It was a great honour to address the Scientiae conference at Belfast in June 2019 on the subject of ‘War and the Supernatural in Early Modern Europe’. This was the title of a research project funded by the European Research Council at Queen’s between 2016 and 2021, the purpose of which was to investigate the relationship between faith and force in early modern Europe. I led a research team comprising Dr Todd Rester, Dr Floris Verhaart, Dr Francesco Quatrini, and now Dr Karie Schultz that examined two groups, Franciscan and Calvinist scholastics, who were accused by their contemporaries of confusing the natural and the supernatural and consequently favouring doctrines of holy war.
Since 2019, one of our major volumes of primary sources, comprising extracts from the writings of Calvinist or Reformed scholastics on war has been dispatched to Routledge, and will be published in 2022. Our second volume of primary sources, comprising extracts from Franciscan scholastics on war, will shortly be sent to Routledge. A wide range of shorter publications by team members have now been published or will be soon.
Most happily, members of the team have gone on the bigger and better things: Dr Todd Rester now teaches at Westminster Theological Seminary, Pennsylvania; Dr Floris Verhaart is an Irish Research Council fellow at University College Cork; Dr Francesco Quatrini is a postdoctoral researcher at Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale; Dr Karie Schultz is a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of St Andrews.
For more on Ian Campbell and his work, see this website. For more on the Scientiae Belfast Conference 2019, see the conference page.