In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Le smanie per l’educazione: Gli scolopi a Venezia tra Sei e Settecento by Maurizio Sangalli
  • Christopher Carlsmith
Le smanie per l’educazione: Gli scolopi a Venezia tra Sei e Settecento. By Maurizio Sangalli. [I libri di Viella, 137.] (Rome: Viella Libreria Editrice. 2012. Pp. 425. €38,00. ISBN 978-88-8334-910-2.)

This book traces the history of the Piarist order inside the Venetian Republic during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In five extended chapters, Sangalli offers an overview of the order (chapter 1), a detailed look at the Piarist schools in Murano and Capodistria (chapters 2–3), an analysis of those schools’ finances (chapter 4), and a consideration of the Piarist attempts to expand west into the Venetian mainland empire and east to Ragusa and nearby towns (chapter 5). The book includes four appendices, listing the dates/locations of attempted foundations, faculty members serving from 1677 to 1805 and their areas of expertise, students resident in the Venetian schools in 1754 and 1765, and sample budgets of 1756 and 1805. The bibliography is very thorough; it consists overwhelmingly of Italian-language scholarship. Four maps and three graphs help to break up the dense but very informative text. Sangalli acknowledges previous scholarship on the Piarists in Naples, Poland, and elsewhere but argues that Venice constitutes a special case where introducing a new religious order, especially one with a Spanish founder, was particularly “delicate.”

The Piarists—also known as the Scolopians or Scuole Pie and formally as the Poor Regular Clerics of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools—were founded by the Aragonese Josè Calasanz in 1597. Similar to the Jesuits, the Somaschans, the Barnabites, and the Theatines, the Piarists were inspired by the Catholic reform in the second half of the sixteenth century. Calasanz’s order shared with its brethren a desire to provide education to those who otherwise would not have been able to receive it. Initially Calasanz focused on primary education—especially religious education. Like the Jesuits, however, the content of classes shifted over time to include more scientific and mathematical instruction, even when such instruction sometimes disagreed with orthodox views from Rome. Sangalli asserts that the Piarists (unlike the Jesuits) were willing to break with directives from Rome and to ally themselves with the Venetian state, when the occasion demanded it. It is difficult to avoid frequent comparisons between the Jesuits and the Piarists, owing to the important similarities, but also differences, between the two orders; fortunately, Sangalli has worked quite a bit on Jesuit history and thus makes a number of enlightening comparisons. [End Page 366]

Sangalli is intimately familiar with the requisite archives for this type of project, including the order’s archives near Piazza Navona, the State and Patriarchal Archives in Venice, and the Vatican Archives. He has written extensively about the history of education in the early-modern Venetian world, including several monographs and dozens of articles since the late 1990s. Unlike many who have penned earlier accounts of the Piarists (and of other religious orders), Sangalli is a professionally trained, lay historian; nevertheless, it is clear that he is sympathetic to the Piarists. He skips lightly over the multiple accusations of child abuse that plagued the order in the seventeenth century and ultimately led to the pope’s suspension of the Piarists (see Karen Liebreich’s excellent Fallen Order: Intrigue, Heresy, and Scandal in the Rome of Caravaggio and Galileo [New York, 2004]).

The strength of this work is its careful reconstruction of the Piarist attempts, both successful and not, at penetrating the Venetian Empire during these two centuries. Sangalli explains how a botched attempt in the early 1630s, when Venice was devastated by plague, set back the order’s attempts by half a century. Drawing upon the voluminous archival records, Sangalli documents the details of the seminarium nobilium at Capodistria on the Adriatic coast, and the later college on the island of Murano near Venice, the only two of twenty attempts that successfully endured.

Christopher Carlsmith
University of Massachusetts Lowell
...

pdf

Share