Spirituality, Gender, and the Self in Renaissance Italy: Angela Merici and the Company of St. Ursula (1474–1540) (review)

A native of Desenzano del Garda, Merici was born in 1474 into a minor noble family whose patriarch traded in wool. After their parents' death, she and her younger brother moved to the home of an uncle in Salò, where she became a Franciscan Tertiary. In 1535, two decades after relocating in Brescia, she established the Company of St. Ursula, a non-cloistered religious order for women. The institute gained papal recognition in 1544, four years after the death of the founder, who was beatified in 1768 and canonized in 1807. Until now, virtually all studies of St. Angela have been produced in house, that is, by Ursulines. The appearance of a study by a secular scholar whose purpose is not hagiographical, therefore, raises high expectations.

This book, a revised version of the author's doctoral dissertation (University of London, 2000), accomplishes one important task. Mazzonis puts to rest the universally held assumption that from the beginning, the Company of St. Ursula was a teaching institute. Although it eventually became one, Merici herself did not envision — indeed, she said not a word about — an educational mission. During her lifetime, members of the company lived on their own incomes or earned their keep in jobs unrelated to teaching. Many readers will recall John O'Malley's demonstration that running schools, a vocation the Jesuits eventually took up, played no part in Ignatius Loyola and his companions' early plans for the Society of Jesus. This parallel evidently did not occur to Mazzonis, nor does he speculate about the possibility that something besides simple backward projection may have contributed to the misunderstanding — or perhaps deliberate misrepresenta-tion — of Ursuline origins.

In other respects, the book is disappointing. Sometimes Mazzonis neglects to pursue what would seem to be obvious lines of analysis. He notes repeatedly, for instance, that Merici called members of the company brides of Christ, a time-honored term for cloistered religious. Gabriella Zarri has shown that the nuptial metaphor attained concrete embodiment in nuns' ceremonies of profession. Until a quarter of a century after Merici's death, Ursulines did not profess vows. During the founder's lifetime, was bride of Christ more than a conventional expression bereft of ritual consequences? Mazzonis does not address this question.

Another shortcoming of this study is the author's vague, general likening of Merici and the Company of St. Ursula to other currents in their past and present. Let me adduce two examples. Mazzonis suggests that previous groups of semi-religious women — the beguines, the bizzoche or pinzochere, and (until the 1560s) the tertiaries — lie somewhere in the background of Merici's institute, but he does not specify how or where. Did she unconsciously imitate or choose consciously to improve upon these styles of life? Did her contemporaries note the similarities and differences between them? I looked in vain for a precise, historically specific characterization of the relationship. Although Mazzonis twice cites Zarri's essay "The Third Status," he neither endorses nor tries to refute its main argument: that "only in the sixteenth century . . . did these alternative forms of female religious life acquire distinct configurations responding to the new circumstances" (in Time, Space, and Women's Lives in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi [2001], 182).

The same holds true for Mazzonis's treatment of his protagonist and spiritual trends of her time, which appear in the movement of the Observance in mendicant orders beginning in the fifteenth century, among some humanists, and in the new congregations and confraternities established in the sixteenth century. After stating correctly that these groups "can no longer be easily seen as a composite movement" (138), that is exactly what he proceeds to do. Figures as different as Erasmus and Battista da Crema are shoehorned...