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  • Reforming Priests and Parishes: Tuscan Dioceses in the First Century of Seminary Education
  • Marco Cavarzere
Kathleen M. Comerford . Reforming Priests and Parishes: Tuscan Dioceses in the First Century of Seminary Education. Education in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 27. Leiden: Brill, 2006. xxx + 162 pp. index. illus. tbls. map. bibl. $98. ISBN: 90-04-15357-8.

The broad historiography dealing with early modern Tuscan history is now enriched by a new book about clerical education in Tuscany after the Council of Trent. Reforming Priests and Parishes is a historical survey of the Tuscan seminaries between the conclusion of the Council of Trent in 1563 and the end of the seventeenth century. The book analyzes the application of the Tridentine decrees on seminaries in various dioceses of Tuscany and the main differences "between major and minor urban centers" that emerge in this process (xviii).

The first two chapters give a general introduction to the historical setting of Tuscany in the period. Chapter 1 explains the institutional structure of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the independent Republic of Lucca, underlining the particular situation of the different cities, while chapter 2 discusses the concrete [End Page 899] condition of clergy in early modern Tuscany. The following four chapters are dedicated to the single dioceses on which the book is focused: Arezzo, Siena, Volterra, and Lucca. Each of these chapters begins with a brief summary of the religious history of the town and especially of its bishops, then passes to the description of the situation of the local seminary. The sources used in this research are rich and various: pastoral visitations, as well as ordination records and local historical surveys, are analyzed in order to fill out a documentation which is often lacunose. Precise quantitative data about the Tuscan seminaries are derived from these sources. For each of the dioceses in question we can therefore know the number of seminary students during the period, the percentage of seminary-educated priests in comparison with the total number of secular priests in the diocese, the geographical origins of seminary-educated priests and of secular priests, and the average duration of stay in seminaries. Tables with statistics always provide useful points of comparison to the narrative. A briefer account of three other Tuscan dioceses, Florence, Montepulciano, and Pienza, is presented in chapter 7: these cases supply a wider context for the study and largely confirm the historical trends portrayed in the preceding four chapters. The conclusions are especially important in a study like this one, mainly based on a comparative perspective. The author stresses some similarities in the Tuscan situation: first of all, the percentage of seminary-educated priests was low everywhere in comparison with the total number of secular clergy and, moreover, seminary-educated priests apparently did not reach high ranking positions in the ecclesiastical hierarchy of their dioceses. Besides, the activity of seminaries always depended on financial resources, and they mainly recruited students from urban areas. On the other hand, the curricula which were offered to the students in seminaries differed profoundly from city to city. In the author's view the failure of seminary education in the first century after the Council of Trent also meant the failure of the attempt to reform priests and pastors in Tuscany.

The research presented in this book completes and sometimes corrects the results of author's previous book, Ordaining the Catholic Reformation, which focused on the seminary of Fiesole. It offers an interesting analysis of the primary sources on the Tuscan seminaries and gives the reader a clear idea of the difficulties encountered by the Catholic Church in its work of reform. However, the too-neat conclusion of the book, based on the rigid equation between the institution of seminaries and reform of clergy, seems to oversimplify the more complex strategy of reform devised by the Catholic Church in the century after the Council of Trent. Moreover, the lack of data deriving from the Tuscan archives, of which the author often complains, can in some cases be made up with the records of the visita ad limina preserved in the Vatican Secret Archive, as Carlo Fantappiè has already signaled in his essays on Tuscan...

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