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The Catholic Historical Review 89.1 (2003) 85-86



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Storia della Chiesa di Bologna. Edited by Paolo Prodi and Lorenzo Paolini. 2 vols. (Bologna: Istituto per la Storia della Chiesa di Bologna, and Bergamo: Edizioni Bolis. 1997. Pp. xv, 402 and 670.)

These two handsome volumes make a splendid contribution to the history of the Church in Italy. In a series of carefully researched and beautifully illustrated essays, twenty-five local experts trace the history of the Bolognese diocese from the early fourth-century Bolognese protomartyrs, Vitale and Agricola, down to the early 1960's. As Paolo Prodi writes in his "Introduction": the substantial novelty of the project lies not so much in the particular research methods, or the discoveries presented in these volumes, as in their ambition to cover the entire history of the Bolognese church in a way that includes substantial treatments of the questions of administration, pastoral care, parish life, and devotional practices that have attracted much recent attention by historians of the Italian Church, but which are usually neglected in the one-bishop-after-another diocesan histories with which Italy abounds.

The first volume gives a basic chronological narrative of the Bolognese church parceled into four essays. Amedeo Benati offers a clear discussion of the evidence concerning the late Roman and early and high medieval periods. His treatments of the boundaries of the diocese and of the local impact of the investiture controversy—Canossa was quite close by—are especially interesting. Augusto Vasina offers a good treatment of ecclesiastical foundations, with particularly thorough discussion of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth centuries. Umberto Mazzone develops much rich material, previously little-explored, on the period from the Council of Trent to the early nineteenth century. Giuseppe Battelli is excellent on the Risorgimento and Fascism, although in the post-World War II period he says not nearly enough on the relations between the local church and the Communist Party, which dominated communal administration beginning in the 1950's.

In the second volume, "Saints and Devotions" in the Middle Ages and the modern period (sixteenth century to the present) are treated in essays by Paolo Golinelli and Gabriella Zarri, respectively; and for "Liturgical Life" a similar division of labor is observed by Giampaolo Ropa and Enzo Lodi. Essays on "Charity, Welfare, and Social Commitment" by Mario Fanti, Giampaolo Venturi, and Alessandro [End Page 85] Albertazzi are especially rich on the Catholic Reformation and the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One imagines that Fanti's treatment of the late medieval and early modern periods would have been more detailed had he been able to consult Nicholas Terpstra's book on Bolognese confraternities, which appeared in English only two years before these volumes were published. Educational issues are treated in an interesting essay on relations between the University and the local church by Carlo Dolcini, and by Gian Paolo Brizzi, who discusses schooling in the modern period. Religious architecture, painting, sculpture, and music are adequately surveyed in essays by Anna Maria Matteucci, Fabrizio Lollini, Donatella Biagi Maino, and Piero Mioli. Religious orders are discussed by Paola Foschi and Alfeo Giacomelli. A final section treats pastoral life, preaching, and religious dissent in essays by Giandomenico Gordini, Samuele Giombi, Maurizio Tagliaferri, and Guido Dall'Olio.

In the first volume, especially, it is surprising that the period from the 1470's down to Council of Trent receives somewhat short shrift. One suspects that Vasina and Mazzone, who already had large and important topics to explore, shied away from each other's turf. In particular, it would be nice to be told more about the policies of the later Bentivoglio, for which there are plentiful sources. The Bentivoglio response to the territorial ambitions of the Borgia papacy merits closer treatment, as do their quarrels with Bishop Giuliano della Rovere—quarrels that certainly contributed to the latter's decision to march on the city after he became Julius II. Similarly, the complexities, and the theoretical and ideological implications of civil administration by the Church in the period after the expulsion of the Bentivoglio are...

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