Miles Pattenden

Orbi ultra Urbem: The Pope beyond Rome is a project to investigate the papacy’s role as a cultural force and an agent of transnational exchange within early modern Catholicism. Acceptance of the pope’s authority was the single most important belief to unite Catholics and distinguish them from other Christians in this period. Yet papal historians have rarely engaged with the texts, images, artefacts and cultural practices by which many Catholics, especially those outside Italy, articulated that belief. The pope is thus a surprisingly marginal figure in many key discourses about early modern Catholicism as a religious and cultural system: its expressions of piety and sanctity, its evangelizing missions, its concepts of political economy and its understandings of categories like the self, community, tradition and knowledge.

This project proposes to excavate and analyse the disparate range of sources needed to restore the pope to wider discussions about wider early modern Catholic culture, not merely as a patron of specific initiatives but as a sacred and authoritative figure in his own right. The project builds on my own earlier work on the political and constitutional aspects to papal history and also on my interest in how the papacy was viewed from Spain, to consider this question on a holistic basis. It aims both to advance a new religious and social history of Roman Catholicism in a global context and also to contribute to important conceptual challenges facing global history today: how to link centres to far-flung peripheries and how to relate the micro-scale of everyday experiences to macro-narratives, stories about "great men" and powerful institutions. The project is therefore a major intervention not only in the history of one of the world’s most populous religions but also in the history of globalization’s first great "age", when Europeans set forth to trade, colonize and disseminate their culture. It uses its analysis of the pope’s role and the way that the papacy was received to consider broad questions about the nature of Catholicism itself.