I religiosi a corte: teologia, politica e diplomazia in antico regime (review)

I religiosi a corte: teologia, politica e diplomazia in antico regime. Edited by Flavio Rurale. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1998. Notes. Index. 353 pp. Paper.

The result of a 1995 conference in Fiesole, I religiosi a corte presents new investigations and large summaries of the religious clergy's involvement in court politics, broadly construed, between 1500 and 1750. It contains four articles in Spanish and five in Italian, including a sizeable introduction. Its authors describe the fortunes of individual religious clerics or whole religious orders in state-building milieus; or they report the ways in which the state-builders themselves valued monastic personnel.

Carlos José Hernando Sánchez surveys the interactions between the sixteenth-
century Spanish viceroy of Naples, Pedro de Toledo, and that city's various religious orders, and he concludes that the viceroy's attention to friars and monks was part of a larger political project. José Martínez Millán outlines the ambiguous fortunes of the Society of Jesus in Spain between 1578 and 1594, and he finds that the Society was at once "hispanized" and bound decisively to Rome. Carlos Javier de Carlos Morales contemplates the court politics of Diego de Cháves, a Dominican friar who managed the conscience of Philip II. Bernardo J. García García studies the opinions and occasional polemic of the confessor of Philip III, Luís Aliaga, who emerges as a highly complex ecclesiastic.

On the Italian side, Gianvittorio Signorotto charts the "semiotics of virtue" that the Capuchins, in particular, represented to the Milanese, which is why the latter occasionally used the former as ambassadors to the Spanish court. Marcello Fantoni addresses the intense interest that Medici Grand-Duke Cosimo III demonstrated toward the religious orders of Florence: that particular ruler fit monastic sojourns into his travel plans, moved his furniture into monastic cells, and encouraged his entourage to perform penitential exercises, to the point that an "osmosis" occurred between court and monastery. Giovanni Pizzorusso scans the entanglements among territorial governments, royal policies, and French missionaries in the Antilles in the seventeenth century and recovers an intersection of religious and ethnic frontiers, where spiritual motives were both important and practical. Finally, Matteo Sanfilippo scrutinizes the intricacies of the Jesuits' actions in French North America between 1604 and 1763, and recounts their attempts to handle local authorities, circumvent the centralizing impulses of the papacy, and bridge divisions within their own religious order.

As a body, the authors highlight paradoxes as they delineate connections among ecclesiastical and secular figures between 1550 and 1750. Indeed, the editor of the volume, Flavio Rurale, encourages ambiguity by explicitly rejecting neat expectations--such as distinguishing between church and state, or identifying particular religious orders with papal interests--that too often govern approaches to the subject. Instead, he urges researchers to unearth the compromises between ecclesiastical and secular spheres, and insists upon the importance of religious motivations. The contributors obviously have agreed with his excellent mandates and have attempted to act upon them.

Yet nearly all these pieces contain significant weaknesses: they offer either too much specificity and historical narrative, and dissolve into lists (Hernando Sánchez, Martínez Millán, Pizzorusso, and Sanfilippo); or they infer overly-large ends from a relatively small incident (Signorotto), or they ultimately fail to make their evidence meaningful (García García). Specialists will find the overviews tedious, while non-specialists will be overwhelmed by details. The volume also does not function as a sophisticated introduction for readers with multiple languages: despite a wealth of learned references, the contributors generally neglect to address historiography, and occasionally employ outmoded paradigms, such as Carlos Morales's diagram of intransigenti and spirituali in the court of Philip II. Only Fantoni's work on Cosimo III is fully successful in terms of a lucid argument, arresting evidence, and documented conclusions; significantly, it is also the shortest article in the volume. In sum, these...