Finzione e santità tra medioevo ed età moderna ed. by Gabriella Zarri
1996; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cat.1996.0093
ISSN1534-0708
Autores Tópico(s)Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
ResumoBOOK REVIEWS87 between the Inquisition and clerics administering the sacrament ofconfession, in this case essentially in Counter-Reformation Italy. Not for the first time in his writing, a personal and brave note is also struck, in a truly moving way, in his concluding observations on possible effects of the evolution of Italian religious practice on the present state of Italian society. After some other valuable contributions, for example on priesdy formation in the CounterReformation or the developments allowed to female communities in the same period, another fine piece is offered by Louis Châtellier, tracing the extension by die Jesuits of the ideal of religious discipline to a practice open to lay members of the confraternities directed by the Society ofJesus. In a third section interesting papers include those on writers such as Della Casa, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Castiglione, and on changing attitudes to and disciplining of the poor. In the penultimate section the legislation of me Medici grand-dukes of Tuscany after die Council of Trent is analyzed, for instance, and the powers of cardinal legates at Bologna are discussed, while there is also treatment offood supply and sumptuary laws as methods ofsocial control and policing. The final section includes an important review by Gian Paolo Brizzi of the development of colleges and their internal discipline both witíiin and without larger universities in the medieval and early modern period, while provision for female orphans in early modern Florence and the gradual reception of Tridentine marriage discipline at Bologna are also addressed . A consideration of the evolution of the University of Wittenberg in the early Reformation, set in a wider German context, represents one of die most interesting of Üiose papers throughout the volume which draw on German radier than Italian evidence. The education ofyoung men, whether noble or not, is also naturally the subject of other papers in this last section of this book. A greater editorial selectivity and intervention to produce more concise papers in some cases might have made the total contribution of die volume to study of an undoubtedly important theme even more impressive. A. D. Wright University ofLeeds Finzione e santità tra medioevo ed età moderna. Edited by Gabriella Zarri. (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier. 1991. Pp. 570. Lire 69,000 paperback) This volume contains twenty-two studies of a crucially important but neglected subject, the transformation on the official level of the definition of sanctity that happened in the early modern era. The book grew out ofa meeting of scholars convoked to discuss the problem and a subsequent meeting at which the results of their research were compared. This process established the coherence of the volume, whose Üiemes die editor presents concisely in her opening essay, while warning against reading die volume as if it were a "kaleidoscope" without firm structure (p. 9). 88BOOK REVIEWS The audiors chart the evolution of the definition by paying attention principally to its verso side, that is, by examining the change in definition of sanctity's opposite number as it moved from "false" to "simulated" sanctity. Among the contributors are some well known on this side of the Atlantic, almost guaranteeing beforehand the high quality ofthe product—Zarri herself, for instance, and André Vauchez, Adriano Prosperi, Gianvittorio Signorotto, Anne Jacobson Schutte, and Mario Rosa. While the book has as its central theme the change of die idea of sanctity or phony sanctity, it for the most part arrives at conclusions through die analysis of specific cases, often with explicit correlation to the great shifts in culture and religious sensibilities of those centuries. The shift in understanding of what constituted sanctity was emblematic ofthe larger shifts. This makes the book an important contribution to the social history of that long era. With one exception, all the articles diat deal with cases deal with women. Thus the volume makes a similarly important contribution to women's studies and to the history of male-female conflict. The juridical expression ofthe shift, nonetheless, provides a touchstone throughoutfor testing its course, especially in the important norms laid down by Urban VIII in the early seventeenth century and by Benedict XIV in the mid-eighteenth. The volume terminates at that date with Rosa's excellent...
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