Visiting Speaker: Dr. Ian Campbell, QUB ‘Magna Carta, Limited Monarchy, and the Ancient Constitution in Early Modern Ireland’

In October 2015, Ian was awarded a Starting Grant of €1.3 million by the European Research Council to pursue the research project ‘War and the Supernatural in Early Modern Europe’ over four-and-a-half years. He will lead a research team of two research fellows and one graduate student to examine the relationship between debates inside the early modern European universities on the proper limits of the natural and supernatural and the character of religious warfare in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe. His project hypothesizes that the mistaken imposition of the modern categories of sacred and secular on early modern religious debate has obscured not only the way that early modern Europeans thought about God and politics at extremes, but also the way that modern ways of speaking about religion slowly emerged during the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment invented the secular, the category without God; but just as important to Enlightenment was the enlargement of the natural, the category in which God left humans free to pursue ends impressed in them by him. The supernatural was that category in which God intervened directly. The arguments of militant Christians, whether Protestant Calvinists or Catholic Franciscans, are important to this story, but so too are the responses of moderate Catholics and Protestants who feared that holy war had the potential to destroy all human government, and not just the government of unbelievers. These debates and disputes were conducted in Europe’s learned language, Latin, without regard for national borders. Drawing on the disciplines of both History and Neo-Latin Studies, this project will recover this discourse by publishing analyses and parallel-text translations. But this project will also track the extension of this discourse of natural and supernatural in vernacular political debate outside the universities. These new editions of early modern Latin texts and analyses of discourse within and without the universities will help to eliminate the assumption among historians of religious violence that early modern people were less rational than ourselves, will redefine our category of religious warfare during Europe’s early modernity, and will re-orientate our understanding of European secularization.

Research Interests