The Discovery of Paganism in Early Modern Europe

A Workshop Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion, the Council on the Humanities, and the Department of History

In the seventeenth century, scholars from across the theological spectrum took seriously the need to understand the origins of idol worship, its permutations in the human past, and its bearing on the religious and philosophical present. Their investigations overwhelmingly took shape inside voluminous inquiries into pagan mythology, ancient Near Eastern polytheism, and their Biblical background. And yet in the shadows lingered the much younger ghosts of New World religions, whose presence in complicated ways haunted the religious and scholarly polemics on the place of images in Christianity and Judaism. From luminaries of the republic of letters to the darker, radical figures who inhabited its fringes, researchers on paganism, gentile theology, Biblical history, and comparative religion dominated the scholarly marketplace, together transforming a purely theological problem into a historical one. As they did so, they began to make religion itself an object of sober scholarly study, setting the stage for the emergence of such disciplines as comparative religion, comparative mythology, and later, religious studies.

Antiquarianism, as contemporary historians have discovered, was a centerpiece of seventeenth-century intellectual life. Across Europe, we now know, antiquaries traced the early development of doctrines and liturgies, charted the development of temples and followed the migrations of deities. These interdisciplinary scholars worked as deftly with inscriptions, statues and vases as they did with texts, read Arabic and Hebrew as easily as Latin and Greek, and did not hesitate to devise vast genealogies of ritual and belief that folded Jews and pagans, Europeans and New World natives into coherent narratives about the decline of primitive monotheism. Vastly learned individuals like Hugo Grotius, John Selden and Gerardus Joannes Vossius brought an astonishing range of sources and methods into play in this field. Their results, moreover, were discussed not only by grave scholars who could read their Latin folios, but also by far less learned men and women reading journals in coffeehouses, and had a massive impact on political and theological debates. All this is widely known in general terms. And yet, the intersection of the antiquarian enterprise with the religious landscape of the early modern period still awaits full mapping and analysis. This workshop proposes to explore precisely this rich and significant area of cultural convergence.

Schedule

Friday November 12 Public Lecture
Sabine MacCormack, Notre Dame "What the Incas did not Know: Gods, Demons and Images"
4:30 101 McCormick Hall
Reception to Follow

Saturday November 13 Seminars on Pre-circulated Papers
9:30-11:30, Dickinson 211
Peter Miller, Bard Graduate Center "History of Religion Becomes Ethnology in the early 17th Century: Evidence from Peiresc's Africa"
Carina Johnson, Pitzer College "Idolatry and Sacrifice: Rites of Distinction and Communication in Early Modern Europe"
12:00 Dickinson 210 Lunch
1:30-2:30 Joan-Pau Rubiés, London School of Economics "Theology, historical ethnography and the possible death of idolatry: Kircher to Voltaire"
2:30 – 3:00 Break
3:00-5:00 Dickinson 211
Martin Mulsow, University of Munich/Rutgers University "Idolatry and Science"
Jonathan Sheehan, Indiana University "Idolatry and Sacrifice: Rites of Distinction and Communication in Early Modern Europe"