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Introduction16 in the affairs of their legal subjects and their resources as a barrier to their en- deavors of overhauling their regimes and countries as territorial sovereigns. Thus, if this governmental aspect of the Catholic Enlightenment was, on the one hand, firmly established on scholarly advances in several fields of knowl- edge, it was also politically bonded, in a sometimes uneasy alliance, with the absolutist reformers of the Iberian and Italian Peninsulas, the Habsburg mon- archy, and the Catholic states of the Holy Roman Empire.39 Admittedly, this is an all too “unproblematic” representation, as if every- thing fell neatly in place in a symbiotic relationship between Enlightenment and Catholicism. In the given space, it is impossible to do justice to the com- plexities, indeed tensions, that, according to the now sizeable literature, char- acterized this relationship—so let these be acknowledged here generically. We have also avoided a roll call of more or less celebrated names whose bearers can be associated with the diverse trends, endeavors, and groups within the Catholic Enlightenment, which could have given these tensions sharper relief. The aim of this deliberately smoothly drawn, concise summary has instead been to emphasize features of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Catholi- cism that made it a cultural entity40 not merely exposed to enlightened stimuli in response to which, somewhat reluctantly, it performed the modicum of ac- commodation necessary for survival or reacted defensively,41 but one that 39 The case of France, where “the monarchy found itself set against the conciliarist, regalist, or Jansenist strain of Enlightenment Catholicism,” was unique. See Burson, “Introduc- tion,” 24. For the other regions, see Anton Schindling, “Theresianismus, Josephinismus, katholische Aufklärung,” Würzburger Diözesansgeschichtsblätter 50 (1988): 215–24; Elisa- beth Kovacs, “Katholische Aufklärung und Josephinismus,” in Klueting, Katholische Aufklärung, 246–59; Michael Printy, “Catholic Enlightenment in the Holy Roman Empire,” in Lehner and Printy, Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment, 165–214, here 181–92; Ga- briel Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and Its Empire, 1759–1808 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 70–78; Andrea J. Smidt, “Luces por la fe: The Cause of Catholic Enlightenment in 18th-Century Spain,” in Lehner and Printy, Compan- ion to the Catholic Enlightenment, 403–52, here 423–32. 40 Brian Young, “Religious History and the Eighteenth-Century Historian,” Historical Journal 43 (2000): 849–68. 41 Such defensive reactions supposedly comprised the “Counter-Enlightenment” that, ac- cording to some scholars, is the inevitable outcome of Enlightenment Catholicism. See Israel, Democratic Enlightenment, 1–35. But see also others, who have stressed the creativ- ity of Catholic conservative thought, and the difficulties created by a much too stark di- chotomy between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. Darrin McMahon, Ene- mies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); James Schmidt, “Introduction,” in Schmidt, What Is Enlightenment?, 5–28; Carolina Armenteros, The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and His Heirs, 1794–1854 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).