For the last decade, early modern studies have significantly been reshaped by raising new and different questions on the uses of religion. This 'religious turn' has generated new discussion of the social processes at work in early modern Europe and their cultural effects — from the struggle over religious rites and doctrines to the persecution of secret adherents to forbidden practices. So far, the issue of religious pluralisation and the divisions between Catholic and Protestant positions, among sectarian movements or between the church and the state have been mostly debated in terms of dissent and escalation. This may have been due to the fact that religious plurality becomes most visible in polemic representations such as pamphlets, treason statutes, religious tracts or ecclesiastical historiography, claiming authority for their particular perspective.
While such representations clearly reflected and actively shaped early modern culture, they did not comprise this culture in its entirety. Despite the centrality of confessional conflict, this did not always erupt into hostilities over how to symbolize and perform the sacred nor lead to a paralysis of social agency. Rather, everyday life had to go on, people had to arrange themselves somehow with divided loyalties — between the old faith and the new, between religious and secular interests or between officially sanctioned and privately held beliefs. The order of the day may often well have been to suspend confessional allegiances rather than enforce religious conflict, suggesting a pragmatic rather than polemic handling of religious plurality.
This conference sets out to explore such a suggestion. The title "Forgetting Faith?" raises the question whether it was necessary or indeed possible to sidestep religious issues in specific contexts and for specific purposes. To reconstruct possible sites and strategies of 'forgetting faith', however, does not mean to describe early modern culture as a process of secularization. Rather, this conference invites discussion of the specific ways to negotiate confessional conflict precisely because faith still mattered more than many other social paradigms emerging at that time, such as nationhood or race.
Our conference thus acknowledges the centrality of confessional conflict to early modern culture but seeks to go beyond the adversarial stance which marks its more extreme positions. Our focus is not on how confessional conflict was experienced or presented in terms of an antagonism but rather how it was negotiated in textual and aesthetic representations as well as in everyday life. Three interrelated fields of inquiry seem promising: scholarly discourse, aesthetic production and social practice. How can we conceive of these as possible sites of de-escalation? Do different discursive, aesthetic or social contexts inflect or even deflect the demands of religious loyalties? Does, in particular, aesthetic practice allow for a suspension of faith that may not have been possible in scholarly discourse? Are there theoretical and programmatic writings that are informed by confessional conflict but manage to avoid an antagonistic rhetorics? How do denominational allegiances intersect with economic or aesthetic considerations or how are they displaced by these? How do individuals or social groups live and work together, communicate or trade with one another, despite given divisions in their faith? Examples would be the humanist networks stretching over Europe, the manifold trade connections between Protestant and Catholic countries as well as diplomatic relations between Christian Europe and Islamic nations. How do textual, pictorial or musical works both reflect on and perform such an erasure, suspension or displacement of confessional conflict? What are the techniques and social practices effecting such a cultural forgetting of faith?