Print and the Remaking of Theology in Paris, 1490–1540

At the turn of the sixteenth century, theology was the most prestigious of the academic disciplines, yet its meaning and authority were increasingly unsettled. For centuries, the University of Paris had stood at the centre of theological learning in Latin Christendom, training generations of masters and defining the standards of the field. Around the turn of the sixteenth century, however, new forms of religious scholarship began to emerge beyond the university's lecture halls. Often characterised as a humanist challenge to scholastic methods, this development was in fact more far-reaching. What was at stake was not simply technique, but theology's social form: its institutional basis, communicative reach, and how expertise was claimed. This book traces this reconfiguration in Paris from the 1490s to the eve of the Council of Trent. In the city's printing houses, scholars and editors experimented with new ways of editing Scripture and the Church Fathers and reimagined how theological knowledge might circulate in print. By expanding the audiences and ambitions of religious scholarship, this editorial culture challenged the Faculty of Theology's claim to define who could speak as a theologian and under what conditions. These tensions intensified with the upheavals of the Lutheran Reformation, as Parisian theologians confronted the possibility that emerging scholarly practices had eroded their jurisdiction. They responded with censorship and polemic, but suppression did not settle the question. In 1536 the Faculty's own curriculum was reformed to include an expanded programme of advanced biblical lectures that permanently altered theological education in France. Drawing together book history and university history, the book investigates printed works alongside the University of Paris's archival records to reconstruct a shared intellectual environment in which scholarship, teaching, institutional power, and the book trade were deeply intertwined. By analysing theology as socially embedded knowledge shaped by its modes of communication, Lundberg demonstrates how, in an age of reform, theology itself became a site of contestation and renewal.

Christa Lundberg is a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study and Assistant Professor of History at Lund University. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2022 and subsequently held a Junior Research Fellowship at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. Her research explores early modern knowledge, book culture, and plagiarism. She has published articles in the Journal of the History of Ideas and Intellectual History Review.