Graceful17: Papal Pardon Systems in the 17 ^th century

This joint research programme between 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), under the coordination of Olivier Poncet and Birgit Emich (Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University, Frankfurt), is an ANR-DFG awardee.

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 governance style of early modern European politics, we wish to undertake a Copernican turn in the history of 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 a global governance subsumed by local dynamics.

Among other goals, the project aims to develop an experimental platform for recording, quantifying, analysing and visualising the extensive materials relating to the papacy's bureaucratic pardon regimes. The chosen field of investigation covers all the pardons granted by the Apostolic Datery in the seventeenth century. The research will focus on three national cases (the Empire, France and the Iberian Peninsula), each the subject of a doctoral research contract.

Graceful17 is a transnational research programme which focuses on combining traditional historical research on serial sources preserved in the Holy See archives with research tools provided by the digital humanities.

The project is funded by ANR-DFG.