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Scholarship has come to value the uncertainties haunting early modern knowledge cultures; indeed, the awareness of the fragility and plurality of knowledge is now offered as a key element of Baroque Science. Yet early modern actors never questioned the possibility of certainty itself; including the notion that truth is out there, universal, and therefore situated at one remove from human manipulations. This book addresses the central question of how early modern actors managed not to succumb to postmodern relativism, amidst uncertainties and blatant disagreements about the nature of God, Man, and the Universe. An international and interdisciplinary team of experts in fields ranging from Astronomy to Business Administration to Theology investigate a number of practices that are central to maintaining and functionalizing the notion of absolute truth, the certainty that could be achieved about it, and of the credibility of a wide plethora of actors in differentiating fields of knowledge.

Scholarship has come to value the uncertainties haunting early modern knowledge cultures; indeed, awareness of the fragility and plurality of knowledge is now offered as a key element for understanding early modern science as a whole. Yet early modern actors never questioned the possibility of certainty itself and never objected to the notion that truth is out there, universal, and therefore safe from human manipulation. This book investigates how early modern actors managed not to succumb to postmodern relativism, despite the increasing uncertainties and blatant disagreements about the nature of God, Man, and the Universe. An international and interdisciplinary team of experts in fields ranging from the history of science to theology and the history of ideas analyses a number of practices that were central to maintaining and functionalizing the notion of absolute truth. Through such an interdisciplinary research the book shows how certainty about truth could be achieved, and how early modern society recognized the credibility of a wide plethora of actors in differentiating fields of knowledge.

Why were seemingly innocent didactic prints on seven articles of the faith that were, moreover, circulating in the Habsburg Netherlands for decades censured and prohibited by the Roman Inquisition in 1682? The answer to this question opens the way to a number of other conundrums that shaped early modern Catholicism in the Lord's Vineyard in Belgium as well as in Roman palaces; to uncertainties that illuminate the dynamic relationship between truth and salvation, between orthodoxy and orthopraxy, between cognition of the faith and diffferent forms of penitential practices in post- Reformation Catholicism, and between the drive towards confessional uniformity and a dynamic inner-confessional plurality.

In June 1682, the internuncio of Flanders, Tanara, dispatched to the secretary of the Holy Office, Cardinal Facchinetti, a dozen booklets and leaflets in Dutch, French, and Latin with a rudimentary summary of Catholic doctrine in seven articles or ‘points’ the knowledge of which was deemed necessary for salvation.¹ According to Tanara, the practice in the Low Countries of summarizing the central tenets of the faith into these seven points for the instruction of the flock could be traced back as early as the 1630s. Drawing on a seminal textbook in Latin (i.e., written for clergymen) from the 1650s, the

Is truth ‘out there’? The proposition has lost much of its evidence. The premise that ‘facts are sacred’ is under pressure from fake news, alternative facts, and scepticism about official science. Conversely, fingers are wagged at a postmodern relativism that is allegedly seeping into scientific research, particularly in the humanities, before intoxicating public debate in general.¹ Historians, too, are eminently vulnerable to these accusations: the fluid, tangled realities and truths from the past often fail to meet the test of objectivity or ‘out-thereness’.² And yet, history of science and science studies have also argued that both this eminently Western approach

This chapter furnishes the reader with a vademecum to the volume. It places uncertainty in the limelight as a key element for understanding confessional cultures and belief systems, and shows how early modern Catholicism struggled to find practical strategies for marrying deepseated uncertainties with its aim of operationalizing an absolute and revealed truth. Inspired by Michel de Certeau and Bruno Latour, among others, this introduction argues that a methodological transfer between science studies, history of knowledge, and religious history offers a toolkit to reconstruct the credibility of past beliefs. It introduces the volume's focus on the myriad of connected laboratories and work floors of early modern Catholicism, and on the untainted emergence of a universal truth from such a multifarious activity. This praxeological approach is illustrated in the subsequent survey of this volume's sections and chapters.