravii alla patria di Liegi . . . L’haver poi impedito ultimamente che li giesuiti non legano in Liegi, ha ulcerato grandemente le animi del prencipe e di questo populo.” Albergati to Borghese, 16 January 1614, ibidem, 891. 134 “Che non era bene di pensare a questo mezzo, perchè né questo principe né li Liegiesi si fidarebbero mai di dire le loro ragioni ad un ministro residente appresso quel prencipe in Brabante per molti ragioni di stato.” Albergati to Borghese, 16 January 1614, ed. Reinhard, Nuntius Antonio Albergati, 892.
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of their papal privileges, in a more benign daylight.135 In addition, he destroyed the image of discord by pointing to the diplomatic exchange and the mutual friendship between the two princes, a presentation of facts that he could confirm after a conversation with the Count of Zollern, special ambassador to Brussels in March 1614.136 Judging by the prince-bishop’s willingness to comply with the desiderata of the delegation of the States, the city, and the university, attempts to fix Ferdinand of Bavaria in his role as a vigorous champion of Liège sovereignty (and of the Liège Jesuit college) had failed. The titular chancellor of the University of Cologne, Zollern, who had made a stop at Louvain on his journey to Brussels, was paving the path for the academic delegation to Liège.137 His mission was more comprehensive, however, as the 1613–14 quarrel over Louvain’s monopoly on public higher learning in the Principality coincided with intensified diplomatic efforts to settle the endemic jurisdictional skirmishes—including those triggered by academic nominations—between Habsburg lands and the prince-bishopric. The need to accommodate the prince-bishop in order to bar him from enrolment as a champion of a national Church was explicitly discussed in the academics’ memorandum of 1613 on Maes’ second draft for a new privilege.138 From the academic point of view, negotiations with the (Roman?) agent of the prince-bishop had become a key to success in the Roman Question.139 A century ago, soothing Erard de la Marck away from Liège pressure groups had proved beneficial to Louvain’s interests in Rome.140 Yet,
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Bentivoglio to Borghese, 8 March 1614, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 136, 21r–22r. “Ha risposto esser vero, che vi sono punti di controversia, di quelle però, che sogliono giornalmente occorrere tra provincie confinanti.” Bentivoglio to Borghese, 15 March 1614, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 136, 45r. 137 “Want de grave van Hoochsvolder, cancellier vande universiteijt van Cuelen (. . .) alhier soude arriveren, ende was treckende naer Bruessel (. . .) onder andere rakende t’doceren vande Jesuiten tot Luijck.” Salutatio with wine donation, Résolutions magistrales, 11 March 1614, SAL, Oud Archief, 312, 26r. 138 Cf. p. 502–03. “Huius tamen conceptus executioni obstitit quod serenissimus episcopus Leodiensis solet indulgere dispositiones de beneficiis ecclesiasticis in quibuscunque mensibus . . . Verum huic malo facile occurretur . . . si perseveraretur indultum episcopi Leodiensis.’ Memorandum of the Faculty of Arts or the university, Négociations de Rome, before 20 September 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 235r–v. 139 “Super quibus omnibus audiretur agens predicti electoris Coloniensis.” Memorandum of the Faculty of Arts or the university, Négociations de Rome, before 20 September 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 235r–v. 140 “Verum huic malo facile occurretur si velut in confirmatione Adriani [= Rationi Congruit, cf. p. 135] factum fuit, (. . .) ita nunc perseveraretur indultum episcopi 136
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academic restraint was in tune with archducal policy as well: when Robaulx and Villeers had proposed, during an audience in February 1613, to proceed with the arrest of Liège property,141 the prince had answered “satis frigide” that he did not want to offend the princebishop, and he explicitly made his ministers’ activities dependent upon the latter’s consent.142 While both princes could resist, for now, being fixed in their roles of sovereigns championing their litigious subjects’ rights, negotiations were conducted by Zollern and others to make sure that they were not embarrassed by petitioners in the future. The year 1615 was not just one in which the “tempest” against the Jesuits abated and the Louvain fathers could report that academics started to seek their spiritual guidance again.143 It was also a year in which, after tiresome negotiations, a Maastricht Conference concluded a Concordat between Brabant and Liège.144 Via several delegations to the chancellor of Brabant Peck in Brussels (Joannes Massen)145 and in Maastricht (Robaulx),146 academics let their desiderata slip in the final text of the agreement. On 27 November 1615, it was agreed that judges on both sides of the borders would execute each others’ sentences (including the conservator’s) but that they would do so in accordance with their own customs. In return for reassurances that academic nominees would never accept benefices vacating in ordinary months, the prince-bishop would intervene in favour of the university with the pope,147 thus making a resuscitation Leodiensis.” Memorandum of the Faculty of Arts or the university, Négociations de Rome, before 20 September 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 235r–v. 141 It may have concerned Robaulx’ lawsuit over a canonship in Tongeren itself, Cf. Borghese to Albergati, 12 October 1613, ed. Reinhard, Nuntius Antonio Albergati, 843–44. 142 Briefing by Gerardus Van Villeers, in Acta Universitatis, 16 February 1613, RAL, OUL, 63, 107v–108r. 143 “Sedataque ea tempestate qua filosofia Leodiensis concitaverat, academicos ad nostros redire” Altieri, Vicar General of the Society, to Cornelisz, SJ, at Louvain, 14 February 1615, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 3, 217. 144 De Louvrex, Recueil contenant les edits et reglemens faits pour le païs de Liege, 1, 233. 145 A divine, former regent of the pedagogy of the Falcon, and Baius’ successor as president of the Savoye College. Cf. the university to Peck, 10 August 1615, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 140v–141r. 146 The university to Peck, 31 August 1615, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 141r– 142r. 147 “Et tiendront lesdicts commissaires de Brabant la main envers ceux de ladicte universite quilz aijent a donner acte et declaration par escrit quil nentendent de le
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of a national Church against Louvain claims, for the time being, virtually impossible. The first step towards untying the Gordian knot of the Roman Question had been taken.
7.2. “Sono insolentissimi quei Lovaniesi.” Confronting the papal prince, 1615–16 The learned men had good reasons to cheer the withdrawal of the prince-bishop from their opponents’ ranks. In January 1614, Maes had received explicit orders from Brussels to start negotiations over the granting of a new privilege that could accommodate the interests of all parties (and sideline voracious curialists).148 But when the diplomat arrived in the Netherlands in the late Spring of 1614, he brought ill tidings. In August 1614, he visited Louvain and briefed the commissioners of town and gown gathering in Jansonius’ College of the Pope on the progress made in Rome. Maes did not beat about the bush, judging by Jansonius’ report in the Congregation of the Arts faculty: under this pope, the privilegium tractus would never be confirmed, nor would the brevia evocatoria of the Apostolic Chamber be neutralised by special clauses.149 This state of affairs would trigger a twofold strategy on behalf of the poor scholars at Louvain in 1615 and 1616. First, they would take their purification from abuses into their own hands; an art they had learned to command in the visitation process. Second, they would radically redefine the problem and adjust their strategies accordingly, thus fixing the Supreme Pontiff as a stakeholder of their interests.
servir du privilege de nomination au prejudice des prebendes et benefices venans vacquer es moijs des ordinaires audit paijs de Liege. Comme aussi lesdicts commissaires de Liege continueront de faire bons devoirs que le dict evesque le prince de Liege soit servi de faire instance envers sa sainctete de naccorder a ladvenir aucuns brief nij autres lettress apostolicques en preiudice du dit privilege de nomination.” Articles concerning the university in the Concordat of 27 November 1615, UAL, OUL, 308. 148 The archduke to Maes, Négociations de Rome, 24 January 1614, AGR, Audience, 449, 26r. 149 Acta Facultatis Artium, 9 August 1614, RAL, OUL, 715, 18r–v; Casus Andreae Mantels, in Les démêlés avec l’Evêché de Liège. Documents, procès, mémoires 1613– 1660, RAL, OUL, 4693.
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7.2.1. “Pro bono usu nominationum.” The “laudabiles consuetudines” of the Arts faculty In their 1613 memorandum, academics had insisted that their abuses were just an excuse to drag poor scholars before Roman tribunals.150 Two years later, papal commissioners sanctioned their views. On 9 October 1615, Drusius and Craesbeke promulgated a declaration that they had inspected, under apostolic authority, the relevant faculty statutes, that they had hardly found a trace of abuse in them, and that all sources of abuse, if any, had been neutralised. Because of this document, abuses (and consequently legitimate opposition to academic claims) could never resurface.151 Not surprisingly, they had acted at the request of the academics:152 a commission from Rome to investigate abuses failing to occur, the authority granted to the apostolic visitators would do. Just as much as the Visitatio and the Ordinatio curiarum, the ratification of the faculty’s statutes was also a legitimisation of the claims entrenched in them. A letter of March 1617 from the abbot of Park to Jansonius envisaged inclusion of the statutes on academic nominations in the Visitatio or in a separate charter.153 There is more. The abbot’s and Jansonius’ plans for a formal codification of the statutes Pro bono usu nominationum did not materialise, which, paradoxically, highlights how the Roman Question became intertwined with the visitation process. Jansonius’ letter of 15 March
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“Sed cum hic modus obviandi abusibus qui per universitatem committi possent, et qui presumendi non sunt neque revera committuntur reddit predictum privilegium nominandi inutile imo et perniciosum, dum studiosi, qui ut predicto privilegio uti valeant, pauperes esse debent hac via possessione suorum beneficiorum spoliati opprimuntur passim in suo bono iure cum desint iis media ad sui defensionem contra potentes et malitiosos adversarios in Romana Curia presentes.” Négociations de Rome, September 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 235r–v. 151 “Qua audita et rationibus per facultatem allatis diligenter perpensis invenimus ea quae de abusibus sunt sparsa non omnia forma veritate subnixa sed plurima magis calumniosa quam vera et conficta potius quam reipsa comperta . . . optimas quasdam nobis approbantibus edidit constitutiones et leges quibus predictum nominationis privilegium ita muniatur ut vix ullus deinceps error, vix ullus abusus irrepere possit.” 9 October 1615, Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R. VII, 60, 260r. 152 Cf. the Faculty’s request, 15 April 1615, in Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII., 60, 167r. 153 “Placet conceptus quoque moderationis nominationum, quem quoque inseremus visitatione, vel peculiari mandato decernemus.” Drusius to an unknown addressee, 30 March 1617, A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xxiv, 3rd bundle. Compare Jansonius to Drusius, 15 March 1617, A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xiii, 3rd bundle.
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1617 reveals that the “laudabiles consuetudines” of the Faculty of Arts were not commonly lauded: the don had been informed by insiders about “abuses” that continued to surface. Not surprisingly, these abuses differed substantially from the specimen thriving on Roman desks: now, it was professors in Philosophy who greedily monopolised the access to promising nominations with the help of their prerogatives.154 Jansonius’ informants (among them the divine Laurentius Zoenius, president of the Divaeus College, recommended by Jansonius as a trustworthy expert in the affair)155 had not picked Jansonius at random as their spokesman to the abbot of Park. In August 1614, Jansonius had briefed the faculty’s deputation on the meeting with Philip Maes at the Pope’s College but also had seized the occasion to refer to complaints pouring in from Rome and Brussels about “abuses.”156 His intervention merits closer attention. For reasons that have been discussed before, remedying Louvain “abuses” did not rank high on the Roman to-do list. Nor had grievances been aired in Brussels quarters until Jansonius produced them. Yet, the faculty board took Jansonius’ recommendations seriously, the don having amply proved his ability, as the prince’s privileged informant, to make the archduke speak. The diagnosis of the so-called abuses, the remedy, and the timing of reform would be determined not by archdukes, pontiffs, curialists, or Church officials but by the academics, by the dons of the higher faculties, and by Jacobus Jansonius. Jansonius’ warnings gained substance when, in March 1615, the visitators, the town, and the academics focused on the question of university membership, an issue that had been on the table since the inspection round of 1607.157 In its attempt to reduce the number of inhabitants exempt from its jurisdiction and taxation, the magistrate had suggested depriving all magistri artium and bachelors of the
154 “Ut per chartam visitationis statueretur modus nominationibus nam professores philosophie habentes preferentiam in nominationibus multiplicunt sibi nominationes sic ut aliis ad eas vix sit accessus.” Jansonius to Drusius, 15 March 1617, A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xiii, 3rd bundle. 155 “Poterit M. Laurentius Zoenius preses Collegii Divei P.V. plenius informare, et modum reformationis suggerere, venturus in Parcum, si fuerit a P.T. accessitus.” Jansonius to Drusius, 15 March 1617, A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xiii, 3rd bundle. 156 Acta Facultatis Artium, 10 August 1614, RAL, OUL, 715, 18v–19r. 157 See the ninth question in the interrogatory list and the answers in Van Waefelghem, “La visite.”
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higher faculties of their privileged status if they could not produce evidence of continued higher studies or an academic position. On 15 March 1615, the board of the Arts faculty observed with horror that the university had complied,158 which inevitably would deprive some of its members in Louvain churches and in the town’s administration of their academic status.159 There is no direct evidence that the university had abandoned its claims160 in order to boost pressure on the faculty, which had benignly ignored Jansonius’ suggestions. But the time had obviously come to settle accounts. When a delegation of the faculty visited the abbey of Park with the request to revise the settlement with the town, Drusius changed the subject and answered that he had been informed that professors in the Arts arranged to have themselves nominated up to five times in order to resign benefices or nominations to their clients, to the detriment of the students and doctors of the other faculties. The delegation was dismissed with the admonition to find a remedy for these inconveniences before others did. The same day, a letter arrived in Park from Jansonius, urging the prelate to mend the abusive ways of the philosophers.161 In his letter of 22 March, the doctor informed the abbot, on the request of the Faculty of Arts,162 that the deputation of faculty deans had discovered that the university’s privileges at Louvain applied to doctors and masters. In return, the faculty was drawing up a settlement, in close contact with 158 “Conclusit universitas magistros birettatos in facultate artium et baccalaureos superiorum facultatum qui sua studia non prosequuntur non habendos pro suppositis.” transcript in Acta Facultatis Artium, 15 March 1615, RAL, OUL, 715, 33v. 159 E.g., the Medardi (uncle and nephew), canons of Saint Peter, and Paulus Faber or Smidts, a cleric who performed as a clerk in the town hall. Other, sporadic, attestations in the university and faculty minutes. 160 Cf. the university’s assessment the 1607 report: “Transactum esse et definitum inter universitatem et civitatem que debeant haberi pro suppositis, scilicet omnes doctores et licentiati et baccalaurei superiorum facultatum; necnon magistri birredati artium; omnes actu studentes.” Van Waefelgem, “La Visite,” 303. 161 “Dixi etiam eis querelam non parvam esse de abusu que in nominationibus professores admittunt, ter, quater et quinties nominantes, et beneficia sua resignantes reservatae personae, cum magno prejudicio doctorum et studiosorum aliarum facultatum . . . Eodem die misit mihi litteras D. Jansonius predictas nominationes concernentes.” Notes by Drusius, 15 March 1614, in Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII., 60. That Jansonius had made concrete proposals is suggested by his letter of 22 March 1615: “Misi ipsi iudicium meum in scriptis quod quatenus secutum sit, ignoro, ob id visum est . . . his inserere et transmittere, si forte aliquid a facultate exiuncta, vos velletis additum et in posterum observatum.” ibidem, 244r–v. 162 Discussions on a request of the Faculty of Arts to Jansonius in order to perform, together with Massen, as the its delegate to Brussels, with speculation on a possible refusal by Jansonius, in Acta Facultatis Artium, 21 March 1615, RAL, OUL, 715, 33r.
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Schinckelius, Jansonius’ expert on the ways of the Arts faculty.163 If magistri Artium wished to enjoy the university’s privileges, university members were not to be excluded from those of the faculty. Schinckelius was a hands-on expert on abuse. A few months before Jansonius’ first intervention in August 1614, the fresh Doctor in Divinity had been excluded from competition for a nomination to Saint Servais at Maastricht in favour of Joannes Massen,164 who bluntly refused arbitration. The nomination board eventually complied with Massen’s demands because of his “quality” and granted the regent of the pedagogy of the Lily his third (!) nomination.165 Not that Schinckelius abhorred such practices: he had obtained a canonship in Ronse in the days he had served as a teacher in Philosophy himself;166 this means that, if the Maastricht nomination was successful, either Massen or Schinckelius would have to resign to third parties, in order to abide with the taxa patrimonialis, benefices they had acquired previously via academic nominations. Yet, Massen’s nomination had required additional work: with the first nomination to the provost of Maastricht still pending, the (second) nomination Massen had applied for was technically not vacant by virtue of statutory legislation stipulating that nobody could apply for a second nomination pendente prima.167 From a strictly legal point of view, all was fine: the faculty could grant dispensations on its own statutes, which it duly did in Massen’s case, under the condition that the nomination letter would be issued only after the first nominee had accepted a benefice. The problem was that 163 Jansonius to Drusius, 22 March 1615, Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII, 60, 244r–v. Schinckelius, from Louvain, Doctor in Theology since 1612, owed his presidence (1609) of the college of Arras to Jansonius, its provisor, as a part of a bargain with the town (cf. p. 467). Schinckelius became ordinary professor in Theology in 1614, regent in 1615. He was Jansonius’ informant on the Arts faculty: “Mitto etiam instructionem circa taxam pleccarum pedagogicarum, industria D. Schenckelii conceptam.” Jansonius to Drusius, 2 April 1615, A.A.Pa., Corpus VII., chest xiii, 2nd bundle. Schinckelius would surface as Jansonius’ associate against the Jesuits from 1618 onwards; cf. Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 9 October 1618 sqq. , RAL, OUL, 387, 91 sqq. 164 Acta Facultatis Artium, 15 March 1614, RAL, OUL, 715, 10r–v. Cf. p. 164. 165 Cf. Liber secundus nominationum, 25 June 1611 and 9 March 1612, RAL, OUL, 4752, 348v and 370r. 166 He had already been canon of Our Lady’s in Antwerp before. Bax, Historia Universitatis Lovaniensis, 1, KBR, Manuscrits, 22172, 309. Nomination and acceptation to the chapter at Ronse, in Liber secundus nominationum, respectively, 9 January 1607 and 16 December 1609, RAL, OUL, 4752, 337v. References to his peaceful possession in Acta Universitatis, 18 March 1620, RAL, OUL, 64, 154r–v. 167 On the nominatio secunda pendente prima, see p. 493 and p. 156.
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Schinckelius had only caught wind of the thus-created opportunity after Massen had been nominated, in the absence of publicly available information about dispensations and/or resignations. And the practice had a high potential for translation into “abuse” of spiritual offices towards a pious and powerful don like Jansonius, who, according to his hagiographers, abhorred cumulation.168 The statutes sanctioned by Drusius on 9 April 1615 indeed reflected the concerns of Jansonius, Schinckelius, and others who no longer belonged to the select club of regents and teachers in Philosophy. First, papal prerogatives in the faculty’s nomination bulls could not be altered,169 but the accumulation of nominations and/or benefices was curtailed by the introduction of three ordines of benefices: those who had obtained, via an academic nomination or otherwise, the peaceful possession of a canonship of the first order, did not qualify for further nominations.170 A second category of canonships blocked the access to other canonships of this category or to those of the first ordo, but only if the benefice in question had been acquired via academic privileges.171 Litigiosi could, in both cases, turn to the faculty for another nomination but had to resign one of the nominations (instead of the benefices) as soon as the other nomination had resulted in peaceful possession. The
168 “Nam ita horrebat pluralitatem beneficiorum, ut illum saepius audiverim dicentem: cum venero ad Judicem meum, habebo satis multa de quibus rationem reddere debeo.” Joannes Vander Meulen to Franciscus Van Vianen, 1 September 1655, ed. Ceyssens, “Autour de Jacques Jansonius,” 423. 169 Which was probably not Jansonius’ purpose either, as many artists were divines. Cf., for instance: “ne alioqui ille conditiones admodum laboriose nec multum inhonorate defugerentur ab ingeniis primariis que suo tempore possent facultati Theologice deservire.” Jansonius to Drusius, 2 April 1615, A.A.Pa., Corpus VII, chest xiii, 2nd bundle. 170 I.e., in the cathedral chapters of Cambrai, Tournai, Arras, Saint-Omer, Liège, in the chapter of Saint Martin in Ypres, and in the collegiate chapters of Saint Servais in Maastricht, Saint Peter’s in Lille, Our Lady’s in Aachen, and the noble chapter utriusque sexus in Thoren. Ordinationes . . . ad meliorem usum privilegii nominationum a diversis pontificibus max. eidem facultati hactenus specialiter concessi, 9 April 1615, in Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII, 60, 225r–v. 171 I.e., the cathedral chapters at Mechlin, Antwerp, ‘s Hertogenbosch, Roermond, Ghent, Bruges, Namur; the chapter of Furnes (transferred to the cathedral of Ypres), and the collegiate chapters of Liège, of Saint-Géry in Cambrai, of Douai, Harelbeke, Ronse, Cassel, Antoing, Séclin, of Our Lady’s in Maastricht, of Huy, of Saint-Germain in Mons, the high choir of Aire, and of Kortrijk, Tongeren, Kerpen, and Oldenzaal (Overyssel ) as well as the canonships of the great chapter of Saint Gudula in Brussels. The chapters in the provinces controlled by the rebels had to be assigned to one of the categories after their return under the obedience of the prince. Ordinationes (. . .), 9 April 1615, in Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII, 60, 225r–v.
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other benefices—rectorships, altars, and canonships in less wealthy or prestigious collegiate churches—constituted the third category, which was not mentioned in the new regulae nominationum but which figured as such in the libri receptoris of the university. There, nomination fees were made dependent on the different categories of nominations, much like previous distinctions between benefices minoris and majoris taxae. Second, all extraordinary vacancies of nominations to the two highest categories, either via resignation or (with respect to the first category) via dispensations on the statute de secunda pendente prima, had to be made public beforehand in order to assure open competition.172 No provisions existed for ordinary vacancies: the opening of decennia or vicennia was of old publicly announced; or in the case of individual collators, aspiring nominees had to consult the notary who kept the nomination registers.173 Similar statutes surface in the 17th-century regulae nominationum of the university, but there is no evidence that the 1615 statutes were inspired by them. Already in 1607, attempts had been made by the faculty to draw up a (considerably shorter) list of nominations to ecclesiae famosiores whose resignations had to be published in order to assure the transparency of the procedures and which had to rein in the accumulation and trade of nominations and benefices.174 The faculty board was pondering these restrictions in fairly similar circumstances; i.e., to purge itself from abuse in line with Lombard’s recommendations, and to submit its statutes for examination in Rome. In 1613–14, however, uncertainties over whether or not resignations had to be made public suggest that their application was far from self-evident.175 They did not figure in the faculty statutes submitted to the abbot of Park in March and April 1615.176 And in 1620, Drusius had to warn against infringements on the new statutes concerning the public notification of extraordinary vacancies.177 The content of these statutory reforms 172 Ordinationes (. . .), 9 April 1615, in Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII, 60, 225r–v. 173 The definitive statutes in Acta Facultatis Artium, after 30 September 1615, RAL, OUL, 715, 47v–49r. 174 Cf. Acta Facultatis Artium, 12 January 1607, RAL, OUL, 713, 347. 175 Acta Facultatis Artium, 29 July 1613 and 25 February 1614, respectively, RAL, OUL, 714, 545v and 715, 9v. 176 Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII., 60, 216r–219v, compared with Statuta Facultatis Artium, 1602, RAL, OUL, 707, 46r–53r and 60r–62r. 177 “Cum ea que visitatorum auctoritate ad firmitatem sunt ordinata non debeant nec possint omni momento et ad cuiusque placitum voluntatemque mutari.” Drusius
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had originated in the minds of academics seeking to counter accusations of opulence and abuse aired by curialists. Yet, their restrictive character gained substance as soon as they were resumed under the pressure of dons in the higher faculties seeking to attenuate, under the banner of a “better use” of the privileges, the prerogatives of the pedagogies.178 Although this all fits neatly into the picture of the visitation process as a vehicle for a more hierarchical ordering of Academia, it would be exaggerated to proclaim the staff of the pedagogies the losers of the day. First, Drusius apparently complied with the faculty’s request not to proclaim the new legislation as an “eternal edict” of the prince. According to the faculty, flexibility (to add new legislation) was a boon when wielding privileges of this type; today’s statutes could become tomorrow’s obstacles. Since no infringements on princely charters or papal bulls had been detected in its statutes, the new text had to reveal the groundlessness of curialist propaganda, nothing more.179 The statement that the faculty had to observe its new statutes apparently satisfied the visitators180 but also kept unresolved the question of whether or not they came under the libertas statuendi (and hence could be dispensed with in particular cases). Second, to the extent that they were observed, the new statutes were not designed to render impossible the privatisation of academic privileges in favour of clients, friends, and kin via resignations and other practices. They were, as a consequence, the result of a compromise that left ample room for flexibility in the second and third categories of benefices. The third category was considerably expanded in favour of the seniores: as the old distinction
to the vice-dean of the Faculty of Arts, 15 April 1620, Acta Facultatis Artium, same date, RAL, OUL, 715, 326; Cf. the intervention of Laurentius Zoenen, Jansonius’ associate, on 23 April 1620, ibidem, 327. 178 To the seven articles of 9 April 1615, one seems to have been added by an unknown author (Schinckelius?) between 9 April and 6 July. Cf. Ordinationes Venerandae Facultatis Artium pro bono usu Privilegii Nominationis, RAL, OUL, 4747. “Deinde merito hic addi posse et illud videtur qui etiam nominationem exhauserit sub qua eiusmodi beneficia comprehensa erant non possit ad collationes huius aut sequentis articuli nominari, quantumvis ipsum illus eiusmodi beneficium non acceptaverint.” Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII., 60, 231r–232r. 179 Supplication, 15 April 1615, Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII, 60, 171r. 180 “Ligabunt autem hec ordinationes imposterum a die constitutionis solemnis earum per facultatem sine prejudicio tamen eorum qui hactenus iuxta antiquum usum nominati sunt ad prebendas ordinatione tertia contentas.” Acta Facultatis Artium, after 30 September 1615, RAL, OUL, 715, 47v–49r.
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between nominations majoris and minoris taxae disappeared definitively with the introduction of the new categories of benefices,181 so did the only possibility for juniores to compete with staff members for smaller benefices—a category that had never been properly defined anyway.182 Fourth, statutory reform became a vehicle to fend off renewed claims, in 1615 as well as in the 1620s, of the teachers in the humanities and the faculty’s public professors of ethics and rhetoric. The latter campaigned for recognition as legentes, which would have eroded the competitiveness of the regents, the philosophers, as well as those in the higher faculties who had preceded them.183 Last but not least, the new statutes did more than merely consolidate the coalition between members of the Arts faculty and the dons of the higher faculties, notably Jansonius and his entourage, in the Roman Question. In the following section, it will become clear that new statutes mediated broader coalitions as well, locking as they did princes and pontiffs into a plot leading, eventually, to victory in the Roman Question. 7.2.2. Academics at the gates of Hell, 1614–16 Once more, sources will prove to be most talkative when they remain silent. In diplomatic dispatches, the Roman Question seemed to have disappeared from Maes’ to-do list. His 1614 general report had paid much attention to the affair of the privileges as an example of how curialist interest and poor counselling of the pontiff could thwart archducal policy in Rome.184 It is not surprising, then, that he did not insist
181 The non-observation of this statute was not to be considered an abuse according to the committee of the Arts faculty. It does not figure in the regulae of the second half of the 17th century, Ordinationes Venerandae Facultatis Artium pro bono usu Privilegii Nominationis, RAL, OUL, 4747. 182 Cf. p. 165. 183 Cf. supplication to the visitators, “Pro recuperando iure prerogativae etiam ordinis in nominationibus, quo professores litterarorum decreto facultatis artium, anno 1602, privati sunt.” Raisons qu’on fait valoir auprès des seigneurs visiteurs, pour recouvrer la prérogative de nomination dont les professeurs de lettres ont été privés en 1602 par décret de la faculté des Arts, SAL, Oud Archief, 3993; reactions in Acta Facultatis Artium, 17 June 1615, RAL, OUL, 715, 39v–40r sqq. 184 “Que poussee par ses ministres qui soubz pretext de vouloir conserver les droictz du Sainct Siege comme ilz disent estre obligez chercent leur particulier, sadicte Sainctete leur donant trop de creance, ou mal informee par eulx, ne veult condescendre a ce que de raison il debvroit, comme se voit encores pour lheure au faict de la confirmation des privileges de luniversite de Lovain, ayant maintenant dure plusieurs annees sans que lon puisse venir a quelque resolution finale [Article 24].” Quelques poincts
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on rekindling the slippery affair of the privileges. Academic records, as well, refer to the Roman Question only sporadically during the last months of 1614 and much of 1615. These few references matter, however. In November 1614, Andreas Mantels, professor of Philosophy in the pedagogy of the Castle, faced deprivation of his altar in Saint Denis at Liège by virtue of a papal brief. For the first time in many years, the granting of litterae inhibitoriales against papal providees was recorded in academic minutes. The town council was mobilised to proceed to the arrest of the apostolic executor, but the execution of the conservatorial sentence warranting this arrest was, for the time being, suspended.185 Instead, a delegation consisting of Robaulx, the jurist Cornelius Sylvius, and Fannius, the pensionary of Louvain, was sent to Brussels in order to obtain, via the councillors of Brabant and the Privy Council, a (general ) mandate to the conservator of the privileges, urging the latter to wield the jurisdiction granted to him by the dynasty and the Apostolic See.186 After that, no mention was made of it again. In April 1615, orders were dispatched to Maes in favour of Theodericus de Grace, another Philosophy professor who was contesting a canonship at Tongeren.187 In Roman sources, echoes of new problems arising concerned the case of Martinus Neeten, a bachelor in Law and a client of Gerardus Corselius, over a Maastricht canonship.188 The Council of Brabant had proceeded, on Van Neeten’s request, to the confiscation of the chapter’s possessions.189 Albergati, apostolic legate for Cologne, urged the Secretariate of State to find a solution. Faced with such harsh measures, the region’s chapters were et articles (. . .), Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 20 August 1614, AGR, Audience, 449, 194r–211r. 185 Acta Universitatis, 11 November 1614, RAL, OUL, 63, 168v. “Is geresolueert zekeren persoon hier expliterende brevia apostolica sine placeto regio tapprehenderen.” Résolutions magistrales, 13 January 1615, SAL, Oud Archief, 312, 80r. 186 Letter from the archduke “en son conseil” to the conservator, 5 February 1615, Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281. 187 Acta Universitatis, 3 April 1615, RAL, OUL, 63, 184r; see also Memoria pro eximio domino Jansonio, in Les démêlés avec l’Evêché de Liège. Documents, procès, mémoires 1613–1660, RAL, OUL, 4693. The archduke to Maes, 9 April 1615, Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281. Cf. Maes’ angry reaction about the academics’ failure to abide with his advice in Maes to the university, 2 May 1615, Acta Universitatis, 21 May 1615, RAL, OUL, 63, 190v–191r. 188 Cf. deliberations in 1610 over measures to favour, via Van Neeten, Gerardus Corselius, “qui et alias sepe de facultate optime meritus erat et modo in negotio Romano concernente privilegio nominationum ex parte universitatis deputatus erat.” Acta Facultatis Artium, 10 May 1615, RAL, OUL, 714, 454–55. 189 Supplication of Our Lady’s in Maastricht to Albergati, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 175, 168r.
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likely to yield to the Council’s “gran rigore,” which was prejudicial to the rights of the Holy See.190 There is no evidence that the university had declared itself a party in Neeten’s struggle. Judging by the caution with which academics proceeded in the other cases recorded in the faculty minutes, it is not impossible that Neeten acted on his own account and narrowly failed to thwart academic strategies. For it is only two days after Drusius had granted his final approval of the new faculty statutes pro bono usu nominationum, on 16 July 1615, that the cases of Mantels and De Grace were put on the agenda again in a special session of the faculty Congregation. Thanks to Drusius’ mediation, De Grace abandoned his claims and was rewarded for it by a grateful faculty, his opponent being in the favour of the Maes brothers. Mantels, for his part, declared that he had postponed execution of a conservatorial sentence in his favour “because not only his private interests, but the conservation of the entire privilege were at stake.” The faculty decided to put, at last, the legal machinery of the Habsburg Netherlands in motion against Mantels’ adversaries.191 A few days later, his adversary Laurentius Jacobens192 had been confined by the Promotor (the university’s officer of police) to “honest custody” in the university’s prison in the old Mechlin Gate. It is at this occasion that a delegation of Jansonius, Robaulx, Mantels, and Fannius left for Brussels with the request that the abbot of Park, in his position as apostolic visitator of the university, would promulgate a solemn declaration that no abuses could be traced in the faculty’s statutes.193 They also explained the university’s point of view to the papal nuncio, before others did. Tellingly, Jansonius had, in addition, to confront the gentlemen of the Privy Council with their own general
190 “Io li [= Our Lady’s in Maastricht] ho fatto sapere che mantengino il provisto apostolico et obediscano ai mandati dell’Auditore della Camera, . . . in queste materie la Cancellaria di Brabante procede con gran rigore, et percio sarebbe espediente che si applicasse qualche rimedio come altre volte si è trattato costa, accio che da una parte li capitoli no patiscano qualche grave danno, et dall’altra non si faccia pregiudizio alla collatura di Nostro Signore.” Albergati to Borghese, 5 July 1615, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 175, 167r. 191 Cf. Acta Facultatis Artium, 18 July 1615 and 17 August 1615, RAL, OUL, 715, 41r–v and 43v–44r. De Grace was rewarded with a nomination secundae ordinis in line with the new statutes; cf. Acta Facultatis Artium, 4 September 1615, ibidem, 46r. 192 Priest of the diocese of Liège. See also a papal provision in his favour of a canonship in Ciney. Brief of Paul V to the auditor of the Apostolic Chamber and to the deacons of Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul in Liège, 3 April 1615, regest in Hansotte and Forgeur, Inventaire analytique, 114. Not mentioned in Vaes, “Les curialistes belges.” 193 This was done before 21 July 1615. Cf. Mantels’ briefing of the faculty’s congregation, Acta Facultatis Artium, 1 August 1615, RAL, OUL, 715, 42r.
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mandate of 5 February 1615 to the conservator of the privileges, by virtue of which academics now claimed to proceed. At this occasion, a new letter was dispatched to Rome with explicit orders to defend the university with all means.194 The chronology of events suggests that the academics—while disclaiming authorship for their deeds and hiding themselves behind papal privileges, a visitation by external powers, and a princely mandate—were very well aware that their “routine legal practices” were highly provocative.195 Already in April 1615, academics had anticipated that a visitation of their statutes would lure the prince into defending their privileges more vigorously.196 Gradually, all players indeed started to act in accordance with the script that had patiently been prepared for months by the humble academics at Louvain. It is in this context that several missions of Joannes Massen and Carolus Robaulx had to secure the support of Peck and other Brabant diplomats at the Maastricht conferences.197 The Brabant dimension entered the picture when another delegation (Robaulx and Sylvius) secured the support of the States. The natural representatives of the Duchy charged a special committee of men who had already earned their spurs in the fight
194 Cf. Jansonius’ report in Acta Facultatis Artium, 8 August 1615, RAL, OUL, 715, 43r; framing of the procedings with reference to apostolic privileges and princely mandates, when charging Jansonius with this mission, in Acta Universitatis, 3 August 1615, RAL, OUL, 63, 199v. “Vous informerez bien et au long du tout ce que dessus sadicte sainctete procl[unreadable] discretement quelle ne trouve mauvais quensuite de nosdicts predecesseurs nous desirons conserver ce que leur a este octroije et prevenir que nostredict universite par contraventions ausdicts previleges ne tombe en aulcune decadence, dont nostre saincte religion en ces paijs (. . .) ne scaurait attendre que beaucoup dinterest et prejudice.” Archduke to Maes, Négociations de Rome, 8 August 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 309r; see also Prats to Maes, same date, ibidem, 309r. 195 An internal document with an anamnesis of the Casus Andreae Mantels in Les démêlés avec l’Evêché de Liège. Documents, procès, mémoires 1613–1660, RAL, OUL, 4693 confirms this, but was drafted post factum. 196 “Ut tamen adversariis nostris Rome et alibi satisfiat item tollantur abusus (. . .) qua sperans Serenissimam suam celsitudinem et ampliss. d.d. visitatores privilegia sua tanto magis esse protecturos sepe iam dicta artium facultas iudicavit ampliss. DD VV supplicandum pro eo quod sequitur.” Informatio summaria of the Faculty of Arts, 15 April 1615, Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, A.A.Pa., R.VII., 60, 167r–179r. 197 Cf. references to Robaulx’ report to the Faculty of Arts, Acta Facultatis Artium, 7 September 1615, RAL, OUL, 715, 46r and his briefing of the academic senate, Acta Universitatis, 10 September 1615, RAL, OUL, 63, 203v. Plans were made to send another delegation of Jansonius, Sylvius, Fannius, and Robaulx to Maastricht in order to “end the jurisdictional differences of opinion with the Principality of Liège,” but they were probably not carried through. Acta Facultatis Artium, 17 September 1615, ibidem, 204r.
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against the Jesuits two years earlier, with the defence of the university and of the land’s constitution Eximiae.198 Now it was the States who urged Peck in Maastricht and (via Drusius) the Archdukes in Brussels to step into the breach for the university.199 Only one key figure had been sidelined. A few months earlier, Philip Maes had introduced a procedure for the Roman Congregation of the Council, which ruled on 23 June 1615 that the Tridentine Fathers had not wished to derogate to Eximiae in that famous Cap. 20 Sess. 24 De Reformatione. This move fitted neatly in the strategies deployed by the Lovanienses in the course of 1615.200 When briefed about Jacobens’ imprisonment, however, Maes complained to his “cher cousin” Prats that the academics were behaving like children who had held their affairs in neglect and that he had warned them not to seek refuge under “extremitez” of this type.201 But it is obvious that academics now relegated Maes to the role of the hapless diplomat in the play that was unfolding. Maes played his involuntary role masterfully, although probably without the gusto that becomes the historian reading his reports. Other support came from unexpected quarters. Already in September 1615, Maes reported on horror stories brought into circulation by the curialist propaganda machine. The Roman choir lamented the physical molestation of the poor Jacobens,202 the clan war reportedly erupting
198 This committee was composed of the abbot of Park Joannes Drusius, the baron of Wezemaal (Sylvius’ patron), the burgomasters of Louvain and Brussels, the registrar of the States (the son of Philip Maes), and Fannius, pensionary of Louvain. 199 Report of the commissioners to the university, Acta Universitatis, 30 September 1615, RAL, OUL, 63, 204v–206r; Robaulx and Sylvius to the rector of the university (Joannes Paludanus, Reusens, Documents relatifs, 1, 276), 28 September 1615, Acta Facultatis Artium, 1 October 1615, RAL, OUL, 715, 48r. In these sources, Jansonius emerges once more as a central figure in the relations with Brussels and Rome. 200 Intriguingly, the Declaratio of the Congregation of the Council of 23 June 1615, signed by its prefect, Lancelotti, was dispatched to the Archdukes only in 1617, together with a brief from Paul V of 20 March 1617 (probably in answer to thanking letters from the archduke for the bull Regimini) in which the pontiff stressed his favourable disposition towards the University of Louvain, which was to be ascribed to his high esteem for the nobility of Albert of Austria. Cf. Estrait d’un bref apostolique de Paul V. en date du 20 Mars de l’an 1617, adressé à son Altesse serenissime Albert Archiduc, prince souverain des Pays-Bas, &c. &c. RAL, OUL, 4683. 201 Maes to Prats, Négociations de Rome, 29 August 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 315r. Academics had interpreted Maes’ message differently, cf. Acta Facultatis Artium, 10 August 1614, RAL, OUL, 715, 18v–19r. 202 Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 5 September 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 322r.
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at Liège between the families of the two litigants,203 the abuses committed under the pretext of Eximiae, the violation of ecclesiastical liberty, Liège sovereignty, and the rights of the Holy See.204 In the given circumstances, the curialists were forced to become a party again, which, by the end of 1615, submitted a letter of supplication to the pontiff. This memorandum stated that academics considered Jacobens as change for a confirmation of their privileges and that, in the near future, all papal providees would share his fate, with the region’s chapters being forced to bow to the whims of the Council of Brabant.205 These dark prophecies would resonate time and again during the following months, but now added substance to academic claims instead of thwarting their policies. This depended on the pope assuming his role of vindicator of the rights of the Holy See that, from a Roman point of view, were now visibly being challenged by the Louvain academics.206 During the first audience after the pope’s return from Frascati, sometime in the middle of September, the resident found the benign pontiff “fort altéré, voire en colère contre ladicte université.”207 Maes, “fort estonné et aussij perplexe,” had reserved the pope’s “propos de
203 “que les parens des ambedeux parties, estans Liegeois, seroijent venuz aux armes et apperens de sentretuer.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 5 September 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 322r. 204 “Pour avoir faict prendre prisonier ledict Laurens non en Brabant, mais sur le mesme paijs de Liege, et ce encoires par ministres de ladicte universite.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 5 September 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 322r. 205 “Que omni cum tendant in spretum jurisdictionis Sanctitatis Vestre eiusque sancte Sedis apostolice, et Lovanistae quod peius est minantur se oratorem non relaxaturos nisi obtenta confirmatione suorum privilegiorum a Sede Apostolica addentes, quod si quis a Sede Apostolica provisus ausus fuerit in nominatum ab universitate predicta suam provisionem intimare, si is talis in Patria Brabantica bona habuerit, illa statim sequestrabuntur, et non prius relaxabuntur nisi suae provisioni renuntiaverit, et idem erit de redditibus collegiatarum ecclesiarum Leodiensium, si capitula brevibus paruerint.” Letter of supplication “al signor cavalier Masio che ne rispondi a Nostro Signore,” in attachment to Négociations de Rome, 21 November 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 382r. 206 “Que de tout ce ilz [= Jacobens’ procurators in Rome] avoijent faict leurs plainctes a sa sainctete laquelle laiijant prins fort mal auroijt ordonne destre escript fort chaudement a son nonce a Brusselles et enoultre commande a son auditeur della camera, de proceder criminellement contre ceulx, qui vouldroijent troubler la liberte et jurisdiction ecclesiasticque.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 5 September 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 322r. 207 “Qu’en cincq ans de residence (. . .) je laij tousiours trouve fort doulx et benigne en ses audiences.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 19 September 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 335r.
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dure digestion” for his letter to Prats, whom he implored “comme ministre tant principal et confident” to pass through messages to the prince which he balked at reporting himself. The pope had exclaimed in the same audience that “those of Flanders may consider themselves exemplary Catholics,” but that “even the heretics could not have done worse,”208 qualifying the academics as “insolentissimi” who would be excommunicated at once and who “mourans iroijent in casa del diabolo.” The ministers and the archduke had not been exempted from the pontiff ’s wrath either, but Maes had judged some utterances too offensive for Brussels’ ears.209 He had, according to his report, stressed the importance of the university for Catholic religion and the authority of the Holy See, tried in vain to appease the pope during more than an hour, and only partially succeeded in doing so after having proposed to release the prisoner, a solution that he warmly recommended to his Brussels employers.210 However, Jacobens stayed where he was until February 1616. The unfortunate resident, who had to endure papal resentment during many audiences to come, continued to plead for his release, claiming that he would not be able to stall the excommunicatory briefs any longer. Trapped between two patrons—one of his sons had just entered the papal household—Maes tried to convince his Brussels audience that Jacobens’ custody was counterproductive, “car ne mancquent icij ceulx, qui conseillent la revocation de tous leurs privileges.”211 Maes’ first letters from Rome since the beginning of the Jacobens affair had reached Brussels on 8 October 1615.212 By then, the faculty’s statutes pro bono usu nominationum in tandem with the mandate of 208
Maes to Prats, Négociations de Rome, 19 September 1615, AGR, Audience, 449,
333r. 209 Three lines were barred in Maes’ letter to Prats. In the margins: “esto me ha venido barrado de Roma.” Maes to Prats, Négociations de Rome, 19 September 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 333r. “Aussij par les rasures de ma lettre derniere sur le mesme faict, avez peu cognoistre, que icij sont passez propos de plus dure digestion.” Maes to Prats, Négociations de Rome, 26 September 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 339r. 210 “Pour donner a sa sainctete quelque sorte dappaisement, je naij toutefoijs sceu prouffiter aultre, qua la parfin a ma tresgrande instance elle sest contente pour asteur, moyenant lon relaxe le prisonnier.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 19 September 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 335r. 211 Maes to Prats, Négociations de Rome, 10 October 1610, AGR, Audience, 449, 347r. 212 Date of arrival of Maes to Prats, Négociations de Rome, 26 September 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 339r.
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the Privy Council of February 1615 had locked all parties firmly in a coalition around academic claims. It was on 9 October that Drusius and Craesbeke publicly had declared that they had, by virtue of their apostolic authority, inspected and approved the faculty’s statutes. On the same day, the archduke sent an answer—“degna d’un principe tanto grande come l’archiduca”213—to Rome that, an obedient son of the Holy See, he would have the molestations of Jacobens examined by his Privy Council and would have possible miscreants punished.214 Roman (and Maes’) expectations that diplomatic pressure would quickly bring the academics to their senses were not validated, however. Two weeks later, the prince informed his resident that, after thorough investigation by the Privy Council, nothing had been found that was in contravention to the privileges granted to the university by the Holy See. His Holiness was surrounded by bad councillors “mal affectionez à ladicte université.” It was because of the councillors’ infringements on the privileges “pour leur particulier prouffict” that the prince himself had ordered, out of reverence for the Holy See and with Public Interest in mind, the privileges be observed with rigour.215 A strong message was conveyed to the Eternal City signalling the archduke’s personal involvement and indicating that the pontiff ignored academic claims at his peril. A bargain was proposed: while on the one hand the pope could be assured that the prince would not allow any of his subjects to show disrespect towards the apostolic church of Rome, the archduke would, on the other hand, be “tresmarij” if the university’s privileges, especially in this dark century, continued to be infringed upon.216
213 Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 31 October 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 366r–v. 214 “Si vous enchargeons de a vostre premiere audience faire scavoir a sadicte sainctete de nostre part que nous avons entendu avecq un particulier desplaisir ce que nous avez represente de la demonstration quelle avoit faict de soffenser contre lesdicts de Louvain, quen ceste conformite nous avons faict prendre information de ce qui sest faict et passe contre ledict pourveu, et si par icelle resultera quelque exces a la charge de quique ce soit, elle se peult bien asseurer de nostre observance envers elle, et le Saint Siege.” The archduke to Maes, Négociations de Rome, 9 October 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 346r. 215 There are no allusions in the faculty or university minutes to an investigation and the necessity of adding a round of “informing” the prince and the legists through delegations to Brussels, which suggests that this “thorough examination” had been carried through before the archduke’s engagement, during academic mobilisation in August and September 1615. 216 “Nous serions aussij tresmarij de veoir que de nostre temps lon vint a enfraindre, au retrencher les privileges de nostredicte universite, et la priver des faveurs,
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Maes’ reports of his audiences with the pontiff during the following months reveal how pressure mounted on Paul V, who at each occasion eagerly asked for news about the release of Jacobens, to live up to the claims of the Holy See. In October 1615, the Roman Secretariat of State had not judged it necessary to refer to the Jacobens affair in its general instructions to Bentivoglio’s successor on the Flanders post;217 in January 1616, it saw itself compelled to involve the new nuncio Gesualdo in order plead with the archduke for the release of Jacobens and an apostolic executor who had been confined to custody on the request of another nominee.218 It is on this occasion that the Court of Brussels decided that it was time to normalise relations, to allow the new nuncio a little success, and to let the archduke perform as an obedient son of the Holy See.219 An archducal order to the university was issued on 5 February 1616.220 After seven months of custody, the unfortunate priest could finally leave the university’s prison. This move quickly was redeemed in a satisfied pontiff, a relieved Maes,221 and a triumphant nuncio.222 The latter knew how to return a favour223 and drew up an apologetic report in favour of the university, which had acted out of “gelosia” about its privileges rather than out of irreverence towards the chair of Saint Peter; in addition, Gesualdo did not neglect to recommend the university’s cause, as far as it was justified, because
prerogatives, droicts et authoritez qua linstance des princes noz predecesseurs, et par la consession de tant de papes.” The archduke to Maes, Négociations de Rome, 23 October 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 358r. 217 Cf. the general briefing on the jurisdictional affairs in the Netherlands. Instruttione per Monsignor Gesualdo (. . .), 23 October 1615, ed. Cauchie and Maere, Recueil des instructions générales, 38–56. 218 I.e., the relative of a papal providee sojourning at the Roman Curia. The curialist’s name is Libertus Goffin, who held claims to two altars in the Principality of Liège. Brief from Paul V to the Uditore and the deacons of Saint-Paul and SaintJean-Evangéliste in Liège, 27 May 1615, regest in Hansotte and Forgeur, Inventaire analytique, 117. Borghese to Gesualdo, 9 January 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 222r–223r. 219 Gesualdo to Borghese, 30 January 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 102, 36r–v. 220 The archduke to the university, 5 February 1616, Acta Universitatis, 9 February 1616, RAL, OUL, 63, 221r. 221 Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 19 March 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 41r–v. 222 “Je veulx croire que sa sainctete sera satisfaicte, comme en at este icij monseigneur le nonce.” Prats to Maes, Négociations de Rome, 6 February 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 22r. 223 Cf. the appreciative sounds reaching the Brussels nunciature from Rome: “se ne commenda però la diligenza usata da lei in questo negotio.” Borghese to Gesualdo, 12 March 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 233r–v.
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of the services this old and famous school rendered to the Holy See.224 Archducal diplomacy seized the occasion to stress for a Roman audience its own merit in convincing the Louvainists to let their prisoner go, despite the legitimacy of their claims.225 There was some truth in this. Academics, after two decades of vain efforts to reach their ends via other means, had stuck much longer to the legalistic logic behind Jacobens’ imprisonment. They could only be prodded, in the course of February 1615, into releasing him after the mediation of Brussels statesmen such as Drusius, Engelbert Maes, and Peck.226 Despite academic protestations that the release of Jacobens had to be carefully crafted as an act of grace rather than as an act of justice (or a potential precedent),227 nobody else really seemed to care. The conditionality of Jacobens’ release remained conveniently open for interpretation, so as to allow both the archduke and the pontiff maximum room for manoeuvre. Nobody wished the logic of conflict to grow beyond the control of diplomats and statesmen. Maes’ correspondence reveals how papal indifference in 1612–14 was gradually converted through the 1615–16 conflict into a slowly unfolding horror scenario,
224
Gesualdo to Borghese, 20 February 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 102, 86r–v. “Et licet eadem universitas iis documentis quae dicto nostro legato ante menses aliquot transmitti iussimus praefati Laurentii apprehensionem legittime factam fuisse commonstret, quia tamen intelligimus sanctitatem vestram in ea voluntate persistere, ut nostram erga eandem et istam sanctam sedem testaremur observantiam, postpositis omnibus, eum dimitti curavimus, hac spe et fiducia sanctitatem vestram tandem opportunum aliquod remedium allaturam quo predictae universitatis nostre, tam bene de sede apostolica fide Catholica adeoque tota republica xpiana meritae quieti et tranquillitati consulatur.” The archduke to Paul V, Négociations de Rome, 23 March 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 44r. 226 Report of Massen on his negotiations, together with Jansonius, over the conditions on which Jacobens had to be released, a mission which may have preceded the archducal letter; delegation of Fannius, Drusius, and representatives of the five faculties (Schinckelius, Sylvius, Corselius, Fienus, Robaulx), Acta Universitatis, 9 and 11 February 1616, RAL, OUL, 63, 221r and 222r–v; Résolutions magistrales, 11 February 1616, SAL, Oud Archief, 312, 140v. Report by Wiggers (as a substitute for Schinckelius?) on the visits to Engelbert Maes (who, of course, proved to be well-informed about the letter), the chancellor of Brabant (who had obviously not been consulted before and needed “information” from president Maes and the confessor, Brizuela, first), and (eventually) the nuncio on 15 February 1616, ibidem, 224r.This delay had forced Philip Maes to go through another unpleasant audience with a wrathful pontiff. Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 5 March 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 34r. 227 Earlier negotiations over Jacobens’ release had, as a matter of fact, preceded Gesualdo’s intervention; cf. Prats to Maes, Négociations de Rome, 15 January 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 8r. 225
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in which the pope, under pressure of the curia, would feel compelled to vindicate the rights of the Holy See through excommunications and the revocation of the privileges. Yet, even the successor of Peter had to pick his battles carefully: the episode of the Venetian Interdict, in the beginning of his pontificate, had dealt a major blow to papal authority. The pontiff found the defiant (but staunchly Catholic) university backed by the power elites of the Duchy and by pious princes, which meant that such a measure would inevitably put papal authority to the test. It is not surprising to learn that, judging from Maes’ reports in these months, decision-makers in the Eternal City frenetically sought a way out of the deadlock and instructed the nuncio to react “con flemma” to events.228 The affair never escalated to the extent that it was discussed in the Avvisi di Roma, which indicates that the pontiff and his entourage had kept, for now, the looming conflict from becoming a grande affare. It is telling, in this context, that business in other academic affairs, notably negotiations over a pension to be levied on the abbey of Saint-Saulne in Valenciennes in favour of King’s College at Louvain, went on as usual. Rome signalled quite early that it was ready to listen to the Louvain grievances, with the pope now displaying his willingness to resume negotiations over a new deal on the privileges.229 At the same time, the curia could not display its benignity if procedures launched by the academics against papal providees would make Roman benevolence look like weakness.230 All this may explain why academics and their allies seemed relatively relaxed about standing before the gates of hell. Yet, there were limits to provoking the papal prince. Even without recurring to excommunications and all that, papal administration was capable of
228 “VS ne tratti (. . .) con la flemma che usa l’istesso archiduca . . . Intanto non si restera di dirle, che conviene di proceder con qualche destrezza con l’istessa università, per esser cattolica, et che altre volte, della Sede Apostolica si è portata bene.” Borghese to Gesualdo, 20 February 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 227v. 229 Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 10 October 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 349r–351v. 230 “Si proteggeranno, in quello che sarà giusto, le ragioni dell’università di Lovanio intorno ai suoi privileggi, che VS raccomanda di nuovo con una delle sue lettere de’ 5, per il conto, che Nostro Signore tiene della medesima università. Ma conviene, che anco essi dal canto loro non gli abusino, o trasgrediscano, acciochè la buona dispositione di Sua Beatitudine possa ricevere augumento anco dal merito delle buone operattioni loro.” Borghese to Gesualdo, 26 March 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 237v.
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making life difficult for the Archdukes and their entourage, who in the long run benefitted from a smooth co-operation with all levels of the curia. The academics, for their part, faced Roman retaliation on other fronts as well; measures that could, moreover, attract over time the support of local Church magnates or competitors for benefices in the Habsburg Netherlands.231 Jacobens’ release, consequently, was the only desirable outcome of the affair. But there is more. On the one hand, academics had been able to fix Paul V in the role of a pontiff surrounded by bad councillors. On the other hand, a scenario in which all parties returned to the negotiation table but in which the pontiff could nonetheless act as a grand benefactor called for additional measures. Much of the activity of the nunciature in these days consisted of restraining both academics and papal providees from unleashing their legal instruments on each other and escalating things—a complication that none of the parties involved needed in the given circumstances.232 Maes had already suggested what was to be done in the beginning of the Jacobens affair—and claimed he had counselled academics to do exactly that back in 1614, at the meeting in the Pope’s College: i.e., that the university had to send a special delegate, who would help him fend off the fascheries of Liège curialists in the Dataria and in the Chancery.233 Rome, for its part, signalled in March 1616 that an envoy who could restore the pontiff and the academics to their roles
231
E.g., “sicome facilmente anco potranno con queste novità procurarsi la rivocatione dei privileggi da Sua Beatitudine et tanto più perche gli abusano, intendendosi che essi in vertu dei medesimi privilegii habbiano nominato, e fatto pigliar il possesso d’un canonicato di Cambrai, benche questi canonicati non siano compresi nella tassa dei loro indulti, per esser di molto maggior valore.” Borghese to Gesualdo, 5 March 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 248, 231r–v. Gesualdo to Borghese, 26 March 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 102, 132r. “quil ne tenoijt qua sa sainctete de faire mectre en prisons tous les lovanistes . . . par tout lestat ecclesiasticques, voijres au paijs de Liege, que causeroijt difficulte plus grande.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 5 March 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 34r. 232 “Cf. for instance Gesualdo to Borghese, 26 March 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 102, 132r. 233 “Auquel effect avoijs conseille ausdicts de luniversite denvoijer icij de leur part homme expres [my italicisation] avecq permission neantmoings et lettres de faveur de vostre Alteze pour demonstrer a sa sainctete et ses ministres, combien cest affaire les presse et importe pour la conservation de leur universite; lequel oultre ce me poura assister a la poursuicte, car ne se peult escripre, combien elle est facheuse et difficiele pour cause des liegeois desquels estant la plus part composee si bien la chancellerie que datarie, ilz contreminent galiardement.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 17 October 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 353r–v.
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of generous Holy Father and submissive subjects respectively would be received most warmly in the capital of the world.234 This does not mean, however, that the format of conflict was dismantled immediately. Until the end of 1616, both scenarios—reconciliation under the guise of submission and confrontation—coexisted and were floated recurrently by both parties. Plans to send another special envoy to the Eternal City had already matured much earlier at Louvain. That a new Roman mission had been discussed during the Louvain meeting with Maes in August 1614 suggests that the appointment of a special envoy (the fifth in three decades) who could prostrate himself, in the name of the university, at the feet of the pontiff, had been envisaged from the very start. The man who was appointed and also the circumstances matter. Two months before Jacobens was released and one month before the nuncio informed the Secretariat of State about the delegation in the making, Carolus Robaulx suddenly surfaces in the faculty minutes as the ambassador of the States of Brabant to the Eternal City:235 after consultation with the abbot of Park, the academics had made themselves invisible again and limited themselves to letters of recommendation to Philip Maes.236 Robaulx having performed as the faculty’s commissioner for several years now, academics could have anticipated the reaction this appointment would trigger among their opponents after his arrival in Rome in the Spring of 1616.237 In his later reports, Gesualdo confirmed
234
“Nel resto per quel, che tocca all’istessa università, della quale VS fa cosi buona attestatione, se manderanno qui persona a fare instanza a Nostro Signore per la conservatione delli privilegii sara ben veduta, et ascoltata volontieri, et in quello, che sarà giusto, non si lascerà di provedere.” Borghese to Gesualdo, 12 March 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 233r–v. 235 The Procuration of the States dates from 7 December 1615; a copy in Les démêlés avec l’Evêché de Liège. Documents, procès, mémoires 1613–1660, RAL, OUL, 4693. Cf. Acta Universitatis, 6 February 1616, RAL, OUL, 63, 220r–v; Acta Facultatis Artium, 18 December 1615, RAL, OUL, 715, 55r. As had been the case in Lombard’s days, another academic would follow him into the heart of patronage: Nicolaus Geldre, professor in philosophy. Cf. faculty minutes of 6 February 1616, ibidem, 220r–v. 236 Acta Universitatis, 6 and 9 February 1616, RAL, OUL, 63, 220r–v and 221r. 237 “Le depute de luniversite est partij, par le premier vous envoijeraij qualques despesches de Son Alteze pour luij, vous priant de les luij delivrer a son arrivee.” Prats to Maes, Négociations de Rome, 27 February 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 30r. “Jaij le 19 du courant par la venue du chanoine Robaux receu les lettres.” Maes to Prats, Négociations de Rome, 23 April 1616, ibidem, 83r. “In quem finem duxi eum heri ad sanctissimum, cuius pedes est osculatus, et ab eodem benigne satis exceptus, postmodum egit perquam diu cum D. Datario. Martis proximo idem officium prestabo apud illustrissimum D. Cardinalem Borgesium Protectorem Belgii.” Maes to the
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that he had tried to persuade Peck, the chancellor of Brabant, to send a “huomo di miglior natura” to whom he could talk.238 He did so in reaction to dispatches from Rome portraying Robaulx as a “huomo assai seditioso, et litigioso” in the Summer of 1616, despite Maes’ efforts to counter the calumnies spread against the envoy of the States of Brabant.239 The curialist faction wanted his skin because of the “stravaganze” committed against papal providees in the past few years, and had even petitioned the pope to launch criminal procedures against him.240 Academics must have been aware that, in Roman eyes, Robaulx was not a “huomo da negotio.” This implies that they were not prepared to abandon the repertoire of confrontation just yet, their base of support in Belgium being, to a large extent, the product as much as the premise of the 1615–16 conflict. They were not unsuccessful: as late as September 1616, Maes as well as the archduke himself pondered returning to the old, confrontational mode (i.e., confiscating ecclesiastical property and arresting executors to enforce conservatorial sentences) as a strategy to prod the pontiff into compliance.241 All this reveals that the curia, too, was reluctant to abandon its positions: the Secretariat of State still reasoned in terms of “we” against “them”;242 abuse continued to populate curialist minds; and the long history of the affair, in which the former cardinal Borghese now took up a very different role than in Lombard’s letters, became another
university, 25 April 1615, Bulle Regimini Universalis de Paul V. Documents et actes y relatifs, RAL, OUL, 4684. 238 Gesualdo to Borghese, 30 July 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 102, 334r–335v. 239 “Mais partie adverse ne cesse encoires de ses calumnies, jusques a sadresser a la personne dudict Roubaux en particulier.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 28 May 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 103r. “Memores forte eius quod dicitur: audacter calumniari semper aliquid haeret, presertim in hac Curia, in qua plerique faciles et creduli nimium sunt eorum que iudicant esse ex re.” Maes to the university, 28 May 1616, Acta Universitatis, 17 June 1616, RAL, OUL, 64, 3r. 240 “Della qualità di questo Carolo Robaulx . . . si è havuto poco buona relatione . . . Et sebbene meritava la sua temerità, che Nostro Signore havesse ordinato che si fosse proceduto contro lui per giustitia, . . . non ha voluto farlo per esser lui stato mandato qui dall’università.” Borghese to Gesualdo, 9 July 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 258r–261v. 241 “Daventure sa sainctete voijant ceste resolution, comprehendera nous raisons mieulx de ce quil na voulu faire jusques oires.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 24 September 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 202r. 242 “Et siccome . . . essi non tentaranno cose di nuovo, cosi conviene, che si facci dalla parte nostra il medesimo.” Borghese to Gesualdo, 23 July 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 264v–265r.
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obstacle.243 This resonated in Maes’ reports as well. After Robaulx’ arrival, the pope had charged a full-blown congregation of three cardinals (plus the datario) with the examination of the affair. Yet, only one of them, Cardinal Fabrizio Verallo, would receive afterwards a fairly good press from the archducal resident;244 the two other cardinals—the inevitable Millino and Lancelotti—he found just as “forts difficilz et durs” as before.245 Even the resident himself became the object of Roman suspicion: in the Summer of 1616, Gesualdo and his Roman correspondents complained about the “temerità,” the “minaccie,” and the “insolenza” of father and son Maes. Two delegations of the States of Brabant in June and July 1616, to which Maes, Jr., had been a party, had insisted on a quick resolution, suggesting that Robaulx might be called back and that the Council of Brabant would protect the Louvain claims in its own manner.246 While this insolence, in Gesualdo’s eyes, prevented the pontiff from wielding his “solita benignità,”247 new escalations loomed and made Brabant elites wary of Roman “tergiversations.”248 The most clamorous document, in this respect, is a letter from the archduke himself to Paul V, in which the prince forsook all “prudenza” Roman diplomats attributed to him and
243 “Altre volte sono stati mandati dall’istessa università di Lovanio persona per l’istesso effetto . . . et particolarmente l’arcivescovo Armacano (. . .) non ci fu presa risolutione, per che li abusi, et eccessi dell’università sono molti, et Sua Santità se ne ricorda benissimo perche fu uno de cardinali a ciò deputati da Papa Clemente.” Borghese to Gesualdo, 9 July 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 258r–261v. 244 “Il at este ung des trois cardinaulx deputez en laffaire de luniversite de Louvain ou il sa porte fort bien.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 16 June 1617, AGR, Audience, 451, 131r. It is impossible to say whether Maes was setting up a new exchange of favour, referring to an old one, or both. 245 A reference to the third meeting of this congregation in Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 23 July 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 147r–v. 246 “Et che non si attendeva alla speditione, come era conveniente, onde mi facevano sapere, che havrebbono richiamato il Rubais, e poi si sarebbono difesi li loro privileggi con ogni miglior modo, e se ne fossero nati inconvenienti, ch’essi non erano in colpa, con molte altre parole temerarie, et fuora di proposito.” Gesualdo to Borghese, 30 July 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 102, 334r–335v. “Veramente la temerità di costoro è molto grande, et se il figlio del cavalier Masio ha usati costi mali termini, qui il padre non gli ha usati migliori.” Borghese to Gesualdo, 20 August 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428. 247 “E che ne anch’essi dovevano domandar simili cose per non render la Santità Sua più difficile ad usargli la sua benignità.” Gesualdo to Borghese, 22 June 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 102, 264r–v. 248 “Questo motivo è proceduto dalla carceratione d’uno di Lovanio, seguita in Liege, la quale dicono sia stata procurata dal Jacobeo.” Gesualdo to Borghese, 22 June 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 102, 264r–v.
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turned the affair into a litmus test of his own standing at the papal court. In addition, he urged the pope to reach his verdict quickly so that his obedient son would not be forced to look for other means to protect the interests of the papacy and of the university.249
7.3. Daughter of Rome—again. Academics and the Holy Father, 1616–22 Nonetheless, an agreement was reached, not after two years, as the nuncio had warned the delegates of the States when lecturing them about the pope being “signore di tutte le cose,” but within a few months. To an extent, the academics had managed to impose their view on things, although they had to abandon definitively their hopes to retain the privileges as they were. The wrangling over legal concepts and instruments provides the historian with an opportunity to open a Pandora’s box of concerns that help us understand why academics preferred grand confirmations of their privileges over technical solutions such as the one that had been proposed by Lombard back in 1610–11. In the process, the performative quality of legal discourse will help to dissolve the boundaries among theatre, society, and the law. Interestingly, the bull Regimini itself is a hybrid of two repertoires: one of equity and one of grace. Academics got more than what they had initially asked for (and as a consequence had to lobby for two more years in order to have their new bull ratified in the South Netherlands, the placet being granted only in 1619). This happened in tandem with the unravelling of the format of conflict that had persisted until the Autumn of 1616. Roman attitudes towards the university as well as towards Robaulx himself had changed. In the 1617 instructions to Lucio Morra, the successor to Gesualdo, the university’s “solita pietà e riverenza” towards the Apostolic See was lauded.250 The academics were satisfied too, as
249 “Quod sane (cum haec ad publicum fidei christianae auctoritatis S Sedis Apostolice bonum toties scripsere esse necessaria) non aliud esse videtur quam de fide zeloque nostro dubitari quapropter rursus etiam voluimus apud S Sanctitatem profiteri, nihil nobis magis in votis esse, quam ea ubique semper intacta conservare, . . . usque eo ut si hoc persuadere nequiverimus, censeamus nos esse obligatos ad conandum adiutore deo de alia via remedium adhibere iustitiamque administrare.” The archduke to Paul V, Négociations de Rome, no date, AGR, Audience, 450, 189r. 250 Instrituttione per Monsignor Morra (. . .), 27 June 1617, ed. Cauchie and Maere, Recueil des instructions générales, 59–74.
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is revealed by their delegations to the nuncio in order to express their gratitude and by their attitude in the 1617 conflict. The Brabant University had become Rome’s daughter again. 7.3.1. “Il falloijt que lung et laultre quicta quelque chose du sien.” Drafting a new language of negotiation in the clerical job market Plans for a new privilege had already been floated from the middle of 1613 onwards, when Lancelotti had suggested that a confirmation of the privileges in their present form was unlikely. Although academics balked at introducing novelties that might have stirred renewed contestation in the Habsburg Netherlands,251 they had grudgingly agreed to negotiate new legal formats for their claims to Liège benefices in 1613–14. The 1615–16 conflict with the papacy, however, had been devised along familiar lines that could keep allies safely locked in the Louvain coalition. The desiderata in the letter of supplication submitted by Robaulx to the pontiff in 1616252 were, therefore, still moulded by the terminology furnished by the nomination bulls. These could be fallen back upon if the negotiations in Rome failed, a possibility pondered by Maes as late as September 1616.253 The anamnesis of the Roman Question in the 1616 supplication steered clear of involving curial reform in the 1580s in the analysis of its causes. Instead, it focused on the more obliging narrative of the temporary downfall of the university, which had been triggered by its unremitting loyalty to the Faith but which had nonetheless lured malign spirits into infringing upon its notorious papal privileges.254
251 Memorandum of the university, Négociations de Rome, 20 September 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 235r–v. 252 Copy of the supplication in BAV, Barberini Latini, 2852, 117–22. 253 “Ou bien de demourer es premieres termes des privileges et faire effectuer les nominations, que par les facultez se feront en vertu diceulx, soijt par sequestration des biens des ecclesiasticques de Liege, en cas ilz ij font aulcun obstacle, comme du passe, ou bien par telle aultre meilleure voije, que vostredicte alteze par sa prudence accoustumee jugera convenir, daventure sa sainctete voijant ceste resolution, comprehendera nous raisons mieulx de ce quil na voulu faire jusques oires.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 24 September 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 202r. 254 “Beatissime pater, inter cetera filiae vestre Lovaniensis universitatis privilegia potissima sunt, unum nominationum, alterum tractus ad instantiam imperatorum, regum, ducum ob necessitatem publicam a diversis summis pontificibus, sub fortissimis, et irrevocabilibus clausulis perpetuis futuribus temporibus concessa, aucta et confirmata satis ut creditur notoria.” Supplication of the Faculty of Arts (?), first half of 1616, BAV, Barberini Latini, 2852, 117–22.
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After having stressed the reverence of the university towards the Holy See (including during the Jacobens affair), academics went on to articulate a twofold request. First, the (all too modest) privileges of the university and the faculty, notably the ius tractus, had to be confirmed with explicit derogation to the claims of curialists.255 No reference was made to Eximiae or other constitutions, nor did these texts figure among the copies of academic privileges granted by former occupants of Peter’s chair that had to support the claims in the letter of supplication. Second, the Louvain petitioners pointed to the apostolic authority of the visitators who had purified them from abuse back in 1615, which official act they did not neglect to attach to their supplication as well. Abuse had loomed large in 1615–16 and risked spreading, during the confrontation with the papal prince, to Habsburg Belgium. In this context, academics called for a papal declaration that they did not abuse their privileges when nominating for canonships at Lille or Cambrai.256 This program informed the Roman agenda until September 1616, when Maes sent drafts of the clauses to be inserted in papal briefs in order to neutralise summons from the uditore del papa.257 This “small program” was now to be integrated into a comprehensive reform of the privileges that the Louvainists had dubbed “the pope’s proposal.” This departed from the legal notions embodied in the faculties granted to the uditore del papa and in the Rota Decision against Danielis; not surprisingly, it aimed to address the jurisdictional problems in the first place.258 According to the Roman Secretariat of State, the pontiff had made an offer the academics could not refuse.259 In his letter of 23 July,
255 “Maxime sane cum Sanctitas Vestra maximas quotidie gratias, et indulta auctissima quotidie concedat aliis communitatibus, et principibus forte de sede apostolica non eque meritis, quorum comparatione hoc privilegium nominationis est perexiguum.” Supplication of the Faculty of Arts (?), first half of 1616, BAV, Barberini Latini, 2852, 117–22. 256 Cf. p. 540 n. 231. 257 These clauses probably were a variant of the solution suggested in the annotations to the 1616 supplications: “Et in brevibus posset apponi clausulae non tamen a nobis metipsis provisos [= Oranus’ clause] nec per Decanum universitatis Lovaniensis servata forma judicum apostolicorum nominatos.” BAV, Barberini Latini, 2852, 117–22. Cf. p. 264. 258 “Quantum ad vocationem ad curiam adsunt privilegia A.C. et decisio Rotae, et excipiuntur officiales et presentes in curia.” Annotiations to the supplication of the Faculty of Arts (?), first half of 1616, BAV, Barberini Latini, 2852, 117–22. 259 “Potrà dare anco conto [to the Archdukes] di quanto s’era fatto qui da ss cardinali deputati conforme alle relazioni, che le furono mandate, et del temperamento,
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Maes was moderately enthusiastic too: hence, litigation involving papal providees would have to be brought before the nuncio of Cologne, “ce quilz disent sera beaucoup plus commodieux aux Louvanistes, que aux curialistes de Rome, pour estre ledict Couloigne plus voisin a la Flandre.”260 The archducal resident himself had warmed to this solution, provided this tribunal was located in Brussels and presided over by the nuncio of Flanders and two archducal assessors. The academics begged to differ, however, in three texts submitted respectively to the States of Brabant, the Archdukes, and the Privy Council, and (probably) to “their” congregation in Rome. The original memorandum to the States could not be retrieved, but a revised version drafted by the States’ commissioners is preserved in the abbey of Park.261 In this text, it was, understandably, above all the constitutional dimension that made the commissioners reject any settlement passing, in contravention of Eximiae, through the nunciature of Cologne. The investments of the States in their university would also be in vain if academics were forced to abandon continuously their auditories for lawsuits before the nuncio in Brussels. Nor was it a permanent solution, the fate of the nunciature of Flanders after the imminent return of the Burgundian Heritage to the Spanish crown being highly uncertain.262 These and other arguments surfaced also in the Informatio Responsoria submitted by the academics to the prince and his Privy Council.263 Interlarded with references to legal doctrine, it added, first, an important dynastic dimension by positioning the foundation bull Sapientiae Immarcessibilis of 1425, with the cession of jurisdiction by the authorities to the rector, as a concordat between the dukes of Brabant (including princes worthy of imitation such as Charles V
che si era preso, accioche la Sua Altezza conosca le difficultà, che sono nel negotio, et che il temperamento pensato era utile più all’università, che ai curiali.” Borghese to Gesualdo, 20 August 1616, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428. 260 Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 23 July 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 147r–v. 261 Varia de universitate Lovaniensi, no date, A.A.Pa., R.VII., 61, 59r–v. On the composition of this commission, see p. 533. 262 Also in 1616, the States of the respective Provinces took an oath of allegiance to the Spanish crown in the presence of the Archdukes, in order to assure a peaceful transition of power after their death. Cf. Thomas, “Andromeda Unbound,” 6; Esteban Estringa, Madrid y Bruselas, 13. 263 In attachment to the letter from the archduke to Maes of 1 September 1616, in Négociations de Rome, before 1 September and after 23 July 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 185r–188v.
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and Philip II) and the pope. Second, it beefed up the link with common law as the legal basis of the Louvain privileges. This source of law also surfaced in the pleading of the consistorial lawyer Giambattista Spada,264 which addressed a Roman audience and which listed a series of arguments drawn from Tridentine decrees in favour of academic jurisdiction, from the decrees of the Congregation of the Council in the 1570s,265 from inadequate clauses in the faculties granted to the uditore in the 1580s, from legal doctrine on privileges, and from (loopholes in) relevant jurisprudence, notably in the Rota Decisions of Peña and Bianchetti against Clarius and Danielis.266 Common law had stipulated since time immemorial that students and scholars had to be sued before their own judges and could not be summoned away from their schools because of the services they rendered to Public Interest.267 The texts submitted to the Privy Council and to the commissioners of the States added elaborations on this theme that reflected the hierarchical self-understanding of academics and that simultaneously seem to draw on deeply entrenched attitudes towards absenteeism in the realm of Church administration and pastoral care: with or without replacements (e.g., deservitores), the absence of teachers and college presidents would trigger the collapse of discipline, morals, and eventually of academic life in general. On top of that, jurisdictional autonomy also visualised the aristocratic paupertas academica that university men sought to embody towards the outside world. The costs of procedures before other than academic tribunals would discourage scholars from asserting their rights, their opponents being inevitably richer and more powerful than themselves.268
264 Spada hailed from the Lucca Spada’s; not from the famous Roman family, cf. Weber, Genealogien zur Papstgeschichte, 2, 902–905. On the college of 12 advocatus consistoriales, the highest class of lawyers at the curia, read De Lanversin, “Avocat consistorial.” The text, which argued against an alteration of the privileges (of jurisdiction), may have been drafted earlier, for instance in 1612–13; its adressees were, judging by the status of an advocatus consistorialis, cardinals. It may have been directed to the Consistory itself, but there is no evidence that the Consistory of cardinals ever intervened directly in the affair, for reasons that have been discussed before: cf. p. 426 265 Cf. p. 205. 266 Marked Leodiensis Privilegiorum, 1613–1616 (?), in Les démêlés avec l’Evêché de Liège. Documents, procès, mémoires 1613–1660, RAL, OUL, 4693. 267 Cf. Kibre, Scholarly Privileges, 12–13. 268 “Sic ut frequenter eveniet pauperes nominatos defectu sumptuum tali justificationi necessariorum in prosecutione licet iusta deficere.” Informatio Responsoria, in Négociations de Rome, 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 185r–188v.
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Second, common law also assisted the academics as a legitimisation of the specific format of academic jurisdiction, a conservatory of the privileges. Against allegations that the conservator was a university member (and therefore prone to partisanship), academics claimed the abbot of Saint Gertrudis was not. That argument could have largely sufficed. Interestingly, however, in Rome as well as in Brussels, academics went to great lengths to prove that, even if he had been a university member, this could not be held against him: common law dictated that the scholar ruled over the student as a father over his son, in line with the ancient jurisdiction wielded by the pater familias; the commonlaw notion that judges should abstain from ruling in cases involving their kin or clients did not apply to the parental relationship among scholars.269 The legal proceedings of the conservatorial tribunal visualised and enacted the repertoires—the literal translation of “patronus” being, after all, “great father”—academics used to define and order their internal relations, in a hybrid setting of corporatist institutions, college structures, and local ecclesiastical hierarchy. Roman technocrats had completely misunderstood the notion of distance when defining it in geographical terms. Even a tribunal of the nuncio at Louvain would have been closer to Rome: being staffed by Liège curialists, the nunciature was considered a pocket-size curia.270 This calls for qualification. In line with Vande Velde’s assessment in his manual for nominees, many university men brought their cases in possessorio before princely councils in Brussels or elsewhere if they had the choice, thus shunning the academic jurisdiction they craved in the Roman Question.271 This pragmatism notwithstanding—or maybe because of this flexibility—we have seen before that academics considered the normalised, uniform practices described in statutes and privileges a superior mode of reality than the messy, heterogeneous practices of individuals that often failed to make it to their records 269 “Tum etiam quia licet parens in causa filii et quilibet in causa domestici, aut famuli recte suspectus allegetur, doctor aut magister (licet parens habeatur) in causa scholaris sui removeri ut suspectus non potest Rebuff. Privilegio 158° ac multo minori ratione conservator.” Informatio Responsoria, in Négociations de Rome, 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 185r–188v. “6° Hoc idem comprobatur arguendo ab usu patris familias et a maiori ad minus.” Leodiensis privilegiorium, in Les démêlés avec l’Evêché de Liège. Documents, procès, mémoires 1613–1660, RAL, OUL, 4693. 270 “Cum illustrissimus Nuncius et eius predecessores abbreviatoribus leodiensibus, quas ex urbe secum adduxerant usi sint, et etiam nunc modernus utatio.” Informatio Responsoria, in Négociations de Rome, 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 185r–188v. 271 Cf. p. 209.
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anyway. But outside the reach of the judicial apparatus of the Habsburg Netherlands, university men needed a jurisdiction that was “close” to them. It visualised, in a highly formalistic manner, relations between scholars and extranei as much as between scholars themselves, distinctions that, in turn, legitimised the legal practices that generated them. Not only does the line between conflicts respectively over jurisdiction and ritual prerogatives prove to be very thin; the boundaries between legal practice and ritual acts were correspondlingly permeable. However, the performativity of legal practice cannot be reduced to a theatrical dimension. The Louvain privileges contained enough derogatory clauses to neutralise the alleged privileges of curialists, an argument that figured in the three texts. In the Brussels memorandums, it was added that failing that, there was still the notion that privilegiatus contra privilegiatum privilegio suo non utatur: the privileged should not use his privilege against another privileged party, which brought common law into the picture again with the legal principle of actor sequitur forum rei; in this case, the court of the prior possessor of the benefice in question. The sting is in the tail: the tribunal of the apostolic conservator was, as a consequence, always competent because nominees were, by virtue of their papal bulls, always priores possessores.272 Vicinity was not assured by a clientelist logic governing the curia conservatorialis or by legal symbolism; it was devised by legal procedures with tangible effects that staged nominees automatically as defendants. The onus of proof was to reside always with their competitors, a claim that was entrenched in conservatorial procedures. In the projected tribunal presided over by the nuncio, university men would inevitably be deprived of this vantage point. This would not only neutralise the academics’ claim that it was up to their opponents to provide proof that the poor scholar in question did not qualify for and/or the miserly benefice was not affected by the Louvain privileges of nomination—the only format of legal conflict academics were apparently willing to envisage. But also, more specifically, university men would be compelled themselves to engage in the dreaded probatio negativa with
272 Probably because of the executorial powers constituted in them. “Servandaque tunc esset dispositio juris communis, iuxta quam prior in possessione (uti semper sunt nominati) ac reus in suo foro conveniri deberet, vel potius Lovaniensis utpote pluribus titulis et privilegiis munitus, uti posset illis contra curialem paucioribus munitium.” Informatio Responsoria, in Négociations de Rome, 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 185r–188v.
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respect to the observance of the taxa beneficialis and patrimonialis.273 A legitimating principle that mediated academic poverty, the taxa would become an unwieldy criterion of eligibility again. Interestingly, this argument was not made explicit in the Roman pleading, which failed to mention the interlocutory Rota Decision against Chineij of 1589 that had shaken academic poverty to its foundations.274 It is with these arguments in mind that Maes proposed to mount pressure by confiscating Liège property in Brabant again in the event of renewed infringements on the privileges. It was based on these arguments that Archduke Albert had written his angry letter to the pontiff in September 1616 and turned the Roman Question into a test case of his own crédit in the heart of Christendom.275 In the accompanying letter to Maes, references to common law and the privileges of other “famous” universities of Christianity, similar to those in the Louvain Informatio, were invoked in order to define the solution proposed by the committee of cardinals as another attack on the university’s privileges-turned-concordats.276 In July 1616, Maes had written that the pope had declared, with his hand on his heart, that he did not want to curtail the rights of the university but that he was obliged to safeguard the rights of the Holy See, and that parties, in order to reach
273 “Secundo imponi onus gravissimum nominatis, qui cum priores sint in possessione ac proinde deberent essere rei favorabiliorem inter litigantes personam sustinere constituuntur per pretactam oblationem actores, et ad probationem duarum negativarum (quod est difficillimum si non impossibile) astringuntur.” Informatio Responsoria, in Négociations de Rome, 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 185r–188v. Compare, for instance, the sentence in possessorio of the Great Council of Mechlin in 18 June 1625 in favour of Guilielmus Vande Velde over a Cambrai canonship, in which the onus of proof fell on his opponent; Privilegia, pars 2nda tit. iv, 125–53. 274 Cf. p. 149 and 258. 275 “Quod sane (cum haec ad publicum fidei christianae auctoritatis S Sedis Apostolice bonum toties scripsere esse necessaria) non aliud esse videtur quam de fide zeloque nostro dubitari quapropter rursus etiam voluimus apud S Sanctitatem profiteri.” The archduke to Paul V, Négociations de Rome, 1 September 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 189r. 276 “Mesme a linstant de son erection fut par forme de contract areste entre le feu Ducq Jehan de Bourgoigne nostre Aieul et le Pape Martin cincquiesme quijceluij . . . de sa part donneroit tous droicts et privileges, desquelles jouijssent les universitez de Boulogne, Cologne, Paris et aultres speciallement de celuij de traict, dont naijans noz predecesseurs nij nous a leurs imitations faillij daccomplir de leur part ce a quoij ilz sestoijent oblige il nous sembleroit estrange si sa Sainctete de son coste ij vouloit mancquer.” the archduke to Maes, Négociations de Rome, 1 September 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 190r.
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an agreement, had to make compromises.277 Yet, the university was not prepared to give in on its jurisdiction, just as much as the pontiff could not accept the superiority of conservatorial sentences over writs of the uditore del papa. In order to avoid new conflicts and to find a way out of the deadlock, it was that other privilege to which Maes and other negotiators now turned.278 7.3.2. “Con dignità però di questa Santa Sede.” The Bull Regimini Universalis (1 December 1616) Maes and Robaulx had not awaited for the verdict from the South Netherlands before they entered negotiations over another solution. By the end of August 1616, the zealous resident briefed his overlord on the progress made in negotiations over the other concept of concord, which had already surfaced in 1613 and which had been floated by the pontiff himself during the 1615–16 crisis. The concerns that this new concept had to respond to were twofold. On the one hand, it had to maintain the niche that academics claimed in the clerical job market of the Principality of Liège without dismantling the routine alliance between the practice of privilege and the legal apparatus in the Habsburg Netherlands. On the other hand, a new legal format had to be created in which academics and the pontiff could, without saying so, agree not to agree on jurisdiction. This entailed somehow keeping papal providees from provoking new crises of papal primacy; read: from translating their conflicts with academic competitors in the clerical job market into conflicts between academic or secular tribunals and Roman ones. Brussels officials, for their part, did not revel in the prospect of chronically strained relations with the curia resulting from new infringements on the land’s and the university’s privileges.279 Confrontational politics also obliged the archduke and his entourage
277 Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 23 July 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 147r–v. 278 “Icij joinct va le billet de la reforme des brefs apostolicques contre luniversite de Louvain, mais il cesse maintenant veu que nous sommes pour nous accorder sur ung aultre pied.” Maes to Prats, Négociations de Rome, 10 September 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 191v. 279 E.g., “et pour dieu levez la main tant que pourez que lon vienne a quelque appoinctement, aultrement nen viendrons jamais au bout. Son Alteze en serat importune souvent, et vous et moij en aurons les facheries.” Maes to Prats, Négociations de Rome, 31 October 1615, AGR, Audience, 449, 368r.
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to a third party: the prince-bishop of Liège, Ferdinand of Bavaria. The latter’s room for manoeuvre to resist enrolment as the champion of a privileged national Church had boosted the academics’ capacity to mount pressure in Rome, but could not be taken for granted. Much expertise was available, in Rome as well as in the South Netherlands, on how to agree not to agree, notably in the realm of conflicts over rank and ritual. The general instructions to Richardot and Maes, for instance, stipulated that the future resident had to avoid entanglement in the numerous conflicts over precedence among princely ambassadors, residents, and agents.280 This meant keeping away from the rich ceremonies and public festivities of papal Rome that were the ideal locus for picking fights of this type, and it meant avoiding contact with other members of the large diplomatic corps in the Eternal City.281 Philip Maes recurrently aired his frustrations in the field, frustrations that were exacerbated by the fact that he did not carry the title of full ambassador: A la derniere dimanche des carnevaulx passez, le prince Peretti, sestant remarie avecq la fille du ducq de Ceri, a faict faire une tresbelle comedie au palais du Cardinal Montalto son frere, ou furent conviez entre aultres tous ambassadeurs, residens et agens des princes, voires presque toute Rome tant homes, que dames, jeuz un grand desir dij aller aussij, pour estre une chose tresexcellente et rare, voires jamais veue icij, mais craignant navoir lieu ou assite convenable a la grandeur de mes princes,
280
This caution probably was part of the job description of diplomats; cf. Visceglia, La città rituale, 152–57. “Sadicte sainctete a faict ce matin la plus belle cavalcata de toutte lannee a leglise de la minerva, accompaignee de tous les cardinaulx, evesques et serviteurs domesticques, aussij avecques les deux ambassadeurs de France et Savoije [read: in the absence of the Ambassador of the Catholic King], comme de toutte la noblesse de Rome, hormis les ducqs, princes et aultres titulez, desquelz presque personne nest comparue, pour la competence de preceance, a ce que jentend comme pour mesme cause coactus fui et ego latitare, bien que a regard pour le respect de noz princes, lesquelz touttesfois aprez les deux rois despagne et France, ne doibvent ceder a personne.” Maes to Prats, Négociations de Rome, 25 March 1611, AGR, Audience, 446, 73v. 281 “Au surplus pourrez excuser de visiter souvent les ambassadeurs et personnes publicques daultres princes, . . . et fuyerez aultant que pourrez de vous rencontres evecq eulx aux eglises ou n aultres lieux publicques afin deviter les contentions des precedences et choses semblables, mais en ceci nentendons estre comprins les ambassadeurs de lempereur ni despaigne, lesquels vous honnorerez et traicteres avecq eulx differamment quavecq les aultres.” Instruction pour vous nostre chier et feal Conseillier . . . Messire Jehan Richardot, in Négociations de Rome, 15 June 1600, AGR, Audience, 438, 131r–134v. A similar clause in the instructions to Maes, Négociations de Rome, 25 September 1610, AGR, Audience, 445, 194r–198r.
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A pontiff who had to keep papal providees and their competitors from enacting renewed crises of papal primacy but who claimed that no indult whatsoever could prejudice the rights of the Apostolic See— and academics insisting that their apostolic tribunal nonetheless had to gain the upper hand against Roman writs by virtue of common law and papal privilege—faced very similar problems, the boundaries between theatrical or ceremonial acts and legal practices being highly permeable. As a consequence, they turned to solutions that bear some resemblance to the tricks grudgingly applied by Maes. These entailed, above all, making sure that academics, curialists, and their respective tribunals remained absent from each others’ sphere of action. This implied, of course, creating separate legal theatres in the first place. The Narratio of the bull is particularly interesting. In contrast to the previously granted papal privileges, it hardly alluded to the academic role in society and its link with poverty, merit, and heresy. Rather, the pope limited himself to the assessment that discord among clerics— the Vicar of Christ himself stood above the fold—had called for his intervention; Regimini honoured the claims to merit (and benefices) of curialists and academics alike. The cause of the conflicts between curialists and academics, and the scandals resulting from them, were enumerated without further comment; a discourse that probably not only had to legitimise the pope’s legislative measure but also, probably, had to rein in future conflicts on similar lines. No reference was made to the rights of the Holy See, which, after all, were beyond discussion. This narration provided a context that legitimised the decisions taken “motu proprio et ex certa scientia,” which were bound to follow.283 In the archducal Netherlands, the regime of academic nominations was not altered, in line with the desiderata of the academics themselves. In 1613, they had preferred the overall suppression of their privileges in the Patria Leodiensis to the introduction of novelties in the Habsburg Netherlands that would only re-ignite the opposition
282 Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 25 February 1614, AGR, Audience, 449, 48v; Cf. “ce que voyans si bien cardinaulx, que aultres prinicpauls, esbahissent fort ne me veoir honore de ce tiltre, que feroit cesser tous desbats.” Maes to Prats, Négociations de Rome, 14 February 1615, ibidem, 184v. 283 Privilegia, 154–68.
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that had been vented at the beginning of the 16th century.284 In the realm of the prince, academic privileges were, as Frangipani had put it, “manifesti in uso,” bolstered as they were by more than a century of favourable jurisprudence and corroborative legislation. The faculty’s nomination rights to benefices in the Principality of Liège (including the county of Loon, the duchy of Bouillon, and the abbatial principalities of Stavelot and Malmédy), in contrast, were suppressed with the consent of the Arts faculty, which was to be compensated by a new privilege. Novelties were avoided when articulating the beneficiaries of the new privilege. The usufruct of the new privilege was limited to magistri artium residing in the university, in line with the requirements of the Leonine Bull of 1513. The bull resumed the categories of seniores and juniores too, as well as the other lines in the Leonina which were, again, read as a system of precedence in the event of competition for the same benefice.285 The taxa patrimonialis was abolished as far as the wielding of the new privilege was concerned. However, “poverty,” that faithful ally of scholars seeking benefices, seems to have had its rights: the taxa was reintroduced in the faculty legislation ratified in October 1617.286 The innovations concerned above all the benefices that could be claimed. In the Patria Leodiensis, the new regime consisted in the assignment to the faculty of two (apostolic) months (January and November) in the uneven and one month (November) in the even years in which the faculty would be allowed to confer all benefices.
284 “Quod potius amitterent ius nominandi in terris temporalis domini episcopi Leodiensis quam quod fieret aliqua generalis alteratio cuius ratio fuit quod magnas in initio concessionis privilegii sustinuerant difficultates ab ordinariis collatores qui se opponebant et proinde in quacunque innovatione verisimiliter novas oppositiones metuebant, siquidem in dictis provinciis acceptant beneficia quocunque mense ea vacare contigerit.” Négociations de Rome, before 20 September 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 235r–v. 285 “Si plures pro obtinenda alicuius beneficii collatione concurrunt, servabitur inter concurrentes ordo in nominationibus servari consuetus, quia ille ordo generaliter etiam in nominationibus ad beneficia patria Leodiensis, ante servabatur, et nova bulla iisdem prorsus verbis prerogativam et ordinam continentibus concepta est [article 2].” Ordinationes pro usu privilegii conferendi beneficia in patria vel diocesi Leodiensi (. . .), ratified in Acta Facultatis Artium, 27 October 1617, RAL, OUL, 715, 97r. 286 “Petens collationem (. . .) tenebitur prestare juramenta, que a nominandis exigi solent, mutata tamen forma octoginta ducatorum auri de Camera, ad formam 130 ducatorum, conformiter ad augmentum taxe noviter obtentum [article 1].” Ordinationes (. . .), in Acta Facultatis Artium, 27 October 1617, RAL, OUL, 715, 97r.
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This awkward alternation of even and uneven years was the result of a compromise. In 1613, the academics had suggested to demand three months, in order to obtain two. By the end of 1615, the pontiff had, at the nadir of the Jacobens crisis, promised one month. Maes seemed not to have met considerable difficulties in obtaining two more weeks,287 but an extension up to two entire months on a yearly basis would prove to be impossible. The “vogue perpetuele en Flandre” promised by Maes had failed to convince the pope to run counter to his curia.288 All benefices becoming vacant per obitum during these months, and coming under the alternativa by virtue of the Concordat of Vienna (1448), would henceforward be held in gift by the committee of the dean, the proctors, and the receptor,289 except for elective dignities and consistorial benefices, regular benefices, benefices that fell under other papal reservations in the Corpus Iuris Canonicum, the first prebend of the cathedral chapter and the first dignities of the collegiate churches, and, last but not least, the benefices that came under the indults granted to Ferdinand of Bavaria.290 In contrast, the primariae preces and the indults obtained by Ferdinand’s successors,291 and by the present and future nuncios of Cologne, could not interfere with the faculty’s provisions. In tandem with the taxa patrimonialis, the taxa beneficialis was suppressed. Faculty legislation of October 1617
287 “Hier avons de rechief ici eu une nouvelle congregation pour les affaires de luniversite de Louvain, ou ces ss.rs cardinaulx sont venuz si avant, que de nous presenter ung moijs et demij, en lieu des deux par nous demandez, jespere nous ij parviendrons encoires.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 27 August 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 179r. 288 “Puis ceste grace depend seul et unicquement de la voulunte du pape.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 24 September 1616, AGR, Audience, 450, 202r. 289 This explicit stipulation in Regimini Universalis was not really a restriction compared to the old regime of the nominations, because in practice, only benefices vacant per obitum were obtained via nominations. Cf. p. 195. 290 This indult granted the prince-bishop the right to confer benefices at his advowson also in the apostolic months. The content of these indults did not change from 1566 onwards. See the edition of the indult granted to Gerard of Groesbeeck in 1566, Dessart, “Les indults accordés aux évêques de Liège,” 110–13. 291 This stipulation reflects the desiderata of the academics as well: “De futuris episcopis non est periculum prejudicii quia non fuit consultum dari simile indultum episcopis Leodiensibus quando erant nudi episcopi Leodienses, sed dumtaxat quando fuerint electores aut cardinales super quibus omnibus audiretur agens predicti electoris Coloniensis.” Négociations de Rome, before 20 September 1613, AGR, Audience, 448, 235r–v.
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regulating the wielding of the new privilege292 also assimilated the 1615 “expurgatory” statutes. Three ordines of benefices were established;293 vacancies of the first ordo had to be published (ad valvas Sancti Petri); and candidates for benefices classified in the two first ordines were supposed to abandon corresponding nominations in Habsburg lands.294 The reader may have gathered from the previous paragraphs that nominations to benefice pools after the model of the gratiae expectativae were replaced, in Regimini, by provisions, “collations” according to faculty records, of vacant benefices. In practice, however, faculty legislation reintroduced the expectativae for smaller benefices via the back door. A number of benefices were pooled on typological and regional lines in districtus; benefice pools that were assigned beforehand, via the so-called admissiones, to maximum three candidates respectively.295 Thus the faculty sought to institutionalise its channels of intelligence in the clerical job market in the Principality of Liège, holders of these
292 This legislation immediately preceded the beginning of the second month, November, assigned to the faculty in the year 1617. In January, the bulls had not yet arrived in Louvain. Cf. the request of Mantels for the collation of a canonship in Tongeren, which was assigned to him but whose formal procedures were postponed, Acta Facultatis Artium, 5 January 1617, RAL, OUL, 715, 72v. 293 “Reducantur omnia beneficia patrie et diocesis Leodiensis, ad tres beneficiorum ordines, in Patria archiducum constitutos: Ad primum ordinem prebende Thorenses et Aquenses [the noble chapter in Thorn and the chapter of Our Lady’s in Aachen], ad 2um prebende S. Alberti Aquisgrani, et si que sunt similes, ac pastoratus pingiores, reliqua ad 3um ordinem: obtentaque collatione alicuius beneficii, servetur id quod iuxta novissimas nominationum ordinationes servari debet. [Article 3].” Ordinationes (. . .), in Acta Facultatis Artium, 27 October 1617, RAL, OUL, 715, 97r. 294 “Cum vacabit beneficium primi ordinis fiat eius publicatio, et nulli tale vel etiam 2i ordinis conferri poterit, nisi prius deserat nominationem si quam habet ad beneficia primi vel secundi ordinis pendentem [Article 4].” Ordinationes (. . .), in Acta Facultatis Artium, 27 October 1617, RAL, OUL, 715, 97r. The frequency with which one could apply for a provision in the Principality of Liège in the interval of one year (i.e., once), as well as over several years (i.e., twice or thrice), was limited as well. [Article 5] in Ordinationes (. . .), in Acta Facultatis Artium, 27 October 1617, RAL, OUL, 715, 97r. 295 “Ne autem per ignorationem vacationum multa collationes facultati pereant, poterunt simplicia beneficia distribui in certos districtus, et ad quemque districtum presentetur aliquis magister artium per deputatos ordinarios facultatis decano, cui magistro sic presentato, vigore istius presentationis veluti ad modum nominationis teneatur, predictus facultatis decanus conferre beneficium, si quod in districtu ad quem presentatus fuerit, vacare contingat. [Article 6]” Ordinationes (. . .), in Acta Facultatis Artium, 27 October 1617, RAL, OUL, 715, 97r. 215 of these addictiones, classified under their respective districtus, were registered in between 1617 and 1640 in the Liber (. . .) complectens admissiones ad usum Privilegii in districtibus Patriae Leodiensis, RAL, OUL, 4786.
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admissiones being obliged to report on the vacancies in the districts “assigned” to them. The faculty was now, “just as much as the other (sic!) ordinary collators of the Prince-Bishopric,” in control of the whole procedure up to the missio in possessionem.296 It had become (something of ) an ordinary collator itself; and the control over the missio in possessionem allowed (as did the executorial powers in the Leonine bull ) its protégés, when needed, to claim that students and scholars did not have to justify their rights and that the burden of proof rested with their opponents. It was these far-reaching clauses which triggered the first contestation in 1617, with the faculty refusing to remove them from its collation letters.297 Another measure raising its profile as a fullblown ordinary collator was the installation of an examination board manned by theologians of the faculty.298 Seen from the perspective of the self-declared pastoral experts at Louvain, this new board met, via the organisation of a concursus, the requirement in Regimini that candidates for benefices with care of souls had to be examined by the ordinarius.299 Within this procedure, traditional ranking orders had to clear the field for another, “pastoral” ranking order of ability. The entries in the Per Obitum register illustrate that the assignment of one and two apostolic months to the faculty did not inhibit papal providees from seizing benefices that had become vacant during these months. If separated spheres of action were created, it was in the
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“Idem decanus, vel vicedecanus Facultatis Artium habeat plenum jus et facultatem conferendi ac immittendi suos, ut prefertur, provisos in possessionem predictorum beneficiorum, prout ceteri collatores ordinarii ejusdem Patriae Leodiensis, et in predictis beneficiis, et vacationibus tantum gaudeat concordatis (. . .), aliisque juribus, quibus gaudent ceteri collatores ejusdem patriae Leodiensis.” Privilegia, 169. 297 Acta Facultatis Artium, 12 December 1617, RAL, OUL, 715, 108. Cf. the assembly of the secondary clergy of Liège to the Faculty of Arts, with respect to its advowson of an altar in the collegiate church of Sainte-Croix at Liège in favour of the licentiate in Divinity Franciscus Piroulle, 26 November 1617, Les démêlés avec l’Evêché de Liège. Documents, procès, mémoires 1613–1660, RAL, OUL, 4693. 298 In 1617, the doctors Guilielmus Ab Angelis and Cornelius Jansenius, as well as the licenciates Carolus de Keersmaekere and Martinus Leunkens, were appointed. “Pretermissis ordinationibus anterioribus ut ea dignissimis conferri possint, deputentur (. . .) impari numero theologi, ex corpore facultatis, qui vacante tali beneficio concursum instituant, et (. . .) et attenta doctrina, gradu, vita, moribus, patria ceterisque qualitatibus officio pastorali convenientibus (. . .) declarent magis idoneum, cui de vacante cura provideri possit (. . .) [Article 9].” Jansenius and Ab Angelis remained members of the examination board until 1621. Ordinationes (. . .), ratified in Acta Facultatis Artium, 27 October 1617, RAL, OUL, 715, 97r. 299 Privilegia, 174.
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thorny field of jurisdiction. Hence, the date of the vacancy became the criterion used to evaluated which tribunal was exclusively competent. For conflicts over benefices that came under Regimini, the active and passive privilegium tractus was confirmed, with explicit derogation to the briefs issued by the auditor of the Apostolic Chamber. In return, academics forfeited their jurisdiction loco parentium when obtaining, via other ways, benefices that had become vacant in the other apostolic months. There, the primacy of Roman tribunals had to be observed meticulously, and academic privileges were powerless against Roman summons. The curia conservatorialis could continue to wield its jurisdiction over “ordinary” benefices, provided these had not been affected by an apostolic reservation.300 After having eradicated the roots of discord by assigning a separate locus of action to Roman and academic tribunals, Regimini abruptly adopted a discourse of grace.301 The Gregorian taxa beneficialis and patrimonialis of 1573 were considerably raised for benefices in the Habsburg Netherlands, respectively, from 60 to 100 and from 80 to 130 ducatus de Camera. This measure probably did not enlarge the benefice pool academics claimed was theirs, for reasons that have been discussed before and that would be sanctioned, albeit on different grounds, by the sentence of the Great Council of Mechlin in favour of Vande Velde in 1625.302 Yet, the new taxa had to shield them from abuse, a beast that had reared its head again in the 1615–16 conflict, while retaining the connotation of the taxa with academic poverty. Maes considered this act of grace a compensation for the two extra weeks that curialists balked at granting to their competitors.303 Papal
300 “Etiam quod actu literarum et theologiae studio, vel lecturae, seu magisterio, vel cuicumque alteri officio incumbant, neque iidem . . . ex eisdem provisis apostolicis ad judicium coram iisdem conservatoribus dictae universitatis trahere, nec quo minus mandata de emittendo, et alia quaecumque, etiam executiva, per executores et judices apostolicos decernenda et relaxanda, executioni demandentur, quoquo modo impedire, nec conservator, vel conservatores universitatis hujusmodi, possint in eis aliquo modo nec cognoscendo, nec impediendo se ingerere.” Privilegia, 170–73. 301 “Nos ut artium facultatem, ac etiam universitatem amplioris gratiae favore prosequamur.” Privilegia, 173. 302 Cf. p. 98 and 551 n. 273. 303 “Hoc tamen aliunde compensatum est . . . cum augmento taxe personarum seniorum nominabilium a dicta facultate usque ad centum et triginta ducatos auri de camera, item beneficiorum acceptabilium ad octoginta facta solum (ad difficultates in perpetuum abscindendas).” Maes to the university, 3 December 1616, Acta Universitatis, 18 January 1617, RAL, OUL, 64, 2r–v. Other instructions in the university to Robaulx, 20 January 1617, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 174v–175r.
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favour was also displayed by another gesture. In March 1617, while Robaulx was preparing his return, he obtained a brief imploring the prince-bishop of Liège to provide three faculty members with canonships in the cathedral or three collegiate churches in the city of Liège.304 When Robaulx had triumphantly returned in May 1617 and briefed the congregation of the Arts faculty on his activities, it generously granted the deserving envoy the right to dispose freely over the three canonships. One month later, the brief could be forwarded to the prince-bishop accompanied by a letter carrying the names of Robaulx, Mantels, and the son of Fannius, the loyal city pensionary who had accompanied Robaulx in many delegations.305 Meanwhile, letters from the cardinal-protector Scipione Borghese and from the pope were reverently read; letters of gratitude were dispatched to the pope, to Millino, and to the datario; and two rents of 50 florins yearly were sold in order to foot for the bill for the new bull. The States of Brabant sent another delegation to the nuncio to thank His Holiness for his generosity.306 Maes raised his own profile as an able negotiator by pointing to the gratitude that academics and the States owed the prince now that, “after more than fifty years,” the problems had ceased.307 In response to Maes’ triumphant letter, the Brussels Secretariat of State wrote that the news had been “fort agreables” and then went back to business as usual: “de ceulx que par vostre lettre du 22e du passe nous escrivez avoir fait pour luniversite de Douaij lesquels vous enchargions de continuer jusques a ce que Sa Sainctete ij ait pris quelque bonne resolution.” After 28 years, the Roman Question had ceased to exist. There is more. Sometime between August 1616 and March 1617, Robaulx underwent a strange metamorphosis. After having been
304 Ed. Dessart, “Les indults accordés aux évêques de Liège,” 118. “Ad sarciendum preiudicium, quod alioquin per cursum indulti vita eius et prelatura durante antedicte facultati crearetur.” Maes to the university, 3 December 1616, Acta Universitatis, 18 January 1617, RAL, OUL, 64, 25r–v. 305 Acta Facultatis Artium, 15 May 1617 and 26 June 1617, RAL, OUL, 715, 84v–85r and 89v. 306 Cf. Liber dictatoris, 1616, RAL, OUL, 103, 171r–173r. Gesualdo to Borghese, 10 June 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 113, 180r. 307 “Mesmes du vivant de feu leur majestez lempereur Charles 5e et du Roij Catholicque (. . .) pendant lequel temps sont este une infinite de proces, facheries et difficultez entre les denomez par ladicte universite en vertu de leurdicts previleges et les pourveus du Sainct Siege.” Maes to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 14 March 1617, AGR, Audience, 451, 43r.
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dubbed a “huomo seditioso,” he returned to the Netherlands with a papal bull that contained some significant bonuses, with a brief, and with the honorary title of “apostolic protonotary.”308 Academics lauded him for having turned the pontiff ’s wrath into paternal benignity.309 In a brief from Paul V to Archduke Albert on the satisfying outcome of the negotiations in Rome, Robaulx was not only lauded for his intervention; the pope also recommended the canon as worthy of an appointment to an ecclesiastical dignity.310 The Secretariat of State urged the nuncio in Brussels to assist Robaulx in all his endeavours and to recommend him to the Archdukes for higher ecclesiastical office.311 During the next few years, Robaulx, who now resided on his Cambrai canonship, would indeed surface regularly in the dispatches of the Flemish nunciature. His activities merit our attention here, because they immediately involved the Daughter of Rome and her crown jewels. 7.3.3. Corpus πολυκεϕαλον.312 Benefices, corporate authority and theology in the De Dominis Affair, 1616–22 The filial relationship of the university with the Holy See was restored in the general instructions of June 1617 to the new nuncio of Flanders, Morra. An apostate, whose foul writings against the papacy called for a solemn condemnation by a body of pious and learned men, had opened a window of opportunity in the Autumn of 1616 for both the
308 Attested as such in Acta Facultatis Artium, 26 June 1617, RAL, OUL, 715, 89v. On the protonotarii apostolici, see Rabikauskas, “Protonotaire.” 309 The university to Robaulx, 20 January 1617, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 174v–175r. 310 Brief from Paul V to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 16 March 1617, AGR, Audience, 451, 55r. 311 “Si portò cosi bene il Signor Carlo robaulx quando fu qui per il negotio dell’università di Lovanio, che merita di recever gratia da Sua Altezza, con la quale vuole pero Nostro Signore che VS passi caldo officio a favor suo, et con altri, con chi sarà di bisogno, accioche succedendo la vacanza di qual che prepositura, come di Mastrich, di Lilla, o di altra di sua nominatione, cada la nomina sopra esso Robaulx.” Borghese to Gesualdo, 24 June 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 327r. “Et favorirà anco il medesimo Robaus nelle sue occorenze, essendosi egli portato bene nel suo negotiato qui per servitio dell’Università.” Instrituttione per Monsignor Morra (. . .), 27 June 1617, ed. Cauchie and Maere, Recueil des instructions générales, 59–74. 312 “Est igitur ecclesia illius [= De Dominis] corpus polukefalon id est ad instar monstri multorum capitum.” De Lovanio contro il Dominis, s.a. , ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 68, 435r–437v.
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Supreme Pontiff and the academics to return to business as usual. The name of Marcantonio De Dominis (1560–1624), a former Jesuit and archbishop of Split in Venice-ruled Dalmatia, may ring few bells among a modern audience but echoed loud and clear in the chancelleries of Europe between 1616, when De Dominis apostasised from the Apostolic Church, and 1624, when he died a captive of the Roman Inquisition in the Castel Sant’Angelo. De Dominis is a man for all seasons: a scientist admired by Kepler, Galileo, and Grotius; the last exponent of the Italian Reformation for historians of the early Novecento; a Serbo-Croat hero standing up against Venice and the papacy; a quasiutopian theorist of the relation between spiritual and civil power in more recent historiography.313 His relations with Rome had already been bruised in 1606–07, when the archbishop sided with the Serenissima in the “guerra degli scritti” conducted by Paolo Sarpi and others against Rome in the affair of the Venetian Interdict. In 1616, fearing summons from the Holy Office, he headed North, crossed the English Channel as many other Italian exiles had done before him, and was welcomed by the king-controversialist James I.314 In London, he would commit Sarpi’s Istoria del Concilio Tridentino to his Majesty’s printing presses in 1619,315 a book that would prove an inexhaustible source of inspiration for contemporary pundits and modern historians alike taking a dim view on the reform zeal of the “baroque papacy.”316 De Dominis’ own prolific writings in his Anglican years were proportionally unforgiving towards the papal see. As he made his way north, his anti-Roman publications succeeded each other rapidly and were a source of constant annoyance at the curia.317 While Sarpi’s manuscript
313 A short review of the historiography on De Dominis in Belligni, Auctoritas e Potestas, 15–16. 314 “Il est venue en Hollande vers les Estats. Mais n’y ayant pas trouvé tout le recueil qu’il attendoit, il s’est jetté entre les bras du Roy d’Angleterre, qui le caresse fort.” Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, 20 July 1617, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 16. 315 The work had been written in between 1612 and 1616. Pietro Soave Polano [Paolo Sarpi], Istoria del Concilio Tridentino. Nella quale si scoprono tutti gli artificii della Corte di Roma per impedire che ne la verità di dogmi si palesasse ne la riforma del papato e della Chiesa si tratasse. Marcantonio de Dominis (ed.), London: John Bill, 1619. Many translations ensued and would end up on the Index of Prohibited Books; cf. Boute, Cristellon, and Dinkels, Systematisches Repertorium. 316 Cf. Congr. Feria V Coram Sanctissimo, 12 February 1620, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1619–20, 202r. 317 Martínez de Bujanda, Index Librorum Prohibitorum, 272–73 lists the London reprints of De Dominis, Marcus Antonius: Papatus Romanus. Liber de origine, progressu, atque extinctione ipsius, London: John Bill, 1917; and idem, Scogli del christiano
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was secretly carried north, De Dominis’ writings were smuggled back into Italy. His movements were closely monitored by the Holy Office via the nunciatures of Cologne, Paris, and Flanders or via Don Diego de Sarmiento, the ambassador of the Catholic king to the English Crown.318 The first booklet that the Holy Office could lay its hands on was the best-selling, utopian Manifesto that De Dominis had written in defence of his defection. It was prohibited with extraordinary speed by a decree of the Index Congregation of 11 November 1616.319 This decree also condemned a work announced in the Consilium: De Re Publica Ecclesiastica, a blend of anti-Roman, episcopalist, and absolutist thought in ten books (to be distributed over four volumes), based on the Scriptures, the Fathers, and the Councils.320 It is this work that figured in the 1617 instructions to nuncio Morra and that the University of Louvain allegedly had offered, via its spokesman Robaulx, to refute as soon as Roman intelligence had managed to track down copies. Before being committed to the printing presses in Belgium, the Louvain writings had to be revised by the Holy Office.321 Only a few months after the nuncio had discretely furnished the
naufragio, quali va scoprendo la Santa Chiesa di Christo, alli suoi diletti figliuoli, perché da quelli possano allontanarsi, [London: John Bill?], 1618. The original editions were printed in Heidelberg. 318 Many references to De Dominis in ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1617–22; e.g., Gesualdo to Borghese, 26 November 1616, regest in Van Meerbeeck, Correspondance des nonces Gesualdo, Morra, Sanseverino, 95. 319 Marcus Antonius De Dominis Suae Profectionis Consilium exponit, Venice 1616. The booklet was reprinted during his stay in Heidelberg; many translations in Italian, English, and Dutch ensued. Cf. Congr. 11 November 1616 (cardinals Bellarmino, Barberini, Millino, Verallo, Aracoeli, Lancelotti, Asculano, and Belmosto), ACDF, Index, Diarii, 2, 99r, with reference to previous examinations by the consultors of the Holy Office. 320 The work has been dubbed “un melange fort intéressant d’Anglicanisme et de Gallicanisme.” See De La Servière, “Dominis (Marc-Antoine de),” 1670; see also Prodi, Il sovrano pontefice, 69. 321 “L’università di Lovanio per la sua solita pietà et osservanza verso questa Santa Sede et per mostrarsi grata et riverente a Nostro Signore, ha risoluto di voler rispondere a questi empii libri del Dominis, si come disse il canonico Robauls, che fu qui per negotii di essa Università, co’l quale fu restato che mandasse qui di mano in mano i quinternetti delle risposte secondo si andassero stampando, acciò che, revisti quà, si mandassero in dietro, per darli poi alla stampa, con quei ricordi che fossero qui parsi opportuni (. . .) et tenghi con lui [= Robaulx] buona corrispondenza in ricevere, mandar qui i quinternetti che le saranno consignati, (. . .) Et desiderando l’Università che ciò non si scuopra sin che l’opera non sarà finita, V. Signoria non ne parlerà con altri (. . .).” Instrituttione per Monsignor Morra (. . .), 27 June 1617, ed. Cauchie and Maere, Recueil des instructions générales, 59–74.
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academics with the first volume,322 Robaulx could report to Morra that the refutation of the first book had been completed, but that they had received orders from their contact man in Rome—Maraldi—to finish the job before submitting it.323 From the Autumn of 1618 onwards, parts of the Louvain refutation of De Dominis were dispatched to Rome. There, they were carefully revised by Cardinal Bellarmino324 and by the Blackfriar Desiderio Scaglia.325 By the time De Dominis signalled his willingness to return to the folds of the Mother Church and to recant his errors, however, the grand refutation of his works by the Louvain doctors still had not been completed. When De Dominis returned to Rome in 1622, the Sacra Facultas decided to suspend the proceedings against his books until further notice.326 They would never resume. It is tempting to consider this non-event just another episode of the university’s reportedly “episcopalist” and “Bajanist” stance.327 In this view, a Theology faculty that nurtured a moderate conciliarism had reluctantly accepted the job of refuting De Dominis but then was secretly relieved when the maverick archbishop repented and revoked his errors himself.328 The conciliarist dimension of the De Dominis 322 Morra to Borghese, 21 October 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 113, 283r; Robaulx’ report in Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 23 October 1617, RAL, OUL, 387, 83; the faculty to Morra, 23 October 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 113, 297r; Morra to the university, 28 October 1617, UAL, Ghent (1927), 43. 323 “Et incaricatogli di nuovo la prestezza, e la segretezza, me ha detto, che egli ha havute lettere da Monsignor Datario costi, nelle quali da parte di N. Signore si commanda, che non si mandi a Roma la detta risposta sintanto che non sia del tutto fornita.” Morra to Borghese, 17 February 1618, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 112, 113r–v. 324 E.g., Congr. 6 March Feria V Coram Sanctissimo and 18 September 1619, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1619–20, 33r and 127v. 325 Scaglia (1567–1639) was made cardinal in January 1621, after having served for many years as commissarius (or highest official) of the Holy Office. Cf. the manuscripts and corrections in De Repubblica Ecclesiastica di Marco Antonio De Dominis, Arcivescovo di Spalato, e scritti che lo criticano (Inghilterra, Olanda, Belgio, Italia), 1624; ACDF, SO, St.St., E 6–b. Regular dispatches in Morra to Borghese, 8 September and 13 October 1618, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 104, 33r and 119r; Borghese to Morra, 2 March 1619, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 137r; Borghese to Sanseverino, 31 August, 14 and 31 October 1619, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 403, 31r–v, 46r, and 80r; Sanseverino to Borghese, 16 January 1621, BAV, Barberini Latini, 6810, 17r and 84r; Sanseverino to Ludovisi, 20 April 1621, ibidem, 84r. 326 Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 7 May 1622, RAL, OUL, 387, 163. 327 “Un cattolicesimo che a posteriori potrà essere classificata come “settentrionale,” antiscolastico e lontano dalle inflessioni normative della pietà Latina.” Motta, Bellarmino, 303; on Episcopalism, see esp. ibidem, 305. 328 Quaghebeur, “In luce et theatro totius orbis.” On the “moderate conciliarism” imputed to the Louvain divines, read ibidem, 449 and 456; Roegiers, “Leuven en
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affair gained substance in 1618–19. The Synod of Dordrecht, a heretic conciliabulum that brought into the open the discord within the heretic camp, nonetheless posed a formidable challenge to papal authority over ecumenical councils.329 Apart from the nuncio’s outrage at the university’s position in the visitation saga,330 or ambiguous allusions in a letter from Cornelius Jansenius to Saint-Cyran,331 the evidence does not support this view, however. It is blurred by later developments in the history of the Louvain Theology faculty; and it is informed by the grudge against all things Roman held by many Catholic historians who, since Vatican II, report with glee any episode that remotely might expose the problematic nature of papal claims. In the period under investigation, academics could not be accused of a principled stance on conciliarism (for instance in the De Auxiliis debate) or on episcopalism; instead, they had been seeking to appropriate papal authority for their own purposes.332 That the pontiff would have foisted the refutation of De Dominis on (embarrassed) academics was a matter of (muted) controversy already in 1618–19.333 Successors to Gregory VII did not want to be seen begging for help against the vile attacks of an apostate.334
Rome,” 67–69; compare: “Nulle trace de doctrines conciliaires soutenues à Louvain” (in sharp contrast to Paris in the 15th Century); cf. De Jongh, L’ancienne Faculté de Théologie, 89. 329 Belligni, Auctoritas e Potestas, 200–01; Boute, “Que ceulx de Flandres se disoijent tant catholicques,” 477. 330 “Perche in tutta quella università per la voce publica, e per quello, ch’io ho potuto scorgere, non vi è prudenza, ne zelo alcuno, e pochissime lettere, e passò il tempo che al nome che tenea potevano corrispondere li fatti, donde avvisai (. . .) che Nostro Signore non havrebbe havuta la sodisfattione, che presupponeva nella risposta al Dominis.” Morra to Borghese, 10 February 1618, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 112, 72–72bis. 331 “[On teaching in his college:] J’en ay cependant tiré ce profit, qu’il m’a servi de couverture à me deporter de la charge qu’on m’a vouly imposer à aider à travailler contre Marcum Antonium, ce que j’abhorre entierement.” Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, 5 August 1618, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 40–41. 332 Cf. the Roman orientation of Irish “proto-Jansenists” (e.g., Lombard) in O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 47. 333 E.g., public perception (notably by Laurentius Beyerlinck, archpriest of Antwerp; cf. infra) in Morra to Borghese, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 112, 67r; “ma VS dovera procurare, che in questa risposta che i medesimi dottori fanno, si vadi con la maggior secretezza, che sia possibile, accioche non si sappi, che ciò venghi procurato di Roma.” Borghese to Morra, 11 November 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 42r. 334 “Perche non si sospetti, esser questa risposta da esse procurata, e mendicata, essendo questi tali libri da per si cosi chiaramente iniqui, che non meritano risposta la quale piuttosto per curiosità di veder puntualmente le sciocchezze, e perversità di
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Academics, for their part, had in the past developed a special expertise in becoming the mere instruments of a transcendental order and derived scholarly credit from being solicited by the occupant of Peter’s chair.335 Analogous to the approach developed in the previous chapters, it is more rewarding to explore the multi-tied concerns that the university could service by stepping into the breach. The chronology of events, the wording in the general instructions to nuncio Morra, and the involvement of Robaulx and Marcantonio Maraldi336 all suggest that the bargain did help solve the Roman Question and allowed the benign pontiff to return to a discourse of grace, at a moment when the papal prince still dragged his feet. Other notorious offenders of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, such as the Venetian Republic, capitalised on the De Dominis affair as well, in order to mend bridges with Rome.337 The cardinals of the Louvain congregation—Millino, Lancelotti, and Verallo—were members of the Holy Office,338 the Index Congregation, or both; Millino, for his part, had prepared the first relazioni for the Index Congregation on De Dominis’ Manifesto.339 Theology and benefices intertwined in the correspondence of Schinckelius on the subject with Maraldi.340 In this respect, the interests of the divines mirrored those of their clients and aspiring (or anointed) future colleagues in the Arts faculty who, in the aftermath of the Roman Question, would beef up their channels of intelligence in the Dataria (cf. infra). The De Dominis affair quickly outgrew the academics’ interest in benefices, however. In July 1619, for instance, Morra had sought to raise the
quel’huomo, che per necessità di defensione si faceva.” Morra to Borghese, 15 December 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 113, 382r. 335 “Le Pape a donné charge à l’université d’y respondre. Ils y travaillent desja.” Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 25. 336 Maraldi has not been identified as a consultor of the Holy Office or of the Index Congregation. 337 Belligni, Auctoritas e Potestas, 56–57. 338 Verallo had been appointed consultor of the Holy Office in 1605; Cf. Congr. 23 July 1605, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1605, 112v. He remained a member of the Suprema after his creation as a cardinal. 339 Belligni, Auctoritas e Potestas, 48. 340 In these letters, the divine discussed the De Dominis affair while fostering support for the primary professor of philosophy Andreas Wypion and his brother Joannes. At stake was a Bouillon rectorship. Schinckelius to Maraldi, 1619 (?) [registration in July 1619 in ASV, Dataria Ap., Per Obitum, 88, 174v, of the related resignation and compositio concerning the parish of Sergnon mentioned in this letter], UAL, Ghent (1927), 43.
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stakes and convinced the board of regents to convert their scholarly labours against De Dominis into Roman support in their conflict with the Jesuits.341 Enter Cardinal Bellarmino, who still was in touch with “his” university in Brabant.342 Belligni identified him, alongside Scipione Borghese, as the mastermind behind Roman “geopolitics of controversy” that aimed to contain De Dominis’ erroneous writings to northwestern Europe by means of a scholarly phalanx of Catholic universities.343 The Sorbonne and Cologne speedily promulgated solemn censurae against De Dominis in 1617 and in 1618.344 More “spontaneous attacks” on De Dominis were either envisaged or encouraged by, among others, the Jesuits’ Roman headquarters.345 The Antwerp archpriest and diocesan censor Laurentius Beyerlinck had distinguished himself in 1617 with a refutation of De Dominis’ Consilium profectionis suae, a small book that had attracted, except for an eschatologist passage, the full approval of Bellarmino.346 Not surprisingly, this self-declared “son of the university,” whose booklet turned out to be the first part of the bargain between Robaulx and his Roman negotiation partners,347 was
341 “Decretum etiam est, ut cum scriptis contra Marcum Anthonium de Dominis ad Suam Sanctitatem mittendis (. . .) ex consilio novi nuntii apostolici (. . .) concipiantur a decano litterae ad indicendum silentium Jesuitis.” Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 30 July 1619, RAL, OUL, 387, 116. 342 A reference to Bellarmino in Schinckelius to Maraldi, c.1619, UAL, Ghent (1927), 43; see also Jansonius to Nuncio Guidi di Bagno, 5 September 1621, BN, Manuscrits Latins, 5174, 20v–22r. 343 Belligni, Auctoritas e potestas, 48–49. 344 Borghese to Morra, 3 February 1618, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 57r; Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, 19 April 1618, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 30–31. 345 E.g., Vitelleschi to Scribani, 28 April 1618, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 3, 476. 346 Laurentius Beyerlinck Profectionis Marci Antonii De Dominis quondam archiepiscopi Spalatensis consilium examinat, Antwerp: Balthasar and Joannes Moretus, 1617, in ACDF, SO, St.St., E 6–b. “Expediret, tolli verba illa (. . .) Sciunt catholici, in ecclesia christi sessurum Antichristum” This would encourage heretics to portray the pontiff as the antichrist. On Bellarmino’s polemical theology of history, read Motta, Bellarmino, 163sqq. 347 Beyerlinck had been a professor in the humanities in the early 1600s at Vaulx College; cf. Reusens, Documents relatifs, 5, 128. “Che [= Robaulx] offerse a Sua Santità in nome dell’Università di fare rispondere l’arciprete di Anversa, (. . .) al detto Spalatense, con l’occasione del suo Manifesto.” Borghese to Morra, 11 November 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 42r. A first reference to Beyerlinck’s activities in Gesualdo to Borghese, 3 December 1616, regest in Van Meerbeeck, Correspondance des nonces Gesualdo, Morra, Sanseverino, 97; the arrival of the archpriest’s libretto in Rome, via Philip Maes (!), was confirmed in Borghese to Gesualdo, 4 March 1617, regest in ibidem, 97; Maes’ intervention is attested in Borghese to Gesualdo, 11 March 1617, regest in ibidem, 120.
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invited to join the choir of controversialists against the De Republica Ecclesiastica as well.348 That Rome expected Louvain’s refutation to become the apotheosis of this new “guerra degli scritti” suggests that its Faculty of Theology, which had quickly sanctioned the Sorbonne censure, was not known for its conciliarist sympathies:349 More probably, it had sent, via the Jansonius-Robaulx team or otherwise, strong signals of its availability already in 1616. Diederik Lanoye’s essay on Louvain’s contribution to Arias Montano’s polyglot bible in the 1570s proves that the learned doctors rarely shunned an occasion to attract the favour of the powerful.350 The Louvain divines were in good company. Biagioli’s influential book on Galileo as a courtier and the pervasive influence of patronage on his scientific practice has consigned the internalist conviction that “science explains truth, society explains error” to the dustbin. It is equally important, however, to note that Biagioli’s conclusions reek of reductionism.351 Galileo had forged an alliance not just with Medici princes but also with heavenly bodies that did not resist being relabelled as Medicean Stars and whose existence was mediated by optical devices as much as by patronage. The heavenly bodies that Louvain divines had to cope with were of a different nature, and their existence was verified by other means. Just as much as Galileo, however—the one that remains out of the picture in Biagioli’s book—they could not afford to forfeit their credibility towards their earthly and heavenly audience. Another theological debate that unfolded in these years proves to be a case in point. It involved the honour of the Celestial Queen herself, with the courts of Madrid and Brussels pressing for a definition of the Immaculate Conception via a dedicated real junta in Rome. The
348 “Comminciò ad escusarse dicendo (. . .) massime che gia haveva dato [Nostro Signore] questo peso all’università di Lovanio, dalla quale lui era figlio (. . .) io gli rispose che (. . .) non haveva dato tal pensiero all’Università di Lovanio, ma’che solo haveva gradito l’affetto offertoli in nome d’essa da Carlo Robaulx, et che cosi ancora haveria gradito il suo.” Morra to Borghese, 27 January 1618, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 112, 67r. 349 On the role attributed to Louvain by Roman circuits, see Belligni, Auctoritas e Potestas, 49. “Quam ut citius res expediatur quam poterant [theologians of an unidentified university] approbare censuram universitatis Sorbone Parisiensis, prout fecerunt alie universitates, presertim universitas Lovaniensis.” Congr. Feria V Coram Sanctissimo, 26 April 1618, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1618, 144–46. 350 Lanoye, “Benito Arias Montano and the University of Louvain.” 351 For a valuable critique, read Shank, “How Shall We Practice History?”
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Blessed Virgin was considered by many to be the “neck of Christ” through which all grace flooded the Church Militant; but she was also, alongside the Eucharist, an important beneficiary of Habsburg dynastic piety.352 Juan Bautista Vives, the curialist whom the Archdukes had employed in 1618 as their Roman resident, did not hesitate to proclaim himself “procurador de la Santissima Virgen,” and he articulated his expectations towards the learned world accordingly. In the course of 1618–19, the commentaries of the Douai professor Franciscus Sylvius on the Summa Theologica were to be expunged from undesirable conclusions on whether or not the Virgin had been conceived in Original Sin, which earned his university, “que es de fundaçion real,” a severe reprimand from the new archducal resident.353 In 1619, the nuncio could report that the divine had substituted the deleted sections with a papal decree of 1617 that imposed silence on all parties.354 Silence once more had to replace clamorous battles that had been waged in Spain from the pulpit as much as from the cathedra; silence had to replace conflicts that risked being transported to the South Netherlands and to the Louvain churches.355 Amidst all these uncertainties about whether or not the Virgin was free from the stain of Original Sin, it is not
352 Duerloo, “Habsburg Piety.” On mariology after Trent, cf. Ellington, From Sacred Body, 142–87. 353 “Que haviendo tenido aviso deste libro y jugando lo mucho que su Mag. sentiria tal action de una universidad que es fundacion real.” Vives to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 26 February 1619, AGR, Audience, 453, 49r. See also Vives to the Archdukes, 2 March 1619, ibidem, 62r. “Et que ferons tresvolontiers prester toute aijde et assistence au nonce dicelle resident pres de nous, pour lexecution de sa commission.” The Archdukes to Vives, 23 March 1619, ibidem, 75r. 354 Sanseverino to Borghese, 17 August 1619, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 105, 331r. Cf. the notification of this papal decree in Borghese to Morra, 10 July 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 32r. Many dispatches on Sylvius and the Immaculate Conception in 1618–19; cf. ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 115, 205r; ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 105, 133r–134v, and 216r; ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 403, 210v–211r; ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 143v–145v, and 149r–v; De Meester, Correspondance, 392. On the De Auxiliis affair, see for instance Congr. Feria V Coram Sanctissimo, 13 May 1621, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1621–22, 52v, with the request, in line with the 1611 decree of the Holy Office (cf. p. 384), for permission to print his book. Cf. Guidi di Bagno to Ludovisi, 7 August 1621, BAV, Barberini Latini, 6812, 21r. The book was to be examined by the Franciscan Girolamo a Casale Maggiore, a consultor of the Holy Office (cf. Congr. Feria IV, 31 March 1622, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1622, 189r). See also Repgen, “Das Hl. Offizium und der ‘Fall Sylvius’.” 355 “E’ piacciuto a Nostro Signore la provisione che VS ha preso in occasione delle doglianze fatte dal Padre priore di Dominicani per le prediche fatte in Lovanio da un padre Gesuita in materia della concettione della Beatissima Vergine.” Borghese to Gesualdo, 4 March 1617, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 302bis.
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surprising that Rome was embarrassed by all that religious fervour in Habsburg quarters and preferred to prohibit public attacks rather than affirm the doctrine as part of the Church’s teachings.356 In the first half of 1619, a brief from Paul V had to rein in archducal devotion, and the new nuncio, Sanseverino, was instructed to discourage the princes from filing new pious requests (or, worse, from sending more “procuradores de la Santissima Virgen”) that Rome could not honour.357 While Roman diplomacy and the Holy Office tried to woo them by clamping down on Sylvius, the Archdukes ordered Vives to continue the good work in close contact with Cardinal De Trejo, the leader of the Virgin’s lobbyists in Rome.358 It is in this context that the Brussels Secretariat of State charged the abbot of Park to investigate whether the University of Louvain was prepared to take a highly visible oath, after the example of Spanish universities, that it would always defend the honour of the Virgin.359 In the given circumstances, the Immaculate Conception could have become the academics’ Medicean stars; the oath in question the Louvain equivalent of the Sidereus Nuntius. But a few days later, Drusius informed the Court of Brussels that foisting such an oath on them would only lead to a painful display of discord, the Theology faculty (and Drusius himself ) being almost unanimous in its rejection of an oath on a tradition it found poorly endorsed by Scripture and the fathers.360 Brussels quietly backed down, and could fall back 356 “Procedevano ad invettive l’un contro l’altro non solo nei studii publici, ma anco nei pulpiti, . . . si mosse quella Maestà a mandar qua il padre Tosantos a posta per la definitione di questo articolo, o vero perche si prohibisse ne gli atti publici l’opinion contraria.” Borghese to Morra, 19 January 1619, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 428, 129v–133r. 357 Cf. Morra to Borghese, 22 February 1619, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 105, 78r–80r; Instruttione per Monsignor Sanseverino (. . .), 2 June 1619, ed. Cauchie and Maere, Recueil des instructions générales, 78–100. 358 The Archdukes to Vives, Négociations de Rome, 3 April 1619, AGR, Audience, 453, 82v; and Vives to the Archdukes, Négociations de Rome, 27 April 1619, ibidem. 359 “Par lequelle elle est suppliee descrire a ceulx de luniversite de Louvain de faire voeu et serment de defendre tousiours la preservation de le bienheureuse vierge mere, a fin que Vostre reverence sinforme (. . .) si semblables lettres porteroient leffect que lon sen promect et si lon nij rencontreroit de la difficulte ou opposition.” Anonymous (Della Faille?) to Drusius, 22 July 1619, Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281. “Toutes les Universitez d’Espaigne et plusieurs villes l’ont signée et juré de la maintenir.” Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, September 1619, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 53. 360 “Quasi toute la faculte est dopinion contraire audict extraict, nestant a doubter, quilz ne voudront en aucune maniere faire veu, nij serment, de defendre la senctence
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on the support of its “fille bien amez” for other projects entrenching the dynasty’s heavenly alliances.361 The episode does not warrant the existence of a unanimous Louvain block against the Immaculate Conception, as the Marian sodalities of the Society recruited many members in the academic community and rigid Augustinianism by no means excluded devotional fervour for the Virgin.362 However, it does indicate that the pedants of the schools balked at compromising their ties not only with earthly alliances (e.g., the Blackfriars, including Brizuela)363 but also with another close ally: a Catholic Orthodoxy that could defy the devotional and/or doctrinal fashions of the day and that constituted the academics’ reason of existence. Returning to the De Dominis affair, it may be worthwhile, before concluding that university men traded off their scholarship for privileges and/or for support against the Jesuits, to ponder the possibility that a refutation of De Dominis did not necessarily contradict scholarly concerns. Refuting De Dominis also was or became an academic enterprise. In his letters to Saint-Cyran, Cornelius Jansenius lifts a tip of the veil. When he assures his correspondents, on several occasions, that he considered himself fortunate to have not been charged with the job by “ceulx qui gouvernent l’université,” he also gives a hint of why the foul works of the apostate could possibly pose an intellectual challenge to the doctors (and to himself ): De Re Publica Ecclesiastica belched out references to the Scriptures and to the Fathers;364 loci of
laquelle ilz jugent nestre assez fondee, aux sainctes escritures, nij aux sainctz peres.” Drusius to Della Faille, 2 August 1619, Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281. 361 E.g., in the affair of the canonisation of Jeanne de Valois in the early 1620s; cf., for instance, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, governess-general of the Spanish Netherlands, to Vives, Négociations de Rome, 13 February 1625, AGR, Audience, 461, 45r. 362 Cf. p. 468, passim. On the position of the Irish Franciscans at Louvain and the affiliations of Florence Conry and Luke Wadding with the real junta, read O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 66–67. 363 E.g., with respect to a dispensation requested by a Louvain Blackfriar: “Concessit facultas gratiose dictam dispensationem, (. . .) intuitu multorum favorum [in the battle against the Jesuits] quos hactenus facultas fuit expecta ex parte ordinis ipsorum, specialiter ex parte reverendi patris Confessarii serenissimorum nostrorum.” Acta Facultatis Theologiae, 16 June 1620, RAL, OUL, 387, 126. 364 “Nous avons veu icy les 4 premiers livres de Marc Antoine jadis archeveque de Spalate: sa prefation est meschante (. . .) il est plein de citations et menace encore de six livres qui doivent suivre.” Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, November 1617, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 25.
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authority that academics considered to be their own special field of expertise. “S’il ya jamais eu subjet qui requiere bon jugement, sçavoir, lecture des Anciens, eloquence, c’est cestuy cy.”365 De Dominis offered an excellent occasion to realise the job profile eternalised in the Visitatio, i.e., that Louvain divines had, above all, to be faithful to Scripture.366 This program matches well with the format and the methodology applied by the Louvain theologians against De Dominis. The discussions over the question of whether they had to follow the example of Paris and Cologne and issue a censura within a short delay, or instead had to engage with De Dominis’ writings more systematically,367 were, at least de facto, resolved in favour of the latter solution. The preserved manuscripts in Rome whose Louvain provenance could be established with certainty368 do not list a few theses extracted from the De Republica that, after comparison with heresies condemned in a recent or a distant past, were then found worthy of proscription. Louvain controversialists painstakingly explored the sources to prove, in argument after argument, the malignity informing Spalato’s hermeneutics and of his attacks on the Holy See. Jansonius’ request in 1621 to publish those parts of the Louvain refutation that had already been completed,369 points in the same direction: thanks to De Dominis, university men could hope to become, via books, the indispensable mediators of an unbreakable bond between Christianity’s sacred texts and the papacy, just as much as the Louvain edition of Augustine’s Opera Omnia had 365 Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, 20 July 1617, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 16. 366 “Rescindent autem praedicti professores curiosas, superfluas, nimiumque philosophicas, ac minus utiles quaestiones: at eas, de quibus hoc tempore potessima est cum Haereticis controversia, dilucidius explicabunt, studebuntque fidem nostram, non tam philosophicis argumentis, quam Scripturis Sanctis, Patrum testimoniis, & deductis ex his rationibus firmare, ne dum nimium Philosophiae (quae ancillare debet) adhibetur, minus Fidei (cujus est intellectum captivare) tribuatur, ac deum in perniciosos ruatur errores.” Visitatio Almae Universitatis Studii Generalis Oppidi Lovaniensis, De Facultate Theologica, art. lx, Privilegia, 266. 367 “L’université va à l’accoustumée. Il y en a un ou deux qui travaillent à refuter les quatres livres de M Antonius de Dominis, archevesque de Spalate, mais on n’est pas encore d’accord s’il faudra le refuter au long, ou bien se contenter d’une censure, comme ont fait ceux de Parys et de Coloigne.” Jansenius to Saint Cyran, 19 April 1618, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 30–31. 368 ACDF, SO, St. St., E 6–b, 3rd bundle. Annotations on the back of the constituent bundles disclose the dates of the relevant dispatches to Millino and/or Borghese. 369 “Illa enim hic a multis expetuntur eo quod tractent scripturas quae de sede apostolica sunt, ut repellant ea quae contra ipsam ex scripturis ab haereticis obiiciuntur.” Jansonius to Guidi di Bagno, 13 August 1621, BN, Manuscrits Latins, 5174, 10r–v.
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eternalised, four decades ago, the bond between academics and the Doctor Gratiae.370 Indirectly, the Society’s Thomists could have raised the stakes when the conflict, in the wake of the visitation, over the right to teach in ordine ad gradus wandered into the realm of theological controversy.371 Local fathers made an attempt, in 1619, to have the university’s teaching on Grace and Free Will examined on accusations of Baianism,372 after an escalation that had triggered the withdrawal of philosophers and theologians from the Jesuit sodalities and the erection of a new spiritual congregation under the guidance of the Blackfriars.373 The fathers’ strategies foundered on Bellarmino’s refusal to go along with them.374 Not only was the university’s orthodoxy at stake; so also was that of Jacobus Jansonius, whom local Jesuits wished to neutralise.375 In the context of the De Dominis affair, Jansonius would
370 “Interim scripta mea in primum librum varii docti viri hic legerunt, eorumque editionem valde urgent, a qua ego alienus non sum presertim quia scripturas sacras pertractant (. . .) Ego vero ab initio studii mei theologici investigandis ex veterum presertim sententia scripturis semper incubui. Itaque si placeat Romanae Ecclesiae optarim mihi dari facultatem scripta illa recognita et in ordinem digestam contra Marcum Antonium seorsim edere ad deducendum ex variis scripturis D Petri Primatum.” Jansonius to Guidi di Bagno, 5 September 1621, BN, Manuscrits Latins, 5174, 20v–22r. 371 Cf. Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, September 1619, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 52. Few details are known; in these months, however, the Louvain Jesuit Aegidius De Coninck was reprimanded by the Society’s censors in Rome for his heretical sententia on the sacrament of the Eucharist; cf. Vitelleschi to De Koninck, 16 November 1619, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 3, 627–28. 372 “Scriptum illud quo explicabatur sententia doctoris cuiusdam de opinionibus a duobus summis pontificibus damnatis (. . .) curavi illud tradi Illustrissimo Cardinali Bellarmino, qui idipsum congregationi Sti Officii proponet.” Vitelleschi to Robert Maelcote, SJ, at Louvain, 31 August 1619, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 3, 605. 373 “Et ont [= the Jesuits] enduré un grand debris de leur sodalité, d’autant que tout en un coup tous les docteurs en Theologie, la plus grande partie des professeurs de philosophie et theologie, se sont transportez au Jacobins et y ont erigé ou plustot renouvellé l’ancienne fraternité du Rosaire, et croy, que si les Jacobins taschent à bien s’acquiter des exercices de pieté qu’on y erige, ils mettront les Jésuites presques en chemise.” Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, 4 February 1619, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 45–46. Compare also Vitelleschi to Maelcote, 9 March 1619, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 3, 544. 374 “De dubitatione istic exorta circa Bullam Pii v et Gregorii xiii de sententiis D Michaelis Baij hactenus hic Romae nihil certi haberi potuit cum non desint hic inter quos et ipse cardinalis Bellarminus qui interpretationem domini Jansonii non improbabilem putent.” Vitelleschi to Maelcote, 16 November 1619, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 3, 605. 375 “Quod quia RV existimat commodam occasionem continere qua nonnihil ipsius adversus societatem conatus impediri possint.” Vitelleschi to Maelcote, 31 August 1619, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 3, 605.
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indeed succeed in reviving his reputation for piety, modesty, and learning in the Roman Holy Office and in the Secretariat of State. Yet, his involvement—as a matter of fact, the old don would eventually be singled out as the “compilatore” of the doctrina Lovaniensis376—also may suggest that answering De Dominis’ arguments au long with the help of the Scriptures and the Fathers furnished him and his partisans with an excellent opportunity to raise the profile of their (positivist) brand of the Science of Salvation and to contain not only the Molinists at the Jesuit college but also the Thomistic wing inside the university. The De Republica Ecclesiastica, after the appointment of Jansonius’ favourite Wiggers to the royal chair of Thomism in 1613 and the stipulations in the Visitatio on the practical objectives of the study of Scripture and the Summa, thus helped to turn Jansonius’ “model of a theology faculty” into a “model faculty.” The Acta Facultatis Theologiae, not surprisingly, did not breathe a word about this or other controversial programmes plugged by shifting academic circuits into the De Dominis affair. In the light of these data, however, the bargain brokered by Robaulx in Rome should not be dismissed as just another example of scholarship being traded off for privileges. It is more plausible that, in some quarters, this all-too-familiar causality of supposedly material interests informing intellectual activity was inverted. In this scenario, Robaulx’ deal was, or became, a means to entrench methodological and cognitive programmes that were better put to practice rather than made explicit. Wrapping up the De Republica Ecclesiastica in multiple layers of interest seems to contradict the Louvainists’ failure to come up with a condemnation of De Dominis. Yet, sometimes failures are just that: the previous paragraphs warn against turning this failure into ecclesiological positions. The anti-climactic outcome of the De Dominis affair was accompanied by the failure of the divines to get their act together in a timely fashion. First, there is the format of the projected refutation, on which the divines reportedly had failed to agree for at
376 “Ma già molti cattolici in varie parti se gli sono fieramente opposti, et fra gl’altri l’università di Lovanio della cui dottrina è però compilatore Giovanni (sic!) Giansonio, che ha la prima cathedra di quella, huomo piissimo, ma che non ha il valore alla pietà inferiore.” Istruttione (. . .) per monsignor Guidi di Bagno (. . .), 1 May 1621, ed. Cauchie and Maere, Recueil des instructions générales, 133–64.
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least six months after they had been charged with the job.377 Once this decision had been made, impatient nuncios yearning to emulate their colleagues at Paris and Cologne were fobbed off with vague references to agreements with (other) Roman contacts. But the choice for a “grand refutation” of De Dominis implied, as Jansenius pointed out in his letters, a lot of work that somehow had to be crammed into an already overcharged programme of keeping the routine of the schools going.378 Obviously, this choice called for a division of labour. Alongside Fabricius, the university’s censor, Jansonius and Schinckelius had been charged with the refutation of the first book,379 the result of which was sent (at least partly) to Bellarmino sometime in the second half of 1618.380 Academics eating humble pie in front of an exasperated nuncio in 1621 referred to four faculty regents charged with De Dominis’ second (Schinckelius), third (Rampen and Fabricius), and fourth (Jansonius) books.381 Rampen’s and Jansonius’ letters suggest that the work eventually was monopolised in the hands of an even smaller number of individuals.382 Yet, on top of their laborious writings, Jansonius and Schinckelius, the former’s closest collaborator in
377 Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, 19 April 1619, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 30. A decision of the faculty to have the last version of the manuscript signed by the faculty’s deputies, but to make it dependent on its approval, suggests they had indeed reached a decision in August 1618. De lectionibus et alia ex actis S Fac Theologiae ab an 1608–1630 De refutandis libris Antonii de Dominis, 3 August 1618, KBR, Manuscrits, 22192, 138v. 378 Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, 16 November 1617, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 25. Cf. Fabricius to Guidi di Bagno, 29 September 1621, BN, Manuscrits Latins, 5174, 29v. Lessius quit for similar reasons; cf. Vitelleschi to Lessius, 10 November 1618, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 3, 511. 379 Cf. Jansonius’ version of the division of labour in Jansonius to Guidi di Bagno, 5 September 1621, BN, Manuscrits Latins, 5174, 20v–22r. Initially, Wiggers had been involved too: “partem sibi assignatam in me non intuitum transposuit, eo quod in illis capitibus tractarentur scripturae ex Evangelio et Actibus Apostolicis, quae sunt de S Petro, illas enim libentissime excussi.” 380 Schinckelius to Maraldi, 1619, UAL, Ghent (1927), 43. Compare also the praise for both theologians in Borghese to Robaulx, 10 October 1618, AGR, Audience, 1468. Only part of the work had been completed; Schinckelius to Guidi di Bagno, 23 March 1622, BN, Manuscrits Latins, 5174, 141v. 381 Jansonius to Guidi di Bagno, 5 September 1621, BN, Manuscrits Latins, 5174, 20v–22r. 382 “Petiit ille [= Robaulx] a me fieri quasdam notas . . . quantum usui esse possent eximio domino Joanni Schinckelio, qui solus operi formando intenderet, et peculiariter me rogarit ut quid amplius non facerem.” Rampen to Guidi di Bagno, 24 March 1622, BN, Manuscrits Latins, 5174, 142v.
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these years, had to monitor the faculty’s lawsuit against the Jesuits over its right to teach in ordine ad gradus.383 That only regents were allowed to display their skills384 points in the same direction. This leads us to another failure: that of entering the stage as a unified body theologic, in response to Roman calls to act as one.385 In the margins of the (Roman version of ) the general instructions of 1621 to the new nuncio, Guidi di Bagno, it had been pointed out that Rome had been expecting much of it, but in vain, “perché hoggi ne’dottori di Lovanio abbonda più fasto e pertinacia che dottrina.” Significantly, only Jansonius was spared from this scathing critique, being the only one who had done his job.386 After the Holy Office had granted its approval in the course of 1620, the bon vieillard had not neglected to notify his authorship of the quinternetti that had been dispatched in the name of the university to Rome.387 Even when one avoids reading a touch of triumphalism into his correspondence of 1621–22 with Bagno, the lack of co-ordination and the petitioning of the pontiff to agree to separate publications under different names leap to the eye. Enter the Holy Office’s instruction to avoid all “disputations” over the corrections, which suggests that it fretted more over being embarrassed by academic infighting than it dreaded a conciliarist tide. Already in the Summer of 1618, Robaulx had conceded to the nuncio that the whole operation had incurred delays because of unsavoury competi-
383 Numerous references in Acta Facultatis Theologiae, from 4 October 1618 onwards, RAL, OUL, 387, 91 sqq. Cf., post factum, Henricus Rampen to Guidi di Bagno, 24 March 1622, BN, Manuscrits Latins, 5174, 142v: “et diu detentus fuit facultatis nostrae adversus Societatem Jesu negociis.” 384 Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, 17 July 1617, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 16. “J’ay esté requis une fois de m’y employer . . . du despuis, soit que ma response ne leur pleust point, ou qu’ils se sont ravisez, voyant qu’ils n’auroyent pas grandement de l’honneur de requerir ayde d’un homme qui ne fait que venir au monde, ils se sont refroidys.” Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, 19 April 1618, ibidem, 31. 385 Borghese to Robaulx, 10 October 1618, Correspondance administrative du docteur Trévisius (. . .), AGR, Audience, 1468/11. “Atque declarantem quod Papa desideraret nos apostatae collegialiter, atque nomine facultatis, ad graviorem authoritatem respondere.” Jansonius to Guidi di Bagno, 5 September 1621, BN, Manuscrits Latins, 5174, 20v–22r. 386 Istruttione (. . .) per monsignor Guidi di Bagno, 1 May 1621, ed. Cauchie and Maere, Recueil des instructions générales, 133–64. 387 Sanseverino to Ludovisi, 20 March 1621, BAV, Barberini Latini, 6810, 70r. For the Holy Office’s decision, see Congr. Feria V Coram Sanctissimo, 8 April 1620, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1619–20, 322r. The only manuscript whose Louvain provenance could be certified in ACDF, SO, St. St., E 6–b, indeed contains the refutation of the fourth book of the De Republica Ecclesiastica and was, by consequence, written by Jansonius.
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tion among the divines.388 In the letter to Robaulx that somehow ended up in the Trevigi papers, Borghese fuelled competition when he stated that the final write-up had to be accomplished by one man, preferably Schinckelius, given Jansonius’ advanced age, in order to maintain a unity of style and purpose.389 It is tempting to read the comments on Schinckelius’ activities in the answers from Rampen and Fabricius to the calls of Guidi di Bagno in 1621–22 from this perspective, i.e., either as sneers at or apologies for Schinckelius’ (lack of) performance. Jansonius, for his part, made no secret of his disdain for Schinckelius’ profile as an “ordinator.” He put his advanced age, which probably had become an argument to antagonise him, to his advantage, as it became his (and, reportedly, Bellarmino’s) reason not to have his writings examined by a junior doctor but to send them directly to Rome.390 The desertion of half of the faculty regents from the project and Jansonius’ decision to divide the work for the remaining books rather than to co-operate was a subtle vote of no confidence in Rome’s projected middleman and allowed Jansonius to re-emerge as the face of the university.391 The whole affair might have become a vehicle for an academic war of succession. The old don recurrently being confined to his sickbed, a relatively large number of young or middle-aged regents and other theologians must have anticipated his disappearance from the academic scene, university men having grown accustomed to the co-existence of semi-formal, oligarchic or quasi-monarchic machineries of academic power with a corporatist format of decision-making. 388 “N’ho parlato col canonico Robaulx (. . .) e m’ha confirmato l’istesso, soggiungendo, che la causa di questa tardanza è una certa dissentione d’emulatione ch’è fra essi Theologi.” Morra to Borghese, 4 August 1618, ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 112, 480r–v. 389 Borghese to Robaulx, 10 November 1618, Correspondance administrative du docteur Trévisius (. . .), AGR, Audience, 1468/11. 390 “Quibus absolutis iuxta quod erat prefinitum misi scripta Romam tacito meo nomine, quae ut legit cardinalis Bellarminus probavit, et quia tantum de me audierat quod senex essem, et quis essem ignoraret, rescripsit senem illum urgendum esse ut quantum per etatem liceret in opere progrederetur. Maiorem enim rationem habendam esse rei quam styli, qui in doctore Joanne Schenckelio totius compositionis ordinatore prae reliquis commendabatur.” Jansonius to Guidi di Bagno, 5 September 1621, BN, Manuscrits Latins, 5174, 20v–22r. 391 “Que contra Spalatensem apostatam per facultatem Sacre Theologie expedita sunt, hoc die transmittit eximius dominus magister noster Jacobus Jansonius eiusdem facultatis senior professor, submissuri singulis, vel alternis septimanis reliqua donec opus perfectum, et ad optatum finem fuerit perductum.” The university to Sanseverino, 9 August 1619, Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103, 205r in answer to renewed exhortations from Sanseverino to the university, 26 July 1619, ibidem, 204v.
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If Schinckelius was indeed plotting regicide—or, more appropriately in an academic context, patricide—he had picked his fight well: in the previous decades, the credibility of academic grandees had to a great degree been mediated (and vice versa) by tested channels of communication and support to the Eternal City as much as among Belgian power elites. However, this seemingly neat and tidy social contest was once more blurred by annoying concerns of a very different nature. In an enigmatic letter to an anonymous Roman contact, probably written sometime in 1618 or 1619, Schinckelius pledged his blood and his sweat in the service of the pontiff.392 In order to do so, he had finished the refutation of the first four chapters of De Dominis’ De Re Publica, with the explicit goal of rectifying the work (on the other chapters?) of the “older and wiser” doctors of the faculty. This fuels speculation over a deep ecclesiological rift between Schinckelius and Jansonius, along familiar lines. To be sure, plenty of statements in Jansonius’ writings preserved in the archives of the Holy Office would confirm his status as a protoJansenist who, noblesse oblige, should feel as uneasy about papal power as Aggiornamento Catholics. It is not difficult to imagine Bellarmino frowning over a passage in which “N,” commenting on the fourth book De Romana Ecclesia, elegantly turned the princely placet into an argument in favour of papal primacy and universal jurisdiction—a move that the old cardinal unmasked as an attempt to turn the questionable hypothesis of lay interference into a thesis.393 The grand theorist of papal might also rejected Jansonius’ implication that, in matters of the faith, the authority of an ecumenical council was superior to the
392 In the letter, he announced the submission of the refutation of the first four chapters of De Dominis’ De Re Publica, which suggests that it had been written either in 1618–19 or in the Spring of 1622. “Egi deo magnas gratias pro hac occasione laboris defendendi sui vicarii, et perquam libenter in hac palestra ingenii mei sudorem et sanguinem profunderem.” Schinckelius to an anonymous “illustrissime domine,” s.d., UAL, Ghent (1958–1959), 66. 393 “Eo tantum pertinet quod imperatores ratione sui interesse voluerunt de persona Romani pontificis cognoscere eamve tali de causa, probare vel improbare prout etiamnum ratione sui interesse principes Burgundie et Belgii cognoscant de variis provisionibus apostolicis easque praestito placeto, quod vocant, approbant vel denegato, improbant, qua in parte nihil iuris exercent circa illa quae provisionibus apostolicis intrinseca sint, sed tantum de earundem circumstantiis tanquam sibi noxiis vel periculosis.” Responsio Universitatis Lovaniensis ad librum M Antonii de Dominis de Republica Ecclesiastica, ACDF, SO, St. St., E 6–b, 3rd bundle. Cf. the Observationes in responsionem ad Cap. XI libri IV de Repub Ecclica Marci Antonii De Dominis, drafted by Scaglia.
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pontiff ’s, a thesis Jansonius had never put into practice but that had urged Bellarmino in 1602 to consider his treatise on practical power worthy of the flames.394 From the endless list of corrections in the Holy Office, quite a few other examples can be drawn, to turn Jansonius into a “moderate conciliarist.” In this respect, it is tempting to stage Schinckelius as the champion of the Holy See he would become at a later stage of his life, in the first Jansenist controversies of the early 1640s. Such an enterprise makes sense from a theologian’s point of view, but not from that of the historian. First, in the absence of sources, it is impossible to localise the differences of opinion between the two Louvain divines.395 Second, the Holy Office did not seem to bother, licensing as it did, a corrected version in a foreseeable future.396 This is, of course, related to the reading methods applied: a procedure of preventive, expurgatory censorship, resulting in a detailed list of corrections. It was never the goal of Roman censors to apply repressive censorship and to extract a number of theses from the work that consequently had to be held against Catholic orthodoxy, the methodology that had been unleashed on the Liturgica. Turning Jansonius into a conciliarist implies applying these reading strategies rather than those deployed by Bellarmino and Scaglia on the refutation of De Dominis. This failing to occur, Jansonius, in line with the premises underlying this work, never became a conciliarist in historical time. The faculty’s decision to ignore, in 1622, the nuncio’s question of whether or not it was willing to refute De Dominis, and to suspend the procedures a few months later, probably was more informed by (embarrassment about) its failure to get its act together than by ecclesiology. In sharp contrast to its profile as a unified body theologic, the Sacra Facultas had proved once more to be the many-headed demon it sought to exorcise from De Dominis’ episcopalist writings.
394
Observationes in responsionem ad cap. 12 lib. 4 (. . .), ACDF, SO, St. St., E 6–b. The brief treatise in UAL, Ghent (1958–1959), 66 can possibly be attributed to Schinckelius, but does not refer directly to specific writings by Jansonius. No other contemporary writings of Schinckelius against De Dominis could be retrieved; compare, maybe, the Quaestio Saturnalis from Louvain in ASV, Fondo Borghese, II, 68, 435v–437v. 396 Philippus Fabri, in contrast, who took up the refutation of De Dominis in the name of the University of Padova, was denied this permission. Congr. 3 June 1620, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1619–20, 356r. 395
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7.3.4. Exitus-Revolutio-Reditus. Academics and the papal prince, 1612–22 In the morning of 20 December 1624, an unusual atto di fede took place in the Minerva, the Roman base of the Dominican Order. In the presence of the Sacred College and the crowds, the Holy Inquisition declared Marcantonio De Dominis, the former archbishop of Spalato, a relapsed heretic and extradited him to the secular authorities.397 It was the third time De Dominis would die: an image of his had already been burned in effigie during his exile at the court of James I; and De Dominis had died a second, physical death in September 1624 in the dungeons of the Castel Sant’Angelo. It was a corpse, unearthed on the orders of the Holy Office,398 that assisted the ceremony at Minerva and that was dragged afterwards through the streets of Rome to the Campo de’ Fiori in order to be consumed, together with his writings, by the flames. Thus ended the last act of De Dominis’ turbulent life. His return from exile to Rome and to the folds of the Mother Church two years earlier was never a complete surprise: already under discussion in 1617,399 it was part of a mise-en-scène of exile, utopian revolution, and submission that scripted the lives of many exiles (and that made the Anglican hierarchy wary of Italians crossing the Channel ). This choreography of penitence and absolution notwithstanding, De Dominis continued to attract the suspicion of concealed heresy. After the pontificate of his patron Gregory XV Ludovisi (1621–23), his case had been reopened by Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini, 1623–44). It was pursued, as justice and equity demanded, even after his much publicised death as a good Christian who had embarked on his last journey at peace with the Church and comforted by the sacraments.
397
Congr. Feria V Coram Sanctissimo, 31 October 1624, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1624, 176r. 398 “Proposito dubio an cadaver, q Marci Antonii de Dominis olim Archiepiscopi Spalaten tradandum sit curie seculari, vel sepulture ecclesiastice condonandum, Sanctissimus auditis votis decrevit predictum cadaver exhumandum, et curie seculari tradendum una cum statua, cum libris a Spalatino compositis, ut comburantur.” Congr. Feria V Coram Sanctissimo, 21 November 1624, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1624, 183v. 399 “Fuerunt relate littere nuncii apostolic Coloniensis date die 2da huius, quibus scribit sibi fuisse relatum a persona fide digna Marcum Antonium de Dominis . . . facile redire ad partes catholicorum si a parte si a Sua Sanctitate et Rege Hispaniarum ei promittatur impunitas.” Congr. Feria V Coram Sanctissimo, 20 July 1617, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1617, 283; references to the brokerage of the Conde di Gondomar in Congr. Feria V Coram Sanctissimo, 19 August 1621, ACDF, SO, Decreta SO, 1621–22, 94v.
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Exitus-Revolutio-Reditus, the performative pattern that emerged as De Dominis’ drama unfolded,400 structured the academics’ relations with the papal prince as well in 1612–22. De Dominis’ exitus provided for an excellent scenery of Louvain’s reditus, in the form of Robaulx throwing himself at the feet of a benign Holy Father and offering help against the apostate’s attacks. Yet, Reditus derived its significance from the two acts preceding it. The attempt to have the Roman Question solved with the help of archducal diplomacy in 1612–14 had failed and might even have made things worse. Plugging academic interest into grander schemes of Public (and dynastic) Interest was replicated by Roman circuits turning conflicts over benefices into a show- and/or test-case of the pontiff ’s resolve to confront challenges against ecclesiastical and papal jurisdiction. Accounting for this failure by pointing at the weak micro-political position of the Archdukes in the “chieff du Monde” is plainly tautological. As a matter of fact, all remaining micro-political ties with the curia, or at least those nurtured by the university in the context of the Roman Question, were cut in 1614–16. This exitus represented an inversion of the Rome-oriented strategies deployed by academics during the preceding three decades as much as of the (projected) Regime of Grace in which their policy had been embedded. The strategic entanglement, under the auspices of the dons of the higher faculties, of the Roman Question with the visitation process from 1612 onwards culminated in the expurgation of the Arts faculty’s statutes from abuse under archducal and papal authority. Exitus paved the path for the second Act, Revolutio, in which Rome’s response to academic petitions in the previous decades was answered in kind: as soon as academics had fixated all parties, via the Jacobens’ affair, into the roles assigned to them, Brussels officialdom resisted diplomatic pressure and investigated the affair in light of Public Interest and in the interest of Catholic religion, with the archduke living up to his profile as the warden of the land’s constitutions, the protector and reformer of the university, and the obedient son of the Holy See. This last specification is significant: a national Liège Church failed to materialise in 1615–16, thanks to the diplomatic efforts at the Maastricht conferences. Thus, the Roman Question eventually became Rome’s Question, with the papal prince trapped in the role of a pontiff surrounded by councillors who, blinded by private interests, had provoked a crisis of his authority. This configuration cannot be reduced 400
Cf. the structure of Belligni, Auctoritas e Potestas.
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to a reversal of power relations, mediated as it was by a third inversion: that of the problematisation. Until 1615, academics had held that confirming their privileges was in the interest of the Apostolic See, the university being Rome’s most faithful ally in the region. In the Jacobens affair, academics conveyed the much more obliging message that not confirming academic privileges would positively result in a crisis of papal authority, with curialist propaganda now adding substance to Louvain claims instead of contradicting them. A pope who had preferred to hold his arms crossed was thus remoulded into a stakeholder who would have to unleash the plenitude of papal power in order to remedy the situation. Reditus, the restoration of the filial relationship between the university and the Supreme Pontiff, provided for a way out of a deadlock that had been carefully engineered for this purpose by the academics. To be sure, all parties involved eventually subscribed to the theatrical performance of submission and pontifical benevolence; an act that could gain substance thanks to the flight of Marcantonio De Dominis. The culmination of this act could, however, only be embodied in a fullblown confirmation of academic claims; not in some low-profile readjustments in the clauses of papal briefs. The bull Regimini Universalis honoured academic claims to benefices in the Principality of Liège; but it also introduced a legal framework that was designed to block all translations of conflicts over benefices into discussions over jurisdictional hierarchies and over the primacy over the Apostolic See. It did so by inverting the old logic of the nomination bulls, by virtue of which some benefices always were subjected to academic jurisdiction, via a settlement in which all benefices came alternatively under either apostolic or academic jurisdiction. The arbitrariness of this solution—a share of apostolic months being assigned to the Dataria and to the faculty’s nomination board respectively—may seem awkward to modern eyes. Yet, it assured that this legal framework itself in turn could not be become an exemplum of an overarching logic that was prejudicial to the Holy See. It seems, as a result, that not just the conflicts over jurisdictional and other prerogatives are unable to be distinguished from the endless litigation over ceremonial prerogatives in the early modern period, as Ago has pertinently suggested. The solutions too resemble those analised in the studies of Stollberg-Rilinger and her students on the legalisation of conflicts over rank, status, and the related ritual prerogatives: Regimini, just as much as the Concordats of the 15th century, intro-
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duced countless qualifications about who could exert which jurisdictional prerogatives in which circumstances. The effects of the bull are comparable as well: in the course of the next two centuries, academics and their competitors would prove to be very inventive in carving out new loopholes in Regimini as much as in the other nomination bulls, and they handily turned them to their advantage. This would not only fuel an endless stream of litigation and result in an impressive jurisprudence that added even more qualifications to the rights and prerogatives exerted by all parties. Until the French Revolution, conflicts over the privileges of nomination, often provoked by conflicts over specific benefices, would also continue to provide an excellent platform from which to reaffirm academic identities and to realise the academic role in society despite all uncertainties, just as they had done in the period under investigation. The time has come, after a short epilogue, to pull things together in order to understand why academics were convinced their world would collapse without privileges.
EPITAPH
When in Rome, the reader is invited to seek shelter in the silent shadows of the Santa Maria dell’Anima. In the choir of this imperial church, he or she will be drawn to the splendid renaissance tomb of an eternally melancholic Hadrian VI, the “papa fiammingo” who had been a driving force behind the Faculty of Arts’ attempts to obtain its own privilege of nomination in the beginning of the 16th century. Receding into the solemn darkness of the nave, the visitor is gently asked to salute the epitaph, dedicated by Cesare Baronio to his friend Gravius, at the base of the first column in the left aisle, while appropriately turning his or her back on the funerary bust of Franciscus Oranus. In the other side-aisle of the Anima, when contemplating the Martyrdom of Saint Lambert by Jan van Miel in one of the two Liège chapels, you will be gazed upon from patrician heights by the busts of Lambertus and Aegidius Ursinus De Vivariis, whose names once struck so much terror in scholars seeking to redeem their poverty into a benefice (or two). On the way out, the monuments for Cardinal Andreas of Austria, governor-general during Albert’s journey to Ferrara and Valencia in 1598–99, and William of Enckenvoirt, the voracious curialist who had narrowly failed to thwart Louvain’s ambitions in the early 16th century, may keep the mind focused on the vanity of worldly affairs. Before emerging into the sensual light of the Eternal City again, have a short look at the tombstones at the entrance. One of them eternalises the name of Cornelius Henricus Mottman, a Liège patrician; alumnus of the universities of Louvain, Cologne, Vienna, and Ingolstadt; and (since 1628) Rota Auditor for the Empire, who embarked on his last journey in 1638.1 Mottman’s tomb also paves the way out of his book. From 1618 onwards, he figured on the payroll of the Arts faculty as its salaried procurator in Rome. Mottman was the right man in the right place, having succeeded De Vivariis, on presentation by the board of provisors of the Santa Maria dell’Anima, as the revisor of supplications for the Empire.2 His Louvain brief consisted largely of keeping an eye on the
1 2
A biography in Indekeu, “Motmans.” Vaes, “Les curialistes belges,” 104.
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activities of the Dataria in order to eradicate at their roots all possible requests for provisions of benefices that already had been filled in by the academics by virtue of Regimini. This task was probably facilitated by Louvain’s involvement in the De Dominis affair, as Mottman found the datario—Robaulx’ contact at the curia—most affectionate towards the university.3 Few of his letters ended up in academic records, however, the monitoring of Roman affairs having been delegated to a special committee. The difficulties Mottman and his employers faced in making the Elector of Cologne comply with the papal brief of 1617 in favour of three academics did not bode well: in 1622, two of the three promised canonships had not been conferred yet on Robaulx’ candidates.4 Worse, the Prince-Bishop raised the spectre of abuse again, Robaulx having resigned his canonship at Liège Cathedral in exchange for a Cambrai canonship. The former envoy of the States of Brabant retired from academic affairs as the De Dominis affair dragged on, and he died a deacon of the metropolitan church of Cambrai in 1641. His short passage at Liège reveals, however, that Regimini had not settled once and for all the conflicts triggered by competition between university men and other clerics on the clerical job market. Browsing through the elaborate Indices on faculty minutes, the historian is confronted with endless litigation over benefices; with renewed attempts of the University of Douai to appropriate the Louvain privileges in the ecclesiastical province of Cambrai; with curialist machinations; with coalitions of bishops and chapters; and with discussions about academic poverty, abuse and its remedy. Names of cardinals, ambassadors, princes, popes, papal providees, legists, and powerful academic dons continue to pass under review. Memoranda on the academic role in society continued to be sent to Rome, Brussels, Madrid, or Vienna. Divines carrying bags filled with memoranda and recommendations continued to cross the Alps in order to safekeep the link among orthodoxy, benefices, and themselves. The first obstacle that had to be removed was the opposition of the bishop of Ypres against the granting of the placet,5 postponing in effect the ratification of the Roman bulls 3 “Mirifice enim erga almam universitatem vestram afficitur, Quare de ipsius patrocinio perpetuo certi esse possumus.” Mottman to the Faculty of Arts, Acta Facultatis Artium, 5 January 1619, RAL, OUL, 715, 244–46. 4 Faculty of Arts to Guidi di Bagno, 1 February 1622, BN, Manuscrits Latins, 5174, 115r. An elaborate correspondence on this matter in Liber dictatoris, RAL, OUL, 103. 5 “Supplie bien humblement, que V.A. serenissime soit servie de naccorder ausdicts Lovanistes ses lettres de placet endroit lexecution de ladicte augmentantion du privilege que preallable le remonstrant et aultres susmentionez collateurs des benefices
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Plate 8.1. Funerary busts Lambertus and Aegidius Ursinus De Vivariis Funerary busts in the Chapel of Saint Lambert in the Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome in the Chapel’s founder, Lambertus Ursinus De Vivariis, patrician from Liège (–1619), who, according to his epitaph, “earned the esteem of the entire curia because of his knowledge of the affairs of the Dataria and of the Apostolic Chancery”, and of his nephew, Aegidius Ursinus De Vivariis (c.1568–1647), Referendarius Utriusque Signaturae, canon of Saint Peter’s, Patriarch of Jerusalem and Datario under the pontificate of Urban VIII (1623–44)
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in archducal territories until 1619. In 1622, Roman intelligence found the Belgian bishops had appointed an agent at the curia in an attempt to neutralise the new taxa in the Pauline Concordat; hopes that were dashed, however, by the 1625 sentence of the Great Council of Mechlin in favour of Vande Velde. Mottman was also involved in the academics’ successful attempts to keep the Jesuits out. In his letters to Saint-Cyran, Cornelius Jansenius had stated sarcastically, when commenting on the attempts to have the order’s founder canonised, that the fathers now wanted Loyola to govern the kingdom of heaven as they tried to rule the earth6—which left them apparently enough energy to hold, in the wake of the 1618 controversy over the interpretation of the Visitatio, “leur pied sur la gorge de l’université.”7 In the ensuing war of propaganda, the Jesuits were suspected by the academics of plotting against their nominees, of rallying their cause to those of the bishops and cathedrals who tried to exclude the Lovanienses from their chapters, and of endearing themselves to Brussels types, the papal providee in question being the son of Neuvelt, archducal ambassador to the king of France.8 In 1626, when academics gathered in the collegiate church of Saint Peter’s to celebrate the university’s bicentenary anniversary, the conflict with the fathers was dragging to its end. This has largely been ascribed to Cornelius Jansenius’ journey to Spain, resulting in a coalition of universities mobilising against the Order; and to the services rendered by Brizuela, now a member of the revamped Consejo de Flandes y de Borgoña in Madrid.
ignorants desdicts despeches nayent inspection et communication dicelles pour par ce moien faire connoistre a VA serenissime leurs griefs en ce regart et moiens dester quelques abus lesquels se trouveront estre glisees en lusance de semblables privileges et malentendus dentre les collateurs et lesdicts de luniversite et faculte.” Apostilla of 6 July 1617, Université de Louvain 1556–1639, AGR, Conseil Privé, 1281. Canonships at Saint Martin’s cathedral, which had been disputed in court since the middle of the 1610s, were at the origin of the bishop’s opposition. 6 “Entre autres choses ils taschent de le faire recevoir par ses Theses, comme Patron des Universités, de la Théologie, et Theologiens, des femmes enceinctes, des scrupuleux, de Louvain cui salutis certae ab ipso dandae omen contigerit, des enfans au ventre de la mere. . . . Somme il semble qu’il ne reste autre chose à leur opinion, sinon, qu’il se mette à gouverner le ciel, comme Cyprin [= the Jesuits] tasche de gouverner la terre.” Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, 13 June 1622, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 152–53. 7 Jansenius to Saint-Cyran, 3 July 1618, ed. Orcibal, Correspondance de Jansénius, 36. 8 See Acta Facultatis Artium, 19 May 1623, RAL, OUL, 715, 495.
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The reader will have gathered that the settings in which the solemn festivities of 1626 took place were very different from those in the previous chapters. If Brizuela monitored Flemish-Burgundian affairs from Madrid, it is because his most serene highness Albert of Austria, the Perseus who had liberated Andromeda Belgica from the three-headed monster of heresy, had migrated from the old palace of the dukes of Burgundy on the Brussels Coudenberg to the Celestial Court in the early morning of 13 July 1621. His funerary procession strides along for eternity in Eurycius Puteanus’ Pompa funebris optimi potentissimique principis Alberti, an iconographical document recording the personnes de qualité—bishops and other Church dignitaries, members of court, ministers of the Collateral Councils—of the Habsburg Netherlands who had participated in the public choreography of mourning in March 1622 as much as in the countless plots unfolding in this book. Albert the Pious was buried in Saint Gudula, where a college of canons founded by the dukes of Brabant could pray for his soul. He appropriately rests under a modest stone in front of the altar of the Sacrament of Miracle: the token of the Habsburgs’ Manifest Destiny since Albert’s distant forefather Rudolph I had ceded his horse to a priest carrying the Eucharist to a deathbed and had been rewarded for it with prophecies about universal rule. Fears that the archduke’s death would trigger a new crisis of the body politic in the archducal Netherlands, did not become a reality. Ironically, Philip III would never see the Netherlands return to the folds of the Monarchy, the Spanish king having preceded Albert into the grave in March 1621. His successor Philip IV appointed Isabella as Governess General of the Low Countries in order to assure a smooth transition. Philip’s ascension to the throne also marked the end of the Pax Hispanica. During much of Isabella’s reign, the mighty army of Flanders, commanded by the Virgin of Lepanto herself, squeezed the heretics in the North hard. At her passing, however, the South and Spain were, after the fall of Den Bosch, Maastricht, Venlo, Roermond, and other fortified towns, on the defensive. Isabella joined Albert, after a sober funeral service, in his grave on the evening of 5 December 1633, under dark clouds gathering over the Monarquía. The tomb of that other great prince figuring in this story, Paul V, was a wee bit less modest. Papa Borghese, for whom the bells of Saint Peter’s had tolled in January 1621, was buried in the Capella Paolina in Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the most splendid achievements of the
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Roman Baroque, in the vicinity of the relics of San Carlo Borromeo and Santa Francesca Romana, saints he himself had elevated to the altars. There he can be found kneeling towards the funeral statue on the other side of the chapel of his patron, Clement VIII Aldobrandini, who in his pontifical majesty stretches his arm to his creatura in an eternal blessing. Both tombs celebrated the Roman pontiffs’ double sovereignty as temporal rulers and as vicars of Christ. The bas-reliefs on Clement VIII’s tomb eternalise the feats of the Aldobrandini pontificate: the devolution of Ferrara to the States of the Church in 1598; the wars against the Turks; the Absolution of Henry IV of France. The tomb of Paul V, with scenes of princely ambassadors genuflecting for the papal prince and of the Rome-sponsored campaigns of Rudolph II against the Sublime Porte, commemorates the arrival of diplomatic delegations from the emperor of Japan and of the king of the Congo, much publicised events that raised the profile of the Roman pontiffs as universal pastors. The faction of Pietro Aldobrandini, the Louvain cardinal-protector, managed to defeat the candidate of the cardinal-nephew in office, Scipione Borghese, at the 1621 conclave. The election of Ludovisi, a Borghese creatura, was a compromise9 but exposes the fragile hold of nepotist factions on politics even after a long pontificate. Under Gregory XV, new procedures, including the secret ballot, were crafted in order to roll back nepotist practices during conclaves electing the Vicars of Christ.10 Aldobrandini himself died on 10 February, the day after Ludovisi’s election. Amid the carefully staged enthroning ceremonies that enacted the transitoriness of papal rule, while the Roman mob performed its own transition rites by looting the palaces of the new pontiff ’s family,11 the former nipote was buried in the Minerva. His death failed to receive much publicity in Louvain quarters, however, where no attempts were made to appoint another cardinal-protector for the university. The theological advisor of both popes, Cardinal Bellarmino, put down forever his restless pen in the same year. The future Doctor of the Church was buried in the Roman Sant’Ignazio, in the tomb that had belonged to Ignatius of Loyola before the latter’s beatification and
9 10 11
Visceglia, “Fazioni e lotta politica.” On this subject, see Wassilowsky, “Dall’Adorazione allo scrutinio segreto.” On the looting of palaces as a transition rite, see Visceglia, La città rituale, 62–63.
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in the immediate vicinity of two other Jesuit saints from Flanders and Italy: San Luigi Gonzaga, the patron of hormonally afflicted students in Federico Fellini’s Amarcord; and Saint Jan Berchmans from Diest, whose manifest sanctity as a seminary student had, in distant days, triggered a feud between Archbishop Hovius and the Society’s talent scouts. Far from incorrupt, Bellarmino’s remains have become tangible history, displayed as they are to the faithful in a windowed coffin underneath a silver death mask and the cardinal robe. The first attempts to have him beatified dated from 1627. Heretics felt less inhibited than Catholics when assessing his merits: already in 1614, years before the cardinal’s passing, a German pamphlet had given a colourful description of Bellarmino’s desperation in the hour of death—an unmistakable sign of his eternal damnation—and let his ghost wander through the dark alleys and dungeons of the Castel Sant’Angelo, as even the hellish Satan would not give shelter to his blackened soul.12 The other “Louvain doctor” in the Caput Mundi, Peter Lombard, remained active as an expert of the Holy Office, intervened in the row over the Malabar rites in the 1620s, and continued the good work of filling in vacant bishoprics of Ireland with Louvain alumni.13 He must have cheered the foundation at Louvain, after the success of the Franciscan College of Saint Anthony’s in 1607, of an Irish Pastoral College for secular clerics in 1624 under the supervision of the recently founded Roman Congregation De Propaganda Fide. Lombard was not party to the foundation of an Irish college in Rome in 1625, having died in the beginning of that year. Curiously, the Irishman’s remains ended up in the parish church of Palombara Sabina, a small town in the Colli Sabini, dozens of miles from the tombs of the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnel in the Spanish church of San Pietro in Montorio.14 A few years later, David Rothe, Lombard’s former secretary in Rome and his eyes and ears in Ireland as the bishop of Ossory, implored Luke Wadding to dispatch the late archbishop’s “laborious writings” to him “so that they would not sink into oblivion.” Unfortunately, they did: although some of his papers ended up in the archives of Saint Isidore and in the Vatican Library, Lombard’s correspondence has been lost;
12 This text is elaborately discussed in Paintner, Das die Jesuiten rechte vnd eigentliche Verfolger Jhesu Christi sein. I wish to thank the author for drawing my attention to it. 13 O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 86. 14 Cf. Clavin, “Lombard, Peter”.
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only one work of his hand, a (rigorist) treatise on the sacrament of Penance, was committed to the printing presses in his lifetime. It was reprinted in 1625, for polemical reasons, by the Belgian Jesuit Aegidius De Coninck.15 Bellarmino’s pupil and correspondent Leonardus Lessius was not among the fathers who had proclaimed, in 1626, the university the Pillar of Belgium. The Society’s prolific writer, teacher, controversialist, and exorcist at Louvain met his Maker in January 1623. He made a brief comeback from the world beyond in 1646, when he was reported to have performed a miracle in favour of the afflicted Catholics of Friesland.16 Lessius now rests in the former Jesuit church of Saint Michael’s at Louvain, between the rows of confessionals that generated a confused flock yearning for (frequent) consolation by the Church’s sacraments. The archbishop conducting the Te Deum in 1626 was not Matthias Hovius: he had grown weary of travelling through the Vineyard of the Lord entrusted to him, of visiting parishes, of punishing frivolous pastors. Hovius had found eternal peace in the early morning of 30 May 1620, in his abbey of Affligem, comforted by the sacraments administered to him by his vicar (and successor) Jacobus Boonen. After a solemn funeral procession and a Mass conducted by the bishop of Antwerp, Joannes Malderus, he was buried in the choir of his cathedral, while thousands of masses were sung for his soul in the churches of his diocese.17 Nor did Jacobus Jansonius, who at his friend’s funeral had held a pious oration interlarded with quotations from the Scripture, participate to the 1626 festivities. After years of physical afflictions, the old don had migrated to a better world with his Saviour’s name on his lips on 30 July 1625, two months after Cornelius Jansenius had briefed, in the presence of Andrea Trevigi, the academic senate on his first mission to Spain against the Jesuits.18 Jansonius had died “non sine opinione sanctitatis”: as the death bells tolled, not only the pedants of the schools but also the entire citizenry gathered before the gates of 15 Petrus Lombardus, Casus circa decretum Clementis Papae VIII de Sacramentali confessione et absolutione non faciendâ in absentiâ (Antwerp, 1624), in Aegidius De Coninck, Responsio ad dissertationem impugnantem Absolutionem Moribundi sensibus destituti, Antwerp: ex officinis Marci Nutii, 1625. 16 Frijhoff, Embodied Belief, 132. 17 Harline and Put, A Bishop’s Tale, 285. 18 Acta Universitatis, 16 May 1625, RAL, OUL, 64, 531v.
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the Pope’s College in order to catch the last gleam of this Man of God; to touch or kiss his lifeless body, which in its unseen beauty already started to emit the sweetest odours of sanctity; or to rip off a piece of his clothes or a few precious hairs.19 Le bon vieillard was buried in the college chapel, next to Michael Baius; “so that their bones would touch each other and death would not separate what had been united by doctrine and piety.” This must have been Jansonius’ final victory over Jacobus Baius, who had found his last resting place in the choir of Saint Peter’s and lost the battle for his uncle’s legacy in the eyes of posterity. In his will, from which Joannes Schinckelius had been removed as an executor a few days before Jansonius’ death, he had founded a perpetual Mass in honour of Saint Augustine. Others would seek to eternalise, in return, his name. In 1630, a first Elogium et vita eximii domini Jacobi Jansonii appeared from the hand of Joannes Masius, a future abbot of Park, as an introduction to the posthumous publication of Jansonius’ commentaries on the Gospel of Saint John. Another biographical outline appeared in a 1655 letter of his former student, later college administrator, Joannes Vander Meulen, to Van Vianen, a successor of Jansonius as president of the Pope’s College.20 Thus, Jansonius became himself an exemplum worthy of imitation, via a series of anecdotes that illustrated the man’s piety, modesty, and conscientiousness as an administrator, a spiritual guide, and a teacher; his deep understanding of the human soul and of demonic powers as an exorcist; his simplicity and sincerity in his dealings with the great of the earth as an academic lobbyist; and the Christian humility with which he embraced his infirmity in the last years of his life. The chapel, the tombs, and the buildings in which the ghosts of Jansonius and Baius dwelled can no longer be venerated. They had to vacate the field for more aristocratic accommodations in the 18th century, a fate that befell most Louvain colleges and university buildings. The Blackfriar Iñigo de Brizuela, who had been promoted to the bishopric of Segovia after Albert’s death, went down in history as “el 19 “Ubi e vivis excessit turmatim ad corpus eius visendum ex tota Urbe, et Academia omnes confluxerunt, Tangere, oscula figere, e vestibus et coma aliquid decerpere singuli contendebant, nec unquam venustior ulli visus est quam post mortem, et vero etiam suavissimum emitti ex ejus corpore odorem nemo non judicabat.” Vernulaeus, Academia Lovaniensis, 154. 20 Both texts, together with Jansonius’ will, have been edited in Ceysens, “Autour de Jacques Jansonius.”
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obispo-presidente de Flandes” because of his active role in the Council of Flanders and Burgundy.21 Joannes Drusius survived Jansonius for ten more years; he displayed, from a Roman point of view, too much zeal as the protector of the university’s jurisdiction against papal providees and felt compelled, in 1627, to draw up an Apologia. He died in 1634 and rests in the choir of the abbey of Park near Louvain, an island of silence and tranquillity in an ever bustling university town. Andrea Trevigi remained in Brussels as the Infanta’s physician and as the healer of Louvain’s Jesuit afflictions. With him, his lineage became extinct, and his last whereabouts are unknown. Yet, he is difficult to avoid in the Piedmontese town of Casale Monferrato, the theatre of the collapse of the Pax Hispanica in Italy in the late 1620s. The Palazzo Trevisio, where he founded, with the support of the ruling Gonzaga, an Augustinian college with grants for poor youth, is in a bad shape, but the local secondary school and one of the town’s main historic streets still bear his name. Cornelius Jansenius, Trevigi’s correspondent in the recurrent skirmishes with the Jesuits both at Louvain and in the periphery, continued to comment with wit on academic business in his letters with his brother in arms Saint-Cyran. In the genealogy of heresy, a lot of illegitimate children surface: Jansonius was not the successor of Baius; he became his successor, in spite of Baius himself. Jansenius was not the spiritual son of Jansonius either, as the don had many clients and had tried to leave his chair to another promising divine. He failed, just as much as Michael Baius had failed to leave his chair to his nephew: it is only in 1630 that the Dutchman acquired Jansonius’ chair. The scholar from Holland would die in 1638 as the bishop of Ypres and was buried in his cathedral. His tomb, or rather his epitaph, would soon become the object of vehement controversies. But that is a story for another book.
21
Cf. Esteban Estríngana, Madrid e Bruselas, passim.
CONCLUSIONS
In the late afternoon of 14 October 1597, Frangipani wrote a letter to Sandrino to congratulate his famigliare with his graduation as a bachelor in Law. The nuncio did not omit to mention that he had warmly recommended his client to the two university men who had joined him as table companions. The delegates—one of whom was the Law professor (and Sandrino’s academic patron) Stephanus Weyms— had promised to do everything in their power to advance Sandrino’s honour and glory. Academics had good reasons to cater to the needs of the nuncio’s clientele. For it was not just a succulent meal that had been on the table but also the alarming number of Roman writs against university men seizing benefices by virtue of nomination privileges granted, respectively, in 1483 and 1513 to the University of Louvain and to its Faculty of Arts. Frangipani had courteously abstained from contradicting their “images”; not, however, because he had been a wee bit convinced by hyperbolic statements about privileges without which the Catholic frontier would collapse. The affable prelate, who dressed down academic claims as “voluntary, not necessary,” had endorsed them because of what the academics stood for; because they represented that which was worthy of veneration and exhortation. Apparently, supporting academic claims did not entail believing them.1 This brings us back to the central problem of this book. How could academics and their overlords hold that privileges which endowed them with a corner of the clerical job market were essential for the survival of the university and of Catholicism in the Low Countries? This question will be tackled in the last section. The path will be paved by two sections which furnish the reader with a synopsis and preliminary conclusions.
“Cum causa voluntaria sit, non necessaria” A first dichotomy underpinning Frangipani’s letter separates (“futile”) interests and a poorly defined academic role in Society. A Roman 1
Frangipani to Sandrino, 14 October 1597, ed. Louant, Correspondance, 246–47.
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diplomat, the Italian had vented his scepticism about academic jurisdiction in the first place, but his question marks can easily be extrapolated to the privileges of nomination. Benefices, in this view, were part of the so-called “structures of science” that supported, but did not affect, an inner core of learning and/or religious beliefs. Obtained via the privileges or otherwise, they were replaceable, “voluntaria,” as a means of financing. The energy going into the defence of academic claims in the field, and the existence of alternative channels of employment for graduates, suggest that these somewhat anachronistic privileges in a Tridentine Age should have been ditched in favour of more modern financing techniques that would allow academics to attend to their core business. Leaving aside the question of whether anomalies of this type should retain our attention, one wonders whether material interests are the best line of approach to religious phenomena, the obligatory excursions to the realm of theological controversy and pastoral theories notwithstanding. The debates over Justification, papal primacy, or sacramental practice are ultimately irreducible to conflicts over benefices. This book subscribes to the need to avoid reductionist interpretations making learning and religion the plaything of external forces. It firmly rejects, however, the internalist implication that this legitimises building, a priori, all kinds of boundaries between supposedly distinct spheres of human activity. It is more rewarding to investigate how dichotomies such as the one in Frangipani’s letter materialised and could thrive, rather than to interrupt artificially the flow that brought us from benefices, to grants, college life, spirituality, and ecclesiastical hierarchy, to earthly and heavenly Grace, Augustine, sacraments, and back again. The assumptions underlying this book and the applied methods were designed to capture these hybrid, networked realities and the multitudes of actors involved in them. By going back to the laboratories of Society, Power, and Truth, we could observe academics “in action,” just before they became the indispensable instruments of a transcendental logic. The result was a de-centred, bottom-up approach that capitalised on the heterogeneity and multiplicity of early modern Catholicism in order to reconstruct the continuous negotiations of chains of actors wondering how to act as one. In this approach, medieval privileges could stop figuring as baffling anomalies and obstacles to “Trent” or other “trends” diffusing themselves over Christendom, and became a passage point to the academic world instead.
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For reasons of clarity and argument, the chapters of this book did not solely describe the trials of academics working towards making themselves and their privileges indispensable. Description was combined with proceedings that bear some similarities to “weak measurement” in Quantum Physics, where the measuring device is only loosely coupled to the measured system in order to assure minimal disturbance. This procedure has recently added substance to Hardy’s Paradox, that the laws of nature might not work properly when nobody is looking. In historiographical practice, “not looking” was achieved by the coupling and decoupling of research paradigms to and from the researched phenomena (e.g., the market and the benefice system; Mikropolitik and decision-making). The outcome—realities that are much more chaotic, orchestrated, localised, and elusive than the norm in a Euro-American culture of knowledge2—opens a window of opportunities for historians charging agents themselves with the job of ordering the world. Only in an originally flat, disorganised world could the practice of privilege start to make a difference. The first part, The Weight of the World, appropriately ended on a confusing note. The availability (or paucity) of benefices for students and teachers as a means to finance deeply informed academic life— in universities founded around collegiate churches that could draw on local church hierarchy to devise academic hierarchies; but also in university colleges that thrived on grants for students and on administrative functions for an emerging staff rather than on beneficeholding. The history of universities, which remained hotspots of clerical presence after the Middle Ages, had always been intertwined with that of the clerical job market, whose fluctuations fuelled, to varying degrees and with different outcomes, the hierarchisation and the professionalisation of the academic enterprise. The logic of the market, however, fails to explain academic mobilisation around their “job agencies.” Powerful clauses coming with academic nominations could, admittedly, be used to fob off competitors in specific circumstances. Leaving 2 Cf. p. 51 and 55–57. In Euro-American metaphysics, reality (1) does not only exist out there beyond ourselves but, in addition, has to be: (2) independent of our actions; (3) anterior to our discoveries; (4) definite, i.e., more or less specific, clear, certain, and definable, provided that the proper methods are used to list its characteristics; (5) eventually singular and homogeneous (instead of multiple and heterogeneous); and (6) stable, in the sense that it remains constant if not disturbed. Cf. Law, After Method, 8–9.
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aside problems of interpretation, the evidence points to a correspondence between enhanced competition on the clerical job market and soaring numbers of academic nominations. Yet, without the datasheets that make investors, enterprises, or governments determine their line of action, it remains unclear to what extent these hundreds of individual stories could become streamlined market forces that, in return, determined policy. If academics occasionally developed a general assessment of their chances on the clerical job market, this coincided with large-scale disruptions (the late medieval crisis on a European level; or the Civil War in the 1570s and 1580s) that could be observed in formats that are not unequivocally macro-economical: respectively the ecclesiological discussions in the Conciliarist crisis and the narrative of collapse and resurrection. The archetypical squeals about poor scholars struggling to acquire a meagre benefice were only loosely related to shortages, the archducal period being an era of opportunity for graduated clerics seeking employment. And it remains a moot point whether privileges were, in a market scenario, worth the fight in a regional church notable for its openness to graduates and their old boys’ networks. In the absence of the invisible hand of the market, the abyss between the plights of individual graduates on the one hand, and the survival of the university and of the frontier against the heretics on the other, needs to be bridged by something else to understand collective action fuelled by the need to defend scholarly privileges: politics. Politics were central to the second part of this book, Assembling Academia. Different explanatory models, underpinned by analytical tools that have informed much of recent scholarship, were explored with the help of one specific conflict: the longstanding “Roman Question” concerning academic claims by virtue of the privilege of nomination of the Arts faculty to benefices situated in the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. This Negotium Romanum consisted in a series of legal conflicts that, from 1588 onwards, were fought with variable intensity. These typically opposed academic nominees and papal providees and escalated into conflicts between academic tribunals, supported by princely councils, and their apostolic counterparts. Academic claims were eventually honoured, after three decades of lobbying in Brussels and Rome, in the bull Regimini Universalis. The notion of two monolithic interest groups with noncommensurate views of Church reform contesting each other’s hold on the clerical job market—an aristocratic model in the Principality of Liège, an
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outpost of the Imperial Church, versus a bourgeois brand in the Low Countries—proved problematic. The prosopographical datasheet of academic nominees and their competitors—Liège curialists and their local contacts, often with ramifications in the Liège patriciate—were not that different. The circuits of Louvain-trained clerics, a privileged Liège Church, and Roman officialdom overlapped. Underneath the commonplace of foreigners raiding the richest benefice pool of Christendom, the overwhelming majority of nominees for Liège benefices were native to the region. The interest groups in the Roman Question took form in the conflicts over benefices, in the practices to acquire them, and in the sources recording it all, rather than being the inevitable outcome of “class wars” within the Catholic clergy. This constatation led to two, not mutually exclusive, explanations for the academics’ staunch attachment, as a group, to their privileges. The first line of argument holds that, for the academic community in its entirety, privilege had a high identitary value. The privileges symbolised an academic poverty that distinguished university men from the power and opulence of their adversaries, thus hiding from view the domination of the academic field by the realms of power that academic learning had to legitimise. Moreover, because of the involvement of ecclesiastical benefices, they raised the profile of the university as a bastion of the secular clergy against encroachments of the religious orders, not only on pastoral care but also on the educational field. Symbols or symbolic practices of this type, then, had to lift the status inconsistency haunting the academic field throughout the continent, caused by the proliferation and the institutional differentiation of higher education and the emergence of other players claiming a hold on truth in the battle against heresy. It is safe to conclude that, in the light of the fragility of scholarly identities, any attack on academic privileges was considered an attack on the ordo academicus and on the honour of its individual members. In this context, it is telling that symbolic practices (graduation rituals) made up the plot of most conflicts between the Jesuits and the universities of Dole, Douai, and Louvain in the period under investigation. Faced with a new order that scarcely resembled older religious orders, that was identified with doctrinal novelty, and that claimed a corner of higher education in its most fertile provinces in northwestern Europe, academics turned to symbolic practices, which the Jesuits sought to imitate and/or to duplicate, as a platform to word their concerns towards the outside world and to get their own act together as
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an interest group in the process. The conflict with the fathers in the 1590s over their plans to organise a philosophical college at Louvain did not only temporarily transfer the Roman Question to the backstage of academic policy. It also offers a telling example of how symbolic practice could effectively structure negotiations over the mutual roles of the secular clerics of the faculties and the fathers in the field of higher education—a problem in which many concerns were, because of their controversial nature, not addressed explicitly—into a recognisable theatre of conflict between two interest groups. Extrapolating these insights to conflicts over jurisdiction and benefices, the analysis of the conflict with the Jesuits as it unfolded in the course of the 1590s, and the structuring role of graduation rituals suggests that we should keep the list of symbolic practices as open as possible, so as to include the practice of privilege as a “functionalising” rite. It also made clear, however, that there is a problem with symbolic practice: the qualification “symbolic” itself. It does not suffice to replace “symbolic” with “performative.” Dissolving the boundaries between theatre and society in the wake of the so-called “Performative Turn” has proved a rewarding procedure in much of recent scholarship. Additional work, however, is needed to address the justified scepticism of historians used to more solid matters of fact and to do justice to the expectations of contemporaries towards the efficacy of their practices. The common graduation rituals of the Faculty of Arts prove to be a case in point. In order to explain why exactly these practices could become a credible stake in what seems to be a textbook-case of university-Jesuit confrontation, we did not turn to a social magic that makes rituals work in a specific subculture, and/or to a related habitus internalised by Homo Academicus to stand up for ceremonial prerogatives projecting scholarly status. The gap left by these arcane forces was, in line with the premises of this book, filled in with more activities nudging rituals into action as ordering devices of the academic order. When legitimising their opposition to separate graduation rituals for the Jesuit alumni, academics blurred the line between symbolic acts, social method, and cognitive technique; between ritual and managerial practice. The mere performance of graduation rituals thus mediated a cycle of credibility in which scholarly achievement generated grants founded by grateful alumni, and grants in turn empowered the fabric of Academia to mould brilliant minds into skilled labourers in the Vineyard of the Lord. The performance of common rituals
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also had to devise stability of doctrine and an undivided body academic. Duplicating graduation rituals inevitably was tantamount to duplicating the ordo academicus within one town, with the monster of multiplicity rearing its ugly head. A much comparable cycle of credibility materialised in the contemporary debates over the technology of Salvation, with diverging modes of sacramental practice generating competing spiritual “business cycles” in which boundaries between religion, infrastructure, and society faded. The results of this analysis tie up with research into “accounting for God” in the Society of Jesus, where the line between spiritual and managerial practices “ordering the Jesuit order” proved to be particularly thin. An additional practice must be taken into consideration in order to understand the performativity of “ritual management practice”: writing. It is in the act of writing about rituals, a practice that included cancelling the heterogeneity of strategies to acquire grants, that promotion rituals themselves could become an automatic device of academic meritocracy; in the administrative sources that informed ritual management theories in memorandums “stabilising”, in return, the highly standardised recording in administrative sources. It is through writing and cancelling that the Louvain doctrine on the Eucharist as the sacrament of Sacrifice was stabilised and that Roman censors conversely could make the miracle of the Eucharist the more or less predictable outcome again of a correctly performed liturgy. It is in writing that the practice itself was homogenised into an object (e.g., promotio; Ignatian spirituality and administration; the liturgy of “the Tridentine Mass”) that existed independently from the more heterogeneous practices it described (ranking students; performing spiritual exercises and administration; liturgical acts). As a consequence, it is in the act of writing that the object of these practices (respectively the academic order, the Society of Jesus, the mystical body of Christ/Society) could acquire more independence from these objectified practices and could, in turn, present themselves as monolithic, streamlined entities framing these practices (rituals as an expression of academic unity; common spiritual and managerial practices as a characteristic of a streamlined, globally operating Society of Jesus; liturgy making present again the lost body of Christ).3
3
Cf. the central point made in Quattrone, “Books to be practised.”
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This relationship between practices, writing (or deleting), and reification resurfaced in the following chapters as well. Graduation rituals devising the academic order they described were substituted by letterwriting (and breaching into the Jesuits’ correspondence) as soon as the unified body academic had to be displaced to the Eternal City and its interests needed to be translated into those of Roman circles. This observation, along with the evidence concerning Liège curialist networks, the Verflechtung or interweaving of Louvain academics with the unprecedented numbers of scholars and experts at the Roman curia, and durable contacts with the “nobility of state” in princely councils or with regional power elites in the States of Brabant have fed another, at first glance much stronger, line of approach. Not market forces or social classes or identitary politics but personal loyalties and clientelist politics determined the agenda of academic boards. It was university dons who turned their clients’ individual interests into the interests of the entire university and who, simultaneously, functioned as ferrymen to the distant banks of power. The ubiquity of clientelism in Louvain quarters, and in contacts with political centres, allows us to conclude that academic policy within and outside the university was determined by personal relations. Learned men crossed the Alps and acted as middlemen between the university and the curia. Their career paths—notably that of the Irishman Peter Lombard—could turn them into powerful patrons themselves. The appointment of big beasts in the Sacred College such as Santori and Aldobrandini as cardinal-protectors of the university bears testimony to the amplitude of academic micropolitical strategies in the City of Grace. Academics could capitalise, especially under the pontificate of Clement VIII, on the policy of the Holy See to emulate the famous schools of Divinity in northwestern Europe and turn Rome into the centre of Catholic orthodoxy. Conversely, the entourage of the pontiff sought to draw the university and its agent into its orbit, thus weakening affiliations with the Spanish faction. Lombard’s rich correspondence with the university in between 1598 and 1612, and the orchestrated flow of flattering letters to his patrons (and back again), fed the culture of favour governing the political centres of early modern Europe—in pontificates that have become textbook-cases in historiography for the micropolitical bent of papal rule in domestic and international politics. References to Lombard’s private correspondence with individual academics suggest that the Irishman was representing some more than others, boosting in return the leverage
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of the higher faculties and of specific factions in academic boards. This led to a seemingly unprincipled shifting of priorities in an “economy of favour.” Lombard’s networks proved strong enough to accommodate academic interests in many affairs but failed to overcome deeply entrenched curialist interest in the Roman Question. As a result, the Irishman forfeited his crédit as an official representative of the university from 1612 onwards. At this stage, academic strategies gradually embedded themselves in diplomatic channels of communication. To an extent, this shift may have mirrored a technocratic turn in papal policy towards Catholic Christendom, after the grand theological programmes of the Peretti and Aldobrandini pontificates had narrowly failed to trigger a crisis of infallibility. This scenario rests on the assumption that references to clientelism should be privileged over hyperbolic, rhetorical statements about privileges that, seen from this perspective, only served individuals and their respective channels of protection at Louvain. To verify this hypothesis, turning back to the moment in which Lombard was writing his reports proved to be a rewarding exercise. A symmetrical analysis including both clientelistic terminology and so-called rhetoric was applied to four case-studies pertaining to different policy areas: the conflict with the Antwerp and other cathedral chapters over nominations to benefices in the new cathedrals of the Habsburg Netherlands (1598–1602); a conflict with the bishop of Antwerp over a foundation of grants (1606–08); the doctrinal debates in the Roman Congregations de Auxiliis (1598–1607); and the censorship by the Holy Office of books on the Eucharist by Louvain divines (1606–09). In each of these affairs, wrapped with different layers of secrecy and discretion in academic sources, more or less the same networks emerged that had also shaped policy in the Roman Question. If “hard facts”—social networks—indeed determined the financial, religious, or doctrinal concerns vented in academic memorandums and official correspondence, this should have become evident. It did not, however. Historians and political scientists who focus on political systems or cultures of decision-making ignore at their peril the political programmes they found too slippery or incredible to involve in the analysis. Realpolitik had to clear the field for real politics; i.e., politics of reality that included a problematisation attracting, via trial and error, the support of relevant negotiation partners, who, after successful entrenchment in the roles ascribed to them, could be mobilised by academics trying to make themselves and their interests
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indispensable to Catholic and/or dynastic restoration. More often than not, the body politic was assembled around these matters of concern in the process, not the other way around. In the Roman Question, the academics’ claim that a confirmation of the privileges of this bastion of the faith on the Catholic Frontier served the interests of the Apostolic See was continuously unravelled by their abuses, which were churned out on a regular basis by papal offices. It was a curialistic machine that undermined the academics’ credibility, rather than a clientelistic faction. Conversely, the distinction between political programmes and systems has revealed itself to be artificial. Micropolitics was as much part of these politics of reality as the political programmes that were the reason for their existence. Just as much as modern historians, early modern theorists and practitioners turned to a micropolitical logic in order to impose some logic and coherence on the fluid microcosms and annoyingly unpredictable procedures they sought to understand and manipulate. Verflechtung should not be reified into a behavioural system or code compensating for the weakness of institutions and abstract norms in an incomplete process of state building. It can better be considered a repertoire of governance that could alternate or overlap with other styles of decision-making and that, when in action, had to be kept in place at great costs and by all means. This was achieved, to a great extent, in writing: in treatises on patronage that, just as much as methodological treatises on sacraments, rituals, or Ignatian spirituality, were books to be practised; in the registers of Scipione Borghese’s patronage secretariat; in the orchestrated flow of correspondence between Louvain and Rome; and in Lombard’s reports. The Irishman’s detailed reports were as prescriptive as they were descriptive. In his Regime of Grace, academic interests flourished thanks to the favourable disposition of pontiffs and members of the Sacred College, with Lombard raising his profile as the academics’ power-broker in the process. Writing up this Regime of Grace, however, also implied deleting elements that did not fit in the picture. His anthropomorphic approach towards the opposition privileged patrons, clients, and clear-cut strategies over routine bureaucratic practice. It was only ditched, with the Regime of Grace itself and the project of a highly visible confirmation of the privileges, in 1609–12, when Lombard prodded the academics temporarily into accepting a technical solution. As a result of academics playing the
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game according to curialist rules, curialists ironically felt compelled to transform into a recognisable faction. The omnipresence of social networks does not make them a passe-partout explanation for decision-making at Louvain, Brussels, or Rome. If one respects the chronology, the power of networks of friends, patrons, and clients tends to materialise together with successful policies—which makes them a poor (and tautological) explanation for these policies. This line of reasoning was also applied to macropolitical dynamics in the following chapters. In the preamble to the bull Regimini Universalis of 1616, the archduke was mentioned as the first of a series of humble petitioners, alongside the States of Brabant and the university, imploring the pontiff to use the plenitude of his power. Power has, so far, remained something of an enigma. In the first decade of the 17th century, it largely remained a theoretical notion as far as the Roman Question was concerned, the pontiff leaning towards not wielding power. From 1612 onwards, by contrast, academic policy in Rome and princely policy towards the universities of the Habsburg Netherlands and Burgundy became something of an item. This feeds the conclusion that academic interests were increasingly absorbed by the re-emerging dynastic state in the South, with corporatist, semi-constitutional privileges figuring simultaneously as a means of financing universities without burdening the treasury and as a harmless, largely symbolic cover for the loss of autonomy of academic corporations towards the State. In this view, archducal policy towards universities can be related to the attempts of urban and central power elites to restore the religious, social, and cultural tissue and the corresponding channels of communication and conflict mediation furnished by the privileged corporations in the South’s towns and cities. The distinction between corporatist university financing and the Trojan horse of state subsidies should, by consequence, not be exaggerated, especially not in the case of contested privileges calling continuously for the protection of great princes. A few elements reduce something of the surprise. The relevant chapters in this book confirm, as far as university policy is concerned, the assessment of the Truce as a prolongation of the war by other means, through the consolidation of Habsburg rule in the reconciled provinces and the inculcation of a Catholicism of a confessionalised bent on both sides of the Demarcation Line. With the spiritual danger
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of heresy now substituting the military threat, the bastions of the Faith moved to the frontline of the House of Israel, resonating in hundreds of diplomatic dispatches to Rome in favour of the universities of Flanders and Burgundy. In the 1610s, the Roman Question became entangled with academic reform under princely authority in the visitation of the University of Louvain (1607–17), which in turn was intertwined with reform at Douai and Dole. At first glance, this episode in the history of Louvain is a textbook case of princely absolutism encroaching on scholarly autonomy in a region that can be considered a showcase of etatist, top-down confessionalisation. Before going into the finale of the Roman Question and the manifestation of papal power coming with it, it was therefore appropriate to delve into the Arcana Imperii. The goal was not to deny the reality of power. Rather, the analysis aimed to track how power was practically assembled before it could become such an overwhelming force. This implied reviving the “State in Action” behind the “Action of the State,” an exercise in which the boundaries between the powerful and the powerless faded. Meandering and often bumpy negotiations in a wide range of affairs, which had started in 1607 after a formal visitation tour by commissioners under papal and princely authority, converged eventually in the solemn promulgation in 1617 of two princely charters with the codification of statutes pertaining to all aspects of academic life and to the functioning of academic tribunals respectively. State power could manifest itself not in spite of, but thanks to the initiative being overtaken by a chain of participants who appropriated it and adjusted the enterprise to their own concerns; and who mutually enhanced each other in their roles of obedient subjects, power elites, and rulers acting in harmony with each other. The result is a much more realistic notion of power as a collective phenomenon that needed to be kept in place at great costs and by all means. The format of a visitation legitimised by Tridentine decrees allowed university men to transform their heterogeneous, multi-layered, and occasionally conflicting interests into a singular Public Interest sanctioned by the highest authorities in the realm and in Christendom. Reform fuelled the formal hierarchisation and the informal oligarchisation of academic governance, with powerful dons acting as natural representatives of the learned communities in Brussels and enhancing their sway over academic affairs in return. Their power materialised in the format of reform, however, which allowed bundling the interests of many via enhanced lines of communication with power and via the
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writing up, pruning, and codification of statutes. The canonisation of academic statutes allowed university dons, under princely authority, to turn their model of the university into a model university: a bastion of the secular clergy in charge of the formation of able lawyers, bureaucrats, and pastoral theologians for whom the Science of Salvation was, above all, an applied science. These multiple activities and actors were censured away when the messy laboratory of power was tidied up; the initiative for the Visitatio of 1617 was ascribed, from its preamble down to recent scholarship, to powerful princes; and academics became obedient subjects of greater forces they could not manipulate. Statutory reform was attributed an expurgatory effect. At regular intervals, normalised practices in legislative texts performed as passage points to a higher truth than the “concrete practices” that more often than not did not even make it to the records, making statutes and statutory reform excellent tools to counter incriminations of abuse. The homologation of the relevant statutes of the Arts faculty concerning the nomination procedures in 1615 by the “apostolic” visitators of the university, with the explicit goal of purifying academics from abuse in the Eternal City (and of settling accounts within the university), intertwined the Roman Question with academic reform. This occurred after archducal diplomacy had proved impotent, in 1612–14, in pushing through a confirmation of the privileges. Under Paul V, the Roman Question had become a test case of the papal prince’s resolve to confront encroachments on ecclesiastical liberty and apostolic jurisdiction. This episode of the Roman Question allows us to pull together a number of insights from the preceding chapters and to put them into a new perspective. Substance was added to the metamorphosis of academic interest into Public Interest via the identification of academic privileges with constitutions of the Duchy of Brabant. It is not just that academics had at last found the right, legalist tune in the political culture of the Low Countries; a political culture that was proverbial, in Roman eyes, for its staunch attachment to all things constitutional. This “Culture” was, after all, fuelled from below by academics who, by tapping into constitutionalist programmes, could revive their own hobby-horse of a highly visible confirmation of the privileges in solemn papal bulls. The analysis of different legal solutions that had been on the table in 1612–16 offered a better understanding of the web of implicit understandings and interests at stake and exposed the performative activity of legal practices generating the ordo academicus
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that legitimised them. This ordo was not just constituted in a symbolic way. The legal practices in question fixated competitors of poor scholars as offenders against notorious privileges who had to bear the onus of proof. Having embarked this story in the 1590s on an application of the dramaturgical model, it was appropriate to end on a theatrical note. It was not micropolitics, beefed up by archducal channels of communication, that brought the Roman Question to an end. In 1615, academics ditched the Regime of Grace that had framed their strategies until then as well as the corresponding definition of the problem, that a confirmation of the privileges was in the interests of the Holy See. The 1615 expurged statutes, which locked the Belgian powers that be in a coalition around the university’s interests, became the mediator of a configuration of conflict in which not honouring academic claims would inevitably undermine the authority of the Apostolic See in the Habsburg Netherlands. Ironically, the cutting-through of all micropolitical contacts and their alternating with a strictly legalist, bureaucratic programme in the Low Countries—a strategy that mirrored those deployed by the Liège curialists in the previous decades in Rome—would nudge the pontiff in action. Jurisdictional conflicts do not relate only to identities in the same way as the endless conflicts over rank and precedence; they share their highly scripted, orchestrated character as well. The outcome of this carefully engineered stalemate, the bull Regimini Universalis, found a way for academics and the pontiff to agree not to agree over which jurisdiction ranked higher, in a way that bears some similarity with complicated ceremonial settlements. The Venetian dance of the academics with the papal prince in 1615–16 was rigorously choreographed and culminated in a reconciliation that restored the pontiff to his role of benign father pondering the plights of his daughter, the University of Louvain. This dance was joined by an apostate, Marcantonio De Dominis, who, after having defected to the Anglican Church, became the object of a Rome-monitored “guerra degli scritti” on behalf of the papacy in northwestern Europe before he eventually submitted himself to the Apostolic See again. Louvain’s contribution to this grand enterprise demonstrated how a clientelistic setting in which privileges were horse-traded for intellectual services did not exclude overtaking ecclesiological programmes and turning them into academic projects, a move that, paradoxically, contributed to Louvain’s failure to come up with a grand condemnation of De Dominis’ works. As justice had
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its course and the Apostate was consumed by the flames on the Roman Campo de’ Fiori, we can leave academics to their own devices again and pull together some general conclusions that concern religious and political history, consensus-building, and the cohesive effects of conflict in a conflict-laden society.
“Quia illud representant, quod venerari et adhorari opportet” In Frangipani’s letter to Sandrino, separated from interests and images, stands, at the other side of the abyss, that which academics really represented. Besides that being the object of veneration and encouragement, Frangipani did not delve into the exact role he attributed to the academics. The only groups that appeared more or less as unproblematic, clearly defined entities in this book were the flock; to a lesser extent, the students; and, above all, the heretics. Each of these groups constituted the reason for the existence of an academic staff, the overwhelming majority of which was constituted by clerics. Their monolithic appearances and their passivity correspond with the hierarchical self-understanding of the body academic and with the comparable roles each of these rudimentary, seemingly preconstructed, markers in the laboratory of the socio-religious order had to fulfil. Besides depositories of academic expectations, hopes, and ambitions, they were staged as spectators who were either scandalised by or elated at divisions in the Catholic clergy caused by Jesuit fathers, Liège curialists, and so on. While prodding the powers that be into action in favour of the academics, they also functioned as early warning systems of heterogeneity, multiplicity, and chaos still lurking behind the fragile mystical body of society, in a South struggling to re-emerge from civil and religious strife.4 It was rewarding to go along with, instead of getting trapped by, this preoccupation with unity, logic, and coherence, in three respects: on a historical level, on a meta-historical level, and concerning the function of conflict. First, because there was no general context or an overarching trend in which this story had to fit, a number of received wisdoms could be revisited. It is not just that the history of Catholicism in the
4
Compare Boute, “Que ceulx de Flandres se disoijent tant catholicques,” 476–79.
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Habsburg Low Countries has been somewhat deformed by scholarly interest in the Old University of Louvain and its famous faculty of Divinity; the history of the learned corporations at Louvain itself has been deformed by the history of Jansenism and its alleged precursors, turning the University of Louvain into an unproblematic episcopalist, anti-Jesuit, and Baianist hotbed propagating a Catholicism of a northern, interiorised (and more “modern”) bent. Instead, a Louvain faculty of Divinity emerged that, despite its staunch Augustinianism and a shared notion of Theology as an applied science, was a heterogeneous lot hosting positivist and Thomistic approaches to the Science of Salvation in tandem with diverging pastoral and sacramental models. This fragile body theologic sought to come to terms with the revamped doctrinal authority of diocesan administrations by accommodating its corporate magisterium with that of the Holy See, via middlemen who brokered the appropriation of papal power in other affairs as well. The historian can easily point to many missed opportunities, and to the fact that the virtues of doctrinal imprecision gradually started to exert an increasing appeal to bureaucrats of the Faith in Rome. Nonetheless, it has become clear that the diplomatic nature of relations between Rome and the periphery in the early modern period should not be overstated. The central case study of this book does not only bear testimony to the ongoing activity of papal bureaucracy in the early modern period, an aspect that has been overlooked by historians focusing on the rich sources produced by the nunciatures and the Roman Secretariat of State. It also seems remote from the concerns central to what historians have called the “Tridentine Age.” This is not the place to argue that a definition of early modern Catholicism as “Tridentine” is reductionist and normative. The point is that university men could claim, in their quality of an eternal body academic, to be more stable passage points to Tridentine reform than the next cleric, however deserving, coming to occupy an episcopal see. As canons of Saint Peter’s, they could claim the glory for the renewal of religious life in the parishes of the university town. Tridentine decrees were used to legitimise the visitation of the university as much as its privileges of nomination and jurisdiction. Although Trent was a text written by and for bishops, even Tridentine Catholicism could attract more heterogeneous agencies than assumed in Aggiornamento historiography, when reform councils were supposed to be about laymen, priests, and dioceses. Answering Ditchfield’s call, this book has added to our understanding
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of how academics could inhabit and adapt the Tridentine Church to their own concerns, and conversely became more Tridentine. “Confessionalisation” captures better than any other label the identitary politics of academics ordering and disciplining their world and making themselves, in the process, indispensable via the use of negative benchmarks (heretics or “innovators” of dogmas such as the Jesuits) both within and outside Catholicism. Religious change was not imposed from the top by an ecclesiastical or social hierarchy, although it was not incompatible with the disciplinary, hierarchical, and synoptic gaze cherished by secular, ecclesiastic, and academic elites either. Just as much as that other phenomenon which has often been associated with it, state building, it was fuelled from below by academics who sought, after the traumatic decades of civil and religious strife, to make a lost socio-religious order present again in their writings, in practice, and in writing about practice. Ordering the world did not necessarily lead to the extinction of heterogeneity and multiplicity, however. Take the example of the Jesuits, who often figured as the antithesis of academics in this book. Despite all this, their educational and spiritual activities reached a fair share of students and teachers. In various ways, it was possible to agree not to agree without abandoning the singular, undivided nature of the Una Sancta Catholica: in Quantum Physics, matter and anti-matter do not necessarily suppress each other—provided, after Hardy’s paradox, that nobody is looking too closely. In many respects, many of the Holy See’s interventions in doctrinal or pastoral conflicts among Jesuits, Dominicans, secular clerics, and others consisted in keeping such debates from being made public, from the pulpit and the cathedra as much as in learned treatises and books of sermons and/or other platforms. Seen from this perspective, coping with this diversity on the Catholic side in an area that at first glance emerged a homogeneous confessional block can be compared to the pragmatic co-existence of different confessions in the Dutch Republic. There, the public space was to be reserved for the Reformed Church, but religious diversity was tolerated in the private sphere, and interconfessional encounters or confrontation were to be confined, by all means, to (ill-defined) liminal areas.5 The comparison with the emerging great power in the 5 See, for instance, the chapter “The Treshold of Toleration. Interconfessional conviviality in Holland during the early modern period,” in Frijhoff, Embodied Belief, 39–66.
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North can be pushed further. It can no longer be maintained that polity in a bourgeois state such as the Dutch Republic (or Venice’s Terraferma) differed fundamentally from the “sea of monarchies” surrounding them, in which power was exerted from above. The argument is not that the Habsburg Netherlands were a (hidden) bourgeois state, with the clergy and the nobility of State figuring alongside the nobility as junior partners of the big cities of Flanders and Brabant. The painstaking efforts, over three decades, of academics to bundle the plenitude of papal power around their privileges indicate that power in action can better be considered a collective phenomenon, regardless of the morphology of institutional shortcuts. This approach, while shifting attention to the stakes of multitudes of actors wondering how to act as one, did not exclude the thriving of monarchic, oligarchic, and hierarchical styles of governance alongside corporatist ones. After the extrapolation of the originally legal notion of composite monarchy to all forms of governance in historiography on the Italian territorial states, attention in this book shifted from composite monarchy to composite power. Second, the methodological bias in this book towards the elusive, hybrid, conflict-laden, heterogeneous, and networked quality of historical events and phenomena did not aim at gratifying postmodern relativists. It allowed following the tracks of academics and their negotiation partners in the process of making their models stable, pure, consensual, monolithic, homogeneous, and time- and context-proof. At the end of the process, the streamlined, unequivocal causalities that materialised together with the configurations prodding the powerful into action were about recognisable causes and effects: discord and the need for scholarly peace caused the pontiff to suspend Jesuit teaching; equity triggered a decision in favour of the academics in the Agricola affair; the deplorable state of the university caused the power of the archduke to initiate a visitation of the university; and Public Interest triggered powerful protectors into granting and confirming privileges. As a result, this book dangles in between micro- and macrohistory, to the extent that both analytical constructs become indistinguishable: construed around two dozen at-first-glance trivial conflicts over benefices that were pruned into one unequivocal challenge of papal authority, the continuous translation and displacement of political projects apparently implied plugging them into something bigger and transcendental, while putting the counter-claims of opponents
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into perspective.6 If anything, the notion of the face-to-face character of collectives in the early modern period can safely be discarded. There is nothing face-to-face about agents turning events into automatic and necessary trends and carving out exempla and/or legal or historical precedents as references of an absent transcendental order that determined the outcome of negotiations—which it typically did, paradoxically, when negotiations had reached their conclusion. It is in this perspective that the sources were never considered as furnishers of “concrete data” but were seen as mediators of the ongoing politics of reality. Reading, writing, and deleting by scholars who ex officio performed as lecturers, authors, and censors alike were central operating devices of the world according to the academics. The generalisation of programmes often resulted in academic projects being reshaped completely in the centres of power and vice versa. In line with historiographical insights with respect to the formalisation of practice, this seems to have been the case especially for the core business of the bulk of the staff members in the faculties of Arts, Theology, or in the colleges; and it did not necessarily leave the doctors in utroque in the Law faculties (or Augustinianist physicians such as Trevigi) unaffected. Intellectual interests of university men were probably more often than not monitored via private channels of communication in order to avoid vocal opposition from outside as much as from within the university. Stability of doctrine, a formalisation itself of doctrinal contents, was assured by graduation rituals and sacramental practice, which made present an absent socio-religious order (and as a result became, in turn, a bone of contention among pedants of the schools with an axe to grind). Categorising such conflicts as social or cultural was already a recurrent strategy applied by the authorities putting them into a social, jurisdictional, or other perspective in order to remedy them without having to wander into uncertain, doctrinal, territories. At various reprisals, this practice was fuelled from below by adversaries who accused each other of acting out of private interest in order to enrol the authorities as stakeholders. Conversely, it proved difficult to ignore the highly methodological and even
6
On the notion of “double reductionism” towards locality, particularity, materiality, multiplicity, and continuity in one direction, and compatibility, standardisation, text, calculation, circulation, relative universality in the other, read Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 71.
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cognitive quality of conflict and conflict regulation as much as the interests at stake, which needed to be defined first. Certalian theory of practice and the related notion of locus was more apt than traditional field theory to capture interest groups strategically seeking to impose their logic, assignment of roles, and related rules of conduct on their opponents, or tactically adjusting themselves to these forms and appropriating them. Interestingly, academics blurred the corresponding distinction between the powerful and the powerless: when they managed to seize the occasion, they immediately swung into passivity again as mere instruments of a greater logic or obedient subjects of great princes and benign pontiffs.7 Third, abandoning the norm of coherence and unity allows us to draw upon refreshing insights in the research into conflicts and conflict regulation in the world of the craft corporations. It is not surprising to learn that discord, especially when openly displayed, was surrounded by negative connotations in the eyes of authorities, churchmen, and academics who had witnessed, within living memory, the abrupt and almost complete dismantlement of religious, social, and political order. However, conflicts also provided occasions for mutual engagement with potential allies. This observation has fuelled interesting thoughts on the cohesive effects of conflicts: provided that allies and opponents shift continuously, conflicts are able to enact society, to format its constituent groups, to define the relations between them, and to revamp channels of mediation and negotiation. In the period under investigation, academics confronted opponents who, the very next day, could become their allies in the next issue that needed to be settled, a situation that kept them from pushing things too far. Not surprisingly, the university town was their most intimate enemy, with both lawsuits and common policies being floated on a daily basis. The Belgian Jesuits shouldered academic lobbying against the garrisoning of troops in the university town or against taxation by the States of Brabant, and the Roman generalate intervened to obtain indulgences for the Louvain churches for the 1600 jubilee. The practice of privilege was, seen from this perspective, at least as integrative and stabilising a practice as it was divisive. Conflicts shaped rather than divided early modern Catholicism. It is also in conflict that the layered performativity of academic privileges come to the surface.
7
Cf. De Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, 1, esp. 50–62.
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“Imagines non respui” The second dichotomy in Frangipani’s letter to Sandrino demarcates the “imagines” of the university’s delegates, which were to take or to leave, from what they really stand for. In its attempt to account for credibility, this book aimed, by exposing the politics of reality, to close the gap between the world itself and talking about the world by pulling the oft-forgotten operations out of the bottom drawer of academics trying to turn the model of reality into the reality of the model. As a result, the distinction between an academic role in society, interests, and identity faded until it reappeared in Frangipani’s writings. With this in mind, it is now time to return to the question of how benefices, and above all benefices obtained via the privileges of nomination, could possibly be vital for the survival of the university and of Catholicism. With reference to the Prologue to this book, the short answer is that benefices as much as the practice of privilege giving access to them were a constitutive part of academic politics of reality, structuring as they did the world according to the Academics. To put it bluntly: if academics believed there was an invisible socio-religious order out there that made benefices and privileges giving access to them necessary and that needed to be defended by all means, it is because benefices and the practice of privilege made that monolithic, singular and objective order tangible, observable and controllable, in conflict as much as in routine. Let us start with benefices. If structure can be understood as a chain of silent actors, benefices, as part of religious and academic infra-structure, can be expected to have gone into hiding even more than academics themselves. Occasionally, benefices did disappear, when reduced to economic units incorporated in colleges or diocesan seminaries. Yet, when they were threatened with abolition by blasphemous heretics or were disputed among Catholics, the otherwise silent, automatic agency of benefices came to the surface again. Therefore, benefices provide an excellent example of what (f )actors are: agents and agencies nudged into action by other agencies. They are crafted in writing, as the object of petitions, of administrative and managerial practices, of financial transactions, of litigation, of legal and theological theorising, and so on and so forth. Thanks to these practices, benefices became objects that could produce, on a daily basis, distinction and independence of the secular clergy from the flock as much as from lay lords. Benefices accommodated the sacrality of office with
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the need of different collectives (families, princely dynasties, nepotist factions) to sustain or stabilise themselves (and the benefice system as a result). They conferred autoritè on those who had them in gift; and they mediated an ecology in which sacerdotal authority could thrive, to the despair of the heretics. Allegedly founded by saintly missionaries, they mediated continuity between the Church Militant and its apostolic predecessor. If held in small quantities, they wrapped their holders in an odour of sanctity. We have seen benefices devising academic communities in contradictory ways: into a hierarchical order and into a conglomerate of scholars living off their benefices that shielded them from misfortunes on the arena of academic politics. We have seen them shaping a body of pastoral theologians administrating local churches and convents, and excluding regular clerics from public chairs in Divinity; we have seen them perform as the tangible referent of the intentions of the university’s founders back in the 15th century or prohibit favouritism of individual professors trying to pass on their chairs on the successor of their choice. And this is only an open list. This book reveals that the modern distinction between finances and religion is not a given fact. For that matter, it would be worthwhile to investigate the extent to which the demise of the benefice system after the French Revolution added flesh to the dichotomy between “pure” religion and “hard” material interests. Modern financing techniques and managerial practices may have been designed to keep these apart—informing, in return, the negative connotations with which the benefice system has been associated in scholarship. Enter the practice of privilege, which involved benefices shattered over the Habsburg Low Countries and the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. It is in conflicts too that the multiple functions of privilege come to the surface. The awareness of the highly fragile and relational quality of identity, notably of the university as a bastion of poor scholars who were ideally secular, benefice-holding clerics, in tandem with the perception of a continuous danger posed against order and status that needed to be preserved by all means and at all costs, fuelled a sense that an attack on the privileges of jurisdiction and of nomination was an attack on the self and on the group. Add the cohesive, stabilising effects of conflicts in a highly networked social fabric. In line with the approach developed towards conflicts over rituals and concerns about academic jurisdiction, however, it is rewarding to push the analysis further in order to explain how precisely these administrative and legal
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practices could become vital for the survival of the university—and by consequence for Catholicism in general. Conflicts over the privileges of nomination were, just as much as conflicts over benefices themselves, an interesting platform to settle a wide range of accounts. We have seen that delegates were sent to the Eternal City on the university’s or the Arts faculty’s payroll to defend the privileges, but could be mobilised in a wide range of other issues that, for some groups within the university, might have been more fundamental but also more controversial. For the privileges of nomination had one considerable advantage: although priorities could shift, tensions could materialise between the higher faculties and the Arts, and faculty members in 1608–09 briefly discussed the possibility of abandoning the pursuit of the Roman Question after two decades of lobbying, the privileges themselves and the need to defend them were never called into question in principle in the loci of academic decision-making. There is more. On several occasions, the privileges of nomination provided both academics and their alternating adversaries with a workable vocabulary to express concerns and interests in other fields. In the conflict over the Agricola foundation, Bishop Miraeus and his cathedral chapter used acceptations of Louvain nominees as a parameter of the university’s poor record as a centre of formation for the pastoral clergy, in comparison with the laudable educational activities of the Jesuits in Antwerp. It is via the privileges that a conflict over an otherwise unequivocal will was plugged into the grand enterprise of the Catholic counter-offensive on the countryside. In the conflict with the Liège Jesuits over their right to organise academic courses across the borders, academics used the privileges of nomination as a substitute for territorial claims; in the absence of solid legal foundations that, firstly, demarcated the university’s Hinterland, and that, secondly, could add a constitutional flavour to their aspirations. Territorial claims may conversely have informed conflicts over the privileges of nomination between the universities of Louvain and Douai before and after the period under investigation. Conflicts directly addressing the privileges of nomination or individual nominations allowed, conversely, the venting of other concerns. In the 1620s, the siding of the Jesuits with the opponents of an academic candidate for a Cambrai canonship was interpreted in academic quarters as an attack on the doctrine and morals of Louvaintrained clerics and, consequently, on the orthodoxy and the pastoral and behavioural models embodied by the university in its entirety, in
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the absence of a public forum for another fight over Justification and related pastoral method. Or take the 1609 dispute with the archbishop of Mechlin over whether or not the new parish church for Our Lady of Scherpenheuvel should be exempted from the Louvain privileges. In this context, academics did not just point at the bad exemplum and rumours of abuse any concession would bring about: a fate that had been bequeathed, for instance, to papal provisions in the wake of the late medieval concordats by ill-favoured authors such as Van Espen. It was in this conflict that academics beefed up their Tridentine credentials, as members of immortal learned corporations, against diocesan administrations the reform zeal of which depended on the quality of corruptible individuals. A third category of arguments vented in this context referred to procedures as proof of the seriousness with which academic nominations were granted, with expurgatory statutes being used as additional proof at several reprisals. Routine administrative procedures thus became an object of reflection and normalisation in conflicts over academic nominations. In the previous chapters, it has become clear that conflicts over academic nominations, conversely, often had a highly procedural, highly engineered quality. As a matter of fact, routine and conflict prove to be difficult to distinguish in the cycle of credibility and recognition generated by academic nominations, just as much as it was impossible to separate routine and politics of reality generated by the academic and religious business cycles that were mediated, say, by graduation rituals or by the frequency of sacramental practice. For the privileges of nomination, granted in solemn bulls and printed and reprinted time and again, were privileges to be put into practice, dozens of times a year. University men applying for them gradually integrated themselves into an ever widening, transcendental and universal, and ubiquitous logic of which they became, in return, mere exponents. As had been the case with other ordering devices, this entailed the hiding from view of many other practices that made this machinery run: to start with, the informal conflict mediation in the case of competition among students or among candidates from the staff of the same pedagogy. Dozens of highly formalised conflicts among staff members, who tended to compete for a much more restricted pool of benefices situated at cathedral and collegiate churches than other nominees, were recorded in the minutes of the Arts faculty. In order to resolve such conflicts, the nomination boards of the university and of
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the Faculty of Arts sought to realise an unequivocal, single hierarchy of preferences with the help of a set of complex rules. These Regulae de praeferentia—a concept that emerges in the titles and chapters of contemporary manuals over ceremonial precedence as well—not only had to homogenise a wide range of heterogeneous claims to merit but also differed substantially from board to board. Analogous to devices which sorted out conflicts over precedence in early modern universities, seniority was often used to mitigate and qualify, in return, these hierarchies. The so-called concurrentiae recorded in the minutes made it possible to stage, redefine, test, and stabilise intangible academic and cognitive hierarchies in concrete circumstances. This suggests that the line with ritual ranking conflicts, their formalisation, and the resulting qualification of precedence is particularly thin. Statutes were, because of the expurgative power ascribed to them, hybrids between internal, academic legislation and the legislation of higher authorities homologating them. The regulae nominationum, which in contrast with other university and faculty statutes were never codified in the Visitatio of 1617, remained much more an internal affair, which could be overruled in specific cases by dispensations. Procedures assured that they remained internal affairs as well, when the (victorious) applicant moved on to the realm of academic authority and was nominated by the respective nomination boards. It was at this stage that the applicant, through a series of oaths that functioned as markers in the laboratory of society, by recommendation letters, and (from the 2nd decade of the 17th century onwards) by internal examinations, was transformed into a poor, apt, and doctrinally sound cleric who needed the protection of privileges against powerful and opulent competitors. Church magnates were denied any influence in the nomination books, where only successful applicants were registered and competitors disappeared from view; in a fixed order of precedence between university and faculty nominees; and in statutes, which denied possible agreements between nominees and ordinary collators. It is this formalised non-intervention that turned a nomination into a streamlined and efficient act of academic authority put on the record, via a chain of apostolic executors and notaries at Louvain as much as in the periphery; and that also turned it into an exponent of a greater order, the contingent names of the participants to the procedures (rectors and deans, nominees, witnesses, notaries, executors) being inserted in pre-printed nomination letters, acts of acceptation, or
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delegations of executorial powers. Thus, a simple applicant for a nomination became a poor scholar deservedly benefiting from an academic corporate authority that could overrule all other hierarchies, fuelling, in return, statements about immortal corporations as the more stable and reliable protagonists of Catholic renewal. After having unleashed his legal instruments, the poor scholar could turn into a peaceful possessor of a benefice—and thus, in time, into a legal precedent beefing up academic claims and facilitating, consequently, new nominations. This is the short route that, in the first part of this book, was remodelled into statistics informing the historian about strategies of academics on a clerical job market. Most attention was dedicated to much longer tracks: if an academic nomination was contested, it nudged academic and princely tribunals into action, engaging (f )actors such as Public Interest, Brabant Constitutions, university dons performing as pater familias, and statesmen being visited (or saluted at Louvain) by academics besieging them with petitions. Favourable verdicts became jurisprudence mediating the link between the matter itself and a transcendental order while stabilising the roles of all participants to the conflict. Some of them were even printed alongside papal bulls and princely charters in the editions of academic privileges. In the Roman Question as well as in many other episodes preceding and following the period under investigation, conflicts could be overtaken by curialists or Liège clerics turning them into even larger entities. The latter plugged them into a dialectical relationship between a national Church and foreigners intruding on the benefice market; or into an opposition between abusive academic tribunals and those of the Holy See. It is now Trent, its interpretation in Roman quarters, and the bull In Coena Domini against lay interferences in ecclesiastical affairs that entered the picture, with causae privatae being streamlined in and distinguished from an emerging causa communis. The analysis in the previous chapters has made it incontestably clear how privileges brought academics into contact with learned circles in Rome (and vice versa), because of the constant need for allies at the Roman curia, and how academics in return sought to translate individual nominations and their privileges into a greater transcendental logic involving the interests of the universal Apostolic See. Roman technocrats, conversely, wove the affair of the privileges into their concerns, with a common ground only being found after three decades. During these
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decades, we have seen the affair of the privileges become entangled with a series of other affairs ranging from grants, book censorship, Saint Augustine, and the Eucharistic liturgy to a war in writing over the primacy of the Holy See and back again. These meandering paths eventually disappeared from sight when a new privilege was granted in the bull Regimini Universalis, which would deeply reform the practice of privilege until the French Revolution. It is in such circumstances that poor and orthodox scholars became indispensable and their privileges an obligatory passage point to dynastic and religious restoration in the Low Countries—which in turn was the cause of new nominations burdening the collations of local church magnates. It is in this cycle, in which individual university men disappeared from the scene in tandem with a transcendental logic emerging of pontiffs and princes taking up the protection over the university, that the practice of privilege generated its own necessity and legitimation, concepts that have proved difficult to distinguish. That privileges had to be necessary just because they existed is not an unconventional line of thinking. The historian’s professional intuitions lean towards a logic of sorts behind the many entries in the nomination books. Within these interpretive schemes, academics were not only granted privileges because they were poor and orthodox. They were also poor and orthodox because they had privileges. Take academic poverty. By appealing to privileges of nomination, university men could become poor scholars in need of privileges and protection, in their routine as much as in the many resulting conflicts. The overwhelming majority of staff members populating academic boards did so. As for students, they could safely redirect their social investments to their academic patrons without having to bother about support of Church magnates outside the university. The extent to which the availability of privileges informed the strategies of young, graduated clerics admittedly remains a moot point. However, academics, in sharp contrast to historians nurturing other concepts of necessity, did not bother to draw up comparative figures of the dozens of graduates who applied for nominations and the much larger numbers who did not. Consequently, other strategies and the channels of support students and aspiring clerics could rely on outside the university, which were not registered in academic records, disappeared from sight; the much more visible activity of nomination boards gathering on a monthly or even weekly basis became the norm; and registered
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nominees became the referents of an invisible academic order in which poor scholars needed privileges to gain access to benefices.8 Louvain procedures, combined with the seemingly inevitable conflicts resulting from the practice of privilege, confirmed university dons in their self understanding as “apex academics”; as head hunters, brokers, spiritual mentors, and academic patrons who had to bridge the gap between poor and powerless students in the colleges on the one hand, and the realms of power on the other. Just as much as in graduation rituals or Jesuit spirituality and management, administrative practices were not just the exponent of the academic world but also informed academic and outsiders’ views on that world, fuelling stereotypes of the “pedants of the school” who were “dotti,” but “inesperti” and “di poca prudenza” in worldly matters, as men “who had never set foot outside their college.” Enter orthodoxy, magisterium, and the self-understanding of Louvain divines as pastoral theologians, combined with a top-down, hierarchical matrix in which alumni were considered depositories of Louvain doctrine and spirituality. In this book, large and even central provinces of the Faith, just as much as the related pastoral models, were exposed as highly controversial in the 16th and 17th centuries, triggering a gradual transformation of the faithful into practising Catholics whose religious acts became the touchstone of orthodoxy for Church authorities seeking to assemble and to observe the Church Militant. It has become incontestably clear that there were enough bones of contention among Louvain divines themselves over the actual content of their teaching to reject the notion of the university as a monolithically proto-Jansenist, episcopalist, and rigorist hotbed. It is not just that continually contested privileges could be used, on several occasions, as a cover to send theological experts to the Eternal City who conversely reinforced “their” school of thought at Louvain in the process. The practice of privilege, endowing academics with a job-agency avantla-lettre, homogenised, formalised, and generalised an orthodoxy that was highly controversial even within the university but that had to be projected, because of Louvain’s claim to a corporate magisterium in doctrinal matters, as the unequivocal, coherent, and consensual teaching of “the Louvain School.” Therefore, it made it possible to com-
8 Compare the question of representativity in Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation,” 214–219; Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 32–36.
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bine an obligatory “sameness” with the need of any organisation to attract and manage difference in order to survive.9 In the absence of open contestation of the university’s orthodoxy via conflicts over benefices (at least until the 1620s), the reader may have been under the impression that the link between orthodoxy, privileges, and benefices was purely rhetorical. Yet bugs disrupting this link, notably in the later history of the University of Louvain and its involvement in Jansenist controversies, indicate that there was also a link between error and the withdrawal of favour, however, with Rome threatening to revoke, from the 1650s onwards, the privileges in order to bully Louvain Divines into compliance with the first condemnation bulls against Cornelius Jansenius.10 In scholarship on the subject, this move has been considered blackmail; i.e., an illegitimate strategy concocted by Roman “zelanti” targeting the financial foundations of the university instead of appealing to the inner force of persuasion in an intellectual debate. In this book, by contrast, interests can no longer be considered a priori as material, intellectual, or whatever else; and inner forces of persuasion are too arcane (and tautological) to account for credibility. Roman curialists had not misunderstood the relationship between knowledge and context when they used their power over the so-called “material” interests of the university to discipline recalcitrant theologians. It is difficult to define the academics’ interests in benefices as merely material if academics did not do so themselves and used their privileges to project their authority in doctrinal affairs in a very practical, highly formalised manner both within and outside the university. By threatening to revoke the privileges, Rome merely sought to interrupt a cycle of credibility in which privileges, when being put to practice, generated the orthodoxy legitimising them.
9
Compare Quattrone, “Accounting for God,” passim. A fragment from one of the many letters on the matter between the internuncio Mangelli and his correspondents in Rome and the Netherlands illustrates this. “Anacephalosim seu compendium professionis obedientiae praestandae per universitatem, a D.V. mihi transmissam, legi summa cum animi mei voluptate. Maximopere mihi arridet quod in schedula contenta sanciantur per publica decreta, nec uno iota demendum esse putarem, ut satisfaciat menti Sanctitatis Suae, quae serio cogitat de remediis expugnandae hujusmodi contumaciae, et signanter de revocatione privilegiorum et iuris conferendi beneficia, nisi sincere et solide obediant. . . . Tempus iam esse ut quoad deponendas omnes exuvias Jansenianae nedum doctrinae sed et affectionis serio cogitaretur. Dominus Deus ita disponat.” Mangelli, internuncio, to Dave, professor in Louvain, Brussels, 2 November 1653, ed. Ceyssens, La première bulle contre Jansénius, 696. 10
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A mediator of academic poverty and orthodoxy, the practice of privilege constituted an excellent socio-technical tool for university men who sought to carve a cohesive, definite, well-ordered, and predictable academic environment out of a chaotic, diffuse, and hybrid world. This being a highly hierarchical world construed around sacred, priestly rule,11 the practice of privilege can be considered the sacrament of learning, making an invisible but eternal body academic present and allowing it to speak as one. The interplay between benefices and Truth mediated by the privileges of nomination resembles, in many respects, the inextricable entanglement of financing and scientific achievement in the world of Big Science today. As such, the practice of privilege mediated a socio-religious and cognitive business cycle in which modern notions of a separation between finances and religion (or science) fade. The privileges typically could do all that in writing, in the academic memorandums and petitions just as much as in administrative sources that recorded reality in a highly selective way. In writing, this ordo academicus produced by the practice of privilege could dissociate itself from its production line and become a higher reality legitimising and necessitating, in return, the privileges. Yet this dissociation also came with a price, reducing, in the eyes of outsiders such as Frangipani (or modern historians), this painstakingly engineered order to mere “images” of Academia that stood apart from what academics really stood for. It is this gap between fact and fiction, between discourse and reality, we have sought to close again in this book, by patiently tracking the politics of reality deployed by early modern academics in action.
11 On the etymological roots of hieros-arkhein, read Quattrone, “Accounting for God,” 660.
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Bull Leo X, Admonet Nos (1513), not registered. Bull Leo X, Hodie a Nobis (1513), not registered. Bull Leo X, Dignum Censemus (1517), not registered. Bull Clement VII, Rationi Congruit (1523), not registered. Bull Sixtus IV, Urget Nos (1483), UAL, OUL, 58. Placet Maximilian of Austria (1484), UAL, OUL, 59. Placet Charles V (1515), UAL, OUL, 62a. Placet Charles V (1515), UAL, OUL, 62b. Placet Charles V (1531), UAL, OUL, 67. Bull Paul III, Ex Debito (1536), UAL, OUL, 71. Bull Gregory XIII, In Praecelsa (1573), UAL, OUL, 74a. Brief Gregory XIII, Nuper Cum (1573), UAL, OUL, 75a. Placet Philip II (1573), UAL, OUL, 75b–c. Brief Gregory XIII (1578), In Supremo Militanti, UAL, OUL, 51. Bull Paul V, Regimini Universalis (1616), UAL, OUL, 76. Placet Albert of Austria (1619), UAL, OUL, 78.
– Documents concerning the Privilegium Nominationis, 1525–1740, UAL, OUL, 304–308. – Documents concerning the Licentia docendi et doctrina, monopoly on higher education, 1530–1629, UAL, OUL, 313–314. – Documents concerning Teachers’ emoluments, 1600–1750, UAL, OUL, 319. – Documents concerning the Theological Faculty, 1500–1640, UAL, OUL, 343–344. – Documents concerning the Theological Faculty, 1500–1699, UAL, OUL, 366. – Documents concerning the Arts Faculty, 1500–1704, UAL, OUL, 366. Fund Library Episcopal Seminary of Ghent (Ghent) Inventories: Claeys-Bouuaert, F., “Inventaire de documents relatifs à l’ancienne université de Louvain (faculté de théologie) conservés au grand séminaire de Gand.” In: L’université de Louvain à travers cinq siècles (Louvain 1927), 273–308. Idem, “Inventaire de pièces d’archives provenant de l’Ancienne Université de Louvain.” In: Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 53 (1958), 796–829 and 54 (1959), 66–114. Unpublished inventory available (series D). – – – –
UAL, Ghent (1927), 33, 40, 43–44, 116, 120, 149–150. UAL, Ghent (1958–1959), 24, 66, 105, 157–159, 161, 181, 273. UAL, Ghent (not registered), 449. UAL, Ghent, D22.
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ASV, Dataria Ap., Per Obitum, 1–42. ASV, Dataria Ap., Expedit., 1–5. ASV, Dataria Ap., Consensus, (year) 1615. ASV, Dataria Ap., Regest. Litter. Contradict., 5–7, 11. ASV, Dataria Ap., Reg. Suppl., 1793 and 2264.
Fund Camera Apostolica (Camera Ap.) – ASV, Camera Ap., Consensus, 88, 90, 101, 109–111. – ASV, Camera Ap., Annatae, 99. – ASV, Camera Ap., Resignationes, Indice 1044. Fund Congregatio Concilii (Congr. Concilio) – ASV, Congr. Concilio, Relat. Dioec., 59A-B, 88, 91, 148A, 159, 175, 360A, 404, 443, 445, 506, 556, 698, 807. – ASV, Congr. Concilio, Libri Decretorum S.C. Concilii, 5–12. – ASV, Congr. Concilio, Libri Litterarum, 9–10. – ASV, Congr. Concilio, Positiones, 11, 21, 43. Fund Brevi Lateranenses – ASV, Brevi Lateranenses, 80. Fund Segretariato dei Brevi – ASV, Secr. Brevium, 357. Fund Armadi (Arm.) – ASV, Arm. LXIV, 10. – ASV, Arm. LII, 20–22a. – ASV, Arm. LIV, 49. Rome, Archivio Della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede (ACDF) Inventories: Unpublished inventories available Blouin, P.F.X., Vatican Archives. An inventory and guide to historical documents of the Holy See. Supplement 1: The Archives of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. S.l. 2004.
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Fund Congregatio Indicis (Index) – ACDF, Index, Diarii, 1571–1596, 1604–1610 and 1616–1622 – ACDF, Index, Protocolli, IIa-2B (1580s–1590s). – ACDF, Index, XXXVI, 8b: Index Librorum Prohibitorum Cum regulis confectis per patres a Tridentina Synodo delectos auctoritate P II.IIII primum editus, postea vero a Sixto V et nunc demum a sanctissimo D.N. Clemente Papa VIII recognitus et auctus, Romae, apud Paulum Bladum Impressorem Cameralem, MDXCIII. Rome, Archivum Romanum Societatis Jesu (ARSI) Inventories: Unpublished inventories available. Fund Provincia Flandro-Belgica (Fl.-Belg.) – Correspondence of the General, 1597–1610, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., Epp. Gen. 1, I–II and 1611–1620, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 3. – Controversiae Lovaniensis et Duacensis, 1585–1596, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., 72, I–II. – Missio Hollandica, 1600–1620, ARSI, Fl.-Belg., 73, I–II–III. Fund Provincia Gallo-Belgica (Gall.-Belg.) – Correspondence of the General, 1612–1625, ARSI, Gall.-Belg., Epp. Gen., 1, I–II. Fund Assistentia Germania (Germ.) – Correspondence to the General, 1591–1606/1610/1614, ARSI, Germ., Epp. ad Gen., 169–181. Fund Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia – Douai, ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia, 1408. – Liegi, ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia, 1452. – Lovanio, ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico, Collegia, 1459. Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) Inventories: Pasture, A., “Inventaire de la Bibliothèque Barberini à la Bibliothèque Vaticane.” In: Bulletin de l’Institut Historique belge de Rome, 3 (1924), 3–117. See above, ASV, and below, Edited Sources, regests. – Correspondence nunciature of Flanders, BAV, Barberini Latini, 2000, 2852, 5910, 5919, 6794, 6804–6810, 6812. – Lombardus, Petrus, De Hibernia Insula Commentarius Stromaticus Romae Conscriptus et oblatus Sanctissimo Patri et DN Clementi Papae Octavo, Anno Sancto Seculari MDC a Petro Lombardo Hiberno artium et STD, ac nuper professore in universitate Lovaniensi, nunc vero pro eadem commissario ad sedem apostolicam, BAV, Barberini Latini, 2466. – Avvisi di Roma, 1615–1616, BAV, Urbinates Latini, 1083–1084. – BAV, Vaticani Latini, 14673.
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LIST OF NAMES
The List of Names registers all individuals mentioned directly or indirectly in the text. For the benefit of the reader, a number of rubrics were included with references to individuals pertaining to a specific group or category. Where appropriate, these rubrics also specify the beginning and the end of the term of office (or, in the case of cardinals, the year of their creation). Modern authors are distinguished by small capitals; university members (or former university members if identified as such in the text) from Dole, Douai or Louvain are listed in Italics.
Abbreviations CRSA OCart OFM OFMCap OFMConv OP OPraem Or OSA OSB OSBVallombr SJ
Canonici Regulares Sancti Augustini Ordo Cartusiensis Ordo Fratrum Minorum Ordo Fratrum Minorum Capuccinorum Ordo Fratrum Minorum Conventualium Ordo Fratrum Praedicatorum Ordo Praemonstratensis Institutum Oratorii Sancti Philippi Neri Ordo Fratrum Eremitarum Sancti Augustini Ordo Sancti Benedicti Congregatio Vallis Umbrosae Ordinis Sancti Benedicti Societas Jesu
Aarschot, Duke of 71 Abbot (Park) Vlierden (Van), Franciscus OPraem (1583–1601) Drusius, Joannes OPraem (1601–34) Masius, Joannes OPraem (1635–47) Abbot (Saint Gertrudis) Eynthouts (ab), Arnoldus CRSA (1593–1607) Eynatten (ab), Ludovicus CRSA (1607–26) Acquaviva, Claudio SJ 274–75, 277, 291, 296, 299, 301–06, 310, 375, 380, 382, 384, 387–88, 392, 487, 495, 499, 504, 507, 509–11, 516–18, 614 Agellio, Antonio CR 229 Ago, Renata 272, 288, 582 Agricola (Ackermans), Nicolaus 351, 352–53, 355–56, 362, 364, 424, 426, 612, 617
Albergati, Antonio 493, 510–11, 513, 517–20, 530–31 Albert of Austria xxiv–xxv, 6–8, 10–11, 19, 60, 71–72, 85, 103, 112, 118, 128, 138, 147, 155, 175, 192, 203, 208, 210, 212, 215, 221–22, 228, 248, 262, 275–77, 297, 304, 306, 313, 318, 321–35, 353, 355, 360, 366, 368, 370, 372,382–83, 410, 415, 426, 433–35, 438–40, 443–56, 461–64, 468–82, 485, 488–518, 521, 523, 530–47, 551–56, 560–61, 569–70, 581, 585, 589, 593, 605, 612 Alberus, Paulus Alvarus, Paulus Alciati, Francesco 246 Aldobrandeschi, Hildebrand Gregory VII Aldobrandini (San Giorgio), Cinzio Passeri 212, 305, 370–71, 414–15 Aldobrandini, family 60, 236, 334, 339, 380, 423–24, 426–27, 590, 603
670
list of names
Aldobrandini, Ippolito Clement VIII Aldobrandini, Pietro 147, 210, 244, 249–50, 256–57, 259, 261, 263, 266–67, 277, 317–18, 321, 324, 326–27, 329, 335–36, 339–44, 346–47, 349–50, 363–64, 369–70, 372, 391, 398, 412, 414–17, 423, 456, 590, 602 Allen, William 242, 317 Altieri, Emilio Clement X Altieri, Ferdinando SJ 520 Alvarus, Paulus 363 Amalteo, Attilio 504 Ambassadors, Spain Aytona, Gastòn de Moncada y Gralla, Marquis of Gondomar, Don Diego de Sarmiento, Count of Sessa, Antonio Fernández de Córdoba y Cardona, Duke of Ameyden (Vander), family 262 Andromeda, mythological figure 313, 512, 589 Angelis (Ab), Guilielmus 558 Antonelli, Giacomo 7 Antoniano, Silvio Or 338, 349, 363, 424 Apostolic Vicars (Utrecht) Vosmeer, Sasbold (1602–14) Rovenius, Philippus (1614–51) Aquino (of ), Thomas OP, Saint 23, 26, 407 Aracoeli Galamini, Agostino OP Arboreus, Adrianus SJ 392 Archbishop (Armagh) Lombard, Peter Archbishop (Cambrai) Berlaymont (De), Ludovicus Florentius (1570–96) Bergis (De), Guilielmus (1598–1609) Richardot, Jean Jr. (1610–14) Archbishop (Cologne) Ernest of Bavaria (1581–1612) Ferdinand of Bavaria (1612–50) Archbishop (Mainz) Schönborn (Von), Lothar Franz Archbishop (Mechlin) Granvelle, Antoine Perrenot (1561–86) Allen, William (1589–94)
Hovius, Matthias (1595–1620) Boonen, Jacobus (1621–55) Archducal Residents / Agents of Flanders (Rome) Dublioul, Laurens (–1600) Richardot, Jean Jr. (1600–03) Toledo (De), Pedro (Don) (1603–05) Ortembergh (d’), Herman (1605–10) Maes, Philip (1610–18) Vives, Juan Bautista (1618–33) Archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia Archduke Albert of Austria Archdukes Albert of Austria Isabella Clara Eugenia Arias Montano, Benedictus 28, 337, 568 Arnauld, Antoine 392 Arrigoni, Pompeo 241, 250–51, 327, 339, 343, 347, 352–353, 355, 359, 361, 367–69, 379–80, 384, 386, 400–02, 424, 427, 503 Asbroeck, [. . .] 366 Asculano (d’Ascoli) Bernerio (Asculano), Girolamo OP Assonleville, Christophe 248, 317–18, 329, 343, 441, 443 Audax, Joannes 412 Auditor (RCA / Uditore del Papa) Cusani, Agostino Or (1586–88) Borghese, Orazio (1588–90) Paul V (Camillo Borghese), Pope (1590–96) Lante, Marcello (1596–1606) Tonti, Michelangelo (?) (1606–08) Crescenzi, Paolo (1608–11) Auditor (Sacra Romana Rota) Arrigoni, Pompeo Bianchetti, Lorenzo Clement VIII (Ippolito Aldobrandini), Pope Lancelotti, Orazio Lancelotti, Scipione Millino, Giangarzia Mottman, Cornelius Henricus Ortembergh (d’), Herman Oranus, Franciscus Peña, Francisco Razzali, Serafino Olivario Vitalis, Laurentius
list of names Augustinus (Hipponensis), Aurelius 24–26, 130, 200, 224, 226, 230, 244, 279, 296, 298, 349, 380, 382–83, 387, 407, 596, 621 Aytona, Gastòn de Moncada y Gralla, Marquis of 500, 553 Baius, Aegidius 213, 331, 465 Baius, family 213, 296, 320, 406, 423, 465, 467 Baius, Jacobus I xi, 295–300, 304, 308, 313, 319–20, 325, 336, 343, 347, 357, 374, 388, 404–07, 409, 415–16, 423, 464–65, 467–70, 485, 492, 520, 593 Baius, Jacobus II 467 Baius, Michael 25, 27, 130, 206, 295–97, 317, 320, 404–05, 463, 465, 468, 573, 593–94 Bandini, Ottavio 427 Bañez, Domingo OP 388, 405 Barberini, family 60, 418 Barberini, Maffeo Urban VIII Barbo, Pietro Paul II Baronio, Cesare Or 230–33, 235, 237, 243, 246, 250, 305, 324, 336–39, 342, 344–45, 349, 355–56, 361, 383, 385, 389, 424, 507, 585 Bax, Adrianus 193 Beda 317 Bellarmino, Roberto SJ, Saint 27, 227–28, 235, 241, 285, 337–39, 347, 354–55, 365, 375–77, 382–84, 387, 390, 401–04, 424, 431–32, 434, 483, 485, 492, 509, 563–64, 567, 573, 575, 577–79, 590–92 Belmosto, Ottavio 563 Bentivoglio, Guido 10, 60, 103, 109, 147, 213, 263, 352–53, 356–57, 381, 387, 395, 400–03, 428, 437, 462, 465, 469, 472, 488, 496–97, 508–09, 510–11, 513, 515, 518–19, 537 Beranus, Gisbertus 418, 420 Berchmans, Jan SJ, Saint 110, 484, 591 Bergis (De), Guilielmus 185, 363 Berlaymont (De), Ludovicus Florentius 185 Bernerio (Asculano), Girolamo OP 241, 379, 385, 401–02, 563 Beyerlinck, Laurentius 351, 565, 567 Biagioli, Mario 237, 314, 568 Bianchetti, Lorenzo 241, 248, 327, 339,
671
344, 347, 359, 361, 363, 365, 367–68, 384, 386, 409–10, 414, 427, 548 Crescenzi, Paolo 417–18 Bishop (Antwerp) Torrentius, Livinus (1586–95) Bergis (De), Guilielmus (1598–1601) Miraeus, Joannes (1604–11) Malderus, Joannes (1611–33) Bishop (Aquino) Filonardi, Flaminio (1579–1609) Bishop (Arras) Richardot, Jean Jr. (1603–10) Orthemberg (d’), Herman (1611–26) Bishop (Bertinoro) Caligari, Giovanni Andrea Bishop (Bruges) Rodoan (De), Charles Philippe (1602–14) Triest, Antoon (1617–22) Bishop (Ghent) Jansenius, Cornelius (of Ghent) (1568–76) Maes, Charles (1610–12) Boonen, Jacobus (1616–20) Triest, Antoon (1622–57) Bishop (Liège) Marck (De La), Erard (1505–38) Groesbeek (of ), Gerard (1564–80) Ernest of Bavaria (1581–1612) Ferdinand of Bavaria (1612–50) Bishop (Middelburg) Stryen, Joannes (1575–94) Bishop (Namur) Dauvin, Joannes (1615–29) Bishop (Ossory) Rothe, David (1618–50) Bishop (Roermond) Cuyckius, Henricus (1596–1609) Castro (A), Jacobus (1611–39) Bishop (Tournai) Vendeville (De), Joannes (1588–92) Bishop (Ypres) Haynin (De), Antonius (1613–26) Jansenius, Cornelius (of Ypres) (1636–38) Blasius, [. . .] 373 Blavirius (Blavier) from Grandville, Jacobus 245–47, 250 Blavirius (Blavier) from Hodeige, Jacobus 245
672
list of names
Blockmans, Wim 314 Blocquerie (De), Christophe 263, 510 Blocquerie (De), family 263, 412 Blocquerie (De), Robertus 412–13, 417, 427 Boden, Mattheus 245, 247–48, 250, 268, 297–99, 301–04, 306, 310, 319–21, 350, 374 Bodin, Jean 235 Boèce Jansenius, Cornelius (of Ypres) Bonardo, Vincenzo OP 229 Bonhomius, Joannes 418 Bonnart, Nicolaus SJ 276 Bonomi, Giovanni Francesco 225, 227–28 Boonen, Jacobus xvii, 76, 78, 82–84, 153, 592 Bophorinck, Philip 366 Borch (Vander), Jean 248 Borghese, Camillo Paul V Borghese, family 60, 265, 423, 505, 590 Borghese, Orazio 239–40, 244, 265, 487 Borghese, Scipione 10, 100, 147, 213, 215, 244, 256, 262, 347, 352–53, 355, 381, 387, 391, 398–99, 403–04, 437–38, 444, 457, 462, 469, 475–81, 487, 493, 495–96, 500, 504–05, 508, 510–11, 513, 515, 518–20, 531, 537–41, 543, 547, 560–61, 563–70, 572, 575–77, 590, 604 Borja (De), Alfonso Calixt III Borja (De), Joannes 354, 415 Borrio, [. . .] 328 Borromeo, Federico 229, 233–35, 246, 349, 408, 590 Bourdieu, Pierre 51–52, 54, 56, 80, 431, 433, 462 Bourgeois, Joannes SJ 387 Bozio, Tomaso Or 336–37, 361, 364, 424 Bras (Le), Gabriel xxiv, 13–14, 32–34, 49, 53 Breijdel, Viglius 214, 371 Breugels, [. . .] 317 Brizuela (de), Iñigo OP 462, 468–69, 498, 510, 515, 517, 538, 571, 588–89, 593 Brockliss, Laurence 289 Bruneel, Claude 283 Buffalo-Cancellieri (Del), Innocenzo 241
Buignies, Joannes 347 Buoncompagni, Ugo Gregory XIII Burke, Peter 42, 50–53 Caligari, Giovanni Andrea 231, 243 Calixt III (Alfonso de Borja), Pope 91–92, 96 Callon, Michel xxvii, 54 Calvin, Joannes 317 Campo (De), Didacus 316 Canis, [. . .] 317 Cano, Melchior OP 381 Carafa, Antonio 229–30, 233, 236, 239–40 Carafa, Decio 352, 400, 402, 417, 428, 438, 444–45 Cardinal-nephew Peretti Montalto, Alessandro Damasceni (1585–90) Sfondrati, Paolo Emilio (1590–91) Aldobrandini, Pietro (1593–1605) Aldobrandini (San Giorgio), Cinzio Passeri (1593–1605) Borghese, Scipione (1605–21) Ludovisi, Ludovico (1621–23) Cardinal-protector (Flanders) Colonna, Marcantonio (–1597) Colonna, Ascanio (1597–1607) Borghese, Scipione (1607–33) Cardinal-protector (Germany) Borghese, Scipione (1611–33) Cardinal-protector (OP) Bernerio (Asculano), Girolamo OP (–1611) Cardinal-protector (Ireland) Mattei, Girolamo (–1603) Cardinal–protector (SJ) Toledo (De), Francisco SJ (1593–96) Cardinal-protector (University of Louvain) Santori, Giulio Antonio (1593–1602) Aldobrandini, Pietro (1603–21) Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church Albert of Austria (1577) Alciati, Francesco (1565) Aldobrandini, Ippolito (1585) Aldobrandini, Pietro (1593) Aldobrandini (San Giorgio), Cinzio Passeri (1593) Allen, William (1587) Andreas of Austria (1576)
list of names Antonelli, Giacomo (1846) Antoniano, Silvio Or (1599) Arrigoni, Pompeo (1596) Bandini, Ottavio (1596) Barberini, Maffeo (1606) Baronio, Cesare Or (1596) Bellarmino, Roberto SJ (1599) Belmosto, Ottavio (1616) Bentivoglio, Guido (1621) Bernerio (Asculano), Girolamo OP (1586) Bianchetti, Lorenzo Or (1596) Borghese, Camillo (1596) Borghese, Scipione (1605) Borromeo, Federico (1587) Buffalo-Cancellieri (Del), Innocenzo (1604) Carafa, Antonio (1586) Colonna, Ascanio (1586) Colonna, Marcantonio (1565) Cueva (De La), Alonso (1622) Cusani, Agostino Or (1588) Farnese, Odoardo (1591) Ferratino, Bartolomeo (1606) Florensz Boeyens (Of Utrecht), Adriaan (1517) Galamini, Agostino OP (1611) Galli, Tolomeo (1565) Giustiniani, Benedetto (1586) Givry (De), Anne d’Escars (1596) Granvelle, Antoine Perennot (1561) Hohenzollern–Sigmaringen, Eitel Friedrich Count of (1621) Lancelotti, Orazio (1611) Lancelotti, Scipione (1583) Lante, Marcello (1606) Ludovisi, Ludovico (1621) Madruzzo, Giovanni Ludovico (1561) Mattei, Girolamo (1586) Medici (de’), Alessandro (1583) Millino, Giangarzia (1606) Palotta, Giovanni Battista (1587) Pamfili, Girolamo (1604) Peretti Montalto, Alessandro Damasceni (1585) Perron (Du), Jacques Davy (1604) Petrocchini (Montelbero), Gregorio (1589) Pinelli, Domenico (1585) Rusticucci, Girolamo (1570) Salviati, Antonmaria (1583) Santori, Giulio Antonio (1570) Scaglia, Desiderio OP (1621)
673
Sfondrati, Paolo Emilio (1590) Sirleto, Guglielmo (1565) Tagliavia d’Aragonia (Terranova), Simone (1583) Tarugi, Francesco Maria Or (1596) Toledo (De), Francisco SJ (1593) Torres (De), Ludovico (1606) Trejo y Paniagua, Gabriel (1615) Verallo, Fabrizio (1608) Carondelet, Jacobus 332, 409 Carthon, Anthonius 166 Casale Maggiore (A), Girolamo OFMConv 569 Castagna, Giambattista Urban VII Castro (A), Jacobus 341, 366, 406 Ceda, Duchess of 332 Celias Saint–Cyran, Abbé de Censier, Joannes 263 Ceri, Duke of 553 Certeau (De), Michel SJ xxvii, 42, 46–48 Ceyssens, Lucien OFM 17, 19, 378, 465 Chapeaville (De), Joannes 264, 399, 510 Charles V, Emperor 22, 27, 99, 101–02, 114, 136, 138, 145, 148, 194, 223, 332, 439, 482, 547, 560 Charles VII, King of France 94 Chatellier, Louis 81 Chineij, Godefridus 185, 224, 238–43, 245–47, 253–54, 258, 260, 551 Cibò, Giovanni Battista Innocent VIII Ciocchi del Monte, Giovanni Maria Jules III Ciprari, Adriano OSBVallombr 229 Clarius, Antonius 370–71 Clarius, Joannes 244–45, 248, 250–51, 253, 259, 263, 266–67, 296, 298, 316–18, 326, 329, 353, 364–67, 369, 406, 408, 423, 427, 548 Clement VII (Giulio de’Medici), Pope 1, 135, 205, 344, 423 Clement VIII (Ippolito Aldobrandini), Pope xxv, 89, 92, 147, 232–37, 243–44, 246, 250–51, 256, 259, 262–63, 265, 275–77, 303–06, 310, 316–18, 321–44, 349–50, 358, 361–65, 369–70, 372, 374–75, 378–83, 385, 397, 408, 410, 412–13, 416, 419–31, 499, 456, 502–03, 505, 543, 590, 602, 612
674
list of names
Clement X (Emilio Altieri), Pope 487 Clerc (Le), Nicolaus 493 Clerc, Claudius 515 Clichtoveus, Judocus 404 Colonna, Ascanio 250, 304, 324, 326, 337, 339, 347, 423 Colonna, family 326, 423 Colonna, Marcantonio 229, 235–36, 242, 304, 326, 337, 339, 423 Colonna, Odoardo Martin V Condulmaro, Gabriele Eugenius IV Coninck (De), Aegidius SJ 391, 573, 592 Conry, Florence OFM 571 Conservator of the Privileges Eynthouts (ab), Arnoldus CRSA (1593–1607) Eynatten (ab), Ludovicus CRSA (1607–26) Conventinus, Gisbertus 146 Copernicus, Nicolaus 4 Coracius, Anthonius Marca 327 Cornelisz, Cornelius SJ 520 Corselius, Gerardus 148, 164–66, 245, 281, 331, 352, 357, 359–60, 364–66, 374, 409, 423, 471, 508, 510, 530, 538 Corselius, Joannes Jacobi 346, 418 Costerius, Henricus 316 Costerus, Franciscus SJ 316, 403 Council of Brabant: Chancellors Damant, Nicolas (1596–1616) Peck, Pieter (1616–25) Council of Brabant: Members Bophorinck, Philip Breugels, [. . .] Canis, [. . .] Craesbeke, Stephan Maelcote, Jean Maes, Jean–Baptiste Schoore (Van), Everard Council of Finances Montmorency (De), Nicolas Craesbeke, Stephan 248, 317, 332, 438, 441–46, 450–51, 454, 460–61, 463, 475, 477, 486, 522, 536 Cueva (De La), Alonso 109 Cusani, Agostino Or 230, 338 Cuyckius, Henricus 223, 225, 231, 233–35, 237, 243, 248, 250, 277–79, 284–85, 295, 297–99, 301–05, 307, 310, 319, 340–41, 350, 360, 390–92, 397–406, 429, 441
Damant, Nicolas 329, 343, 441 Danielis, Gisbertus 239–41, 243–44, 247–48, 250–51, 253, 259, 263, 267, 316, 326, 381, 420, 487, 546, 548 Dasseriers, Antoine 331 Datario (Pro– or Subdatario) of the Holy Roman Church Clement VIII (Ippolito Aldobrandini), Pope (1585–87) Palotta, Giovanni Battista (1587–90) Sasso, Lucio (1590–1604) Paolini, Bernardino (1604–05) Arrigoni, Pompeo (1605–07) Tonti, Michelangelo (1607–11) Maraldi, Marcaurelio (1611–21) Vivariis (De), Aegidius Ursinus (1627–44) Daulmerie, Jacobus 166 Dauvin, Joannes 170 Dave, Antonius 623 Dave, Nicolaus 413 David, biblical figure 230, 273 Deacon (Saint Peter’s, Louvain) Baius, Michael (1575–89) Cuyckius, Henricus (1589–96) Goudanus, Cornelius Reyneri (1596–1609) Baius, Jacobus I (1609–14) Jansonius, Jacobus (1615–25) Delange, Balduinus SJ 375 Delrio, Franciscus 359–60, 367–68 Delrio, Joannes 360, 367–68 Delrio, Luis 359 Delrio, Martinus SJ 231, 359 Delumeau, Jean xxiv, 4–6, 13, 34–35 Diderot, Denis 280 Dillenus, Joannes 299, 302, 320 Ditchfield, Simon 44, 610 Dominis (De), Marcantonio 561–67, 571–82, 586, 608–09 Donnelly, John Patrick SJ 270–71 Donneux, Aegidius 347, 418 Dorenet, Jacobus 515 Dralantius, Franciscus 346–47, 350–57, 374, 423 Driedo, Joannes 24–25, 27 Drinckwaert, Jean 333 Drusius, Joannes OPraem 59, 155, 207, 438–39, 441–55, 458, 460–63, 469–71, 473–74, 477–78, 484, 486, 498, 508, 513, 515, 522–28, 531, 533, 536, 538, 541, 570–71, 594
list of names Dublioul, Laurens 103, 147, 241, 247–48, 285, 323–24, 327, 335, 499 Dullaert, Joannes 413 Dumortier, Barthélémy 7 Dungan, Edmund OFM 492 Duns Scotus, Joannes OFM 404 Duras, Georgius SJ 297 Duvergier de Hauranne, Jean Saint–Cyran (de), Abbé Eckius, Joannes 404 Eelen (Van), Charles Lonson 215–16 Eelen (Van), Christobal Lonson 215 Eertwijck (Van), Joannes 170 Eijnatten (Van), Maximilianus 359–60, 364 Elias, Hendrik 433, 442, 475 Emerix, family 262 Emich, Birgit 265 Enckenvoirt (Van), William 585 Episcopus Hieracensis Bonardo, Vincenzo OP Erasmus, Desiderius 21–22, 89, 131, 234, 337 Ernest of Austria 247–48 Ernest of Bavaria 8, 245–46, 253–55, 257, 261, 266, 328, 331–32, 409–13, 505 Espen (Van), Zegerus Bernardus 66–67, 74, 79, 96, 98, 101–02, 138, 199, 618 Essenghien, Count of 147, 335 Estius, Guilielmus 388 Eugenius IV (Gabriele Condulmaro), Pope 21, 95, 121, 457 Eynatten (ab), Ludovicus CRSA 207, 549 Eynthouts (ab), Arnoldus CRSA 207, 267, 275–76, 278, 304, 343–44, 366, 413, 416 Faber, Paulus 524 Fabri, Philippus 579 Fabricius, Guilielmus 235, 399, 404–06, 575, 577 Facchinetti, Giovanni Antonio Innocent IX Faille (Della), Charles 215–16, 395–96, 476, 488, 492, 570–71 Fannius, Jean 507, 513, 530–33, 538, 560 Farnese, Alessandro I Paul III Farnese, Alessandro II 173, 322, 326, 339, 342
675
Farnese, Odoardo 326 Farnese, Ranuccio I 326 Fattori, Maria Teresa 427 Fayn (Du), Guilielmus 412, 414–18 Fechius, Guilielmus 412 Fellini, Federico 591 Ferdinand of Bavaria 249, 505, 510, 513, 517–21, 553, 556, 560, 586 Ferratino, Bartolomeo 365 Fienus, Thomas 164, 351, 374, 409, 472–73, 485, 510, 538 Filonardi, Flaminio 254 Filonardi, Marcello 254, 388, 402, 404 Flechin, Guilielmus 251 Flerontinus, Franciscus SJ 392, 509, 511, 517–18 Florensz Boeyens (of Utrecht), Adriaan Hadrian VI Frangipani, Ottavio Mirto 147, 210, 212, 214, 223, 227–28, 238–41, 248–50, 254–59, 261–62, 266–67, 277–78, 298, 306, 316–18, 324, 330, 341–42, 344–46, 352, 354, 359, 365–72, 388, 390–91, 398–400, 404, 409, 414, 555, 595–96, 609, 615, 624 Fraxinis (A), Joannes 412, 418–19, 491–93, 502, 505, 507, 509 Freisne (De), Balduinus 264 Frijhoff, Willem xxi, 44, 54 Fritema (De), Folkart 215–16, 480 Füssel, Marian 272, 309 Fugger, family 351 Galamini, Agostino OP 563 Galilei, Galileo xxi, 4, 314, 322, 563, 568 Galli, Tolomeo 261 Garzadoro, Coriolano 249, 255–56, 416 Gay, Antonius 515 Geldre, Nicolaus 541 General (SJ) Acquaviva, Claudio SJ (1581–1615) Vitelleschi, Muzio SJ (1615–45) Georg of Austria 469, 498 Gerardi, Jacobus 388, 405 Gesualdo, Ascanio 262, 403, 462, 477, 487–88, 497, 537–47, 560–61, 563, 567, 569 Ghennaert, Matthias 263 Ghiffene, Laurentius 193
676
list of names
Ghislieri, Michele Pius V Giusti, Pietro Francesco 230, 232 Giustiniani, Benedetto 365 Givry (De), Anne d’Escars 241, 384, 401–02 Goffin, Libertus 537 Goliath, biblical figure 373 Gondomar, Don Diego de Sarmiento, Count of 563, 580 Gonzaga, family 594 Gonzaga, Luigi SJ, Saint 591 Goswinus, Georgius 328, 409 Gouda (De), Joannes SJ 403 Goudanus, Cornelius Reyneri 130, 223, 404, 465 Goudt, Philippus 330, 354, 374, 412, 415 Governor General Farnese, Alessandro II (1579–92) Mansfeldt, Peter Ernst Count of (1592–94) Ernest of Austria (1594–95) Albert of Austria (1596–98) Andreas of Austria (1598–99) Isabella Clara Eugenia (1621–33) Grace (De), Theodericus 530–31 Granvelle, Antoine Perennot 10 Gravius, Henricus 223–24, 227–33, 236, 242–47, 253–54, 329, 336, 338, 345, 389, 424, 585 Gregory I (Gregory The Great), Pope, Saint 356 Gregory VII (Aldobrandeschi, Hildebrand), Pope 488, 501, 507, 565 Gregory XIII (Ugo Buoncompagni), Pope 3, 30, 122, 136–37, 149, 168, 181, 191, 193, 198, 200, 213, 224–25, 237, 243, 246, 251, 345, 404, 573 Gregory XIV (Niccolò Sfondrati), Pope 229–32, 243, 265 Gregory XV (Alessandro Ludovisi), Pope 88, 216, 322, 464, 576, 580, 590 Grimbergen (Van), Guilielmus 246 Groesbeek (Of ), Gerard 556 Grotius, Hugo 562 Gudelinus, Petrus 206, 343 Guelluy, Robert 23 Guidi di Bagno, Giovanni Francesco 147, 216, 567, 569, 572–77, 586 Guignet, [. . .] 471
Haacht (Van), Jacobus 206 Habsburg, family xxiv, xxvii, 19, 22, 30, 36, 72, 80, 101–02, 136, 247–48, 262, 277, 283, 306, 325, 335–36, 340, 423, 427, 442, 446, 480, 484, 486, 495, 506, 530, 547, 569–71, 581, 589, 604–06, 621 Hadrian VI (Adriaan Florensz Boeyens of Utrecht), Pope 22, 25, 135, 176, 197, 519, 585 Haller, Joannes 97 Hardy, Lucien 597, 611 Harlebecanus, Adamus 208 Havré, Marquis of 333 Haynin (De), Antonius 99, 191, 193 Henry I, Duke of Brabant 332 Henry IV, King of France 236, 344, 370, 590 Herennius, Joannes SJ 517 Hesse, Christian 91, 121 Houst, Anton 248, 276, 317, 343 Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Eitel Friedrich Count of 263, 519–20 Horeus, Hubertus 418 Hornkens, Gerardus 324, 329–30, 362–63, 412, 415, 417, 421 Hornkens, Henricus 329–30 House of Bavaria Wittelsbach, family Hovius, Franciscus 361–62 Hovius, Matthias 10, 12, 15, 64–86, 88, 105–07, 111, 115, 159–61, 179, 181, 211, 215, 317, 333, 353, 360, 379, 394, 464, 467, 482, 484, 489, 591–92, 618 Hugo, Carolus 413 Hustinus, Sebastianus 417 Incoronato, [. . .] 327 Innocent VIII (Giovanni Battista Cibò), Pope 91 Innocent IX (Giovanni Antonio Facchinetti), Pope 232 Innocent X (Giovanni Battista Pamfili), Pope 623 Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain xxiv, 6–7, 19, 138, 147, 215–16, 222, 331–32, 440, 464–65, 512, 569, 571, 594 Jacobens, Laurentius 531, 533–38, 540–41, 543, 546, 556, 581–82 Jacobs, Marc 471 Jamart, family 418
list of names Jamart, Guilielmus 418 James I, King of England, Scotland and Ireland 335, 562, 580 Jansenius, Cornelius (of Ghent) 25 Jansenius, Cornelius (of Ypres) 17, 20, 131, 133–34, 143–45, 148, 154–56, 166, 172, 175, 191, 194–96, 198–99, 213, 234, 392, 407, 456, 464–65, 517, 558, 562, 565–67, 570–73, 575–76, 588, 592, 594, 623 Jansonius, Jacobus 215, 219, 249, 292, 297–98, 308, 319, 348, 352, 388, 390, 392, 397–406, 413, 418, 429, 445, 451, 458, 463–74, 477–78, 482–86, 492, 507, 510–11, 513–15, 517, 521–26, 528–29, 531–33, 538, 567–68, 572–79, 592–94 Jeanne de Valois, Saint 571 Jedin, Hubert 4–5, 8, 15, 17, 34 John IV of Burgundy, Duke of Brabant 551 Jonathan, biblical figure 230 Jonnaert, Philippus 347 Jules II (Giuliano della Rovere), Pope 94 Jules III (Giammaria Ciocchi del Monte), Pope 197 Keersmaekere (De), Carolus 558 Kepler, Joannes 562 Kerkovius, Judocus SJ 298 Kettering, Sharon 314, 423 Kibre, Pearl 117 Kintius, Joannes 148 Lamata, Francisco 389 Lancelotti, Orazio 240, 502–03, 507, 533, 543, 545, 564, 566 Lancelotti, Scipione 240 Landi Da Sessa, Lelio 229 Lanoye, Diederik 482, 568 Lante, Marcello 266–67, 327–28, 342–43, 364, 410, 412, 416, 421 Lante–Della Rovere, family 328 Lapide (a), Cornelius SJ 6 Latomus, Jacobus 24–25, 27 Latour, Bruno xxiii, xxvii, 55, 57 Law, John xxvii, 597 Lensaeus, Joannes 27 Leo X (Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici), Pope xviii, 22, 91–92, 96, 102, 106, 134–35, 158, 175, 193, 248, 344, 423 Leo XI (Alessandro de’Medici), Pope 344, 423
677
Lerma, don Francisco Gòmez Sandoval y Roja, Count of 386 Lessius, Leonardus SJ 26, 225, 228–29, 232–33, 238–39, 241–43, 285, 294, 297–98, 375–76, 383, 387–89, 392, 402–04, 469–70, 517, 575, 592 Leunkens, Martinus 558 Lindanus, Guilielmus 231, 233 Lins, Georgius 355 Lintermans, […] 216 Lintermans, Bartholomeus 514 Lipsius, Justus 235–37, 247, 279, 313–14, 340, 359, 364, 447–48, 462, 472 Lombard, Peter 23, 147, 169, 221–23, 245, 264, 267, 316, 318–55, 358, 361–66, 369–75, 385–86, 388–91, 393, 399, 403, 406, 408–10, 412–30, 491–93, 503, 505, 527, 541–44, 565, 591–92, 602–04 Lombardus, Petrus (Sentences) 23, 26, 294 Loonbeeck, […] 513 Loots, Philippus 416 Louis XII, King of France 94 Loyaerts, Samuel 412, 414–16 Loyola (of), Ignatius SJ, Saint 393, 517, 588, 590 Ludovisi, Alessandro → Gregory XV Ludovisi, family 590 Ludovisi, Ludovico 480, 564, 569, 576, 580, 590 Luther, Martin 5, 22, 389 Lytle, Guy Fitch 126 Madruzzo, Giovanni Ludovico 243–46, 325–26, 379, 387 Maelcote, Jean 248, 302 Maelcote, Robert SJ 573 Maes, Charles 73 Maes, Engelbert 73, 331, 476, 478–81, 488, 510–11, 531, 538 Maes, family 480 Maes, Jean–Baptiste 510, 513, 533, 543 Maes, Philip 103, 262, 332, 351, 476, 479–80, 488–511, 514, 516, 519, 521, 523, 529–60, 567 Malderus, Joannes 12, 296, 342, 346, 374, 388, 406, 423, 468, 592 Manareus, Oliverius SJ 274, 296, 298–300, 392, 394 Mangelli, Andrea 623
678
list of names
Mansfeldt, Peter Ernst, Count of 247 Mantels, Andreas 215, 521, 530–32, 557, 560 Maraldi, Marcaurelio 347, 492, 501–03, 541, 543, 560, 564, 566–67, 575, 586 Marck (De La), Erard 519 Martin V (Odoardo Colonna), Pope 21, 98, 167, 202, 204–05, 304, 326, 423, 551 Marx, Karl 41 Masius, Joannes OPraem 593 Massen, Joannes 164–65, 347, 510, 516, 520, 524–26, 532, 538 Masson, Jean Papire 235 Mattei, family 334 Mattei, Girolamo 320, 322, 324, 334, 339 Maximilian I of Austria, Emperor 99, 136 Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria 351 Mechliniensis, Jacobus 355 Medardus, Ludovicus I 153, 524 Medardus, Ludovicus II 524 Medici (de’), Alessandro Leo XI Medici (de’), family 344 Medici (de’), Giovanni di Lorenzo Leo X Medici (de’), Giulio Clement VII Medici (de’), Maria 370 Melchisedek, biblical figure 390, 403 Meulen (Vander), Joannes 526, 593 Meurant, Joannes 170 Meyer, Andreas 91, 167 Meyer (De), Livinius SJ 379 Micaultius (Michout), Nicolaus 324, 326, 329, 336–37 Miel (Van), Jan 585 Milius, Joannes 351 Millino, Giangarzia 335, 502–07, 543, 560, 563, 566, 572 Miraeus, Aubertus 359 Miraeus, Joannes 32, 212, 351–57, 617 Molanus, Joannes 27 Molina (De), Luis SJ 228, 377, 379, 381–84, 386–87, 389 Monopoli (da), Anselmo OFMCap 241 Montalto Peretti Montalto, Alessandro Damasceni
Montelbero Petrocchini (Montelbero), Gregorio Monterensis, Julius 417 Montmorency (De), Florentius SJ 301 Montmorency (De), Nicolas 301, 333 Morin, Pierre 229 Morra, Lucio xxvi, 262, 462, 475, 477–81, 486–88, 544, 561, 563–70, 577 Motta, Franco 375–76, 383, 390 Mottman, Cornelius Henricus 196, 262, 585–86, 588 Mottman, family 262 Mozzarelli, Cesare 19 Neeten, Martinus 530–31 Nény (de), Patrice 96, 102 Neri, Filippo Or, Saint 230, 237, 336–38 Neuvelt, [. . .] 588 Nicolas V (Tommaso Parentuccelli), Pope 207 Noteleers, Joannes 159 Nuncio (Cologne) Bonomi, Giovanni Francesco (1584– 87) Frangipani, Ottavio Mirto (1587–96) Garzadoro, Coriolano (1593–1606) Amalteo, Attilio (1606–10) Albergati, Antonio (1610–21) Nuncio (Flanders) Frangipani, Ottavio Mirto (1596–1606) Carafa, Decio (1606–07) Bentivoglio, Guido (1607–15) Gesualdo, Ascanio (1615–17) Morra, Lucio (1617–19) Sanseverino, Lucio (1619–21) Guidi Di Bagno, Giovanni Francesco (1621–27) Mangelli, Andrea (1652–55) O’Malley, John SJ 5 Oeteren (Van), Edmond 413 Oplen, Hermannus 264 Oppiterus, Joannes Hermanni 332 Oranus, Aegidius 263 Oranus, family 262–63 Oranus, Franciscus 241, 260–61, 264–65, 329, 411–12, 419–20, 546, 585
list of names Oranus, Joannes SJ 286, 299 Ortembergh (d’), Herman 10, 157, 245, 325, 342, 353–55, 372, 447, 498, 500, 503 Otgerus, Saint 399 Palotta, Giovanni Battista 241–42, 260 Paludanus, Franciscus 153, 413 Paludanus, Joannes 166, 467, 533 Pamfili, Girolamo 263, 344–45, 417 Parentuccelli, Tommaso Nicolas V Paridanus, Henricus 213 Parisiis (De), Joannes 342, 353, 355, 421 Parma, Duke of Farnese, Ranuccio I Pasture, Alexandre 60, 71 Paul II (Pietro Barbo), Pope 204, 244 Paul III (Alessandro Farnese), Pope 136, 200 Paul V (Camillo Borghese), Pope 17, 60, 88, 92, 149, 185, 191, 193, 207, 244, 247–48, 259, 262, 266, 314, 316, 327, 335, 339, 343–48, 352–56, 361–62, 367–68, 373, 375, 378–88, 391, 398–409, 417, 420, 422–24, 427–28, 430, 434, 443, 465, 481–82, 485, 487–93, 496, 498, 500–11, 520–21, 529–48, 551–56, 560–62, 565–67, 570, 578, 580–82, 589–90, 605–08 Peck, Pieter 189, 478–80, 511, 520, 532–33, 538, 542 Pegasus, mythological figure 313 Peña, Francisco 236, 239, 250, 262, 306, 327, 342, 361, 382, 385, 388, 548 Peranus, Jacobus 412 Peretti Montalto, Alessandro Damasceni 223–24, 227–28, 232, 234, 240–42, 244, 260, 265, 298, 324, 344, 553 Peretti Montalto, family 334, 553 Peretti, Felice Sixtus V Peretti, prince 553–54 Perez, Antonius 130 Perron (Du), Jacques Davy 341 Perseus, mythological figure 313, 512, 589 Petrocchini (Montelbero), Gregorio 327 Philip II (Philip of Swabia), Emperor 332
679
Philip II, King of Spain xxv, 6, 10, 22, 28, 30, 101, 114, 136, 169, 236–37, 241–42, 247, 305, 309, 317, 321, 327, 331–32, 377, 383, 447, 482, 499, 548, 560 Philip III, King of Spain 327, 331, 383, 496, 499, 500, 553, 563, 570, 580, 589 Philip IV, King of Spain 90, 440, 589 Philip The Fair, Archduke of Austria 203 Philip The Good, Duke of Burgundy 98, 203 Pinelli, Domenico 241 Piroulle, Franciscus 558 Pisquiera (De), Andrea (Don) 361 Pisquiera (De), family 361 Pius V (Michele Ghislieri), Pope 168, 225, 243, 279, 404, 573 Pius X (Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto), Pope 236 Pius XI (Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti), Pope 431 Planca, [. . .] 327 Plechelmus, Saint 399 Po–Chia Hsia, Ronnie 5 Polano, Pietro Soave Sarpi, Paolo Poncelet, Alfred SJ 16, 271, 273–74, 291, 295, 460 Pope Gregory I (590–604) Gregory VII (1073–85) Martin V (1417–31) Eugenius IV (1431–47) Nicolas V (1447–55) Calixt III (1455–58) Paul II (1464–71) Sixtus IV (1471–84) Innocent VIII (1484–92) Jules II (1503–13) Leo X (1513–21) Hadrian VI (1522–23) Clement VII (1523–34) Paul III (1534–49) Jules III (1550–55) Pius V (1566–72) Gregory XIII (1572–85) Sixtus V (1585–90) Urban VII (1590) Gregory XIV (1590–91) Innocent IX (1591) Clement VIII (1592–1605) Leo XI (1605)
680
list of names
Paul V (1605–21) Gregory XV (1621–23) Urban VIII (1623–44) Innocent X (1644–55) Clement X (1667–69) Pius X (1903–14) Pius XI (1922–39) Prats, Philippe 157, 334, 360, 441, 468, 494, 501, 506–07, 511, 515, 532–33, 535, 537–38, 541, 552–54 Privy Council: Members Assonleville, Christophe Dasseriers, Antoine Houst, Anton Salinas (de), Ferdinand Steenhuysen, William Privy Council: Presidents Borch (Vander), Jean (1593–97) Richardot, Jean Sr. (1597–1609) Maes, Engelbert (1614–30) Prodi, Paolo 19, 97 Proost (De), Adrianus 213 Provincial SJ (Belg.) Delange, Balduinus SJ (1582–85) Costerus, Franciscus SJ (1585–89) Manareus, Oliverius SJ (1589–94) Duras, Georgius SJ (1594–98) Flerontinus, Franciscus SJ (1605–12) Viron, Michael SJ (1610–11) Provincial SJ (Fl.–Belg.) Scribani, Carolus SJ (1613–19) Montmorency (De), Florentius SJ (1623–27) Provincial SJ (Gall.–Belg.) Herennius, Joannes SJ (1612–19) Montmorency (De), Florentius SJ (1619–23) Herennius, Joannes SJ (1623–27) Provost (Saint Peter’s, Louvain), Chancellor of the University Georg of Austria Puis (Du), Oliverius 166 Puteanus, Erycius 462, 472, 589 Quaghebeur, Toon
73, 82
Rampen, Henricus 146, 417–18, 575–77 Ratti, Ambrogio Damiano Achile Pius XI Razzali, Serafino Olivario 373 Rebuffus, Petrus 164, 193–95, 549
Reijneri, Gerardus 208 Reinhard, Wolfgang xxii, 36–38, 40, 47, 265, 314, 423 Richardot, family 359, 479 Richardot, Jean Jr. 73, 103, 147, 210, 330–31, 333–34, 354–55, 366, 370, 382–83, 407, 415, 480, 498–500, 553 Richardot, Jean Sr. 73, 328–31, 333–35, 353, 359, 407, 441, 444–45, 477–80 Robaulx, Carolus 492–93, 502, 507, 510–11, 513, 515, 520, 530–33, 538, 541–45, 552, 559–61, 563–64, 566–68, 574–77, 581, 586 Roberti, Joannes 197, 253, 339, 365, 387, 402–03 Rocca, Angelo OSA 229 Rodoan (de), Carolus Philippus 170 Roij (Le), Theodorus 317 Rothe, David 335, 591 Rovenius, Philippus 465 Rovere (Della), Francesco Sixtus IV Rovere (Della), Giuliano Jules II Rudolph I, Emperor 589 Rudolph II, Emperor 590 Rusticucci, Girolamo 327 Saillot,Thomas SJ 517 Saint–Cyran (de), Abbé 133, 144, 194, 456, 465, 562, 565–67, 570–73, 575–76, 588, 594 Sales (De), François, Saint 405 Salinas (De), Ferdinand 360 Salmis (De), family 262, 418 Salmis (De) Henricus 418 Salmis (De), Stephanus 418 Salviati, Antonmaria 327 San Giorgio Aldobrandini (San Giorgio), Cinzio Passeri Sandrino, Joannes 249–50, 317, 342–43, 345, 366–67, 369, 595, 609, 615 Sanseverino, Lucio 100, 213, 262, 476–78, 480, 563–64, 567, 569–70, 576–77 Sant’Eusebio Taverna (Sant’ Eusebio), Ferdinando Santori, Giulio Antonio 228, 233–35, 237, 240, 242–45, 247, 265, 303, 327, 339–40, 349, 361, 363, 424, 427, 602
list of names Sarpi, Paolo 19, 562 Sarto, Giuseppe Melchiorre Pius X Sassenus, Franciscus 471–73 Sassenus, Servatius 361 Sasso, Lucio 333, 363, 369, 414–16 Saverbroot, [. . .] 264 Scaglia, Desiderio OP 564, 578–79 Scaliger, Josephus Justus 235 Schilling, Heinz 36–38, 141 Schinckelius, Joannes 146, 164–65, 192, 374, 467–68, 525–26, 528, 538, 566–67, 575, 577–79, 593 Schönborn (Von), Lothar Franz 255 Schoonhoven, Lord of 359 Schoore (Van), Everard 328, 360 Schoore (Van), family 359 Schwarz, Brigide 88, 91, 167 Scribani, Carolus SJ 388, 482, 517, 567 Secretaries of State (Brussels) Prats, Philippe Faille (Della), Charles Fritema (De), Folkart Selva (De), Juan 164 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 313 Serry, Jacobus Hyacinthus OP 378–82, 385–86, 388, 426, 469 Sessa, Antonio Fernández de Córdoba y Cardona, Duke of 247–48, 275, 304, 306, 317, 322, 324–25, 327, 331, 336, 366, 499 Sfondrati, Niccolò Gregory XIV Sfondrati, Paolo Emilio 229, 231, 243, 337, 365 Sforza, Francesco 96, 326 Sigismond, King of Poland 8 Siqura, Pedro 361–62 Sirleto, Guglielmo 224, 233 Sixtus IV (Francesco Della Rovere), Pope xviii, 113, 134, 158, 175 Sixtus V (Felice Peretti), Pope 223–43, 258, 324, 327, 376, 408, 431 Slins, Nicolaus 418 Slins, Philippus 318 Sluijter, Ronald xviii Soto (De), Andrea OFM 510, 515 Soto (De), Franciscus SJ 404 Soumagne, Arnold 413 Spada, Giambattista 548 Spinola, Ambrogio 497 Spoelberch (De), family 365 Spoelbergh (De), Jean-Baptiste 365 Staphilaeus, Joannes 196
681
Stapleton, Thomas 27, 297–98, 317–19, 452 States of Brabant Drusius, Joannes OPraem Eynatten (ab), Ludovicus CRSA Fannius, Jean Hovius, Matthias Loonbeeck, [. . .] Maes, Philip Maes, Jean–Baptiste Miraeus, Joannes Roij (Le), Theodorus Vanneij, [. . .] Wezemaal, Antoine Schetz, Baron of Grobbendonk, Baron of Steenhuysen, William 478, 480 Stollberg–Rilinger, Barbara 395, 582 Stone, Laurence 125 Stone, Martin 378, 394 Stravius, family 261–62, 369 Stravius, Franciscus 261 Stravius, Henricus 261, 352, 369 Stravius, Lambertus 369 Strecheus, Stephanus 332, 341–43, 410–11, 413, 416 Stryen, Joannes 297, 361 Stuart, family 335 Sublindius, Clemens 224, 245–46, 250, 413, 418 Sucquet, Guilielmus 157 Suessanus Landi Da Sessa, Lelio Sulpice Jansenius, Cornelius (of Ypres) Swanson, Robert 125–27 Sylvius (Bosmans), Conrardus 160, 321, 325, 336, 343, 507 Sylvius (Bosmans), Cornelius 206, 357, 367, 451, 470, 486, 516, 530, 532–33, 538 Sylvius (Bosmans), Franciscus 384, 569–70 Tagliavia d’Aragonia (Terranova), Simone 333 Tapper, Ruardus 24, 27, 29, 384, 404 Tarugi, Francesco Maria Or 324, 338 Taverna (Sant’ Eusebio), Ferdinando 241, 505 Terranova Tagliavia d’Aragonia (Terranova), Simone
682
list of names
Tewes, Götz–Rüdiger 89, 91, 93–94, 97, 103, 106–07 Thisius, Leonardus 263–64 Thisius, Theodatus 263 Thyrreus, Petrus SJ 376 Titelmans, Franciscus OFMCap 513 Toledo (De), Francisco SJ 224, 233, 243, 305–06, 339, 375, 424 Toledo (De), Pedro (Don) 333, 342, 354, 498, 503 Tollet (a), Bernardus 328, 409 Tonti, Michelangelo 347–48, 417–18, 503 Torrentius, Laevinius 273–74, 286, 297, 299, 350–51, 397, 456 Torres (De), Ludovico 247 Torres (De), Tomaso OP 269, 407, 467–69, 517–18 Tosantos (De), Plácido Pacheco OSB 570 Trejo y Paniagua (De), Gabriel 570 Trevigi, Andrea 60, 453, 471–73, 498, 504, 515, 577, 592, 594, 613 Triest, Antoon 12, 170 Tyrconnel, Ronny O’Donnell, Earl of 591 Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of 322–23, 335, 591 Urban VII (Giambattista Castagna), Pope 229 Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini), Pope xvii, 88, 147, 244, 263, 348, 384, 491, 563, 580, 587 Valbelle, family 423 Valverdius, Bartolomaeus 229 Van Waefelghem, Michel 433, 443, 475 Vanneij, [. . .] 447 Vasquez, Gabriel SJ 383, 388 Velde (Vande), Guilielmus 98–99, 143, 176, 187, 190–96, 208–10, 331–32, 549, 551, 559, 588 Vendegies, Baron of Montmorency (De), Nicolas Vendeville (De), Joannes 148, 185, 238–39 Verallo, Fabrizio 335, 543, 563, 566 Verlaye, Henricus 413, 417 Verlaye, Paulus 413 Verlaye, Petrus 413, 417 Vermeij, Petrus 164, 359–60
Vernulaeus, Nicolaus 154, 593 Vervianus, Bertrandus 262, 346, 418 Vervianus, family 261 Vestrio, [. . .] 342, 421 Viaene, Vincent 52 Vianen (Van), Franciscus 526, 593 Villeers (Van), Gerardus 507, 520 Viringi (Wieringhe), Joannes 370–72, 414 Viron, Michael SJ 517 Vitalis, Laurentius 373 Vitelleschi, Muzio SJ 291, 482, 567, 573, 575 Vivariis (De), Aegidius Ursinus 418, 491, 585, 587 Vivariis (De), Lambertus Ursinus 587 Vivariis (De), Ursinus, family 262–63 Vives, Juan Bautista 215–16, 498, 569, 570–71 Vlierden (Van), Franciscus OPraem 275–77, 304, 366, 443 Voltaire 7 Vosmeer, Sasbold 249, 395, 403, 464–65 Vosmeer, Tilman 249 Vossius, Gerardus 233, 242, 244, 246–47, 250–51, 267–68, 275, 298, 302–06, 310, 316, 319–20, 324, 350, 358, 373–74, 412, 422, 424 Vossius, Leonardus 246, 250, 275, 350 Wadding, Luke OFM 386, 492, 571, 591 Wamesius, Joannes 185, 196, 223–24, 238–42, 247, 321, 361 Watsinges (de), Nicolaus 159 Weber, Max 37, 50 Weyms, Stephanus 248–49, 317–18, 320–21, 342–43, 352, 366, 595 Wezemaal, Antoine Schetz, Baron of Grobbendonk, Baron of 471, 513, 533 White, Louise 61 White, Thomas 267, 341–46, 350–51, 353–56, 374, 413, 418, 421–22, 426 White, Peter 221 Wiggers, Joannes 26, 468–70, 538, 574–75 Willibrord, Saint 398 Winckel (Vanden), Hercules OCart 357, 359, 365
list of names Wintershoven, Joannes Baptista SJ 395–96 Wiringus, Thomas SJ 297 Wittelsbach, family 80, 262 Wolfsfelt, Joannes 371 Woolgar, Steve 57 Wypion, Andreas 566 Wypion, Joannes 566 Wytfliet, Gregorius 206
683
Xandre, Jean Sandrino, Joannes Zoenius, Laurentius 346, 412, 523 Zollern, Count of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Eitel Friedrich Count of Zuerius, Philippus 223, 242, 295, 321, 360–61, 366, 472
