A Critical Reading of The Roman Church and Multiconfessional Europe in the Early Modern Period, Edited by Elena Bonora. Rome: Viella, 2026.
The question, therefore, is straightforward: does the impressive accumulation of archival research assembled in this volume actually demonstrate the broader interpretative claims advanced by its underlying historiographical framework?
The answer, in my view, is only partially affirmative.
There is little doubt that the volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars and offers a series of carefully researched essays grounded in extensive archival documentation. The individual contributions considerably enrich our knowledge of papal diplomacy, the Roman Curia, missionary policies, censorship, the Holy Roman Empire, France, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As collections of primary-source-based historical research, many of these chapters represent valuable contributions to their respective fields.
Yet the methodological problem already identified in the earlier essay largely remains unresolved.
The difficulty lies not in the quality of the individual investigations but in the relationship between the empirical material they present and the general historical conclusions that the volume seeks to support. Most chapters examine frontier regions, diplomatic negotiations, religious settlements, jurisdictional conflicts, missionary encounters, legal exceptions, or institutional interactions within politically and confessionally complex environments. These are precisely the contexts in which multiconfessionality generated the richest documentary record. Consequently, they provide exceptionally fertile ground for historical investigation.
The individual contributions clearly illustrate this tendency. Elena Bonora's own chapter on Cardinal Giovanni Francesco Commendone reconstructs, with considerable documentary sophistication, the emergence of new diplomatic languages capable of operating within legally plural environments. Silvano Giordano's essay on the imperial nunciatures similarly highlights Rome's pragmatic accommodation to "countries with much freedom", while Olivier Poncet's study of France follows the gradual adaptation of papal diplomacy to the successive peaces of religion. Likewise, the essays on Propaganda Fide, the Congregation of the Index, and the management of mixed-confessional territories consistently demonstrate Rome's remarkable institutional capacity for adaptation, privileging moments of negotiation, jurisdictional adjustment, and administrative flexibility. Yet precisely because all these contributions investigate settings in which confessional plurality constituted the very object of administrative intervention, they tend to reinforce the interpretative framework within which the research programme was originally conceived. What remains less visible is systematic engagement with evidence capable of challenging, rather than confirming, that framework.
However, documentary richness should not be confused with historical representativeness.
Precisely because the volume is organised around such contexts, the reader is left wondering whether the overall picture reflects the confessional reality of early modern Europe or, rather, the particular documentary profile of those regions and institutions where multiconfessionality inevitably generated the greatest quantity of surviving evidence. The cumulative effect of the essays is therefore less to test the underlying historiographical framework than to illustrate it through a carefully selected body of exceptionally favourable cases.
The volume substantially enlarges the documentary basis available for studying the Roman Church's interaction with religious pluralism. What it does not fully demonstrate is that these exceptional contexts can legitimately sustain a general reconfiguration of the confessional geography of early modern Europe. Expanding historical knowledge of previously neglected phenomena is not equivalent to establishing their overall historical centrality.
In this respect, the collection largely confirms the methodological concern expressed in my previous contribution. Rather than resolving the tension between empirical investigation and historiographical construction, it often reproduces it on a larger scale. The multiplication of case studies undoubtedly strengthens our understanding of multiconfessional situations; it does not automatically establish that multiconfessionality constituted the dominant historical configuration of Europe as a whole.
The problem is further reinforced by the nature of the sources themselves. Much of the documentation employed throughout the volume originates from institutions whose very purpose was to intervene whenever coexistence generated legal uncertainty, jurisdictional disputes, diplomatic tensions, ecclesiastical litigation, or administrative exceptions. Nunciatures, Roman congregations, missionary correspondence, judicial proceedings, and negotiations naturally illuminate moments of conflict, accommodation, and institutional adaptation. They provide extraordinarily rich evidence—but precisely because of their institutional character, they also privilege the exceptional over the ordinary.
This raises a methodological issue that deserves more sustained discussion than the volume provides. Source criticism cannot stop at questions of authenticity or reliability. It must also ask why certain documents were produced, why they survived, which social realities they illuminate, and which they inevitably leave in the shadows. Without such reflection, there is always a risk that the documentary density of exceptional situations will gradually be mistaken for the historical density of the phenomenon itself.
To the editors' credit, the introduction is noticeably more cautious than Bonora's 2023 historiographical essay. It explicitly rejects the construction of new "Procrustean beds" and insists that multiconfessionality should remain an open heuristic category rather than harden into another comprehensive explanatory paradigm. This methodological clarification represents an important refinement of the original programme.
Nevertheless, the overall architecture of the volume only partially reflects this welcome caution. Despite the explicit warning against replacing one paradigm with another, the individual essays are consistently interpreted through the unifying framework of multiconfessionality. The result is that the concept often performs precisely the paradigmatic function that the introduction seeks to avoid.
This is particularly evident in the cumulative structure of the collection. Read individually, the chapters are careful, nuanced, and appropriately attentive to local circumstances. Read together, however, they tend to produce an implicit narrative in which virtually every form of diplomatic flexibility, jurisdictional negotiation, or institutional adaptation becomes further confirmation of the same overarching historiographical model. The risk is that analytical convergence is achieved less through explicit comparative demonstration than through the shared interpretative lens adopted from the outset.
Another aspect deserves attention. Throughout the volume, considerable emphasis is placed upon negotiation, accommodation, flexibility, legal pluralism, and institutional pragmatism. These were undoubtedly fundamental dimensions of early modern religious politics. Yet such emphasis sometimes risks relegating to the background the continuing normative force of confessional identities, doctrinal commitments, ecclesiological constructions, and competing claims to religious truth. Historical actors negotiated because they believed profoundly different things—not because doctrinal divisions had become secondary.
One might also observe that relatively little attention is devoted to those areas of Europe where confessional identities became more firmly institutionalised and where religious coexistence was limited, heavily regulated, or largely absent. As a consequence, the empirical balance of the volume naturally favours environments in which multiconfessionality was particularly visible, thereby reinforcing the interpretative framework without systematically confronting its geographical or chronological limits.
Ultimately, The Roman Church and Multiconfessional Europe in the Early Modern Period succeeds more convincingly as a collection of excellent archival investigations than as a demonstration of the broader historiographical paradigm it seeks to advance.
None of this detracts from the documentary interest of the individual chapters. Several of them provide careful analyses of specific historical contexts and institutional practices. Yet the contrast between the local investigations and the volume's broader historiographical ambitions remains evident. The local analyses are generally more persuasive than the overarching synthesis they are expected to sustain.
Taken together, the essays contribute to our understanding of Roman policies within confessionally diverse environments. Whether they collectively justify a fundamental reinterpretation of early modern Europe's confessional landscape remains far more open to debate.
Perhaps the most convincing way to demonstrate the explanatory power of the multiconfessional paradigm would have been to test it precisely where it appears least applicable. A historiographical model gains strength not by repeatedly explaining favourable cases, but by demonstrating its capacity either to illuminate—or to acknowledge its own limits—in less accommodating historical contexts.
In this sense, the volume ultimately confirms rather than dispels the methodological concerns raised in Against Over-Interpretation, Once More. The issue is not whether multiconfessionality existed, nor whether its study has produced important historical discoveries. It undoubtedly has. The real question is whether the accumulation of exceptional case studies, however sophisticated and meticulously documented, is sufficient to support a comprehensive reinterpretation of early modern Europe. On that crucial point, the central historiographical claim remains insufficiently demonstrated. The volume therefore remains open to serious methodological reservations.
(Daniele Santarelli)
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