Kirche und Klöster zwischen Aufklärung und administrativen Reformen

The history of secularization has been intensively investigated by Austrian historical research since the nineteenth century against the background of the conflicts between church, state, and ...

This essay poses the question how Catholic reformers attempted to integrate members of the Order of Jesus into state structures following the suppression in 1773. Were the ex-Jesuits “enlightened” ...

The Council of Trent initiated a process which led – as a result of the pontifical and episcopal norms and curial decisions in the eighteenth century – to the parish priest becoming the most ...

Under the sole reign of Joseph II between 1780 and 1790, circumstances in the Habsburg Monarchy changed dramatically. This affected not only the state itself but smaller institutions and social ...

When the satire “Monachologia” appeared in 1783, it caused a stir in Austria and beyond. In this pseudo-scientific work, monastic orders were described as exotic animal species living among humans ...

In 1782/1783, Emperor Joseph II dissolved all convents maintained by contemplative orders. Of the formerly nine Viennese nunneries, only the Ursulines, the Salesians, and the Elisabethines were ...

This essay looks at Italy in the 1760s, when the reform movement reached its apogee, in a society fractured between its ecclesiastical and secular components. The jurisdictionalist policy advanced ...

As divine warnings, astrological signs and astronomical phenomena, comets have always fascinated people. What was accepted as true and right knowledge about comets, however, changed over ...

After the Habsburg Monarchy had become involved in the First Partition of Poland in 1772 its newly emerged province of Galicia was basically perceived as an inland colony by state ...

In the course of the recatholicization in the sixteenth century, the Habsburg rulers invited the first members of the Order of Jesus to come to Bohemia and Moravia. The Jesuits founded a ...

The Collecçam dos Papeis Anonymos represents a mid-18th century paper, based on the discourses of the Spectator, the famous English magazine, whose exorbitant success served as an inspiration for many other magazines around Europe and the world. ...