Sectarian Conflicts, Ideological Biases, and Professional Standards

Abstract This article is about politics, history, and the politics of history. It centers on the Dominican friar Abraham Bzowski, or Bzovius (1567–1637). Born in Poland, Bzovius in the early seventeenth century moved to Rome, where Pope Paul V entrusted him with the task of continuing Cesare Baronio’s Annales Ecclesiastici. Baronio’s last volume was published in 1607, the same year as Baronio’s death, and reached the year 1198. Bzovius was supposed to pick up where Baronio had left off, ideally taking the Annalesup to the seventeenth century. Bzovius produced twelve additional volumes in his life: Virtually all of them were controversial; most of them had to undergo several rounds of revisions and emendations; and a few of them were never authorized for publication, thus remaining in manuscript. This article discusses the conflicts that Bzovius’s work provoked. Even though Bzovius’s name might be unknown even to the majority of early modern historians today, his case is well worth studying because it elucidates crucial aspects of the relationship between history writing and politics in seventeenth-century Catholicism. Understanding this relationship, in turn, provides insightful considerations on the ways in which history writing and politics are intertwined today.