Graceful17: Papal Pardon Systems in the 17 ^th century

This research programme involves the École des Chartes—PSL, the universities of Reims-Champagne-Ardenne and Frankfurt, and the national institutes in Rome (École française and Deutsches Historisches Institut). It is coordinated by Olivier Poncet and Birgit Emich (Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University, Frankfurt). The ANR-DFG awarded it a prize.

The project aims to reconsider pontifical grace from a fresh perspective. Pontifical grace was handled at the time as an infinite resource that governed souls and subjects on a spectrum ranging from sacramental absolution to the routine settlement of ecclesiastical property transactions. Given the reactive style of governance of early modern European politics, we wish to undertake a Copernican turn in the history of these global entities: early modern Catholicism and the papacy. Our conclusions should not lead us back to top-down accounts of centralisation but rather support a bottom-up analysis of regimes of grace in global governance that was thus subsumed by local dynamics.

One of the project's aims is to set up an experimental platform for recording, quantifying, analysing, and visualising the vast amount of material relating to the papacy's bureaucratic pardon regimes. The field of investigation selected covers all the pardons granted by the Apostolic Datery in the seventeenth century, mainly studied through three national cases (Empire, France, Iberian Peninsula), which are the subject of three doctoral research contracts. 

An eminently transnational research programme, Graceful17 focuses on combining traditional historical research on essentially serial sources preserved in the Holy See archives with the research tools provided by the digital humanities.

The project is funded by ANR-DFG.