Boute, Bruno, “Attritionnisme et contritionnisme entre la France, les Pays-Bas espagnols, et Rome. La Censure Romaine et le Sacrement de Pénitence.” in: L'Inquisition romaine et la France. Juridiction, doctrine et pluralité des catholicismes européens à l'"Age Tridentin" (Collection de l'École française de Rome) edited by Albrecht Burkardt and Jean-Pascal Gay, Rome: École française de Rome 2024, pp. 194-223.

The continuing polemics among seemingly polarised religious elites in the Franco-Belgian area over questions of morality and sacramental method in the confessional provide an excellent case study for addressing the central questions in this volume: the involvement of Roman censorship and apostolic authority in (g) local affairs, despite the prevailing perception, among scholars, of a papal primacy besieged by Gallicanism in France or constitutionalist “jurisdictionalism” in the Habsburg Netherlands. Below I offer a connected history, across different arenas of conflict in France and the Low Countries, of these seemingly rarefied disputes over the nature of “sufficient” remorse for sacramental absolution and their transfer to Roman censorship files – a history which reveals the granular, eminently local nature of these disputes and their wide-ranging social and cultural ramifications. At the same time, there emerges from Roman censorship the synoptic view by which a Franco-Belgian arena of conflict was identified as a single entity, at the crossroads of continental and overseas Catholicisms. Entangled with the transformation of the public sphere, these disputes and their Roman appropriation shed light on the ongoing circulation of apostolic authority that was grounded in the local yet connected dynamics and cultures of conflict that shaped plural Catholicisms in the early modern era.