9

Italy

Nicholas Terpstra

Bonifacio dalle Balle, youngest and most shiftless of the three sons of a merchant family, walked the night streets of Bologna’s red light district and had a religious experience. Falling in step behind a prostitute who was walking with a companion, he overheard her sigh, “Who will deliver me from this life?” Jolted by her distress, and conscious of his own misspent youth, dalle Balle embarked on a path that would see him devote his fortune, his properties, and his life to developing a shelter for prostitutes’ daughters. Was it this prostitute’s distress that moved him? He wrote elsewhere of coming across a twelve-year-old girl, in the same seedy quarter, who was holding off a mob of taunting boys with a stick. Thinking perhaps of the dangers facing his own illegitimate daughter, Anna (conceived with a servant), he found the girl’s mother and persuaded her to let him place her with a woman who would raise her at dalle Balle’s expense. Dalle Balle would later write a third account of finding another girl abandoned on the city street and of also placing her with another female guardian. Dalle Balle’s rescue work developed, by the early 1580s, into the Casa di Santa Croce—a home for abandoned and vulnerable girls. But it was also his own life that dalle Balle was rescuing, and he wrote the three differing accounts of his moment of conversion in order to get the narrative right. He adopted a personal lay vocation, never marrying or joining a religious order, signing his share of the family business over to his brothers, studying theology intently, and devoting his energies to his charitable shelter for young illegitimate girls like his own daughter (who was, however, sent off to a convent). He preached to the girls in Santa Croce, wrote sermons and tracts that paid scant regard for the intermediary role of saints and clerics, and wrote the multiple—and sometimes contradictory—autobiographical fragments that cast his life and work as a morality tale. Intensely Christo-centric—in all three narratives his conversion occurs at age thirty-three—his orphanage was the only one in Bologna not dedicated to the Virgin Mary or a saint, but to Christ’s cross. Dalle Balle determined to “work in the world for the greater glory of God and to establish a current of love between the creation and the Creator.”

Was dalle Balle a Protestant? a Catholic Reformer? Counter-Reformer? a spirituale or “aspiring saint”? These questions are likely unanswerable and certainly moot. It is not even clear whether he wrote or merely transcribed the sermons and spiritual writings that fill his personal papers and that he shared with the girls in his care. Yet he is a type who recurs across late sixteenth-century Italy, practicing a biblically simple faith, adapting the model of Christ to lay life, and directing charity to the spiritually and morally vulnerable. He is also a type encountered more frequently in current research on the Reformation in Italy, which has been deeply influenced by the methods of microhistory, and even more by its orientation to the individual, the marginal and dispossessed, and above all, the local.

In their chapters in the 1992 Reformation research guide, Elisabeth G. Gleason and Frederick J. McGinness explored the archaeology and diffusion of new religious ideas through communities such as the Oratories of Divine Love, individuals such as Juan de Valdes and Reginald Pole, and books such as the Beneficio di Cristo, along with the institutional Catholic response to them in the Index, the Inquisition, and the Council of Trent. These areas of research tested one of the fundamental questions bandied back and forth by those tracking the shifting religious climate of sixteenth-century Italy: when did the chill set in? Following Delio Cantimori, the early leader among Italian historians of religious dissent, many historians pointed to the 1540s—and specifically, 1542—as the turning point when orthodox hard-liners began getting the upper hand over Erasmian-spirituali moderates. According to Cantimori, the ideas of these latter had been ascendant since circa 1513, but experienced a crisis-inducing reaction from the 1540s to the 1560s, before inspiring a second generation from the 1560s to the 1580s, and finally mutating into some very personal compounds by thinkers like Giordano Bruno and Tommasso Campanella from the 1580s to 1620s. This periodization, and the question and dating of a turning point, focused attention on intellectual and institutional history and, to a lesser extent, on the fates of high-profile male and clerical reformers. It assumed a move from openness to repression.

The debate continues, though with relaxed temporal boundaries and without the urgency brought to it by those shaped by the sharp, ideological struggles of the mid-twentieth century—ranging from the fascist/communist debates of the 1930s to the upheavals following Vatican II. Anne J. Schutte’s article on “The Post-Cantimori Paradigm Shift” helped reorient the field by suggesting that historians should consider a different set of markers, which she has elsewhere described as “the shape of sanctity, the contours of holiness.”¹ These markers point to the lived religious experience of laypeople, women, children, and marginal groups. They highlight the drawn-out processes of Christianization and confessionalization by which political and ecclesiastical authorities attempted, with mixed results and against significant resistance, to direct that sometimes free-flowing experience into orthodox channels. For some historians, these processes implied the allied concepts of social discipline and centralization, worked out through the Council of Trent and a reinvigorated papacy and episcopacy.² Others have questioned whether such concepts lead inevitably to simplified dichotomies of center vs. periphery, clergy vs. laity, and high vs. low culture, and so obscure the shifting identities of the parties, the inefficiencies of the process, and the reciprocations of influence. They would ask, apropos of the question noted above, whether it is valid to say that a chill set in at all.³

An allied fundamental question posed by historians of sixteenth-century Italian religious history has been: what shall we call it—Catholic Reform? Counter-Reform? Tridentine Catholicism? Reminiscent of an earlier generation’s preoccupations and relevant across Europe, the question takes on broader social, political, and cultural relevance in Italy, because from the later sixteenth century we are dealing with a more deliberately Roman Catholic Church. John O’Malley’s concise and authoritative discussion in Trent and All That, argues for the phrase “early modern Catholicism” in part on the basis that it more easily accommodates the new focus on the social history of religion and the understanding that the Catholic Church was not simply a monolithic agency handing down norms at absolutism’s dawn.⁴ It was itself caught up, taken by surprise, altered, and internally divided by the social, economic, and political changes that characterized the early modern period.

The narrative of sixteenth-century Italian religious history is different now. In place of epic Manichean struggles between darkness and light, we now have the twisting Foucauldian dynamics of power and negotiation. In place of a Reformation focused on dramatic flights by high-profile Reformers eluding the Inquisition, we now have the slow twisting of the screws of social discipline in areas like convent enclosure, marriage law, and charity that “supports and redeems”—and the determined resistance of those fighting for “the preservation of the particular.”⁵ In place of binary oppositions between high and low culture, or center and periphery, we have intensely negotiated reciprocations. And we have the likes of Bonifacio dalle Balle, launching his personal rescue mission and discovering firsthand how tricky the dynamics of power and negotiation could be.

In the balance of this article, the aim will be more to supplement than revisit the authoritative treatments by Gleason and McGinness. Recent surveys of early modern Catholicism⁶ and of early modern Italy⁷ update and contextualize their studies. O’Malley’s Trent and All That offers an indispensable orientation to the historiographical big picture, while Salvatore Caponnetto’s The Protestant Reformation in Sixteenth Century Italy and Christopher Black’s Church, Religion, and Society in Early Modern Italy offer excellent starting points for a detailed investigation of the social and cultural history of early modern Italian Protestantism and Catholicism.⁸ The focus here will be on three interlinked areas that received less attention in the earlier research guides, but have expanded rapidly in the past fifteen years: local and lay religion, current institutional history (with an emphasis, in particular, on women’s religious communities), and Jewish-Catholic relations.

Local and Lay Religion

A critical issue in current research involves measuring local religion in the early modern period, and determining what its continuing vitality may say about the Council of Trent’s supposed centralizing effects on local traditions, institutions, and relations. In its medieval roots, local religion assumes that while the dogmas, catechisms, and hierarchy of Catholicism provide the grammar of religion, the lived faith of believers is always expressed in a vernacular of confraternities, shrines, processions, hospitals, and cults. These are the elements out of which towns and cities write the pious narrative of God’s tough love (expressed through prosperity or punishment as local devotion and deviance require), of the Virgin Mary’s enduring favor, and of their own efforts to negotiate between the two. Each of these elements emerges out of thanks or propitiation, and becomes a marker in a local sacred history that forms in conversation with local political, economic, and social changes. These civic religions are deeply rooted in the mendicant piety and factional politics of the communal period, are often strongly lay, and can generate affective, emotive, and superstitious elements that the more educated find troubling. A good deal of sixteenth-century Catholic Reform is aimed not simply at rooting out nascent (philo-)Protestant heresies, but at correcting or even extirpating these overly enthusiastic, but unorthodox, Catholic practices. The tools studied in recent works for Italy, as indeed for elsewhere in Europe, are confessionalization and social discipline.⁹ They have become such dominant motifs in recent studies of late sixteenth-century Catholicism and Protestantism that it takes an effort of will—and determined research—to recover the local dimension of religious life.¹⁰

The models for studying urban religion as a communal expression that engaged laity and clergy, and that was shaped by local sociopolitical realities, were set in the pioneering studies of Florence by Richard Trexler and Ronald Weissman,¹¹ and of Venice by Brian Pullan and Edward Muir.¹² Their ambitious morphologies of Renaissance urban religious life centered significantly on confraternities, the lay brotherhoods that organized much of local devotional worship, and charitable service. Nicholas Eckstein followed with the best study yet of Florentine confraternities in their neighborhood context, showing how artisans used them to organize areas of local social life ranging beyond religion as traditionally conceived, and how Medici political priorities narrowed this scope through the later fifteenth century.¹³ A similar process was at work in contemporary Bolognese confraternities, whose success in framing a lay civic-religious ideology, in distinction from papal overlords, led to their gradual infiltration by highborn elements, who marginalized the original artisanal male and female membership while expanding cultic and charitable activities.¹⁴ Recent essay collections confirm that political and social priorities shaped confraternally directed local religious life through the ancien régime.¹⁵ Highborn members fundamentally altered confraternal community activities without changing institutional forms, but they also brought the ambitions and resources that kept the brotherhoods at the center of the artistic, architectural, and musical patronage of the baroque.¹⁶

The active participation of laity in framing a spiritual life, which worked with and beyond conventional elements provided by the hierarchy, is explored for rural areas by David Gentilcore’s study of the “system of the sacred” in the southern region of Otranto, and Angelo Torre’s work on “devotional consumption” in Piedmont.¹⁷ Both reject an easy division between subordinate and hegemonic groups in favor of investigating how lay believers manipulated for subsistence, health, and fertility in liturgical and sacramental dialogue with clergy, who either were willing participants or, if not, aimed more often to persuade or co-opt than to challenge or discipline.¹⁸ Similarly, studies of Milan and Lombardy demonstrate that urban reformers necessarily adapted their goals and strategies to a countryside that moved to different rhythms and expectations, and that frequently frustrated the efforts of those who aimed for confessionalizing reform.¹⁹

These studies cast their largely sociological and anthropological analysis over a longue—or at least medium—durée. The purely civic studies have tended to focus on a particular century, and on the intersection of Renaissance or early modern religious and cultural values with particular political processes and evolving charitable networks.²⁰ The rural studies have demonstrated that the implications of “Christianization” as a reciprocal rather than top-down process can only be understood when plotted through the length of the ancien régime. Both have shown that the boundary between orthodoxy and unorthodoxy was porous at best.

Was unorthodox belief necessarily heretical? Carlo Ginzburg’s famous studies of the benandanti and the miller Menocchio attempted to demonstrate the reciprocation of intellectual influences between high and low, and how an extended process of Inquisitorial prosecution could shift locals’ understandings of where the boundary lay between orthodoxy and heresy, and where they, as believers, stood in relation to them. In both cases, his results have been challenged on the basis of closer examination of the now-published trial records.²¹ “Heresy” in Venice mutated in response to local repression. A broad civic consensus for social and ecclesiastical reform built around evangelism engaged men and women of different classes and particularly artisans. But this consensus progressively narrowed with an Inquisitorial winnowing that began with spirituali, millenarians, antitrinitarians, and Anabaptists, before moving to those who aspired in ways deemed unorthodox by the Tridentine hierarchy, to reach the higher levels of Catholic sanctity.²² In Florence, Savonarola’s shadow stretched to the mid-sixteenth century and animated the visionaries of a holy and charitable republic as their delicate dance with the Medici moved from opposition to accommodation to (by the end of the ancien régime) orthodoxy.²³ More tellingly, it was the dovetailing of Savonarolan religious politics with Medici absolutist politics and local charitable and confraternal traditions that shaped Florence’s nascent system of social charity very differently from the neighboring city of Bologna, whose own antipapal politics and traditions dictated a more broad-based, lay-directed, and civic-oriented system.²⁴ The comparative approach allows closer examination of how local “systems of the sacred,” both urban and rural, played on the boundary between orthodoxy and unorthodoxy, and dictated the implementation and fate of peninsular or Europe-wide movements for devotional, educational, or charitable change.

Two agents found in many analyses of sixteenth-century Italian religious history are a centralizing papacy and a reformed episcopacy—sometimes working together, sometimes apart, but always key players in the process of social discipline. Simon Ditchfield suggests that they are caricatures generated by the desire to locate the Catholic Church in the process of bureaucratic and state modernization that led to the modern state.²⁵ He argues for more reciprocation between center and periphery, and for recognizing that the three-way dynamics between local clergy, reforming bishop, and papal curia were constantly shifting. Rome was more a divided court than an absolutist monarchy; the papacy was neither as effective nor as single-minded as the tropes would have it, and the Roman Congregation of Rites was “closer to a referee than a policeman” in its efforts to secure adherence to the new liturgical forms.²⁶

Ditchfield offers a valuable corrective to the centralizing, disciplinary, and top-down tropes, and recovers the dialogue between interested parties in the Roman center and the local periphery regarding cults, missals, and liturgy. He demonstrates that the curia’s willingness to tolerate local liturgical particularities of demonstrated antiquity stimulated scholarship by clergy aiming to preserve a form of the mass distinct from the new Roman model. He thus aims to recover engagement and dialogue among the parties who were constructing early modern Catholicism. Recent work on saints’ lives and sermons shows how this drive had started transforming the traditional forms of communication in the fifteenth century.²⁷ Likewise, Henry Stone asserts the existence of a “public square” in the disputes of scholars, local clergy, and Roman clergy surrounding St. Augustine’s bones, and the efforts of all to sway public opinion with their writing.²⁸ Yet real access to that square was limited, and if many Catholics of artisanal and merchant rank experienced a tightening of screws, it was because they fell outside the politically engaged classes. As lay and clerical elites found their community of interests around a more educated and disciplined Catholicism, they co-opted those institutional forms (such as confraternities and hospitals) that had traditionally expressed the local religion of middling and subordinate classes. The institutions retained a voice in the public square, but the speakers were of a decidedly superior qualità, and frequently had a more distinctly confessionalizing agenda. Further, disciplinary institutions like the Holy Office might have had more bark than bite, but despite their inefficiencies, internal divisions, and occasional mercies, they did not lack for teeth.²⁹

The Institutional Church

The Catholic Church was not a monolithic institution before the Council of Trent, and recent studies have emphasized that it was not one afterwards either. Although not quite “localized,” the study of the Catholic Church as an Italian institution has devolved into a study of its various constituent parts. New biographies have moderated the reputation of the fearsome Julius II and boosted that of the underrated Clement VII—though it remains surprising how few papal biographies there are for this entire period.³⁰ Thanks to superb recent biographies, we now have a fuller picture of key moderates like Gasparo Contarini and Reginald Pole, and of deeply engaged power brokers like Francesco Soderini.³¹ Few scholars have explored hard-liners like Gian Pietro Carafa, much less the negligent bishops or incompetent clerics who, to judge by their reforming peers’ complaints, clogged the hierarchy. On the other hand, more studies explore how higher clergy became critical to framing local cultural life through their own publishing and patronage in expanding educational institutions like seminaries and universities (where theology faculties expanded as canon law studies declined), and by the discipline of external or self-censorship.³² Financial and political realities forced the church to become ever more engaged in local Italian politics, and much recent institutional history explores these links. Paolo Prodi set the tone with an examination of the Papal State that cast it as the prototype of early modern absolutism, thoroughly engaged with the political priorities of local elites to the frequent frustration of local bishops who were pushing spiritual reform.³³ The papal administration expanded rapidly in scale and scope, and in the efficiency of its financial apparatus, even as methods of curial appointment and office holding remained traditionally patronal and venal and closely tied to Roman politics.³⁴

The area of church institutional history most changed over the past two decades by the emphasis on the local and the microhistorical is the study of religious orders and communities, particularly convents. Studies of sixteenth-century Catholicism traditionally emphasized new religious orders such as the Theatines, Barnabites, and Somaschans, but dealt largely with male groups and emphasized institutional history.³⁵ The current wave of research on convents focuses on individual houses or the houses of a particular city, and contextualizes them deliberately into domestic and civic politics. Moreover, while the studies of new male orders emphasized their expanding missionary outreach, studies of convents explore the diminishing scope afforded by the gradually lowering boom of enforced enclosure, and the nuns’ efforts to resist, avoid, or resign themselves to it.

A common theme is that nuns entered convents less out of their own devotion than out of their families’ marriage strategies. Dowry inflation secured this result in most cities in the fifteenth century, and it was this inflation rather than any increase in piety that spurred the growth in houses and professions through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries. Becoming a bride of Christ also required a dowry, albeit lower than that required on the marriage market, but the spiritual marriage was still shaped by kin politics. Families frequently favored particular houses and aimed to make their daughter’s profession a means of gaining and advertising familial honor. Before Trent, nuns maintained more active contact with their families: making visits, receiving kin, and even participating discreetly in local politics.³⁶ Houses exercised greater or lesser enclosure, and women adopted different types of vocation when professing by informal (as pinzochere), formal, or third order vows.³⁷

While the Council of Trent ordered more strict enclosure of convents, compliance was no more immediate or complete than with any other Tridentine decree. Yet Craig Monson documents the progression of steps by which the walls enclosing a convent like Santa Cristina della Fondazza in Bologna, famous for musical skill and innovation, became less porous in the late sixteenth century; music teachers could not come in to teach, nuns could not go out to perform, and audiences could listen only from behind a screen. The nuns protested in local ecclesiastical courts, arguing that these restrictions constituted an arbitrary and illegitimate alteration of the terms under which they had first professed. This slowed but did not reverse the process, which moved ahead as the older nuns died off. Having been a focal point of a lively local music scene, the convent became ever more conservative musically as the nuns’ access was gradually cut off.³⁸ Caroline Reardon paints a radically different picture in Siena, where a local bishop determined to maintain more open access in and out, and where the nuns remained active participants in the local musical culture.³⁹

The creativity shown in these studies finds roots, in part, in their authors’ determination to broaden the range of sources employed in order to convey more thoroughly the culture that women created together. Current convent studies deal extensively with the theater performed by nuns, with their artistic production, and with their literature as a means of recovering nuns’ own voices.⁴⁰ This last area embraces the chronicles through which they recorded their history, the letters nuns sent to relatives, and the devotional literature that plots the active engagement of some in the new models of sanctity developing after Trent—models shared by both nuns and women living outside the convent walls. Cultural patronage and performance became a significant bridge connecting women within and outside the convents in common pursuit of spiritual and patronal goals.⁴¹ Some authors have explored this internal production in conjunction with external sources produced by tribunals (such as the Inquisition), which tested the professed or aspiring sanctity of nuns and laywomen against the tighter behavioral standards that obtained after Trent—hence Judith Brown’s microhistorical study of one nun’s efforts to negotiate and perhaps exploit the intersections of spirituality and sexuality that figured large in medieval convents, and Anne Jacobson Schutte’s nuanced studies of laywomen’s (and men’s) aspirations to sanctity in the changed temper of baroque Italy.⁴²

In the past fifteen years, there has been surprisingly little new scholarship on the new male orders. The exception is Jesuit historiography, which has demonstrated exceptional quantity and breadth. John O’Malley inaugurated the recent wave with, appropriately, The First Jesuits, a study that effectively conveys the fluidity of Loyola’s early followers and of his own intentions. Beginning initially as an informal confraternity, they metamorphosed into an order and took on their educational and charitable missions more by happenstance and seized opportunity than by any deliberate plan. Yet once seized, the opportunities multiplied and the Jesuits expressed the emerging baroque ethos as effectively as the Franciscans and Dominicans had expressed the medieval communal ethos of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. More than any of their contemporaries, they used art and architecture to persuasively express a form of belief that engaged emotion in order to capture the will. A great deal of recent work explores this broadly cultural approach to missions.⁴³ Jesuit missions also aimed to “support and redeem” through schools and wide-ranging charities, and achieved a rapid diffusion of institutions by turning the confraternal form to their needs for administration and fund-raising, and to the broader cultural project of Christianization.⁴⁴

Jews

The themes of locality and enclosure intersected with the development in Italy of Jewish ghettos in Venice (1516), Rome (1555), Bologna (1556), Florence (1571), and elsewhere. The ghettos added physical form to longstanding legal restrictions, and underlined the extent to which Jewish communities were seen as potentially contagious elements in the Christian body politic. Some, such as the Venetian ghetto, aimed largely to contain, while others, as in Rome, intended to convert. An earlier tradition of Jewish historiography focused on Jewish exclusion from Christian society, fueled in part by the fact that many of the sources used were generated by Catholic inquisitorial and secular prosecutions. Recent work has probed the expanding legal, social, and cultural institutions of Jewish communities in the ghettos, and explored how some Christian social and cultural forms were adapted selectively by Jews⁴⁵—although research has also continued into more antagonistic relations, particularly with regard to forced conversion.⁴⁶

Robert Bonfil’s early survey developed the theme of cultural reciprocation across the peninsula, and more recent work explores local implications.⁴⁷ Kenneth Stow’s extensive and detailed investigations into the Roman community—working particularly with notarial documents—explores its emerging forms of internal arbitration and its interactions and negotiations with a Christian culture that was alternately fascinated and repelled by it.⁴⁸ Elliott Horowitz’s numerous studies into aspects of communal life across northern Italy have shown, for instance, how Catholic funeral rituals influenced burial rituals in Jewish communities, and how Jewish confraternities acted much like their Catholic counterparts to socialize and educate youths and to organize charity and devotions when communities lacked a synagogue.⁴⁹ This interest in agency, negotiation, and culture echoes investigations more generally into the broader meaning and effects of the early modern stage of the grand renfermement. Moreover, new work aims to expand the contexts for Christian-Jewish relations by examining the long history of engagement between Christian and Muslim individuals, groups, and states.⁵⁰ Cross-cultural traffic and opportune conversion were widespread, particularly by merchants. Contemporaries sometimes called merchant-converts a “boat with two rudders,” but it seems they were more like a ship with many sails.

Postscript

Catholics of 1650 found themselves shepherded by a more disciplined and cohesive church than their counterparts of 1500. If not uniform, it was more deliberate and consistent in its liturgies, its educational efforts, and its moral codes. Its churches were more grand, its confraternities more numerous and more effectively connected to local parishes, and its charitable institutions larger. There was greater discipline among clergy and laity alike, and fewer divergent voices and practices. What explains these changes?

Financial necessity forced Bonifacio dalle Balle to bring Franciscan tertiaries into his charitable rescue mission in Bologna by 1592. Together they built and staffed larger quarters, and fought off Franciscan conventuals who were eying the property. Dalle Balle’s confreres recruited highborn patrons (who could place girls in the home) and found piecework contracts in the silk industry to keep the girls busy and the bottom line healthy. When dalle Balle protested the erosion of Santa Croce’s spiritual purpose, the tertiaries wrote statutes that pushed him to the side and instituted an administrative model that had been framed locally decades earlier and widely adopted in Bologna’s charities. This model improved accountability, efficiency, and political oversight and was endorsed by the local archbishop and senate. It was this community of interests between highborn laity and clergy—expressed almost too perfectly by the tertiaries—that squeezed dalle Balle, as indeed it was squeezing confraternities, convents, Jews, and the traditional institutions of artisanal civil society in early modern Italy. Clergy may have disliked dalle Balle’s spiritual freelancing, but lay elites were more concerned with preserving the social institution it had brought into being. They believed, not without reason, that the home needed the discipline of patrons, statutes, and income if it was to survive at all. One person’s enthusiasms or qualms could not stand in the way of building a holy and a safe society.

Terms like “discipline,” “confessionalization,” and “Christianization” can quickly feed into negative evaluations that perpetuate, at a diplomatically indirect remove, the parochial fights of earlier generations of church historians. Yet they also express the continuities between the efforts of many Italians of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries to perfect humanity by promoting an educated spirituality (informed by classical and patristic learning), civil values (framed around self-control), and governance by those whose qualità and carità made them most fit to rule. For many, discipline began in the heart and at home, where they prayed, fasted, and flagellated devoutly. Equally, devotion demanded expression in the local public square, where sometimes unlikely coalitions formed in pursuit of a more Christian social order. And if there is a tendency to emphasize clerical elites’ disciplining laity, work on contemporary Spain, France, and Bavaria has emphasized that these roles could frequently be reversed as animated laity held their priests to higher standards. Local, microhistorical, and biographical studies can allow us better to understand how a community of interests formed around the needs, convictions, aspirations, and self-interest of professionals, prosperous merchants and artisans, patricians, and clergy, and on terms distinct from those that had animated late medieval and Renaissance civic religion. Such studies analytically unravel the peninsular and local economic and political realities that gave this community of interests a different face, focus, and priorities in cities, towns, and regions. They also reveal how stubborn individuals and groups and still-vibrant traditions and institutions shaped the reciprocations and negotiations that characterized the religio-political culture of the ancien régime. There was a broad consensus among early moderns that all of life is religion. Even if this begs the question of just what religion is, it reminds us to integrate spiritual and ecclesiological questions into our analysis of early modern social, political, and cultural history.

Research Aids

The electronic resources available when the previous research guide was published were modest, but their rapid expansion has made it significantly easier to plan and conduct library and archival research. Most of the major Italian archives have websites, bibliographical finding aids for secondary sources have multiplied, specialized listservs have made it easier to pursue questions, and a steadily expanding number of books and manuscripts are being digitized and made accessible through the worldwide web.

Since 1997 an Italian government ministry has mounted the Archivi portal, which, among other services, provides links to the websites of all the state archives and to many other local archives (http://archivi.beniculturali.it/). It hosts a similar site for Italian libraries (http://www.sbn.it). These are of varying utility. Some convey little more than information on access and services, while others include whole or partial inventories, searchable catalogues of holdings, digitized documents, and the libraries’ website links to searchable catalogues of Latin manuscripts and Italian sixteenth-century editions held in Italian libraries. In some instances, scholars can register online and order materials in advance. Among the most helpful of these is the website for the Florentine State Archive (http://www.archiviodistato.firenze.it), which provides links to a broader range of archives across Italy, than those found in the Archivi portal. This website also offers links to further international portals that in turn link to an expanded range of civic, ecclesiastical, and institutional archives. At the time of writing, there is no single portal that provides links to all the websites for archdioceses, religious orders, ecclesiastical institutions, and church historical study centers; indeed, not all of these have websites.

Research help can be gained through a number of specialized proprietary, online bibliographies, which are accessed by subscription, by membership in scholarly societies, or through some university libraries. Among the most helpful are ITER (http://www.itergateway.org) and a comprehensive bibliography of English and French works on early modern Italy (http://www.EarlyModernItaly.com). Both list a large number of journal articles and essay collections, and while they do not yet post texts, in many instances these are available electronically through J-STOR (http://www.jstor.org). Research help in Q & A format can be gained by posting queries on listservs hosted by societies dedicated to research in Italian or early modern religious history. Among the most helpful are H-Italy (http://www.h-net.org/~italy), the Society for Early Modern Catholic Studies (http://www.georgetown.edu/users/ael3/semcs), and FICINO at the Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at the University of Toronto (http://www.crrs.ca/publications/electronic/ficino/htm).

The digitization of manuscripts and texts is the area of greatest promise, providing ease of access far beyond existing microfilm and microfiche series. As previously noted, a number of Italian archives are expanding their offerings in this area. The Florentine State Archive is steadily digitizing and posting manuscript materials, while Bologna’s civic library of the Archiginnasio has posted an entire collection of printed broadsheets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (http://www.archiginnasio.it). Two more ambitious projects are the Medici Archive Project, which is creating the searchable online database Documentary Sources for the Arts and the Humanities in the Medici Granducal Archive: 1537–1743 (http://www.medici.org), and the Ad Fontes Digital Libraries of the Catholic and Protestant Reformations (http://www.ad-fontes.com), which is making available fully searchable collections of key texts published in sixteenth-and seventeenth- century Europe.

Bibliography

ELECTRONIC SOURCES

Ad Fontes Digital Libraries of the Catholic and Protestant Reformations: http://www.ad-fontes.com

Archivi portal, with links to state and local archives: http://archivi.beniculturali.it/

Biblioteca comunale dell’Archiginnasio: http://www.archiginnasio.it

Documentary Sources for the Arts and the Humanities in the Medici Granducal Archive (1537–1743): http://www.medici.org

Early Modern Italy, bibliography of English and French works: http://www.EarlyModernItaly.com

FICINO, Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at the University of Toronto: http://www.crrs.ca/publications/electronic/ficino/htm

Florentine State Archive: http://www.archiviodistato.firenze.it

H-Italy: http://www.h-net.org/~italy

ITER: http://www.itergateway.org

J-STOR: http://www.jstor.org

Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale, links to Italian libraries: http://www.sbn.it

Society for Early Modern Catholic Studies: http://www.georgetown.edu/users/ael3/semcs

PRINTED SOURCES

Baernstein, P. Renée. A Convent Tale: A Century of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Bailey, Gauvin Alexander. Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

——. Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565–1610. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

Bireley, Robert. The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1400–1750: A Re-Assessment of the Counter-Reformation. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1999.

Black, Christopher F. Church, Religion and Society in Early Modern Italy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

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