Fr. John Lingard (1771-1851): Between Enlightened Catholicism and the Newmanian Second Spring

“I don’t like Newman,” wrote the famous English historian Fr. John Lingard in January 1850. The reasons the aged and ailing Catholic historian gave for his antipathy towards perhaps the most celebrated English convert of all time encapsulated the collision of old and new: “too much fancy or enthusiasm”[1] was Lingard’s gripe in a letter to his friend John Walker. The relative obscurity of Lingard today is surprising, since in his day (he died in 1851) he was “the best-known and most widely read English Catholic writer.”[2] Lingard’s “Victorian celebrity” was due primarily to ground-breaking historical works, but also significantly buttressed by his reputation as a formidable theo-political controversialist: both in intra-Catholic squabbles and in defense of his community against Protestant detractors.[3] The crowning achievement of a life of research, his eight-volume History of England (1819–1830) featured pioneering work with primary source material.[4] Lingard’s History was widely reviewed and debated. It was translated into many languages, went through multiple editions, and was even abridged for use as a school textbook in France. In the twentieth century, Hilaire Belloc added a final volume to bring the narrative from 1688 to the present; this version of Lingard’s History of England can still be found in old family libraries around the UK. Lingard can be counted as a kind of founding father of certain “revisionist” historical positions on English history advanced by scholars like Eamon Duffy and Christopher Haigh. Long before Duffy’s classic The Stripping of the Altars (1992), Lingard’s work suggested a re-narration of the Whiggish and triumphalist national story vis-à-vis Catholicism.[5]

Lingard in fact had quite a lot of interesting things to say about Newman, dating from his growing awareness of the importance of the Oxford Movement in the 1830s until Newman’s conversion in 1845, when Lingard was in his mid-seventies. In a subsequent essay, I’ll explore Lingard’s take on Newman and on the great changes sweeping the English Catholic community at the end of his life (Lingard strongly associated Newman with many of these changes, and mostly bemoaned them). This essay, however, will introduce readers to Lingard, one of the major intellectual lights of the English Catholic community when Newman joined it in 1845 at Littlemore. Lingard merits a close look for both historical and theological reasons, not least because his extraordinary career spans that unjustly neglected period of English Catholic history—after the final wreck of the Jacobite cause at the Battle of Culloden (1746) but before the “Second Spring” and the rise of the confident and quite ultramontane church of the restored episcopal hierarchy (1850) that was swelled by Irish immigration and a number of eminent converts, Newman and Manning chief among them.

Lingard’s Legacy: First-Rate Historian and Advocate for the English Catholic Community

Lingard was one of the founders of Ushaw College, county Durham, where his body now rests. Visitors to the college—and a visit to this beautiful cultural center is highly recommended to any lover of English or Catholic history—will recognize Lingard’s portrait by James Lonsdale hanging in the long hallway beside other presidents and clergymen.[6] Most people today, if they have heard of Lingard at all, perhaps recognize the name as the author of Hail Queen of Heaven, the Ocean Star, a beloved English hymn based on the ancient Ave Maris Stella.[7] There is some amusing irony here, since Lingard was frustrated by what he saw as an obscuration of Christocentrism in Catholic devotion, and due to his efforts to correct this was pointedly accused by some of his contemporaries of downplaying or denigrating devotion to Mary. (Lingard had a good sense of humor. He would probably smile to learn his name has become forever linked to a warm and effusive Marian piety.)

The son of a carpenter, Lingard was born in Winchester in 1771. His intellectual talent was identified early, and he was sent to the seminary at Douai, which was French territory before the Revolution of 1789. We should recall that the England of Lingard’s early years was still ardently, occasionally violently, anti-Catholic. Before Parliament passed Relief Acts in 1778 and 1791, Catholic churches could not be built, and Mass was still technically illegal (priests were no longer executed, but they could be charged with felonies). Catholics could not vote or matriculate into the universities, and theoretically they could still be subjected to enormous fines. By the time of Lingard’s birth, the harsher of these penalties were, mercifully, virtually never enacted.

The bright young Lingard flourished at Douai, where he encountered a form of Catholic intellectual life that, while orthodox and respectful of papal authority, was open to moderate Enlightenment currents in philosophy, as well as in historical scholarship and political thought. Lingard was strongly shaped by this enlightened, philo-Gallican perspective, one rooted in a “positive theology” that privileged the scriptures, councils, and church fathers.[8] This perspective also at least partly explains his life-long crotchetiness whenever the subjects of ultramontanism, the Jesuit Order, or continental devotions were raised. More positively, this formation also explains Lingard’s emulation of the critical early modern historical erudition exemplified by the famous Gallican Claude Fleury (1640–1723), the leading enlightened Catholic historian Lodovico Muratori (1672–1750), the Jesuit Bollandist chroniclers of the lives of the saints, and the Benedictines of St. Maur (the Maurists) like  Jean Mabillon (1632–1707). Although Lingard was too young to participate in the divisive conflict that pitted the “Cisalpine” laity and their clerical supporters against the conservative party of the Vicars Apostolic in the 1790s, his intellectual roots and subsequent trajectory is generally (and in my view correctly) regarded as Cisalpine in inclination and milieu.[9] But whatever his “Cisalpine” credentials, Lingard was undoubtedly a sterling example of an “enlightened” English Catholic.[10]

Due to the increasing violence and anti-clericalism of the French Revolution, Lingard and all his classmates had to flee Douai in 1793. The next eighteen years were spent teaching and ministering in the north of England, mostly near Durham; first at Crook Hall, then the recently-founded Ushaw College. Terrified by the thought of a life in educational administration, which he quickly realized he loathed, Lingard fled to the small village of Hornby in Lancashire in 1811. He never looked back. Accompanied by many and various pets including a cat, a guinea fowl, a tortoise, and his beloved giant poodle named Etna, Lingard happily served his small parish and wrote historical and theological works until his death in 1851. Lingard had fallen in love with Lancashire, a northern county with a deep recusant tradition. He begged his superiors not to send him back south, and he turned down two bishoprics and an offer to become President of Maynooth (outside of Dublin). Pius VII (pope from 1800–1823) awarded him the triple doctorate in 1821 in recognition of his scholarly excellence, and there was a rumor that Leo XII (pope from 1823–1829) had made him a cardinal in pectore (secretly, literally “in the pope’s breast”). It is more likely, unfortunately, that the pope’s statement in question referred to another scholar (possibly to the dynamic French priest Hugues-Félicité de Lammenais [1782–1854] who later became a controversial torchbearer for Liberal Catholicism).[11]

While his scholarly achievements were vast, Lingard should also be remembered as a conscientious pastor and a kind and generous friend. He became somewhat overwhelmed by his growing celebrity, and when tourists were driven in coaches by his rectory to get a glimpse of the famous Catholic historian working at his desk by the window, he would sometimes hide and wait for the inevitable cries of laughter when the only occupant at said desk was a gigantic old poodle wearing a top hat, glasses, and overcoat. Warm in friendship, Lingard also had quite an edge in controversy. While his willingness to defend the Catholic community from outside critics had won him renown, he grew extremely critical of elements within English Catholicism that he found embarrassing, theologically suspect, or intellectually wanting. He dismissively mocked Italian priests who came to England to run retreats fueled by “enthusiasm,” and criticized the women who attended them (sometimes directly, by letter, as attendees included close friends). Lingard’s correspondence also reflects a stereotypical English mistrust of the French and the Irish. A man of the eighteenth century and the Catholic Enlightenment, he could barely contain his dislike of Gothic revival, Pugin’s work, and the Anglo-Catholic Tractarians. While ardently desiring the conversion of non-Catholics, especially socially prominent Anglicans, he distrusted the leading converts of the Oxford Movement like Frederick Faber and Newman.

In recent years Lingard has received renewed attention as an important scholar of English history, and particularly of the Reformation.[12] Grand claims have been made for his originality as a historian. Given his pioneering use of original source material from all over Europe, there is much truth to these claims. He was indeed an early example of modern historical consciousness, and he showed a rare ability to get at what Edwin Jones called the “sources behind the sources.” However, as several studies have shown, Lingard was by no means an unbiased chronicler of events. He sought to subtly overturn a variety of anti-Catholic “national myths” and to complicate the story of the Reformation, but he did so in a manner that rose above the simplistic caricatures and vicious polemics that historians of his day, from every ideological camp, so often repeated. Or, at least, he usually rose above them: his discussions of Ann Boleyn showed he was not totally immune to partisan invective.

Lingard’s historical scholarship and his occasional writings were at the service of concrete theological and political goals. Theologically, he wanted to prove that English Christianity—in its origins and in the Saxon and later medieval periods—was continuous, at least in essentials, with contemporary Catholicism and not with Protestantism and the established (Anglican) Church. Politically, he wanted to show that Catholics were patriotic Englishmen and not dangerous to crown or country. Consequently, they should receive full political rights. This aim, which the Relief Acts of Lingard’s younger years had been important steps towards attaining, was essentially achieved in 1829 when Parliament finally passed a bill for Catholic Emancipation, removing the prohibition on Catholics sitting in Parliament. Privately, Lingard was very direct about the apologetic, theo-political goals of his work: he wished to be an antidote to the popular anti-clerical and skeptical histories of David Hume and Edward Gibbon. Not appearing to be so at first brush would, he believed, make him all the more effective.

While Lingard was certainly an heir to the Cisalpine tradition and one of the finest scholarly products of English-speaking enlightened Catholicism, the portrait of the man is incomplete without considering the broad theological and ecclesial worth of his life and work as a scholar and a pastor. Lingard should be viewed not just as a peculiarly English Catholic with peculiarly English theological, political, and pastoral concerns—although he certainly had those, and was proud to say so—but as a significant voice in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century struggle for Catholic reform that spanned Europe and the Americas.

A Moderate Reformer: Lingard’s Enduring Contributions

When I call Lingard a church reformer, I don’t mean that he necessarily self-consciously saw himself this way. At least at the beginning of his career, he definitely didn’t. What the church primarily needed wasn’t reform, but defense, and what English Catholics needed most of all were political rights and the confidence to state the strength of their case to Protestant friends and neighbors. However, like many other Catholic scholars who combine deep searches into church history with pastoral commitments and zeal (e.g. Lodovico Muratori in the eighteenth century, Newman in the nineteenth, and Yves Congar in the twentieth), Lingard found himself weighing the status quo he saw around him against an ideal—either in scripture, the early church, or some other period—and finding the current status quo wanting in certain ways.

Lingard’s ecclesiology inherited the enlightened Catholic “Cisalpine” distrust for authoritarianism. He had a high view of the rights of local churches, diocesan bishops, and lay people, but in a manner similar to John Carroll (1736–1815), the first bishop of the United States, Lingard combined these basically conciliarist sympathies with a moderate, respectful attitude towards the papacy. While Lingard’s dislike of ultramontanism is well-known, he clearly held that the pope had received primacy from Christ over the whole church, and that this primacy was not merely honorary. While Lingard might not have liked this comparison, had he lived on to Vatican I in 1870 he almost certainly would have aligned with Newman’s “inopportunist” stance opposing the timeliness and wisdom of a dogmatic definition of papal infallibility, rather than with the more combative position of a figure like the German historian Ignaz von Döllinger (1799–1890), who actually rejected the dogma. Such a position certainly fits Lingard’s temperament, and aligns with his moderate ecclesiological position.

Regarding church and state and the issue of religious liberty, Lingard decried all civil intolerance and persecution, and he definitively rejected a pining for the so-called medieval Catholic synthesis. One might say such a situation was easier to accept as a member of a religious minority suing for toleration and social acceptance (especially after the extinction of the Jacobite cause), but Lingard was clearly deeply affected on these questions from his study of history and theology. He knew Catholics and Protestants alike had brutally persecuted each other, and he knew the arguments justifying such persecution were intertwined with sinful prejudices and arose not from the Gospel but from contingent historical systems. On these issues in particular, he and the Cisalpine movement out of which he arose were clear forerunners of Vatican II and modern Catholic teaching.

In the realm of devotions, Lingard did sometimes betray tones of nationalism, elitism, and an Enlightenment disdain towards practices he believed were extravagant, un-English, or stumbling blocks to Protestants. However, he did not propose a dry moralism to take their place, but real evangelical content—he wanted to recall his countrymen to what he believed were the most Catholic (and English) of all devotions—meditations on scripture, the life of Jesus, and above all Christ’s passion. In devotional and liturgical life, Lingard worked constantly to provide suitable aids for lay people—prayer books, hymns, catechisms, and even his own (rather idiosyncratic) translation of the four gospels.[13]

Lingard’s pastoral efforts in liturgy were innovative, foreshadowing later Catholic reforms and even Vatican II. He sought to curb the practice, apparently widespread, of the laity pursuing private devotions during Mass (like praying the rosary) rather than following the liturgical action itself.[14] Lingard placed a strong emphasis on the role of all the baptized in offering the eucharistic sacrifice alongside the priest. To this end, he directly translated the Ordinary of the Mass into English, rather than paraphrasing it as Bishop Challoner (1691–1781) had done before him. The most important of Lingard’s pastoral works, and the only one exclusively devoted to the liturgy, is his Manual of Prayers on Sundays and During Mass (1833), which was initially intended only for his congregation of Hornby.[15] This work was lauded at the time by some other Catholic pastors, and has earned the praise of later commentators, including John Bossy, who considered it to mark “the successful culmination of a phase of liturgical experiment.”[16]

Another important episode, particularly revealing of Lingard’s attitudes towards the relationship between devotions and the liturgy (as well as his ecumenical sensibilities), is his polemical exchanges in the Catholic Magazine, under the pseudonym “Proselytos” in 1833–1834. In these exchanges, Lingard rather sharply critiqued contemporary Catholic liturgy and devotional life through the eyes of his character “Proselytos,” a well-catechized and recently converted former Protestant.[17]

Lingard prefigured Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium when he wrote that liturgy should be “simple to comprehend, edifying, prayerful, and dignified.”[18] To this end, he actually introduced the vernacular into the Mass itself in a limited but poignant way. While the recitation of English litanies before or after Mass was not unheard of, Lingard actually included them in the liturgy itself, at least on certain occasions like Holy Week.[19] He also had the Good Friday Passion account read in English by a layman while he chanted it solemnly in Latin—a practice which, Lingard must have been aware of, was controversial not least because it mirrored the practice of some radical French and Italian Jansenists.[20]

Lingard never gave the impression he was embarrassed by the use of Latin in worship, as some of the Cisalpines and other enlightened Catholics did before him. However, Lingard clearly believed Latin posed certain ecumenical challenges. His motivations for his liturgical experimentation on Holy Week, however, were pastoral and directly aimed at his parishioners: he believed many Catholics were, for whatever reason, not troubled enough over the sufferings of Christ.[21] He was also concerned with those who could not read—apparently not an insignificant number in his own congregation—since the use of printed English translations alone would not help them. Lingard probably never thought of himself as a liturgical reformer, but as a historically informed pastor. Nevertheless, all fruitful Catholic liturgical reform comes from a combination of pastoral zeal and historical erudition.

Finally, Lingard had a sensitivity for Protestants and a desire for dialogue that I call “proto-ecumenical,” in the sense that he was a forerunner of modern ecumenism. He exemplified the irenic attitude towards Protestants that many eighteenth-century Catholics, including the Cisalpines, had pursued—that is, an eschewal of needlessly offensive language and a pursuit of friendship with Protestants. However, Lingard went beyond mere irenicism. In a move that outraged certain Catholics, Lingard argued that the belief of some Anglicans in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist could not be considered heretical just because they explained the doctrine in a way that was not verbally equivalent to the (scholastic) language of transubstantiation. In discussions like these, Lingard exhibited the ability to separate a Christian theological truth from the historically contingent expression of that truth—a vital skill for any ecumenist, and one that, again, arose from Lingard’s historical work and knowledge of the development of formulations of Catholic doctrine.

Lingard’s balancing of his desire for liturgical, biblical, and proto-ecumenical reform with his deference to consensus and his loyalty to the papacy had a strong Muratorian flavor.[22] It is no coincidence that the historians Muratori and Lingard were both active as pastors alongside their scholarship. While Lingard clearly believed that the contemporary church faced deficiencies, some of them major, he was unwilling to undertake unilateral actions to correct them, and he knew from history that reform was hard, gradual, and only worked in fits and starts. This thoughtful grounding in the concrete history of the church and in his own context and community allowed Lingard to be a critical scholar and innovative thinker while remaining a faithful priest and pastor who avoided the arrogance and recklessness of earlier Cisalpines like Joseph Berington (1743–1827) or Alexander Geddes (1737–1802). Lingard is best understood as something of a paradox—as a man both stubbornly stuck in the eighteenth century past yet presciently forward-looking to the twentieth century and Vatican II. Frustrated in a no-man’s land between Enlightenment and Romanticism, conciliarist “Old Catholicism” and the rising tide of ultramontanism, he grasped some timeless truths about patience, moderation, and the nature of Catholic reform.

[1] Lingard to John Walker, (12 Jan. 1850), Ushaw College Archives (henceforth UC), UC/P9/7/1. I am grateful to Dr. Jonathan Bush, archivist at Ushaw College, for his generosity and expertise.

[2] Eamon Duffy, “From Sanders to Lingard: Recusant Readings of the Reformation,” in Duffy, ed., Reformation Divided: Catholics, Protestants, and the Conversion of England (London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 287–324, at 308. Important works on Lingard include the excellent biography by Peter Phillips, John Lingard: Priest and Historian (Herefordshire, UK: Gracewing, 2008); Joseph Chinnici, The English Catholic Enlightenment: John Lingard and the Cisalpine Movement, 1750–1850 (Shepherdstown, WV: Patmos, 1980); and the following collections of essays: J. A. Hilton, ed., A Catholic of the Enlightenment (Wigan, UK: North West Catholic History Society, 1999); Peter Philips, ed. Lingard Remembered: Essays to Mark the Sesquicentenary of John Lingard’s Death (London: Catholic Record Society, 2004). See also Sheridan Gilley, “John Lingard and the Catholic Revival,” in Derek Baker, ed., Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History, Studies in Church History 14 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1977), 313–27. For an early biography that also prints many of Lingard’s letters, see Martin Haile and Edwin Bonney, Life and Letters of John Lingard: 1771–1851 (London: Herbert and Daniel, 1911); and for recently published correspondence see John Trappes-Lomax, ed., The Letters of Dr John Lingard to Mrs Thomas Lomax (1835–51) (Hampshire, UK: Catholic Record Society, 2000).

[3] Duffy, “From Sanders to Lingard,” 308. I say “theo-political,” since theology and politics were so closely intertwined in the public debates raging over Catholic civil rights. Joseph Chinnici even called Lingard the “foremost [English] apologist for Catholic Emancipation” (English Catholic Enlightenment, 33). The literature on English and British anti-Catholicism is vast. For the polemical Protestant use of the notion of “Popery” specifically in the Cisalpine context, see Leo Gooch, “Lingard v. Barrington, et al.: Ecclesiastical Politics in Durham, 1805–29,” in Lingard Remembered, 35–64, especially 35–39. Gooch details Lingard’s efforts to counteract one polite but nonetheless vehement instantiation of “No-Popery” in a pamphlet war with the Anglican bishop of Durham, Shute Barrington (bishop from 1791–1826).

[4] John Lingard, The History of England, From the First Invasion by the Romans to the Accession of William and Mary in 1688, 8 vols. (London: J. Mawman, 1819–30).

[5] See, for example, Peter Milward, SJ, “A Via Media in the Elizabethan Church?,” Heythrop Journal 52 (2011): 392–98, at 392.

[6] Ushaw was a major English Catholic seminary and in fact the transplanted English College of Douai.

[7] Jim Hughes, “The Stella Hymn part 1,” Catholic Archives: The Journal of the Catholic Archives Society 36 (2016): 60–75; Jim Hughes, “The Stella Hymn part 2,” Catholic Archives: The Journal of the Catholic Archives Society 37 (2017): 41–62.

[8] As such, it was “eminently suited to distinguish essentials from accidentals.” Chinnici, The English Catholic Enlightenment, 8. See also pp. vii-ix; 3–8; Phillips, John Lingard, 1–49.

[9] “Cisalpine”—literally “this side of the Alps”—was a term used to describe those Enlightenment-influenced British Catholics who emphasized ecclesiastical independence from Rome, and argued that the theological and political views of Catholics, rightly understood, were not only not inimical to British citizenship but conducive to it. Opponents used the term “Cisalpine” pejoratively, but Cisalpine Catholics also used the term. In 1792, the Cisalpine Club was formed as a successor to the Catholic Committee to continue the struggle for legal emancipation for British Catholics. The contrast with “ultramontane” was intentional and provocative.

[10] On Cisalpinism, see J. A. Hilton, “The Cisalpines,” in A Catholic of the Enlightenment, 10–20; Bernard Ward, The Dawn of the Catholic Revival in England, 1781–1803, 2 vols. (London: Longmans & Green, 1909); See Eamon Duffy, “Doctor Douglas and Mister Berington—An Eighteenth-Century Retraction,” Downside Review 88 (1970): 249–69; Eamon Duffy, “Ecclesiastical Democracy Detected: I (1779–1787),” Recusant History 10 (1970): 193–209, and part II (1787–1796), Recusant History 10 (1970): 309–331, and part III (1796–1803),” Recusant History 13, no. 2 (1975): 123–148. See also Duffy’s unpublished dissertation, “Joseph Berington and the English Catholic Cisalpine Movement, 1772–1803” (PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 1973). Geoffrey Scott, “Dom Joseph Cuthbert Wilks [1747–1829] and English Benedictine Involvement in the Cisalpine Stirs,” Recusant History 32 (1996): 318–40; Shaun Blanchard, “Neither Cisalpine nor Ultramontane: John Carroll’s Ambivalent Relationship with English Catholicism, 1780–1800,” US Catholic Historian 36, no. 3 (2018): 1–28; Blanchard, “The Catholic Enlightenment,” in Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, ed. Liam Chambers (series edited by James E. Kelly and John McCafferty) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

[11] The definitive biography of Lingard is Peter Phillips, John Lingard.

[12] For two recent studies of Lingard as a historian see Philip Cattermole, John Lingard: The Historian as Apologist (Leicester, UK: Troubador Publishing, 2013) and Edwin Jones, John Lingard and the Pursuit of Historical Truth (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001). See also Donald F. Shea, The English Ranke: John Lingard (New York: Humanities Press, 1969); Gerard Culkin, “The Making of Lingard’s History,” The Month (1951): 8–18; Philip Hughes, “Lingard and the St Bartholomew,” in C. H. Carter, ed., From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honour of Garrett Mattingly (New York: Random House, 1965), 179–204; Peter Phillips, “John Lingard and the Anglo-Saxon church,” Recusant History 23 (1996–1997): 178–89.

[13] See Lingard, A New Version of the Four Gospels; With Notes Critical and Explanatory (London: Joseph Booker, 1836). See also Peter Philips, “The New Version of the Four Gospels,” in Lingard Remembered, 157–69.

[14] Emma Riley, “John Lingard and the Liturgy,” in Lingard Remembered, 143–56, at 147. Lingard wanted “to encourage a more full participation in the liturgy, rather than abandoning people to their own individual prayer.” See also Riley, “Lingard as Liturgist,” in A Catholic of the Enlightenment, 33–47.

[15] Riley, “John Lingard and the Liturgy,” 143.

[16] Robert Tate, who was a popular preacher and eventually president of Ushaw College adapted Lingard’s book for his own congregation (see Riley, “John Lingard and the Liturgy,” 143). Bossy evaluated Lingard’s Manual thus: “[It] gives an impression of considerable formal beauty and appropriateness, and it strikes me personally both as a genuine creative achievement in its own right and as the successful culmination of a phase of liturgical experiment.” Bossy, English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1975), 376.

[17] See, inter alia, Catholic Magazine 3 (1833) 18–19.

[18] Cf. Lingard to Robert Tate, (7 Dec. 1831), UCA, Lingard Transcript 623.

[19] “Tomorrow [Good Friday] I mean to omit the adoration of the cross, and instead of it to kneel before it on the altar step and to say the English litany of the passion, which I find in my prayers that were published by Tate at York. The Litany is not mine.” Lingard to John Walker, (5 Apr. 1844), UC/P9/6/13.

[21] On favoring devotions centered on Christ’s passion, see, for example, Lingard to John Walker, (5 Apr. 1844), UC/P9/6/13. “I wish to encourage devotion to the passion. It was a favourite devotion once.”

[22] On Muratori and a Muratorian style of church reform see Émile Appolis, Le tiers parti Catholique: Entre Janséniste et zelanti (Paris, 1966); Paola Vismara, “Lodovico Antonio Muratori, (1672–1750): Enlightenment in a Tridentine Mode,” in Ulrich L. Lehner and Jeffrey D. Burson, eds., Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2014), 249–268; Blanchard, The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II: Jansenism and the Struggle for Catholic Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 83–100.

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