Böcker av Stefania (Professor of History Tutino

The Many Faces of Credulitas is about the relationship between belief, credibility, and credulity. It argues that due to a series of different historical factors, credibility assumed a central role in post-Reformation Catholicism. This led to an important reconsideration of the relationship between natural reason and supernatural grace and consequently to novel and significant tensions. This book seeks to elucidate some of the difficulties, anxieties, andtensions caused by the new insistence on credibility that came to dominate the theological and intellectual landscape of the early modern Catholic Church.

A Fake Saint and the True Church uncovers the remarkable story of a fake saint to tell a tale about truth. It begins at the end of the 1650s, when a large quantity of forged documents suddenly appeared throughout the Kingdom of Naples. Narrating the life and deeds of a previously unknown medieval saint named Giovanni Calà, the trove generated much excitement around the kingdom. No one was more delighted by the news than Carlo Calà, Giovanni''swealthy and politically influential seventeenth-century descendant. Attracted by the prospect of adding a saint to the family tree, Carlo presented Giovanni''s case to the Roman Curia. The Catholic authorities, however, immediately realized that the sources were forged, and that Giovanni was not real (let alone holy). Yet,it took more than two decades before the forgery was exposed: why?Vividly reconstructing the intricate case of the supposed saint, Stefania Tutino explores the tensions between historical and theological truth. How much could the truth of doctrine depend on the truth of the facts before religion lost its connection with the supernatural? To what extent could the truth of doctrine ignore the truth of the facts without ending up engulfed in falsity and deceit? How could the absolute truth of theology relate to the far less absolute certainty of human affairs? This story of a fake saint illuminates early modern tensions. But the struggles to distinguish between facts, opinions, and beliefs remain with us. Examining, as this book does, how our predecessors dealt with the relationship between truth and authenticity guides us too in thinking through what is true and what is not.

This book provides a historical account of early modern probabilism and its theological, intellectual, and cultural implications. Tutino argues that probabilism played a central role in helping early modern theologians grapple with the uncertainties originated by a geographically and intellectually expanding world.