Three of the four
chapters derive from studies previously published elsewhere and subsequently
reworked, while the essay devoted to Girolamo Vielmi develops a line of inquiry
that the author has cultivated for some time, as evidenced by her entry on Vielmi
in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (2020). The explicitly
composite nature of the volume is not in itself a limitation; it does, however,
make the presence of a strong interpretative framework all the more necessary
if chronologically and thematically heterogeneous case studies are to be
brought into meaningful dialogue. It is precisely on this level that some of
the book’s most significant historiographical questions emerge.
Barzazi herself acknowledges this point (p. 18): “Le pagine che seguono
non hanno l’ambizione di contribuire a una discussione che meriterebbe ben
altro spazio. Intendono piuttosto proporre alcuni spunti di riflessione a
margine di vicende e figure di una Chiesa regolare saldamente radicata al di
qua delle Alpi, in un orizzonte lontano dagli stimoli di società
multiconfessionali e di quotidiani contatti con differenti culture, ma
condizionato dall’intreccio tra centralismo pontificio, contiguità con la corte
romana, logiche politiche degli Stati. I quattro capitoli, che raccolgono
contributi di ricerca redatti in momenti diversi di un itinerario intorno agli
ordini religiosi iniziato molti anni fa e diramatosi in varie direzioni,
costituiscono degli affondi su una serie di passaggi politici e culturali cruciali
che marcarono l’ultima fase di capillare presenza della rete conventuale e
monastica negli spazi della penisola, tra la crisi religiosa del Cinquecento e
l’impatto, due secoli più tardi, con l’Illuminismo”. (“The pages that follow do not aspire to
contribute to a debate that would require far more space. Rather, they aim to
offer a number of reflections on events and figures belonging to a regular
Church firmly rooted on this side of the Alps, in a setting far removed from
the stimuli of multiconfessional societies and from everyday encounters with
different cultures, yet shaped by the interplay of papal centralization,
proximity to the Roman court, and the political logics of the states. The four
chapters, which collect research contributions written at different moments
within a scholarly itinerary on religious orders begun many years ago and
developed in various directions, focus on a series of crucial political and
cultural turning points that marked the final phase of the dense conventual and
monastic network throughout the Italian peninsula, from the religious crisis of
the sixteenth century to the encounter with the Enlightenment two centuries
later.”).
Yet some reservations
arise from the introduction’s definition of the Italian regular Church as a
reality “firmly rooted on this side of the Alps,” operating within a horizon
relatively distant from the stimuli of multiconfessional societies and from
daily encounters with different cultures. Although this is a declared
interpretative choice—one that tends to identify the governance of religious
orders with the orders themselves—it risks producing an image of the regular
world that is excessively compact and centripetal. Documentation produced by
the orders themselves, inquisitorial records, and recent scholarship on early
modern networks point instead to a far more mobile and permeable reality:
friars and monks engaged in constant movement, libraries nourished by
international circuits of book circulation, epistolary exchanges crossing
political and confessional boundaries, and a continuous exposure to the
cultural and religious tensions of the age. Rather than institutions defined
exclusively by their relationship with Rome and the states of the peninsula,
religious orders often appear as spaces of mediation, traversed by influences,
exchanges, and conflicts that significantly complicate their institutional
profile.
The introduction
attempts to address this tension. Barzazi offers a diachronic survey of the
development of scholarship on religious orders in Italy, paying particular
attention to historiographical debates from the 1980s through the early 2000s.
Yet, for all its density, the survey remains selective and somewhat
self-referential. Considerable attention is devoted to the author’s own work
and to that of scholars working within a similar historiographical tradition
(Giannini, Rosa, Fragnito), while references to more recent international
scholarship appear only in passing, often as bibliographical signposts rather
than as opportunities for sustained engagement with interpretative models
developed outside the Italian—or Italian-speaking—context. The impression is
that dialogue with global historiography is invoked more as an obligation than
as a genuine methodological exchange. Readers encounter names such as Wallnig,
Županov, Quantin, and Lehner, yet these references are consistently filtered
through a defensive posture aimed at reaffirming the importance of the Italian
context and the supposed “specificity” of the peninsula’s regular experiences.
The selection of case
studies contributes to the same effect. The protagonists chosen by Barzazi are,
in keeping with her long-standing research interests, figures and congregations
rooted in the Veneto-Roman world: the Servites during the Interdict, the
Camaldolese between Padua, Venice, and Murano, the Dominicans involved in
eighteenth-century censorship, and, of course, Vielmi, a Venetian friar who
later became bishop. All are relevant examples, well documented and firmly
grounded in specific historical contexts, yet limited in their broader
interpretative reach. None of the chapters succeeds in articulating a wider
argument about regular cultures as autonomous systems of power, nor do they
fundamentally challenge the very notion of the “regular republic” as an
operative historiographical category. If the implicit model is that of the
“Republic of Letters,” the author has identified a potentially fruitful
parallel without fully achieving its analytical implications. The result is an
approach that confirms more than it interrogates and ultimately remains
embedded within the very mentality it seeks to examine—an epistemology of continuity
and preservation rather than of rupture and transformation.
A close reading of the
volume reveals a number of interpretative weaknesses, significant omissions,
and problematic perspectival choices. Among the most notable is an outlook that
remains strongly Italian and self-contained. Despite frequent references to
international scholarship, the book remains anchored in an Italian-centred
perspective, with a distinctly Veneto-Roman focus and little meaningful use of
comparative or transnational evidence. Global history appears largely confined
to the level of theoretical framing. The case studies are local in scope and
often revisit topics previously addressed by the author. International
scholarship is cited but rarely integrated into the argument or critically
discussed. The result is a fundamentally monographic perspective presented
under the guise of a broader synthesis.
On p. 19 and the pages
that follow, Barzazi offers a debatable interpretation of the post-Tridentine
transformation of religious orders, arguing that their history in the second
half of the sixteenth century “did not pass through Trent,” but was instead reduced
to questions of papal authority and inquisitorial intervention, drawing on the
tenth chapter of Adriano Prosperi’s Il Concilio di Trento: una introduzione
storica (2001). Such a claim is problematic unless carefully
contextualized. To simplify—and above all to revive—a position that much recent
scholarship has substantially revised regarding the impact of the Council of
Trent on the regular clergy risks obscuring the complexity of the period and
the creative ways in which religious orders appropriated and reinterpreted
conciliar decrees. The Tridentine congregations, the expansion of missionary
activity, the reform of theological education, the numerous testimonies concerning
the participation of regular clergy in conciliar debates, and the liturgical
renewal promoted after Trent cannot simply be relegated to the background, as
studies such as Novi Chavarria’s Il clero prima e dopo il Concilio di Trento
(2014) have demonstrated. Similar conclusions emerge from Al Kalak’s
more recent Il concilio di Trento e i regolari. Gli ordini religiosi alla prova della
Controriforma
(2021). Barzazi ultimately reduces the Counter-Reformation—a term she
consistently employs, rather than the now more commonly preferred “Catholic Reform”—to
a struggle over curial power, overlooking the dynamic role played by internal
religious reforms. Ironically, this role had already been highlighted under
various aspects in the collective volume Il contributo degli Ordini
religiosi al Concilio di Trento (1946), edited by Cherubelli for the fourth
centenary of the council. A question therefore naturally arises: if the loss of
certain institutional autonomies (while others were preserved and even expanded
through the decree De regularibus et monialibus) challenged prerogatives
previously enjoyed by religious orders, how can the numerous and significant
contributions of the regular clergy to the broader history of global
Catholicism be integrated into the unified narrative proposed not only by this
volume, but by the author’s overall interpretative framework?
Among the most
convincing contributions in the volume is the chapter devoted to the Servites
between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, already published elsewhere in
the proceedings of the conference I Servi di S. Maria nell’epoca delle
riforme (1431–1623) (2011–2012), and now republished with some updates.
Drawing on rich archival documentation and a solid command of the order’s
historiography, Barzazi—also in light of her earlier Sarpi-centred
work—reconstructs the tensions that accompanied the progressive strengthening
of Roman authority within the Servite family, focusing on constitutional
reforms, the role of cardinal protectors, and the conflicts between different
conceptions of religious government. Paolo Sarpi emerges as a privileged
vantage point from which to read the transformations of the order between the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: not so much as an individual exception,
but as a symptom of the deep institutional fractures that traversed the regular
world. Particularly effective is the analysis of Cardinal Giulio Antonio
Santoro’s activity, whose reforming policy is described as based on
authoritative appointments of his own trusted men to provincial and central
offices (p. 97), according to a logic of increasing control that helped
redefine the internal balance of the order.
This essay probably
represents the point at which the category of the “regular republic” finds its
most persuasive application, showing how religious orders were also political
organisms endowed with elective procedures, forms of representation, and spaces
of autonomy constantly negotiated with ecclesiastical authorities. Yet this
very approach also constitutes the contribution’s main limitation. The focus is
almost exclusively on structures of government, constitutional dynamics, and
power relations between centre and periphery, while other dimensions of regular
life remain in the background: cultural practices, relations with local
societies, economic networks, and the forms of social mediation exercised by
convents. The result is a strongly institutional reading, capable of
illuminating with precision the processes of post-Tridentine centralization but
less interested in grasping the plurality of experiences that concretely shaped
the presence of religious orders within early modern Italian society. The
author appears fully in command when describing institutions and structures of
power, but less so when attempting to transform them into a broad
interpretative category capable of encompassing the complexity of the regular
world. The densely analytical perspective, built around biographies or
individual case studies, distances the reader from the initial premise of a
comprehensive and historiographically coherent reading of the role of “regular
republics” in the pre- and post-Tridentine context on the threshold of the
Enlightenment.
The third chapter,
devoted to “Benedictine cultural geographies” through the case of the
Camaldolese congregation, is probably the contribution most fully embedded in
the tradition of scholarship that has made Antonella Barzazi one of the leading
historians of Italian religious erudition in the early modern period. Starting
from a critical revision of the established historiographical narrative that
identifies the loss of San Michele di Murano’s centrality as a sign of the congregation’s
progressive cultural decline, the author proposes a more complex and nuanced
reconstruction of the processes that affected Camaldolese intellectual life
between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. From the opening pages, her
intention to move beyond overly linear interpretative schemes is clear: the
evidence provided by the Annales Camaldulenses and other documentation
“suggests, however, more varied scenarios and different chronological rhythms”
(p. 134), in which the weakening of certain traditional centres was accompanied
by the emergence of new cultural poles and by a redefinition of the congregation’s
internal balances. Through the analysis of libraries, studia, monastic
academies, and the careers of several protagonists, Barzazi shows how the
production of knowledge within the congregation was not concentrated in a
single centre but distributed across a network of institutions that included
Venice, Este, Classe, Florence, and other sites of Camaldolese presence.
Despite its geographical limits in relation to what is announced by the title,
the chapter is also notable for its ability to connect apparently local
developments with broader processes. Transformations in the organization of
studies, the growing role assumed by certain monasteries, and the progressive
redefinition of internal cultural hierarchies are interpreted as part of a more
general adaptation of the congregation to the needs of the post-Tridentine
Church and to changes in the European political and religious context.
Yet the very solidity
of the reconstruction makes more visible a question that concerns the volume as
a whole. While the essay is fully convincing as a contribution to cultural
history and to the history of monastic erudition, its relationship with the category
of “regular republics” that gives the book its title appears less immediate.
The analysis centres on libraries, studia, learned environments, and
networks of production and transmission of knowledge, whereas the structures of
government, representative mechanisms, and forms of self-management that should
define the politico-institutional specificity of regular republics receive less
attention—categories that had occupied a predominant place in the second
chapter on the Servites. The perspective adopted therefore privileges the
cultural over the constitutional dimension, producing a contribution of
considerable interest whose insertion into the volume’s general interpretative
framework is not always fully made explicit.
A further element
should also be noted. The cultural geographies reconstructed by Barzazi are
observed primarily from within the congregation, through its institutions, its
centres of study, and its leading figures. Relations with lay environments,
universities, civic academies, and the external cultural networks that also
contributed to shaping Camaldolese intellectual identity remain more in the
background. Also absent is any sustained engagement with the Coronese branch of
the Camaldolese family, which in the early sixteenth century had initiated one
of the first attempts at internal reform within the Church through Paolo
Giustiniani and Vincenzo Querini. Given the author’s numerous studies on the
impact of Camaldolese historiography between the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, it would have been interesting to see a more original element emerge
from a comparison between different traditions and different receptions of
learned knowledge, historical self-perception—and therefore historiographical
self-perception—within two realities at once close and distant. The result is
an extremely detailed account of the order’s internal dynamics, but one less
interested in exploring the interactions between monastic culture and the
broader social and cultural context of the peninsula.
As an autonomous
essay, detached from the economy of the volume, the chapter seems to find its
full coherence within the history of religious erudition and monastic cultural
institutions rather than within the category of the regular republic. The
actual capacity of that category to unify such diverse contributions remains
one of the unresolved questions left by the volume.
The concluding
chapter, devoted to the Dominican memory of ecclesiastical censorship in the
eighteenth century through the figure of Giuseppe Catalano, offers a careful
and well-documented reconstruction of the tensions that shaped the Congregation
of the Index and of the strategies of legitimization developed within the Order
of Preachers. Particularly noteworthy is the attention devoted to the ways in
which the Dominicans sought to present their role in Roman censorship not as a
merely repressive function, but as an activity grounded in learned expertise,
documentary verification, and the safeguarding of doctrinal correctness. The
result is a more nuanced picture than that offered by traditional
interpretations that tend to identify censorship exclusively with control and
prohibition.
Yet the very quality
of the contribution makes more apparent a question that runs throughout the
entire volume. While the essay possesses a clear thematic and methodological
coherence of its own, its integration into the category of “regular republics”
proposed in the title is less immediately evident. Unlike the other chapters,
which focus on structures of government, institutional networks, or relations
with political authorities, attention here is directed primarily toward
processes of historical memory-making and the learned practices associated with
ecclesiastical censorship. The connection with the interpretative paradigm
outlined in the introduction therefore remains more implicit than explicit and
reinforces the impression of a collection of studies united above all by the
author’s research interests rather than by a fully developed and consistently
tested analytical category.
The result is a sense
of partial autonomy with respect to the overall architecture of the book.
Rather than putting the notion of the “regular republic” to the test, the
chapter seems primarily concerned with reconstructing a specific case of
cultural and institutional self-representation within the Dominican Order. This
is a legitimate and, in many respects, fruitful choice; nevertheless, it leaves
unresolved the question of the relationship between the individual studies
collected in the volume and the interpretative framework that is meant to
provide them with coherence.
Equally striking is
the silence surrounding the question of female religious life. The volume
speaks of “regular republics” yet never addresses the role played by women’s
religious orders in the cultural and political history of early modern Italy.
There is no discussion of the Poor Clares, Benedictine nuns, Visitandines, or
the missionary women associated with various religious traditions—women who, by
extending their activity into Catholic spaces reaching as far as the
Philippines, carried the identity of their orders beyond the cloister and
facilitated encounters with different cultures and sensibilities. The issue is
certainly not a lack of available sources. To borrow the author’s own words,
the volume was not conceived as an attempt to introduce something entirely new
into the historiographical landscape, but rather to offer a series of
reflections. Reflections, sure, not a summary of many years of work and
research. But they are still reflections already made, already published,
already discussed. Yet if the language of “republics” is to be taken seriously,
this omission becomes even more apparent. It constitutes a significant
historiographical gap, one that is increasingly difficult to justify today,
especially given that many of the categories explored throughout the
volume—censorship, education, book circulation, tensions between centre and
periphery, and others—could have found in the female religious world an
exceptionally fruitful field of inquiry, capable of complicating and refining
those very categories. The result is a book that appears somewhat dated in its
selection of subjects as well as in its analytical priorities.
If the title
implicitly evokes other historiographical frameworks, such as the Republic of
Letters and the role of learned culture in the formation of the early modern
state, the volume nevertheless lacks a sustained conceptual reflection on the
term “republic” itself. The expression “regular republic” is treated largely as
a self-evident category, even though it is acknowledged to have functioned
historically as a form of self-definition, especially between the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. What is missing is a theoretical engagement with the
political vocabulary employed by religious orders to describe themselves. The
relationships between this terminology and broader concepts such as authority,
power, obedience, mixed government, and election are never systematically
explored, nor are the “regular republics” meaningfully compared with the other
republics of the period—civic, communal, academic, or otherwise. Here again,
the perspective remains primarily descriptive rather than conceptual. The category
at the centre of the volume is invoked more often than it is interrogated.
The analysis of the
“constitutional structure” of religious orders—a term that Barzazi adopts from
the very beginning of her introduction—is grounded in the assumption that each
order functioned as an autonomous republic, endowed with elective mechanisms
and statutes of self-government. Yet the problem of internal normative
plurality is never fully addressed: Observants and Conventuals, reformed
congregations, provincial autonomies, and particular statutes remain largely
absent from the discussion. This omission reinforces the impression that the
book operates through juridical abstractions or ideal-typical models (“the
orders,” “the Benedictines,” “the Dominicans”) rather than engaging with the
concrete historical processes that generated reforms, internal divisions, and
territorial variations. In a context marked by recurring tensions between
observance and relaxation, between central authority and local autonomy, the
omission appears not merely historiographical but structural to the
interpretative framework itself.
Despite the
introductory emphasis on the importance of religious orders in pastoral care,
preaching, and education, the volume never systematically examines the
relationship between religious orders and local society, whether from an
economic, social, or cultural perspective. Libraries, schools, and even
academies are frequently mentioned, yet primarily as self-contained
institutional realities rather than as instruments of cultural mediation
between Church and community. Once again, the impression is that of a book
written largely from within the institutional world of the orders themselves
and addressed primarily to specialists, rather than an attempt to understand
how these religious bodies shaped the social, cultural, and economic fabric of
early modern Italy. The only partial exception is the discussion of Paolo Sarpi
and the Venetian Interdict—a subject on which the author has long-standing
expertise and which recent international scholarship has helped place within a
broader historiographical framework. Yet even here, the analysis rarely
descends to the level of local communities and lived experience.
The volume’s more
detailed investigations—such as those devoted to the internal “wars of friars”
among the Servites or to the Camaldolese libraries—are undoubtedly rich in
documentary value. Even in these cases, however, the language sometimes risks
flattening rather than illuminating complexity. The academic prose becomes
highly dense, marked by numerous qualifications, subordinate clauses, and
stylistic convolutions that often slow the reader’s progress without
proportionally enriching the argument. A persistent desire to maintain
analytical control and to minimize ambiguity occasionally comes at the expense
of the vitality of the material itself. The overall impression is of a
discourse designed more to contain than to question. Perhaps it would have been
useful, when facing the necessity of a book like this, to present it in
English: it would have allowed the style to be more concise and made that kind
of essays on “regular scholarship” less marginal. This would have undoubtedly
required a more international approach to the subject, a plan that the Author
rejected from the very introduction.
The bibliography
ultimately reinforces this sense of closure. While the references included are
generally accurate and carefully selected, a number of important contributions
central to contemporary reappraisals of the history of religious orders are
notably absent. There is no engagement, for example, with recent international
debates on the infrastructural history of monasticism, on the transcontinental
mobility of religious orders, or on decolonial approaches to missionary
history. The volume presents itself as reflective, yet its gaze remains
directed primarily toward its own established historiographical horizon.
Repubbliche
regolari is very
much “an author’s book” in the fullest sense of the term: the product of a long
and coherent scholarly trajectory, sustained by archival expertise and
methodological consistency. At the same time, it is a work whose interpretative
horizons remain relatively circumscribed, shaped by a strongly self-referential
vision of research and by an editorial framework that rarely challenges its
underlying assumptions. If religious orders indeed represented for centuries an
intermediate form of power between state, Church, and society, this volume
tends more often to reproduce the vertical logics of those institutions than to
subject them to critical scrutiny. In the end, the category of the “regular
republic” remains more evocative than demonstrative: an intriguing title whose
full analytical potential is never entirely realized.
Editor's Note. We received this review from a scholar and, considering it to offer valuable critical insights worthy of discussion and to be fully consistent with the editorial line of this journal, we decided to publish it in full in both English and Italian. The author preferred to remain anonymous, and we considered it appropriate to respect that wish. Experience has shown that, in parts of Italian academia, well-argued criticism is not always welcomed as an opportunity for scholarly debate but may instead provoke personal reactions and forms of retaliation that are as predictable as they are dispiriting. We therefore prefer that the discussion focus exclusively on the arguments themselves.
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