Belief

Simon Renard de Saint-André (1614-1677), Nature morte aux statuettes

Simon Renard de Saint-André (1614-1677), Nature morte aux statuettes

Early modern believers favour material sites for pious focus. Privacy is therefore often presented as a place fit for prayer and insight. However, such private piety evades complete control and prompts suspicion of heresy or sin. The efforts to regulate the private sphere are therefore numerous, but we also find counter-strategies that attempt to safeguard a precarious sphere for private devotion.  

 

In Western societies, privacy is an individual right. It is one of the fundamental freedoms of Western democracies. Like the freedoms of religion and expression, the right to privacy protects individuals. Personal information cannot be made public without consent; security concerns might momentarily suspend this right, but such a suspension is an exception to the general rule. However, non-western cultures have long voiced similar concerns about the protection of information. Privacy, understood as the human need to protect and regulate information, is no European invention. Today, the increasing digitalization of human communication actually calls privacy into question; maybe such protection has already become a pipe-dream? In response to this question, historical research is called for. We can document that privacy in Western societies had multifarious meanings before the 19th century. Put differently, Western privacy has a long history, and the study of this history sheds a new light on our present predicament.

The theme BELIEFS engages with the long history of privacy, seeking to answer how this concept in confessional cultures has been invested by different language-usages and enacted through different social practices. The first phase of PRIVACY (2017–2023) focused on site-based interdisciplinary analysis of nine selected cities. These cases have generated studies on specific aspects of confessional cultures, particularly within the context of Copenhagen, Dresden, Helmstedt, and Versailles. We have elucidated how the private-public divide was established in discourse and navigated in practice. At the intersection of theology, law, and philosophy, we have worked extensively on the role of the private in the discursive construction of the early modern state and theories of natural law. Surveying a broad array of sources, ranging from paintings, engravings, sermons, devotional manuals, letters, monastic constitutes, and liturgical celebrations, we have shown the permeable boundaries between private and public, between the personal and the professional, between particular preferences and common opinions. In particular, we have encountered such permeability at early modern courts, where religion was part of the official staging of the ruler but also subject to personal appropriations.

In the coming years (2023–2027), we shall move beyond the private-public divide by investigating particular manuscripts and the material ways in which believers created their own spaces in the margins of orthodox semantics. We pursue this task with a global perspective, especially focused on missions to Greenland and the material conditions that constrained the colonial efforts of the 18th and 19th centuries. BELIEFS also engages with the past-present perspective: we study, e.g., how terms and practices migrated from early modern religion to, e.g., the modern discourse on madness and to present-day ideals of “healing” architectural programmes.   

 

Profile articles

Bastian Felter Vaucanson, La conversation éternelle. L’intimité spirituelle dans la correspondance Guyon-Fénelon, PhD thesis, Principle supervisors: M.B. Bruun and F. Trémolières. Co-supervisor: L.C. Nørgaard, Copenhagen, Rennes: 2022.

Paolo Astorri, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Publicus–Privatus The Divine Foundations of Authority in Dietrich Reinking”, Journal of Early Modern Christianity 9/1 (2022), 93-119.

Søren Frank Jensen, Nicolaus Selnecker's Psalterbuch, 1563-1623. Addressing the Public – Voicing the Private, PhD thesis, supervised by M.B. Bruun (Principal supervisor) and L.C. Nørgaard (Co-supervisor), Copenhagen 2023.

Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Les Petits Livres Secrets (Paris: 2023)

 

Paolo Astorri, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Natural Law and Governance in Henning Arnisaeus” in W. Druwé, R. Lesaffer, G. Sluijs (eds.), Natural Law and Domestic Government, Studies in the History of International Law (Leiden: 2024).

Bastian Felter Vaucanson, La conversation éternelle: L’intimité spirituelle dans les lettres de Madame Guyon à Fénelon, 2024, (Accepteret/In press) Paris: Hermann. (Les collections de la République des Lettres).

Mette Birkedal Bruun, ”Cloistered Correspondences: Engaging and Renouncing the Grand Siècle”, in M. Green & L.C. Nørgaard (eds.), Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence (Turnhout: 2024).

Bastian Felter Vaucanson, Michaël Green, "Refractions of Privacy in Early Modern Letter Writing" in  Michaël Green & Lars Cyril Nørgaard (eds.) Early Modern Correspondence: The Privacy Perspective (Brepols Publishers: 2024).

Lars Cyril Nørgaard, & Bastian Felter Vaucanson, Privacy Misconstrued? The Correspondence between Fénelon and Maintenon, (Accepteret/In press) Early Modern Correspondence : The Privacy Perspective. Michael Green & Lars Cyril Nørgaard (eds.). Brepols Publishers: 2024.

Bastian Felter Vaucanson, Nathalie Freidel (ed.), Judith Scribnai (ed.), Emma Gauthier-Mamaril (ed.), Le pouvoir de la faiblesse: L’éthos mystique de Jeanne Guyon à la lumière de sa correspondance, 2024, (Accepteret/In press) In: Tangence.

Mette Birkedal Bruun, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Au Milieu d’une Cour Superbe & Tumultueuse’ Devotional privacy at the Court of Versailles”, in D.M. Neigbors, L.C. Nørgaard, E. Woodacre (eds.), Notions of Privacy at Early Modern Courts. Reassessing the Public/Private Divide, (Amsterdam: 2024), 215-240.

Adam Horsley, “When Private Speech Goes Public: Libertinage, Crypto-Judaic Conversations, and the Private Literary World of Jean Fontanier, 1621”, in Tracing Private Conversations in Early Modern Europe. Talking in Everyday Life, ed. by Johannes Ljungberg & Natacha Klein Käfer, Palgrave Macmillan 2024, 59–80.

Jane McKee, ‘Privacy and Discretion in the Correspondence of Charles Drelincourt’, in  M. Green & L.C. Nørgaard (eds.), Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence (Turnhout: 2024)

Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Bastian Felter Vaucanson, “Privacy Misconstrued? The Correspondance between Fénelon and Maintenon”, in M. Green & L.C. Nørgaard (eds.), Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence (Turnhout: 2024)

Virginia Reinburg, “Talking About Religion During Religious War: Gilles de Gouberville, Normandy, 1562”, in Tracing Private Conversations in Early Modern Europe. Talking in Everyday Life, ed. by Johannes Ljungberg & Natacha Klein Käfer, Palgrave Macmillan 2024, 33–57.

Oskar J. Rojewski, ”The translation of court culture from the Burgundian Court to the Kingdom of Castile: The sovereign’s privacy and relationship with court artists”, in D.M. Neigbors, L.C. Nørgaard, E. Woodacre (eds.), Notions of Privacy at Early Modern Courts. Reassessing the Public/Private Divide (Amsterdam: 2024), 163-190.

Paolo Astorri, ”The Redefinition of Clandestine Marriage by Sixteenth-Century Lutheran Theologians and Jurists”, Law and History Review 41/1 (2023), 65-92.

Bastian Felter Vaucanson, "Between Faith and Work: Fénelon's Conception of Charity for a Monarch". French Historical Studies vol. 46 (2023), no. 1: pp. 37-55.

Paolo Astorri, Lars Cyril Nørgaard “A little Republic. The conceptualisation of the household according to Henning Arnisaeus (1570-1636)”, in B. Holm & N. Koefoed (eds.), Reformation and Everyday Life, (Göttingen: 2023), 195-220.

Jesper Jakobsen, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Changing Reasons of Censorship? The Faculty of Theology of Copenhagen University (1740-1770)”, in J. Ljungberg & E. Sidenvall (eds.), Between reason and orthodoxy: Religious Enlightenment in the Nordic Countries, c. 1680–1820, (Manchester: 2023), 287-311.

Johannes Ljungberg, “Sabbath Crimes in a City of Enlightenment. Religious and Commercial (dis)order in mid-eighteenth-century Altona”, in J. Ljungberg & E. Sidenvall (eds.), Between reason and orthodoxy: Religious Enlightenment in the Nordic Countries, c. 1680–1820, (Manchester: 2023), 312–40.

Paolo Astorri, Søren Frank Jensen, ”Heinrich Hahn (1605–1668). A Portrait of a Lutheran Jurist at the University of Helmstedt”, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fur Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 108/1 (2022), 204-242.

Anni Henriksen, The Private Mind in Elizabethan England: Representations of the Mind in Literary, Political, Religious, and Legal Discourse”, PhD dissertation, supervised by M.B. Bruun and A.Brett (Copenhagen: 2022).

Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Copie ou Création? Les petits livres secrets de Madame de Maintenon”, in “Toute la cour était étonnée”: Madame de Maintenon ou l’ambition politique au féminin, actes du colloque, eds. M. da Vinha & N. Grande. (Rennes: 2022), pp. 137-148.

Paolo Astorri, ”Can a judge rely on his private knowledge? Early modern Lutherans and Catholics compared” , Comparative Legal History 9/1 (2021), 56-88.

Maarten Delbeke, “Privacy and Exemplarity in Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Cornaro Chapel”, in M. Green, L.C. Nørgaard, M.B. Bruun (eds.), Early Modern Privacy. Sources and Approaches (Leiden: 2021), 317-363.

Walter S. Melion, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as Artisans of the Heart and Home in Manuscript MPM R 35 “Vita S. Joseph beatissimae Virginis sponsi” of ca. 1600”, in M. Green, L.C. Nørgaard, M.B. Bruun (eds.), Early Modern Privacy. Sources and Approaches (Leiden: 2021), 317-363.

Natacha Klein Käfer, ”Dynamics of Healer-Patient Confidentiality in Early Modern Witch Trials”, in M. Green, L.C. Nørgaard, M.B. Bruun (eds.), Early Modern Privacy. Sources and Approaches (Leiden: 2021),281-296.

Lars Cyril Nørgaard, ”Making Private Public”, in M. Green, L.C. Nørgaard, M.B. Bruun (eds.), Early Modern Privacy. Sources and Approaches (Leiden: 2021), 378-400.

Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Eelco Nagelsmit, “Ah! Mignard que vous louez bien !”: Le secret et le sacré dans le portrait de Madame de Maintenon” Bulletin du Centre de recherche du château de Versailles. Sociétés de cour en Europe, XVIe-XIXe siècle (2021)

Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Levels to ekphrasis in the Tableaux de la Pénitence”, in A.J. DiFuria & W.S. Melion (eds.), Ekphrastic Image-making in the Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700, (Leiden: 2021), 410-482.

Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Overvejelser over en ligprædiken” Kirkehistoriske Samlinger, 2021, p. 7-39

Natália Da Silva Perez, Peter Thule Kristensen, ”Gender, Space, and Religious Privacy in Amsterdam”, TSEG - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History 18/3 (2021), 75–106. 

Anne Régent-Susini, “How to make exemplarity with secret virtues”, in M. Green, L.C. Nørgaard, M.B. Bruun (eds.), Early Modern Privacy. Sources and Approaches (Leiden: 2021), 179-193.

Lee Palmer Wandel, ”The Moment of Communion”, in M. Green, L.C. Nørgaard, M.B. Bruun (eds.), Early Modern Privacy. Sources and Approaches (Leiden: 2021), 159-178.

M.B. Bruun, M. Green, L.C. Nørgaard, “En privé & en public. The Epistolary Preparation of the Dutch Stadtholders” Journal of Early Modern History 24.3 (2020),  253–279.

 

Partner projects

VIVE Det Nationale Forsknings- og analysecenter

Together with Thorben Peter Høj Simonsen at VIVE, we are attempting to develop a novel framework for studying how past privacy was and continues to be translated in architectural terms: we focus on present-day and purpose-built spaces like, e.g., psychiatric hospitals and prisons, where we will test our historical approaches. 

Section for systematic theology, University of Copenhagen

With Elizabeth Xiao-An Li at the Section for Systematic Theology, we study the Danish philosopher Rasmus Nielsen (1809-1884), who developed a system of the sciences, where church history played an important role. We aim, historically, to contribute to the further refinement of the interdisciplinary approach pioneered at PRIVACY.

The Danish National Security and Intelligence Service

BELIEFS has established contact with the Director of Counter-Terrorism, Henrik Bjelke Hansen, who, since December 2020, has headed a group comprising several experts and investigating the dynamics of radicalization in Danish society (the so-called Bjelke-group). We will learn from Henrik, his present-day approach to the ambiguities of privacy, and discuss our historical approach with him.

The Missions to Greenland

This PhD project studies how encounters between missionaries and the inuit developed from the 18th century until 20th century. These encounters are prisms for the (mis-)translation of identities and concepts, including notions of the private and the personal. Alexander’s project will combine close analysis of sources with the methods developed at PRIVACY.

Nuns at the end of the world (NEW): Cross-cultural contact in 17th-century colonial Québec

Bastian Felter Vaucanson's Internationalisation Fellowship, granted by the Carlsberg Foundation, explores French Ursuline nuns in colonial Quebec in the 17th century, with a focus on cross-cultural exchange between the nuns and the Indigenous people.