Dr Miles Pattenden, Senior Research Fellow, Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University, is Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre ANU in March 2022, and the first visiting scholar welcomed by the Centre for Early Modern Studies. Miles’ work explores the nature of politics in papal Rome and of diverse Catholic clerical and intellectual cultures during the Counter-Reformation and Enlightenment. His first monograph Pius IV and the Fall of the Carafa reconstructed the events surrounding a notorious treason trial in which one pope ordered his predecessor’s nephews to be impeached for corruption. His second, Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy analyzed the political culture of the papal conclave as it evolved over a two-hundred-and-fifty-year period.
Miles’ seminar “Mobilising Papal History” on March 22, and his Visiting Fellowship at the HRC, explore the surprising dynamism of the papacy through history, the “oscillations in the papacy’s focuses and locuses of mobility and how these things have shaped broader changes in its relationship with the Church and wider society as a whole.” Register here.
On March 25 Miles will present the “Works the Shaped the World” public lecture for the Humanities Research Centre on Gaetano Moroni’s Dizionario di erudizione storico-ecclesiastica “the most significant work of nineteenth-century amateur scholarship that you have never heard about.” This 103 volumes work (plus a six-volume index) printed in Venice between 1840 and 1861 claims to offer a full account of the Catholic Church’s most important persons and points of cultural reference: from saints, martyrs, popes, bishops, cardinals, and councils, to feasts, rites, ceremonies, paraphernalia and sacramentals. Miles writes “as a work that takes seriously the material culture of religion, it represents an important milestone in the evolution of nineteenth-century historiography and deserves to be reappraised on those terms.” Register here.