Stefania Tutino. Shadows of Doubt

In Shadows of Doubt: Language and Truth in Post-Reformation Catholic Culture, Stefania Tutino presents readers with an exceptionally incisive, sophisticated, and readable exposition of hitherto neglected aspects of early modern Catholic culture. In a nutshell, she finds truth in doubt. Tutino acknowledges the tension between language and reality as “a fundamental and constitutive element of our current intellectual horizon” (3) and makes it the focus of her inquiry into early modern thought. Putting on “a pair of self-aware and self-conscious postmodernist glasses” (3), she is able to identify layers of uncertainty concerning the relationship between reality, language, and truth that point to a “darker” side of early modern Catholic thought. This is an area of Catholic intellectual endeavor characterized by doubt and disruption rather than by doctrinal certainty and confidence in language as a vessel of secular and divine truth. It does not easily fit into prevalent views of post-Reformation Catholicism, and it is much closer to postmodern epistemological and hermeneutical concerns than we tend to assume. Tutino convincingly establishes epistemological anxiety and sensitivity as something (post)modern historians share, to a degree, with early modern Catholic theologians.

Art · Certainty · Epistemology · Exposition (narrative) · Literature · Postmodernism · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies