True Warriors? Negotiating Dissent in the Intellectual Debate (c. 1100-1700)

Dissent, polemics and rivalry have always been at the centre of intellectual development. The scholarly Streitkultur was given a fresh impetus by the newly founded universities in the High Middle Ages and later turned into a quintessential part of early modern intellectual life, with the emergence of the Protestant Reformation creating a new momentum. It was not only mirrored in various well-known intellectual disputations and controversies, but also embodied in numerous literary genres and non-literary modes of expression, as well as discursive or political strategies. Moreover, the harsh debates notwithstanding, consensus was also actively searched for, both within particular disciplines and within society as a whole.

This volume collects thirteen contributions offering a very rich variety of topics with regard to the negotiation of disagreements from the twelfth till the eighteenth centuries. They reflect inter alia upon the rules and conventions of the intellectual debate, upon the media used to negotiate dissent, as well as upon the role of formal institutions created to judge and decide in cases of dissent. The contributions are offered by scholars from fields as diverse as history of literature, political history, history of philosophy, history of Church and theology, and legal history.

Introduction (Wouter Druwé & Wim François)
Jousting Schoolmen: Managing Dissent in Scholastic Culture (Anita Traninger)

Part 1: Middle Ages (12th-15th Centuries)
Preposterous Debates: Parodies of Debate in Latin Literature before 1200 (Dinah Wouters)
Sulle tracce della Querelle du Roman de la Rose. Alcune osservazioni su un anonimo explicit del MS Ludwig XV 7 (83.MR.177), J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Siria De Francesco)
A Fair Fight or a Rigged Jury? The Council of Basel (1431-1449) and the Structure of its Debate about the Immaculate Conception (Jacob Langeloh)
An Intellectual Warrior and his Hero: Johannes Wessel Gansfort (1420-1489) and Jean Gerson (1363-1429) (Yelena Mazour-Matusevich)
Condemning Political Dissent and Anti-Princely Views in Fifteenth-Century Milanese Literature (Marta Celati)

Part 2: Early Modern Period (16th-18th Centuries)
Thomas Stapleton ed Elisabetta I: una relazione impossibile (Antonio Gerace)
Sileant theologi: nec alienam temnant temere disciplinam. La controversia fra giuristi e teologi nel I libro del De nuptiis di Alberico Gentili: nuove indagini (Giovanni Minnucci)
Strategies and Agency in the Censorship of Modern Science and Natural Philosophy: Some Case Studies (Leen Spruit)
L’Inquisition espagnole, arbitre des controverses entre les ordres religieux (XVII^e siècle) (Mathilde Albisson)
Vernacular Religious Disputes in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Later Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (Magdalena Ryszka-Kurczab)
Latin versus the Vernacular in Seventeenth-Century Uppsala: Johannes Schefferus’ Latin Attack on Olof Rudbeck’s Swedish Dissection Programme (Elena Dahlberg)
Historia litteraria iuris: Mapping Controversies in Eighteenth-Century Jurisprudence (Laura Beck Varela)

Name Index