Odile Panetta

Odile Panetta is an historian of early modern ideas, with a particular interest in Protestant political thought between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Before joining the Koch History Centre, Odile Panetta was a Lecturer in Cultural and Intellectual History at the Warburg Institute and a Departmental Lecturer in Early Modern History at Oxford and Christ Church. She also remains affiliated to Aarhus University, where she has been contributing to the AUFF-funded project “Body politic(s) – The body in early modern political thought”.

Her previous research has focused on the development and dissemination of ideas about (il)legitimate coercion among Protestants of various denominations, and particularly on discussions about religious toleration in mid-sixteenth-century Switzerland and their later impact.

As a Koch History Centre Fellow, Dr Panetta will be investigating the debate over the state’s authority in matters of religion that split the Dutch Republic in the wake of the Arminian controversy in the first half of the seventeenth century. She will focus on how leading theologians at the Reformed universities of Leiden and Franeker articulated a view of Church-state relations that guaranteed the autonomy of the Church from magisterial control while still preserving a role for civil authorities in matters of religion, as well as on how their ideas were received and contested.

Her aim is to both situate these ideas within the wider development of early modern Reformed political thinking, and explore the role played by universities as public-facing spaces for the development and promotion of alternative visions of the state’s ius circa sacra.