ABSTRACT
The historiography surrounding the significance of the Council of Trent (1545–63) presents a particular challenge; even before the Council fathers hurried away from the freezing city in December 1563, the event had become the subject of myth-making. In the intervening 450 years the Council has come to represent – particularly amongst historians of Roman Catholicism – everything that is valued or abhorrent about organized, ‘official religion’. The fateful decision, taken by the papacy within a year of the Council’s conclusion, not to publish the full (or even edited) proceedings (or acta), notoriously left the way open for the Venetian Servite friar Paolo Sarpi to compose his warts-and-all Istoria del concilio tridentino – ‘the Iliad of our times’ – which was printed in London in 1619 to avoid censorship. 1 By attempting to rebut Sarpi chapter-and-verse (yet without being allowed to quote in extenso from the Council papers which by then had been carefully collected together and were closely guarded in the papal archives), the official response of the Jesuit Pietro Sforza Pallavicino, first printed in two folio volumes (1656–57), merely served to draw attention to the rhetorical brilliance of Sarpi’s argument. 2 As is well known, the complete publication of the Conciliar acts had to await the dawn of the twenty-first century, with the appearance of the final volume of the comprehensive edition sponsored by the Görres Gesellschaft in 2001 precisely 100 years after the first. 3 It is one of the ironies of historiography that the conclusion of this magnificent monument to scholarship came about long after interest in its contents had peaked. There were three reasons for this. Firstly, this series of volumes both made possible, and then continued after the completion of, what is by far the most authoritative historical account of the Council, that by the German Catholic priest, Hubert Jedin (1900–80), which was first published between 1949 and 1975 (only the first two volumes of which are available in English translation). 4 Secondly, Jedin’s work was of a thoroughness, range and level of detail to close down discussion rather than open it up. (In this respect, the complex arrangement of the Görres Gesellschaft edition of the Conciliar acts, which is anything but chronological, has compounded the problem). Thirdly, the echoes of the event which has done most to shape the agenda of those researching Roman Catholicism of the later Middle Ages and early modern period since the 1960s – the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) – were fast receding.
