| Summary: | This article discusses the impact of a “corporeal turn” in early modern religious
history on recent publications in Counter-Reformation Catholic History. Scholars
increasingly look towards the Church’s legal archives in Rome as a source of information
about ecclesiastical and theological attitudes to the body and sexuality. The figure of the
priest has emerged as one of the most interesting subjects in that inquiry because of the
richness of material about clerics which those archives hold. Scholars are now engaged in
study of how past generations of theologians, ecclesiastical magistrates, and medics assessed
priestly abilities and disabilities, priests’ engagement in sexual acts, and their wider
performances of masculine identities. Rome’s role as a major centre in shaping Catholic
masculinities is reinforced in this scholarship but a new study underscores the blurred
boundaries between the lay and ecclesiastical in masculinities there. Overall, this research
provides much new material both for rethinking historical questions about Trent’s impact on
reform discourses and also for commenting on contemporary debates in theology and Church
politics about the nature of Christian priesthood.
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