The author briefly retraces the contents of Homily No. 25 in Evangelia, in order to deepen the sequence of images that constitutes its conclusion: the suggestive cosmic struggle of Leviathan, defeated by the aculeus of Christ’s body that he intended to devour. An attempt is made to reconstruct a history of texts and traditions that feature the sea monster and the allegory of fishing, variously connected to the conduct of God, the devil, Jesus and the disciples, in Jerome’s exegesis of the book of the prophet Habakkuk and of Matthew’s gospel. The picture of a cosmic struggle between God and the devil sketched through the allegory of fishing allows us to reflect on the Christological component of the figuration, on the ecclesial space of preaching, and on the poetic and stylistic figure of Gregory as an intellectual and preacher at the service of the ecclesia.
A well-established historiographical tradition has presented great Benedictine abbeys and monasteries as institutions in charge of the bonification of territories and as protagonists of rural settlements. By virtue of their religious formation and discipline, the monks of the West, carriers of Christianity in ancient pagan territories, have been considered pioneers of colonization, as well as architects of the early medieval landscape. Beginning with some passages from the Vita and Regula Benedicti, the essay examines some aspects of the original relationship established by monasticism with the country space, starting from Italy during the era of the Gothic war and peaking with Carolingian Europe. The aim of the work is to emphasize that the close connections between Benedictine monasticism and the ecosystem was largely determined by liturgical and normative basis and did not depend only from historical-political circumstances or social, economic and cultural conditioning.
In the Malatesta folder of the Gonzaga Archive in Mantua is preserved a letter of March 1, 1438, sent by the archbishop of Patras Pandolfo Malatesti to Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, in the framework of the preparation of the first session of the Council of Ferrara (1438). The letter is an interesting source on the disagreements within the Church of Rome, oscillating between the theory of the conciliar primacy and the pontifical plenitudo potestatis, and on the atmosphere of excitement and hope that the Council could provoke in Western and Eastern Christianity.
This essay aims to investigate the genesis and composition of the Constitutions of the Chapter of the cathedral of Siena, commissioned by the Sienese pope Pius II in 1459. The investigation is carried out on different levels. The point of departure is the observation of the difficulties that the chapter and the canons of the cathedral went through in the first half of the fifteenth century and of the local urban context. Thereafter the Chapter Constitutions themselves, their redaction and content are analysed. The study continues with a dating proposal and with the identification of the characters represented in the miniated frontispiece of the Constitutions’ manuscript, attributed to Lorenzo di Pietro known as “il Vecchietta”. Consequently, some considerations regarding the symbolic value of this work in the relationship between the canons of the Sienese cathedral and the pope are proposed.
Recent historiography has focused on identifying the themes that over time have given substance to the broader framework of anti-Jesuit literature, with the aim of detecting the most widespread arguments used within the Catholic Church against Company of Jesus. To examine the phenomenon, limited to the Venetian context, this essay focalises on an unpublished text, the treatise of Giovanni Fatò On the hypocrisy of the Jesuits, to be found in a miscellaneous codex of the Herzog August Bibliothek of Wolfenbüttel. This work was written during the period of the interdict in Venice (1606-1607) and is imbued with all those widespread anti- Jesuit stereotypes present in the period of greatest tension between Rome and the Venetian Republic. This essay aims to highlight the most significant passages of the work, structured in twelve chapters with a prologue, and to identify the sources used by the author, to reconstruct the context in which the treatise was conceived and to identify the audience it was intended for.
The Paduan nobleman Antonio Maria Cortivo de Santi (1586-1650), following a sudden conversion, entered the Oratory of St. Jerome, originally established by the “unorthodox” Dominican friar Battista da Crema in 1519 and relaunched by Antonio Pagani in 1579. Ordained in 1614 and aggregated to the Oratorian congregation around 1620, Cortivo directed the oratory and established it in several cities in Veneto and Trentino, composing manuals of perfection (the Pugne spirituali) for his disciples. Little known to historians, Cortivo’s case bears witness to the variety of piety in Counter-Reformation Italy. Aimed at laymen and clergy, without distinction of gender or social status, the oratory promoted a path of inner perfection and mystical union with God. The oratory reveals the survival of an “unconventional” model of Christian life and has affinities with the mystical “heresies” of the late 17th century.
The present article aims to illustrate the internal dynamics of the Holy Office during the twentieth century, retracing its normative acts, starting from the Lex et Ordo of 1911 and its subsequent amendments, completed by the internal norms approved in 1945 and still unpublished. The appendix of this study contains the complete text of the Regolamento that served to the Congregation to carry out its functions throughout the twentieth century.
Penelope Nash, The Spirituality of Countess Matilda of Tuscany (Pierluigi Licciardello) Maria Teresa Dolso, Gli ordini Mendicanti. Il secolo delle origini (Emanuele Fontana) Sidney Damasio Machado, L’“Altissimo” e il “Santissimo”. Studio semantico simbolico di due termini chiave degli “Scritti” di san Francesco d’Assisi (Pietro Maranesi) Fra Elemosina e la riscrittura della memoria cittadina a Gualdo Tadino. Atti dell’incontro di studio (Gualdo Tadino, 17-18 luglio 2017) (Mauro Papalini) Giuseppe Mazzanti, Un imperatore musulmano. Il Liber de sceleribus et infelicitate perfidi turchi ac de spurcitia et feditate gentis et secte sue (1467-1468), di Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo (Simona Negruzzo) I Cappuccini. Fonti documentarie e narrative del primo secolo (1525-1619), seconda edizione, a cura di Vincenzo Criscuolo (Michele Lodone) Il dissenso religioso a Bergamo nel Cinquecento. Atti del Convegno (Bergamo, 28 ottobre 2017), a cura di Giulio Orazio Bravi (Michele Cassese) Claudio Paolocci, La Provincia di Genova dei Frati minori cappuccini 1530-2020 (Roberto Rusconi) Laura Quadri, Una fabula mystica nel Seicento Italiano. Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi e le Estasi (1609-1611) (Paolo Fontana) Saretta Marotta, Gli anni della pazienza. Bea, l’ecumenismo e il Sant’Uffizio di Pio XII (Michael Pfister)
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