Editorial - Interconfessional Dialogues in Early Modern Ethics and Economics

Abstract

For nearly fifty years there has been a movement of reassessment in historical theology that has reexamined both the relationships among the confessional traditions that developed in Europe after the Protestant Reformation and the continuities and discontinuities between Protestant theology and medieval theology. This reassessment has challenged (one might fairly say, overturned) several formerly settled positions from nineteenthand twentieth-century historiography, including the depiction of the Reformation and its confessional theologies as radical and comprehensive breaks from medieval theology and scholasticism. Only relatively recently has this development in the discipline of historical theology begun to find its analog in the study of early-modern ethics and economics. One still encounters, for example, the claim that Protestant ethics of the period was characterized by a thorough rejection of virtue ethics and Christian Aristotelianism. In the history of economics, even when it is granted that early-modern writers did in fact develop economic ideas, these writers are seldom given more than a mention in the typical story of economics, which often leaps from the classical period to a few medieval authors and then to the founder of the modern discipline, Adam Smith. Despite some significant studies on the late scholastics and the so-called ‘School of Salamanca,’ research into early-modern theologians’ economic contributions is arguably still in its infancy. This Special Issue on interconfessional dialogues in early-modern ethics and economics is an exploratory contribution to a fuller understanding of the relationships among Protestants and Roman Catholics in the aforementioned disciplines. The articles here illustrate avenues by which ideas in practical philosophy, moral theology, and economics were received across confessional and national lines. Even in the midst of intense dispute among the adherents of the different confessional traditions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the exchange of sources and ideas in ethics and economics indicates that the boundaries in these fields were more porous than would appear merely from the consideration of the doctrinal and polemical literature of the era. Overall, the articles in this Special Issue focus more on Protestant sources than on Catholic ones. This is not to suggest, however, that the traffic of ideas only flowed in one direction. Even given the fact that early-modern Catholic writers were officially forbidden from reading those Protestant authors and works which were listed in the Index, such engagement with Protestant writings still occurred. Thus, there remains an open field for further research into Catholic interactions with Protestant writings on ethics and economics. Also, to the extent that the moral and economic thought of this period has been studied, Catholic writers (especially the Salamancans) have received far more attention than Protestant orthodox writers. Among early-modern Protestants, however, we find a rich continuation and even flowering of the tradition of Aristotelian ethics and, as the research presented here indicates, Protestants were also contributing to the conversation about commerce and the new challenges of international trade. As Manfred Svensson shows in his article, Protestant Aristotelianism was alive and well from the early Reformation to the end of the seventeenth century as Protestant professors developed moral philosophy curricula for their universities. Svensson unearths a treasure