Grace is a slippery subject. As Julian Pitt-Rivers noted a few decades ago, it covers a wide range of meanings: the divine concept in Abrahamic theologies of salvation; the perks accompanying the rank of Dukes and Kings; a behavioral quality; a feature of successful artistic performance; the tip left on the table for the waiter; to the ordinary thanks said in Romance languages (Peristiany and Pitt-Rivers, 1992). Its fleeting nature has eluded, from an ecclesiastical perspective, not only quite a few heretics stumbling over its definition but also modern scholars in the fields of history, anthropology and the social sciences: grace (or functional equivalents in non-Christian cultures) as a mediator of personal and collective lives remains notably out of sight–and reach–in the humanities. In a recent special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology dedicated to the subject, Edwards and McIvor (Edwards and McIvor 2022) attribute this lacuna to grace’s indefinite nature, which cannot easily be accommodated to deeply ingrained, Euro-American assumptions about objectivity and reality (cfr. Boute, Badea, Cavarzere, and Vanden Broecke, 2021). Another factor may be the scholarly (and capitalist?) bias towards the “Maussian” reciprocity of human interactions, which is inadequate to capture the performative gratuity of grace as it works towards (re)assembling collectives moving across the boundaries that separate heaven and earth. Tribes of historians researching the European late Middle Ages and the early modern period have mainly focused on the princely remission of crimes, a practice that has survived in executive pardon. Scholars tend to consider most interactions that were framed by contemporaries in a “graceful” context through the lens of unequal, yet essentially reciprocal and transactional, exchanges between agents managing unequal (but theoretically definable) amounts of social, cultural or economic “capitals” in studying, for instance, informal politics and clientelism in early modern European polities.

Some anthropologists and social scientists have come to value, in recent years, the potential of grace and its functional equivalents as a hermeneutical challenge in both Christian and non-Christian, both European and overseas contexts. Historians, for their part, face the daunting tasks of (1) investigating the vast empires of grace that governed both souls and subjects in premodern eras ((chronologically intended, cf. Latour 1991) across confessional boundaries and (2) solving the question of where grace – as well as its functional twin, honour – went after the transition to modernity. For medieval and early modern Europeans “did” grace in a particular way, with quite a few of these intersecting forms of grace involving lots and lots of bureaucracy – a hybridisation of graceful and administrative practices that seems to challenge the dyadic lens of grace vs. law and tradition that informs the work of anthropologists and social scientists who research the gracefulness of late twentieth and early twenty-first century communities. Defying Protestant critique and transferring their chancery desks to the four corners of the early modern world, Catholics in particular proved to be hands-on experts in the bureaucratization of “gratuitous grace”, to the extent that the administration of Divine Grace in the sacraments (Fattori 2010) spilled over into graceful discourses that permeate large chunks of administration. These graceful bureaucracies were also operated on a continental and global scale by institutions and transnational networks that had emerged in Rome at the onset of the second Millennium and that encompassed areas such as the sacramental and legal absolution of particularly hideous sins; dispensations of all kind of irregularities; indulgences; all kinds of indults and faculties transferring apostolic authority to agents on the ground; papal appointments to local church offices; and including the seemingly down-to-earth transactions that concerned ecclesiastical property. Regimes of grace were not unique to the papacy, for that matter: in medieval and early modern European polities, authorities were commonly addressed as the “source of all grace” alongside justice.

Taking a salutary distance from Whig perceptions of an “institutional cronyism” that interfered with humanity’s relentless march to modernity, recent scholarship has instead focused on “ruling by exception.” Such a shift has allowed scholarship to integrate elites into micropolitical power dynamics (Emich 2001; Reinhard et al. 2004). “Ruling by exception” can be seen as the object of (symbolic) communication between rulers and subjects (Millet 2003; Haug-Moritz and Ullman 2015) in premodern “theatre states”; or as a flexible tool of government in its own right, allowing, on a case by case basis, local, contingent and multi-tiered interests and concerns to measure against and merge with supposedly “given”, canonically or divinely sanctioned, and universalist normative order(ing)s (Cerutti and Vallerani 2015), allowing souls and subjects to inhabit, appropriate (and subvert) seemingly timeless and rigid systems. In relation to the assumed opposition between grace and law mentioned above, or that between charisma and institutions ingrained in our mental maps, it is interesting to note that, in European polities, these regimes of grace thrived within medieval and early modern juridico-ecclesial orderings of power and knowledge production which seem to have all but evaporated in subsequent, “modern”, politico-economic orderings (Clarke 2006): ideal-types of governance that, from a historicist point of view, probably require further qualification, and likewise for the apparent dismantling of regimes of grace in later modernity itself (Cf. Paul Piff’s work on the effects of monetization on social ecologies of behavior and relations).

Two issues need to be foregrounded here. First is the fact that grace was theorized as an infinite resource: in ecclesiastical lore, the so-called thesaurus ecclesiae of grace tapped into the infinite merit of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Closer investigation of how grace was practiced on a daily basis – by Roman bureaucrats, among others – sheds light on the operationalising of “boundless grace” into a resource that, in sharp contrast to cultural, social or symbolic forms of capital, actually defies our “capitalist”, transactionalist conception (Clavero 1998) of the dynamics and (finite) resources that assemble and reassemble premodern and modern collectives (cf. Latour 2005). Secondly, regimes of grace draw attention to the typically reactive governance styles informing European (and non-European) polities, as their unfolding depended to a great extent on the submission of supplication letters on behalf of “humble” petitioners seeking all kinds of graces catering to their spiritual or material needs. Indeed, much of the daily business of government, in Rome and elsewhere, consisted of receiving, vetting, granting (or shelving) innumerable petitions from bewilderingly diverse localities and social ecologies rather than initiating grand, “executive-style” policies. Because of this, grace appears to be first and foremost an eminently (g)local affair, since papal regimes of grace, even across regions and nations, were developed in terms of local negotiations over sin and its appropriate retribution; local devotions, needs, concerns, constraints, and competition over material resources and offices; and the corresponding local cultures and dynamics of conflict. Seen from this perspective, the granular workings of grace underpin local, connected and entangled early modern Catholicisms as they were being reformatted on a daily basis into a world religion (Ditchfield 2018), while being resourced in the prime locus of centrist master narratives, the Eternal City.

The Frankfurt Research Group Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities (POLY), in cooperation with the Franco-German Research Group GRACEFUL17: Global Governance, Local Dynamics. Transnational Regimes of Grace in the Roman Dataria Apostolica (17th Century), wishes to convene an interdisciplinary workshop of theologians, anthropologists, lawyers, and historians to investigate the potential of grace (or its functional equivalents in non-Christian societies) as an infinite resource that both mediates and is mediated by an open-ended list of practices and connections in this world and, in the Christian context, the beyond. As we move towards integrating grace as a hermeneutical category in our scholarly toolkit, how can we escape the “doctrine of grace” inherited from our own Christian past slipping into our scholarly lenses, as it was molded by Protestant criticisms of the Catholic practice and later by the Weberian linking of Calvinism and capitalism? How can we, secondly, overcome the dyadic opposition between grace on one hand and structure, law, tradition on the other assumed in anthropological studies, involve institutional charisma and grace – which seem oxymorons in our modern conceptions – and pursue an analysis that is based rather on the premise that medieval and early modern Europeans (among others?) “did” grace in a highly regulated, bureaucratic manner? Last but not least, how can we take a salutary distance from the exoticizing contraposition of a graceful premodern era with a graceless modernity marked by executive-style governance? Loosely drawing on recent scholarship concerning the rebounding of honour and shame in modern configurations (notably on the world wide web), we can also ask, did grace, having apparently receded into the shadows as a formal regime of governance, disappear altogether from our transactional worlds?