Tiziana Faitini presents a working paper on 'Shaping the Profession. Some Thoughts on the Moral Problematization of Professional Activities in the Counter-Reformation'

This paper investigates the theorisation of the duties belonging to different – lay and professional – conditions, elaborated upon by post-Tridentine moral theology, in order to contribute to the genealogy of the modern concept and experience of the profession, and, more generally, to modern economic and political rationality. It focuses particularly on how work and professional activities are dealt with in Juan Azor’s Institutiones morales, Hermann Busenbaum’s Medulla theologiae moralis and Alfonso de Liguori’s Theologia moralis, between the early 17th and mid-18th Centuries. After an introduction on the rationale of the research (§1), and some quick historical remarks on the sources and the theological elaboration on the states of life (§2), the paper examines the specific prescriptions imposed by these sources on professional activities in their discussions of the Third Commandment, and the obligations to rest and fast on certain days (§3). A brief analysis of the paragraphs explicitly devoted to the duties of professionals (law and health professionals in particular) (§4) precedes some final observations about the post-Tridentine model of profession, and its influence on the moral and socio-political valorisation of professional activities (§5).

Martin Mulsow gives a working paper on 'A New Orient. Scholars, Objects, and the quest for Asia'

Where the pioneer scholars of the 17th century had broadened the intellectual horizon out from the study of the Bible by learning Arabic, Armenian, Coptic and Ge’ez, in the early 18th century was a push that went considerably further east, into areas which no longer belonged to the broader compass of Greek antiquity or to the Biblical context – to Persia, Bactria, India, China and the Tatar and Mongol steppes. Largely unnoticed and as it were behind the back of the early German Enlightenment, which had quite different preoccupations, young scholars such as Georg Jacob Kehr and Theophil Siegfried Bayer laboured to discover a new and considerably larger world. Kehr wrote the first monograph on an Islamic coin: a coin of the Mughal emperor Aurengzeb. The expansion by leaps and bounds of the scope of the books giving the Lord’s Prayer in exotic languages – to 60, 80 and then over 100 – is a measure of the rapidity, even explosiveness of the expansion of the horizon. It was to be a further 100 to 150 years before this linguistic explosion was gradually absorbed, and oriental studies, neatly organised into faculties, disciplines and professorial chairs, entered into calmer waters.