This book offers a fresh, original and interdisciplinary interpretation of what the Catholic Reformation meant at local diocesan level in the face of attempts by Rome to regularize worship c. 1550-1700. In the process of protecting the spiritual integrity of their patria, representatives of Italian local history such as Pietro Maria Campi of Piacenza (1569-1649)--who provides the focus of this wide-ranging study--significantly broadened the boundaries of historical study and helped to lay the foundations of Italian national history writing.

This book provides a meticulous examination of the ideology, structure, and functions of the papal police as they operated in the city and province of Bologna in the period before Italian unity, and in doing so offers an important new interpretation of the Risorgimento. The author argues that after the Restoration the new police soon found themselves incapable of dealing effectively with overwhelming problems of crime and public order. In allowing Bologna's elites to arm themselves in posse-style "citizen patrols" on two occasions, the papal government had opened the doors to reform and,...

This is the first social and cultural study of the principal "free" professions in Italy between unification and the First World War. It is a major contribution both to the history of the bourgeoisie in Italy and to the developing role of professions in modern European society. The first section discusses the formation of modern Italian engineering, notarial occupations, law, and medicine. The second section provides an analysis of the interrelation among the professions, the nobility and Parliament, and examines the social status of members of the professions.

This volume is the first attempt at a comparative reconstruction of the foreign policy and diplomacy of the major Italian states in the early modern period. The various contributions reveal the instruments and forms of foreign relations in the Italian peninsula. They also reveal through a range of case studies, including Venice, the Papal States, the duchy of Savoy, Florence (later the duchy of Tuscany), Mantua, Modena, and the kingdom of Naples, a new interpretation of the political history of early modern Italy.

This book covers one of the most controversial subjects in Italian historiography, namely the success or failure of the Church's policy during the counter-Reformation to exert rigorous control not only over theology but over all branches of knowledge. By drawing extensively upon newly-opened sources in the archive of the former Congregation of the Holy Office, generally known as the "Inquisition," it affords a more articulated and objective assessment of the effects of ecclesiastical censorship on religion and culture in early modern Italy.

This is the first multi-disciplinary study of the dissemination of Italian culture in northern Europe during the "long eighteenth century" (1689-1815). The book covers a diverse range of important artists such as Amigoni, Canaletto and Rosalba Carriera, as well as opera singers, commedia dell'arte performers and librettists who left Italy to seek work beyond the Alps. It also considers key themes such as social networks, the relationships between court and market cultures, the importance of religion and politics to the reception of culture, and the evolution of taste.

This study describes power and politics in Rome and the role of the papacy in European politics during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It attempts to overcome the traditional historiographical approach to the role of the papacy during this period by focusing on the actual mechanisms of power in the papal court--political, personal, spiritual, and ceremonial. Based on new research in Italian and other European archives, it charts the transition from a political to a primarily spiritual power between the Renaissance and the Peace of Westphalia.