Chiese del Sud. Nuove ricerche per la storia religiosa della società meridionale in età moderna e contemporanea by Luciano Orabona (review)

BOOK REVIEWS125 lowings, thus demonstrating to the crown the need for placating gestures, both financial and honorific. Not religious orthodoxy, then, but aristocratic honor drove Guise political decisions. They could not allow themselves to be pushed to the margins of political life, and they reacted bitterly to other families (notably the Montmorency) who sought to push them. But together with these virtues come some serious limitations. Like other works in the Namier-Syme tradition, Carroll's narrative frequently crumbles into long and detailed accounts of specific relationships and events, whose significance even specialists may have difficulty appreciating. More serious, his methods tend to magnify the force and scope of the Guise affinity. He considers it mainly at points of peak effectiveness, without establishing what share of the provincial elite attached itself to the Guise, or managed to combine occasional service with a larger independence. This matters, because Jean-Marie Constant has shown that most nobles in fact steered clear of ligueur involvements, either joining the royalists or remaining neutral, despite the power and prominence of families like the Guise. Carroll perhaps misses this fact because he tends to assume the unvarying force of some basic nobiliar values, such as honor and provincial community; he does not give much thought to other values, or ask how nobles' value systems worked as a whole. This book thus teaches us much about how sixteenth-century politics happened, but what that politics meant remains an open historical question. Jonathan Dewald State University ofNew York at Buffalo Chiese del Sud. Nuove ricerche per la storia religiosa della società méridionale in età moderna e contemporánea. By Luciano Orabona. [Chiesa e Società, 1.] (Cassino: Editrice Garigliano. 1998. Pp. 233. 35,000 Italian lire.) This volume gathers seven essays on topics relating to the history of the Catholic Church and of Catholic spirituality in the sixteenth through twentieth centuries. The geographic focus is on southern Italy, and especially on the area near Casería, northwest of Naples. Although this is not clearly explained, at least six of the essays were written as journal articles, conference papers, or prefaces to other volumes. The author teaches church history at the University of Cassino, near the region here studied, and he is the director of the series, also published in Cassino, in which the present volume appears. The volume is thus somewhat of a vanity publication, and its broader interest is limited. The first two essays are centered on two Relationes ad limina,the reports to Rome that were required of bishops after the Council of Trent. These two examples , published here as appendices to the essays, were written by the bishops of Aversa in 1589 and 1600. They, and Orabona's introductory remarks to 126BOOK REV IEWS the texts, reflect the usual concerns of Counter-Reformation prelates for the improvement of church administration and in the quality of the clergy. The next two essays focus on the nineteenth century. One, on Bishop Mancinelli of Caserta (1831-1848), discusses the prelate's spiritual work alongside his administrative activity. The fourth essay, on the bishops of Capua in the 1850's to 1870's, deals with church administration and with the political context of postUnification Italy. The fifth essay is a study of Paolo Manna (1872-1952), a priest noted for his ecumenical and missionary activities and writings. The sixth essay, written on the centennial of Rerum Novarum, the 1891 papal encyclical on the social question, examines its limited effect on the work of the bishops of the Caserta area. The final essay surveys recent studies on Catholicism in southern Italy in the modern era; again, the focus is on the Caserta area, though the selection of the works reviewed is rather haphazard. The volume has no index, no bibliography, and no conclusion. The essays by and large do not go beyond local erudition, and the writing is fairly prolix. References to broader, comparative, or methodological issues are scarce. Some essays do not even seem to have been revised prior to their republication (see, e.g., pp. 118 and 120). Overall, then, the volume is not useful to those not already well versed in its specific topics. Tommaso Astarita Georgetown...