The University of Mantua, the Gonzaga, and the Jesuits, 1584–1630 by Paul F. Grendler (review)

With the publication of The University of Mantua, Paul F. Grendler has produced another fine study of Renaissance education. Once again, he breaks new ground. This first-ever analysis of the University of Mantua offers fresh insight into the intellectual history of Renaissance Italy and the contrasting pedagogies of the lay and Jesuit professorate that staffed Mantua’s transitory but exceptional institution.

The Peaceful University of Mantua – the institution’s formal title – was inaugurated in 1625 by Ferdinando Gonzaga, whose household had exceptionally strong public and spiritual ties to the Society of Jesus. In 1584 the Jesuits, sustained by the patronage of the Gonzaga family, opened a school in Mantua out of which the university subsequently emerged. The beatification in 1605 of Luigi Gonzaga, a young Jesuit and member of a cadet branch of the family, sealed the bond between the Gonzagas and the Society. The elevation of the Jesuit college of Mantua into a university was the work of Duke Ferdinando. ‘If ever there was an Italian prince at ease in the university world,’ Grendler writes, ‘it was Ferdinando Gonzaga, the most intellectually gifted Italian ruler since Lorenzo de’ Medici.’ A prince-savant without equal, the duke was equally at home in music, poetry, philosophy, theology, and the law. Educated by private tutors and Jesuits in Mantua and at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria and the University of Pisa, Ferdinando once debated a mathematical-astronomical problem with Galileo Galilei. So fond was the prince of his Jesuit subjects, he built a wooden passageway connecting his palace and their residence in the city of Mantua so that they could recreate together.

Ferdinando, fulfilling a long-standing desire of the Gonzagas, transformed his Jesuit alma mater into the University of Mantua as a joint Jesuit-civic institution in which two academic cultures coexisted. Jesuits were given charge of professorships in the arts, theology, and philosophy, and star professors recruited from other Italian universities were assigned law, natural history, medicine, botany, alchemy, and pharmacology. The celebrity scholars of Mantua – whose careers Grendler has extensively researched – included Giacomo Antonio Mara, the top civil law scholar of the day, and Fabrizio Bartoletti from Bologna. The university was an instant success. Its creation of a professorship in chemistry antedated by a century other Italian universities and most universities in Europe, making Mantua a centre for modern chemical medicine. In addition, Mantua boasted the best natural history museum of the day and its botanical garden sustained the most advanced medical research.

In an especially informative chapter, Grendler explores how the Jesuit mode of instruction differed from that of their lay counterparts. With the exception of casuistry, the priests taught the same arts subjects and as professors in civic institutions, they had a similar approach to the Greek and Latin classics, and their instruction in mathematics and astronomy was comparable to that of their non-Jesuit peers. The order, however, exercised greater reliance on compendiums and textbooks than did civic professors. Reflecting the Society’s growing stress on uniformity in teaching, this practice led critics to accuse Jesuits of relying on second-hand knowledge. The latter taught a greater variety of subjects during their academic careers than did their lay colleagues, and the two professorates differed in their methods of teaching and their view of academic culture. Following the schema laid out in the order’s Ratio studiorum, the Jesuits favoured an integrated and comprehensive curriculum and pedagogy that contrasted with the laissez-faire approach of independent lay professors.

For all its novelty, Duke Ferdinando’s experiment in half-civil, half-Jesuit education was short-lived. Undermined by the War of the Mantuan Succession and by Spain’s sack of the duchy in 1627–31, the Peaceful University quickly devolved into a phantom of its former self. The university did not endure, but Grendler’s superb monograph will have lasting value. Gracefully written and thoroughly researched...