“Promoting the Common Interest of Christ”. H.W. Ludolf’s “impartial” Projects and the Beginnings of the SPCK

My essay deals with the concept of confessional impartiality, which can be considered as the criticism of confessional barriers, the refusal to accept dogmatic and doctrinal distinctions or even as the attempt to establish contacts or a dialogue between individuals and/or groups belonging to different confessions (in some cases existing on the margins of these confessions or even outside of them). Instead of approaching this topic from a theological point of view or in terms of the history of ideas, I decided to explore cultural transfers between the Catholic and Protestant worlds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing in particular on the reception by the Protestant world of late medieval and early modern Catholic mystical literature. Given that this process could be considered as an indicator or a “tracer” of certain interconfessional relations, of how they came about and of the shapes that they could assume, I decided to dedicate a more in-depth study to a series of concrete aspects, such as: 1.The production, circulation and translation of the texts, and of the social and cultural contexts in which they were reproposed in new linguistic and confessional guises (by means of translations and adaptations); 2. The figures of the mediators who played various roles in these cultural transfer processes; 3. the networks within which this mediation process occurred. I would like to dedicate my attentions to this last point: the links and networks ¬– real as well as planned and imagined – between Germany, England and Italy. I would like to propose a microanalysis limited to a handful of places and persons, and to the brief span of time between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, that was crucial for the birth of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.