Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FORPRAL (Forbidden Prayers Library. Shaping Private Piety in Counter-Reformation Europe (16th-18th))
Reporting period: 2020-09-01 to 2022-08-31
FORPRAL focused on the analysis of vernacular prayers prohibited in Spain, Portugal and Italy between the 16th and 18th centuries. These prayers were used as protection against adversity or illness, and were effective whether they were read, carried or worn round the neck like talismans e incluso si se ingerían. Because of the variety of uses, which were not always aimed at reading, the prayers were widely, but not exclusively, used by illiterate people, and imply consideration in the category of text-object. From a hitherto unexplored corpus, FORPRAL compiled an exhaustive catalogue of the prayers contained in the indexes of forbidden books promulgated between 1551 and 1790, in the records of local inquisitions in Italy and in censorship reports preserved in the Spanish National Historical Archive. From a comparative perspective, it has explored this pan-European heritage of piety by recovering preserved or indirect testimonies and performed a rigorous analysis of the censorship policies aimed at regulating the practices of private devotion. The study of the documentation revealed the importance of the prayers as instruments of popular reinterpretation of regulated forms of devotion or as conflicting manifestations of private devotion, understood as that which was not subject to the guidance of the ecclesiastical authorities and took place independently of the obligatory rites, in the domestic space or outside the places of official worship. Analysis of the material aspects revealed that the way the prayers were used as portable objects was reflected in the choice of printing format, as they were often printed in small sizes to be worn as pendants for easy portability. The proven popularity and persistence of these texts throughout the modern period is indicative of their relevance in European religious culture, which confirms the need for a comparative approach to study this phenomenon. In short, FORPRAL have provided an study of forbidden prayers in their historical, symbolic, and material dimensions, and have integrated a gender perspective into the analysis of certain devotions that have proved to be of exclusive interest to women.
FORPRAL's first aim was to make a complete inventory of the forbidden prayers in the indexes of prohibited books and to make an analysis of the complementary prohibitory documents, which were to be consulted in Italian and Portuguese archives. The extension of the Covid-19 restrictions made it necessary to make some adjustments: access to the Italian documentation through digitisations and to reduce the chronology of the Portuguese sources down to the last index of 1624, excluding from the analysis later documents. Even so, the objective of collecting the banned prayers was achieved and a complete inventory consisting of 88 titles was compiled. An important part of the work was devoted to identifying and locating these texts. This task entailed some difficulties caused by the effectiveness of censorship, which succeeded in erasing several of them from textual memory, and by the use of anepigraphic references in the prohibitory documents, where the usefulness of the prayer acted as a title (e.g. prayer to conjure rue). It was possible to trace and access the texts of 35 titles in at least one of the working languages. These prayers can be found in the digital catalogue of the website Forbidden Prayers Digital Library, the most important dissemination activity of the MSCA. For each prayer, one or more copies were located and collected indirect testimonies from works contemporary to prohibition. Where the copies have not survived, their content were reconstructed from other testimonies. An analysis of this documentation has revealed details of the way the texts were used -read, written, portable or tactile -and the virtues attributed to them- healing, controlling atmospheric phenomena, protection, or subduing the will of others. All this information is entered into the database files, together with a carefully written analysis of the key aspects of the origin and circulation of the prayer, and a select bibliography of existing studies on each text. The content is enriched with an image of the forbidden copy or a representative iconographic testimony of each prayer. The main objectives of this major task of documentation and selection were achieved: 1) to recover and disseminate this lost heritage of piety, 2) to increase the impact of the results of MSC project, 3) to publish this reference material in open access, useful for specialists of various disciplines; 4) to integrate the use of digital tools into the philological edition of texts in the field of European censorship studies. Initially, the development of the Forbidden Prayers Digital Library was conceived for the duration of the 24-month action. However, the volume of documentation and to some unforeseen events (the sanitary emergency and the suspension of the project for a period of one and a half months) made it necessary to rethink the website as an evolving space that will continue to develop in the near future until the maximum amount of information possible was completed and the eighty-eight titles listed were introduced.
Other channels have also been used for the dissemination of results, e.g. two Open Access articles will be published in high-impact journals (in press for 2023), the participation in several international conferences, the organization of one international workshop, the organisation of two training events for PhD students, the creation of a blog with updates to communicate research progress and a podcast. Due to the unforeseen events mentioned above, the dissemination of FORPRAL results will be extended until 2023.
Other channels have also been used for the dissemination of results, e.g. two Open Access articles will be published in high-impact journals (in press for 2023), the participation in several international conferences, the organization of one international workshop, the organisation of two training events for PhD students, the creation of a blog with updates to communicate research progress and a podcast. Due to the unforeseen events mentioned above, the dissemination of FORPRAL results will be extended until 2023.
The project contributed to filling the bibliographical gap around a group of texts neglected by modern censorship studies, restoring this pan-European heritage of piety. The development and online availability of the Forbidden Prayers Digital Library is the most outstanding contribution to the goal of recovering a part of European religious culture disturbed by the effects of censorship. The subject matter of this project, which deals with texts of a popular nature, whose production characteristics made them economically accessible to the entire population, has allowed us to deepen our knowledge of the devotion of the humblest during the modern period. It has also provided information on the importance of Inquisitorial control of popular devotional literature in the vernacular, showing the extension of the censorship of heretical texts to the simplest manifestations of Catholic piety. On the other hand, the gender perspective applied to research has been one of the aspects with the greatest impact and has been reflected in the scientific production (one peer-reviewed article). The discovery of texts and protective objects for (almost) exclusively female use has provided valuable information on the concerns and motivations of women in Early Modern Europe, and has revealed the existence of a network of devotion and sociability in which devotional instruments useful for the challenges of everyday life (childbirth, child rearing, falling out of love, illness) circulated.