Church, Religion and Society in Early Modern Italy (review)

As the author of this book implies in his preface, it can well be read as complementing his previous Early Modern Italy. A Social History (2000) as well as expanding on his Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (first published in 1989). The preface indeed suggests that this volume represents the culmination of his thinking about the subject during his professional career. It is written in a fluent and personal style, with some remarks couched in the first person, though on occasion the text could have benefited from more perfect revision. The treatment is balanced and concise; and students in particular will probably value some special features, not just the maps, and tables (for some Inquisition cases), or the attempt to list the Italian bishoprics and their key activities in the period covered, but also the suggestion of CDs reproducing some of the relevant church music for example. In fact, the strength of the book is arguably its demonstration of the continued importance in the Italian peninsula of post-Tridentine episcopal reform right into the later seventeenth century, contrary to the views which have often been derived from the work of Paolo Prodi. The role of the papacy within the peninsula is by contrast more summarily treated since, as the author generously insists, the present reviewer's volume, The Early Modern Papacy (2000), should be read alongside. That does mean that in this publication Prodi's theories are not subject to more than neutral report, at the explicit level, while the dramatic opinions of Adriano Prosperi (Tribunali della coscienza, 1996), with their implications about Italian Church and society to the present day, are again not more than implicitly treated to criticism, any more than in the author's Early Modern Italy. There is, however, some reflection of contributions to debate by others, including Simon Ditchfield and Gigliola Fragnito, though not of the recent approach to Italian Mikropolitik pioneered by Wolfgang Reinhard and his disciples. But there is very sound coverage of religious orders, parish priests and parishioners, religious education, confraternities, hospitals and charity, female convents, popular devotion, and the visual arts, before a brief conclusion about "successes and failures." In the body of the text archival sources supply, either directly or via other scholars' publications, examples, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of particular cases relating to such issues as betrothal and marriage, while in the matter of confession the findings of Wietse de Boer which substantially challenge aspects of theories advanced by John Bossy (in The Conquest of the Soul, 2001) are noted. On other subjects evidence is drawn not just from the Papal States in central Italy or from the special circumstances in the Venetian Republic and Friuli, but also from other areas, including Piedmont and, where appropriate, the kingdom of Naples. The relatively brief existence, in parts of sixteenth-century Italy, of varieties of 'Protestant' dissent is not forgotten. Despite political and other divisions in the peninsula, the case seems here to be accepted that by the late seventeenth century there was something which may legitimately be discussed as "the Italian Church," defined not least (as was acknowledged in Early Modern Italy) by an Alpine cordon sanitaire.