Abstract

A vast international historiography has recently highlighted the existence of an early-modern multidenominational Europe, which was the result of the religious pluralism triggered by the Protestant Reformation and the ‘religious peaces’. This Europe, marked by shifting confessional topographies densely interwoven with each other, is quite different from the one that the theorists of Confessionalization and Social Disciplining have depicted. Nevertheless, many questions arise if we approach multidenominational Europe from the perspective of the Church of Rome: how did the Roman Curia act in this Europe, where 'heresy' was legalised and Catholicism had often become a minority? How did the Roman Church operate in contexts where religious conflicts were judicially settled by competing ecclesiastical and civil authorities belonging to different confessions? This article suggests new research directions to answer these questions and explore the European dimension of the Counter-Reformation