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In the Vatican Archives, a manuscript diary records the daily activities of an unnamed Italian priest. When the household he served moved from Spain to Rome in the late 1570s, the diarist began to take especially careful note of the sermons he attended nearly every day of Lent. He continued the practice every year until the diary ended in 1593. 1 The priest belonged to an increasingly important entourage. During the 1580s his employer, Ippolito Aldobrandini, was elevated to the cardinalate, and later became Pope Clement VIII. Throughout the diarist's time in Rome, his patron's rising star led him increasingly to sermons in Rome's newest or grandest churches: Chiesa Nuova,

This chapter describes the emergence of the system called “Tridentinism” following the Council of Trent. The Council incorporated, redefined, and updated the norms of the previous centuries to such an extent that it became preferable to view these norms through the lens of the Council's decrees. The body of Tridentine decrees increasingly edged all previous sources out of ecclesiastical use. Thus, it became obligatory to refer to Trent for solutions to every problem that arose, doctrinal or institutional. As a result, post-Tridentine Catholicism gradually took on a uniformity that nobody would have dared to think possible during the acute phase of the Protestant schism. This “Tridentinism” even managed to penetrate, in important ways, certain parts of the Protestant world.

This chapter focuses on conversionary preaching that reflected and promoted early modern Catholicism's innovations and triumphalism. It highlights unusual departures that are best revealed in an untapped cache of over 750 manuscript sermons by Gregorio Boncompagni Corcos. Corcos, a respected conversionary preacher of the late seventeenth century, held his position for nearly forty years and delivered handwritten sermons that introduced unprecedented topics discussing Catholicism's triumphs. The chapter recounts how Corcos formulated influential arguments for the continued importance of sermons to Jews in the Roman devotional landscape, revealing his own personal doubts and insecurities. Corcos's preaching confirms that Judaism directly helped a resurgent early modern Catholicism to define itself, providing a context for the new “others” and new devotional priorities of the early modern period.