- Title
- Dangerous Friendships: Girolamo Seripando, Giulia Gonzaga, and the Spirituali in Tridentine Italy
- Creator
- Russell, Camilla
- Relation
- The Council of Trent: Reform and Controversy in Europe and Beyond (1545-1700) p. 251-276
- Relation
- Refo500 Academic Studies (R5AS) 35
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.13109/9783666551079.249
- Publisher
- Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- This essay explores how the Council of Trent – with its innumerable debates, crises, and alliances – was the backdrop for an unlikely epistolary exchange between a man and a woman: Giulia Gonzaga (1513–66) and Girolamo Seripando (1493–1563). Gonzaga was a widow from the famed noble Lombard family, who spent most of her life in a Neapolitan convent (although she never took the veil), while Seripando was a noted theologian and preacher, General of the Augustinian Order, then Cardinal and papal legate to the final sitting of the Council of Trent. Both were associated to varying degrees with the religious reforming elements in Italy that sought profound reform of the Church through spiritual renewal, theological rigour, and the renovation of ecclesiastical structures to their original form and function. This approach, which also was the hallmark of a loosely formed group known as the spirituali – of which Gonzaga was a patron, and Seripando a protector – contrasted with other reforming elements in Italy that looked to canonical and juridical solutions to solve the Church’s problems, advocating instruments such as the Index of Prohibited Books and the Inquisition. These very tools came to be used against Gonzaga, Seripando, and their networks, to identify and in some cases prosecute their associates for theological views that were considered to correspond to those of the Lutheran and Reformed confessions.
- Subject
- Italian history; reformation studies; religious history; early modern Catholicism
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1446257
- Identifier
- uon:42809
- Identifier
- ISBN:9783647551081
- Language
- eng
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