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  • The University of Mantua, the Gonzaga, and the Jesuits, 1584–1630 by Paul F. Grendler
  • Paul V. Murphy
The University of Mantua, the Gonzaga, and the Jesuits, 1584–1630. By Paul F. Grendler. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2009. Pp. xxiv, 287. $62.00. ISBN 978-0-8018-9171-7.)

For many years, Paul F. Grendler has provided illuminating studies of education and culture in Italy during the Renaissance and the Reformation. Grendler now examines one of the more unique examples of Italian university life, the “Peaceful University of Mantua” (p. 149). He recounts the complex interests of the Gonzaga rulers of Mantua; the Jesuits; and the Italian professors of humanities, law, and medicine who collaborated in the establishment of this short-lived institution. [End Page 356]

The decision of Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga (1587–1626) to establish this joint Jesuit-civic university grew out of his family’s close connection with the Jesuits, his own academic training, and his love of learning. The Gonzaga drew close to the Jesuits when Luigi Gonzaga (1568–91) entered the Society, died a heroic death, and was eventually canonized (he is better known in the English-speaking world as St. Aloysius Gonzaga). No other Italian ruling family had such a close connection to the Jesuits. A Jesuit college opened in Mantua in 1584 that offered a curriculum in the humanities typical of other early Jesuit colleges. Ferdinando came to know the Jesuits both in Mantua and in Rome and was influenced by their teaching and spirituality. He had initially begun a career in the Church, becoming a cardinal in 1607. His earliest studies were under the “cautious baroque polymath,” Giovanni Antonio Magini (1555–1617) who introduced him to mathematics, astrology, and alchemy (p. 60). Subsequently he studied at both the University of Ingolstadt and the University of Pisa. Grendler describes Ferdinando as “the most intellectually gifted Italian ruler since Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–94)” (p. 59). Only with the death of his older brother, Duke Francesco III, did he resign his ecclesiastical posts and assume the role of duke of Mantua in 1612. Apart from the customary political interest of the Gonzaga, Ferdinando sought to build his own university largely out of his own love of learning.

This Mantuan enterprise illustrates the professional interests and ambitions of Italian university professors of the early-seventeenth century. Giacomo Antonio Marta (c. 1557/8–1629), a law professor of enormous ego who had been virtually raised by the Jesuits in his native Naples, held a post at the University of Pavia prior to his arrival in Mantua, and functioned as a spy for King James I, became the new university’s star. The duke and his advisers saw him as a means to make a statement about their new institution. After careful negotiations that concerned reputation as much as salary, Marta became the new university’s leading figure. He was soon joined by professors in medicine and the sciences who explored the boundaries of accepted method in seventeenth-century Italy. The university was home to the first professorship of chemistry in any Italian university. The thought of Paracelsus was included alongside the orthodoxy of Galen. The university’s hybrid constitution led to an unusual set of tensions between the Jesuits and the faculty of law and medicine.

This experiment did not last long. The university opened in November 1625 and grew to an enrollment of nearly 300. It exhibited some of the intellectual developments of seventeenth-century Europe but, before it could make much of a contribution, the university closed as a result of the War of the Mantuan Succession (1627–31). As alien as such an institution might seem today, at least some of the issues concerning the politics, financing, and professorial egos of that long-ago university may seem painfully—or perhaps comically—familiar to those with experience of a modern university. Grendler has provided a microcosm of life in a university that was simultaneously unique and representative of broader cultural issues. [End Page 357]

Paul V. Murphy
John Carroll University
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