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Reform and Repression in the Same Movement

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Reform and Repression in the Same Movement

The century that follows Trent produced two things at once, and any honest account has to hold them together. On one side there were the new orders. The Jesuits, approved in 1540, built schools and colleges across Catholic Europe and mission fields in Asia and the Americas, and took a fourth vow that made them available to be sent anywhere. Other foundations took up teaching, nursing and work with the poor, and women's congregations pressed, against considerable resistance, for forms of religious life that were not enclosed. Devotional life was reorganised around frequent confession, the catechism and new forms of prayer.

On the other side the same movement produced the Roman Inquisition, reorganised in 1542, and the Index of prohibited books, and both were used against Catholics as well as against Protestants, over doctrine, over scholarship and over mysticism that looked unregulated. The atlas does not present these as a good side and a bad side of the period, because contemporaries did not experience them as separate programmes. A church that had decided its problem was disorder pursued education and discipline together, and the Index and the seminary were the same argument applied to different objects.

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