Global Governance, Local Dynamics. Transnational Regimes of Grace in the Roman Dataria Apostolica (17th Century).

GRACEFUL17旨在建立一个跨国研究团队，由École Nationale des Chartes；法兰克福歌德大学；罗马的École法兰西学院和德意志历史研究所，以及兰斯大学，共同研究了一个跨国主题：教皇恩典政权的治理体系，在应该灭绝的时候却矛盾地繁荣起来，这在很大程度上被忽视了。学者们强调，近代早期属于专制国家和君主，而不属于在大西洋、欧洲和印度-太平洋之间向请愿者施恩的古老的教皇管理机构。这就要求我们的目标不仅仅是经验上的修正：它们还需要一种解释学上的转变，以便更好地理解仍然在历史学家雷达之下的权威和权威行为。与主流对权力的理解形成鲜明对比的是，在天主教的基督教世界里，恩典被视为一种无限的资源，在从圣礼赦免到教会财产交易的日常清算等范围内，它既统治着灵魂，也统治着主体。考虑到早期现代欧洲政治的反应式治理风格，我们希望在全球机构（如早期现代天主教和教皇）的历史上进行哥白尼式的转向。我们的发现不应该让我们回到自上而下的集中化的解释，而是支持自下而上的恩典制度的分析，从不同的全球边缘流向多态中心。全球治理以地方动力为基础。为了驾驭Dataria作为主管罗马当局的未知文件海洋，并管理由此产生的大量数据，我们的研究计划寻求，首先，交织一个团队研究组成部分，提供17世纪教皇恩典制度广泛维度的代表性统计数据；以及个案研究的专题组成部分，调查教皇登记册中出现的封闭数字背后的当地动态。其次，它的目的是平衡这一深入的研究轴，使之成为一种特定类型的恩典——教皇“在地面上”提供给较低的教会办公室，而牺牲了当地的招聘渠道——在恩典的伴侣部分中有一个横向轴，考虑了近代早期教皇恩宠的全部范围和分配它们的机构。第三，它承诺使用由此积累的数据集作为数字人文组成部分中数字数据管理和研究工具开发的试点，以延长本项目之后我们数据的寿命和可访问性。第四，GRACEFUL17将重点放在培养早期职业研究人员上，旨在将“恩典”作为人类集体的一项组织原则再次纳入人文学科、人类学、社会科学和政治学的研究议程。

GRACEFUL17 seeks to build a transnational research team between the École Nationale des Chartes; the Goethe University Frankfurt; the École française and the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome, and the University of Reims to investigate a transnational theme: the largely overlooked governance system of papal regimes of grace that paradoxically thrived when they should have gone extinct. Scholarship emphasizes that the early modern period belonged to absolutist states and princes, not to the antiquated administrations of the papacy dispensing graces to petitioners between the Atlantic, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific. This entails that our goals encompass more than a merely empirical correction: they also require a hermeneutical shift to get a better understanding of authority and authoritative acts that remained under the historian’s radar. In sharp contrast with mainstream understandings of power, grace was operationalized as an infinite resource that, in Catholic Christendom, governed souls as much as subjects on a spectrum ranging from sacramental absolution to the routine clearing of transactions of church property. Considering the reactive style of governance in early modern European polities, we wish to undertake a Copernican turn in the history of global agencies such as early modern Catholicisms and the papacy. Our findings should not lead us back to top-down accounts of centralization but instead support the bottom up analysis of regimes of grace that flowed from diverse glocal peripheries to a polymorphic center. Global governance was underpinned by local dynamics.In order to navigate uncharted oceans of documents of the Dataria as the competent Roman authority, and to manage the resulting mass of data, our research program seeks, firstly, to intertwine a team research component that furnishes representative statistical data on the broad dimensions of papal regimes of grace in the 17th Century; and a monographic component of case-studies investigating the local dynamics behind the hermetic figures emerging from papal registers. Secondly, it aims to balance this in-depth research axis into one specific type of grace–papal provision “on the ground” to lower church offices at the expense of local recruitment channels–with a transversal axis in the Companion to Grace Component that considers the full range of papal graces and institutions dispensing them in the early modern period. Thirdly, it commits to using the thus accumulated data sets as a pilot for the development of digital data management and research tools in the Digital Humanities Component that extend the life span and the accessibility of our data beyond this project. Focusing, fourthly, on the training of early career researchers for whom this grant proposal has been designed, GRACEFUL17 seeks to put grace as an organizational principle of human collectivities on the research agenda again of the humanities as well as anthropological, social and political sciences.