Carolina Armenteros

Trained at Stanford (B.A., B.S., M.A.) and Cambridge (M.Phil, Ph.D.), Carolina Armenteros is an intellectual historian of modern Europe, specializing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has taught and conducted research in five national academic systems (as represented by the University of Cambridge, the Sorbonne Nouvelle, the University of Groningen, the American University of Paris, among others) and is now Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in Santo Domingo. She has published extensively in the history of social, political and religious thought – in particular Joseph de Maistre’s – and her work has appeared in six languages.

Abstract: A practically instant classic, Joseph de Maistre’s Du pape (1819) had a nineteenth-century reception that remains to be studied, especially in its Catholic aspects. This project plans to examine in detail the ways in which Du pape’s ideas were adopted, contested, and/or transformed by both Gallican and ultramontane Catholics in the decades leading up to the First Vatican Council, and during the Council itself. It will discuss the ways in which Félicité de Lamennais and the Mennaisians liberalized the book’s ideas on sovereignty and the papacy; the impact that the book had on the thought of Louis Veuillot and the (often scandalous) militancy of L’Univers; the heated controversy that Juan Donoso Cortés’ interpretation of Maistre’s founding work sparked among the mostly Gallican French clergy; and how, at the Council, engagement with the book’s ideas continued to influence the debate between infallibilists and their opponents – in particular Lord Acton. Beyond contributing to our knowledge of Maistre’s reception and writing an untold chapter in the history of the idea of infallibility, the project’s aim is to reflect on the shifting, centuries-old relationship between Catholic ecclesiology and political thought.