Having already published a comparative history of the reformatory movements in France and Italy, the École française in Rome offers a continuation regarding the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Two internationally renowned specialists for early modern Italian and French history, Gigliola Fragnito and Alain Tallon, took the task of editing this volume in which a number of the most distinguished scholars in the field can be found. The title suggests a concept to understand the relationship between Italy and France during this period: Italy and France describe in a figurative sense two differing styles of early modern Catholicism, an orthodox and a gallican concept respectively. What was orthodox on the one side of the Alps could be considered heterodox on the other. Naturally, the editors and authors of the volume assume their readers are familiar with these so-called styles, but as each article sheds light on the phenomena in a particular way, the reader gets a rich and almost comprehensive picture.
The first section of the volume, with articles by Bernard Barbiche, Sylvie Daubresse, and Elena Bonora, focuses on the institutions in the political field between France and Rome. Interestingly enough, the papal nuncios were often passed over in major causes in favor of the French ambassadors in Rome. As Bonora shows, the nuncios were furthermore occasionally controlled and given instructions by the Holy Office. The parlement de Paris, as Daubresse depicts it, does not appear as an anti-Roman or anti-Papal institution, but as the custodian of the balance between clerical and secular power.
In the second part of the volume, Gigliola Fragnito and Jean-Louis Quantin present the institutions and proceedings of censorship, both ecclesiastical in Italy and secular in France. While Fragnito summarizes the abundance of recent publications on censorship in Italy, Quantin’s detailed study of the development of the French system of privileges (as a form of pre-censorship) and post-publication censorship in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century is particularly valuable and instructive.
A third group of articles (Frédéric Gabriel, Benoît Schmitz, Michaela Catto) presents controversies between gallicanism and Roman orthodoxy. Obviously, ecclesiological issues dominate the essays, but the authors also draw attention to aspects taken into account only rarely. Gabriel, for example, refers to the medieval conflict between the magistery exercised by theologians and the one exercised by the Holy Orders as the foundations of the debate between Cajetan and Jacques Almain on the Fifth Lateran Council as well as of early modern gallicanism in general. Schmitz links the gallican ecclesiology to Reformation theology and convincingly shows that the first was developed further, influenced by the latter.
In the fourth section, five authors (Giorgio Caravale, Elena Valeri, Jean-Louis Quantin, Miguel Gotor, Jean-Pascal Gay) present case studies from the history of censorship between France and Rome. Each of these highly interesting studies reveals the convoluted tangle of political, theological, and personal motives—even more complicated by the two different styles—which could promote or prevent the prohibition of a book. Thus, political or personal conflicts from outside the censorial debate could have a say in the decision on what was regarded as orthodox or heterodox.
Finally, three articles are dedicated to the relationship between Venice and France in the period of the interdict 1606/07 (Corrado Pin, Sylvio Hermann de Franceschi, Antonella Barzazi), demonstrating that a common interest in an alternative ecclesiology made both the republic and the kingdom partners in the arguments with Rome. The book’s articles are written in French and Italian. Unfortunately, the book provides short summaries only in the respective language, which may make this valuable publication less accessible to the anglophone world. The reader might also miss some remarks on the Spanish influence, though this would open a new field of research. Nevertheless, the wide variety of perspectives and subjects in this volume (often already known in principle) sheds bright light on the shaping of different Catholic styles in the early modern period. This renders the book a worthwhile reading for anyone interested in early modern Catholicism.
