La geografia celeste dei duchi di Savoia. Religione, devozioni e sacralità in uno Stato di età moderna (secoli XVI-XVII) (review)

This absorbing study examines the religious policies of the two dukes, Emanuel Filibert and Charles Emanuel I, who ruled the Savoyard state (straddling the Alpine borderland between France and Italy), between 1559 and 1630. It does not deal with their struggle against Protestantism—a subject that has long attracted intensive scholarly research—but pursues a novel kind of inquiry: how they harnessed the Catholic Reformation to underpin their policies of absolutist state-formation and dynastic self-promotion. The author does not fall into the trap of portraying their faith reductively, as simply an instrumentum regni manipulated for secular purposes. He is not interested in their private devotional life (a field well plowed by earlier scholarship), but in the public practice of their faith. As they refashioned their domains into an avowedly confessional state, their religious and political agendas converged and reinforced one another.

In 1562 Duke Emanuel Filibert transferred the capital across the Alps to Turin from Chambéry, in the old heartland of Savoy. But this move did not simply involve shifting the court and the government to a new site. Turin had a long tradition of urban autonomy, embodied in the cults surrounding its patron saints—its "civic religion." This the dukes systematically undermined, in order to control their new capital. They appropriated some civic saints, notably St. Maurice, who metamorphosed into a dynastic patron; they intruded into civic rituals; they introduced new cults centering on the dynasty. The most important was that of the Holy Shroud, owned by the dynasty since the mid-fifteenth century. It was conveyed to Turin from Chambéry in 1578 in a solemn translatio that made the city a consecrated space, at once the political and the spiritual heart of the monarchy. Similarly, the dukes promoted veneration of the Virgin, as a devotion that transcended civic cults—and civic autonomy—and co-opted a pre-existing form of popular devotion, the Sacri Monti (hilltop shrines modeled on the original one at Varallo, designed by its Franciscan founder in the 1490's as a symbolic representation of Jerusalem). They founded Sacri Monti of their own, re-imagined as centers of Marian devotion, at Vico, Oropa, or the Monte dei Cappuccini just outside Turin. The first of these was also designed as a sumptuous dynastic mausoleum, neatly identifying devotion to the Virgin with devotion to the ruling family.

The ideological foundations for this program were provided by the court clergy, based in the expanded ducal chapel, and by members of those new religious Orders that attracted the dukes' favor, notably the Jesuits, Capuchins, Barnabites, and Theatines. They extolled the dukes as the bulwark guarding Italy against the infection of heresy from Geneva and France, perilously close at hand. They designed the ceremonies that dramatized the new devotional forms the dukes were promulgating, and elaborated the strategies for subordinating local cults and promoting those that exalted the dynasty. They aided the dukes in amassing a vast collection of relics that advertised their piety. Some of them functioned as diplomats promoting their masters' interests at foreign courts, especially the Papal curia, the focus of perpetual competition for primacy among the princes of Italy, conducted in the coded language of their shared Catholic values. Here the Savoyard clerical envoys strove to enhance the dukes' prestige by exalting their spiritual merits as rulers of an exemplary state imbued with all the vigor of Tridentine orthodoxy. Externally as well as internally, therefore, resurgent Catholicism underwrote the growing political and dynastic power of the dukes of Savoy.