Querciolo Mazzoni's latest book represents the culmination of a research journey which started in 2007 with the publication of Spirituality, gender and the self in Renaissance Italy: Angela Merici and the Company of St Ursula (1474–1540). Yet Reforms of Christian life offers a wider spectrum of research, as it provides a new investigation of the activities and role played by the Angelics, the Barnabites, the Somascans and the Ursulines in the Italian Peninsula of the sixteenth century. The author has decided to focus on these orders as they promoted a different perception and view of Christianity which was diametrically opposed to Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism. By doing so Querciolo illustrates how and to which extent these orders promoted a widespread reforming programme which aimed to renew not only the ecclesiastical structures but the entire society.
Based on an impressive range of primary sources and secondary literature, the book is structured in five chapters which bring the reader into the Italian Peninsula of the sixteenth century. The first chapter serves as an introduction to the intellectual milieu which influenced and shaped the mind of Battista Carioni da Crema, Angela Merici and Girolamo Miani, three crucial reforming figures during the sixteenth century. The second chapter and the third are connected to each other as they investigate the ideas as well as the writings of these figures and how they sought to elaborate and develop a model of perfection and relationship with God. Furthermore, these two chapters provide an avenue for understanding and comparing the affinities that Carioni, Merici and Miani had on the role of the Church within a society which was experiencing dramatic and constant political and religious changes. The fourth chapter examines the activities of the Angelics, the Barnabites, the Somascans and the Ursulines within the thorny context of Italian reformism, and how, in some cases, they sought to converge on the ideas proposed by the most prominent figures within the circles of Evangelism and Spiritualism. The fifth chapter examines how, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the reforming orders underwent a series of seminal changes which would alter their physiognomy. At the same time the chapter explores how the ideas of Battista da Crema, and in part those of Merici and Miani, managed to survive in the years following the Council of Trent.
Mazzonis's book offers a vivid and well-researched investigation of the intellectual and religious ferment which characterised the reforming orders of the Italian Peninsula during a period which was polarised by the spread of Lutheranism and the orthodoxy of the Catholic Reformation. By focusing on the key – but hard to decode – concepts of devotion, salvation and spiritualism, the author sheds lights on the inner mechanisms which regulated the life of the reforming orders and how their agenda was much freer and more inclusive than that elaborated by the traditional Tridentine orders like the Jesuits or the Oratorians. Overall, Mazzonis's book is a welcome and much awaited analysis. It will finally explain to both established and young scholars how the concept and practice of reforms of Christian life in the sixteenth-century Italian peninsula was more extremely articulated and fluid than the traditional historiography on the Catholic Reformation had previously taught.
