Introduction: Re-Orienting the History of Catholic Confessional Control

The text offers a historiographical review that highlights how, within the now substantial scholarship on the Inquisition and, more broadly, on Catholic global expansion in the early modern period, the Christian East has generally been neglected. This historiographical gap is striking, given that the archives of the various Inquisitions—especially those of the Roman Holy Office—contain extensive documentation on the confessional oversight exercised by the Catholic Church over Eastern Christianity, both in judicial matters (such as trials) and in doctrinal matters (dubia circa sacramenta, censures, etc). In addition to introducing the volume that aims to fill this historiographical gap, the essay also sets out to demonstrate the usefulness of such an approach. It argues that the long and complex formation of an “Eastern Catholicism” constituted a fundamental chapter in the history of early modern Catholicism tout court. Furthermore, it suggests that engagement with the Christian East furnished the Inquisition with a set of cultural tools and interpretive frameworks that were subsequently applied in other contexts, especially in missionary settings and in the broader theological controversies that shook the Catholic world from the seventeenth century onward.