Religion and Ideas in Southern Italy Church, State and its People during the Early Modern Age

List of Figures

List of Contributors

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Angela Carbone, Isabel Harvey and Milena Sabato

1      “His conscience will take care of it”: Book Censorship and Its Consequences in the Early Modern Kingdom of Naples

Milena Sabato

2      Books, reading, orality. Synodal constitutions and ecclesiastical control over speeches in the Terra di Bari (16th-17th centuries)

Domenico Uccellini

3      “Printers on Trial.” Typographic Activity, Book Circulation, Church and State Intervention in the Terra di Bari during the Early Modern Period

Angela Carbone

4      Public Devotion in Early Modern Naples. Catholic Hierarchy, Urban elite, and the Faithful

Vittoria Fiorelli

5      The Female Milieu of San Domenico Maggiore of Naples: Friars and their Women during the Counter-Reformation

Isabel Harvey

6      Between Erudition and Heresy: Books and Libraries of the Friars Minor of Campobasso during the Early Modern Period

Stefano Colavecchia

7      ‘Dio quant’è grande l’arrogantia di un Frate Agostiniano’. Constructing Luther in Naples, 1700.

Clorinda Donato

8      Deaths Without Wills and Ecclesiastical Interventions in the Kingdom of Naples. Calabria, Sixteenth–Seventeenth Centuries

Francesco Gaudioso

9      ‘They Found only Anguish Where There should have been Joy’: Marriage Dissolution in Early Nineteenth-Century Sicily

Sara Delmedico

10   The Right to Use and Preserve the Body: Perspectives from Spanish Sicily

Maria Sole Testuzza

11   Threats of Dominance in the Late 1500s: The Biblical Epics Projecting Contemporary Political and Religious Threats

Silvia Giovanardi Byer

12   The Church Triumphant and the Pedagogy of Fear: Muslim Stereotypes in the Church of San Francesco Saverio in Naples

Rachel Miller

13   Grand Masters and the Grand Tour: Freemasonic ‘Rites of Passage’ from France to Sicily

Giovanna Summerfield

Index

Biography

Isabel Harvey is a FNRS Postdoctoral Fellow at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium, and Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Canada. She co-directs the international research project Sorores. Religieuses non cloîtrées en Europe (XII–XVIII siècles) and leads a major project on the environmental history of Catholic missions. She is the author of a recent monograph on the body of nuns in early modern Italy, exploring reform, sanctity, and religious authority in the post-Tridentine Church. 

Milena Sabato is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Salento, Italy, and holds the Italian National Scientific Qualification as Associate Professor in Early Modern History. Her research primarily explores book censorship, women readers, women travelers, as well as the religious, political, and cultural history of early modern southern Italy. Her publications include two monographs on censorship, book circulation, and State-Church relations in southern Italy (Il sapere che brucia, 2009; Poteri censori, 2007). She is Co-Editor of the journal Modern Italy.