Cardinal Giovanni Morone (1509-80) remains one of the most intriguing characters in the history of the sixteenth century Catholic Church - with neither his contemporaries nor subsequent scholars being able to agree on his motivations, theology or his legacy. Appointed Bishop of Modena in 1529 and created Cardinal in 1542 by Pope Paul III, his glittering career appeared to be in ruins following his arrest in 1557 on charges of heresy. Yet, despite spending more than two years imprisoned in Castel Sant' Angelo, he managed to resurrect his career and in 1563 was appointed principal legate to the Council of Trent, whereupon he resolved the difficulties besetting the council, which had brought it to a virtual standstill, and guided it to a successful conclusion. Concentrating largely - but by no means exclusively - upon the period of the pontificate of Pius IV (1559-65) and an evaluation of Morone's role as presiding legate at the Council of Trent, this book tackles a number of issues that have exercised scholars. How does Morone's activity at Trent in 1563 now look in the light of the information available in connection with his processo? What was the result of the wider activity of Morone and the spirituali during Pius' pontificate? How did Morone's career progress after Trent, with regards his actions as a diocesan in the immediate post-conciliar situation and his renewed difficulties in the pontificate of Pius V? Through a re-reading of important archival material and a re-examination of the wealth of recently published primary sources, this study revisits these key questions, and analyses the fluctuating fortunes of Morone's career as bishop, diplomat, heretic and cardinal legate.

Vittoria Colonna (1490-1547) was the genre-defining secular woman writer of Renaissance Italy, whose literary model helped to establish a decorous and wholly assimilated voice for women within the field of Italian literature. The Companion to Vittoria Colonna brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of leading scholars to assess Colonna’s contribution, both as a writer, a role model, and a contributor to important religious debates of the era. This book, while amply fulfilling the remit of providing a useful and comprehensive handbook to meet the needs of students and scholars at earlier and advanced levels, aims in addition to do more than this, by drawing into a single volume for the first time scholarship from across disciplines in which Vittoria Colonna’s influence has been felt, including literary criticism, religious history, history of art and music. Contributors are: Abigail Brundin, Stephen Bowd, Emidio Campi, Eleonora Carinci, Adriana Chemello, Virginia Cox, Tatiana Crivelli, Maria Forcellino, Gaudenz Freuler, Anne Piéjus, Diana Robin, Helena Sanson, and Maria Serena Sapegno.

A Companion to the Early Modern Cardinal is the first comprehensive overview of its subject in English or any language. Cardinals are best known as the pope’s electors, but in the centuries from 1400 to 1800 they were so much more: pastors, inquisitors, diplomats, bureaucrats, statesmen, saints; entrepreneurs and investors; patrons of the arts, of music, literature, and science. Thirty-five essays explain their social background, positions and roles in Rome and beyond, and what they meant for wider society. This volume shows the impact which those men who took up the purple had in their respective fields and how their tenure of office shaped the entangled histories of Rome and the Catholic Church from a European and global perspective.

Winner of the John Gilmary Shea Prize The Council of Trent (1545–1563), the Catholic Church’s attempt to put its house in order in response to the Protestant Reformation, has long been praised and blamed for things it never did. Now, in this first full one-volume history in modern times, John W. O’Malley brings to life the volatile issues that pushed several Holy Roman emperors, kings and queens of France, and five popes—and all of Europe with them—repeatedly to the brink of disaster. During the council’s eighteen years, war and threat of war among the key players, as well as the Ottoman Turks’ onslaught against Christendom, turned the council into a perilous enterprise. Its leaders declined to make a pronouncement on war against infidels, but Trent’s most glaring and ironic silence was on the authority of the papacy itself. The popes, who reigned as Italian monarchs while serving as pastors, did everything in their power to keep papal reform out of the council’s hands—and their power was considerable. O’Malley shows how the council pursued its contentious parallel agenda of reforming the Church while simultaneously asserting Catholic doctrine. Like What Happened at Vatican II, O’Malley’s Trent: What Happened at the Council strips mythology from historical truth while providing a clear, concise, and fascinating account of a pivotal episode in Church history. In celebration of the 450th anniversary of the council’s closing, it sets the record straight about the much misunderstood failures and achievements of this critical moment in European history.

The Council of Trent was a major event in the history of Christianity. It shaped Roman Catholicism's doctrine and practice for the next four hundred years and continues to do so today. The literature on the Council is vast and in numerous languages. This Companion, written by an international group of leading researchers, brings together the latest scholarship on the principal issues treated at the Council: the relationship between Scripture and Tradition, original sin, justification, the sacraments (Baptism, Penance, Confirmation, Eucharist, Holy Orders, Marriage, and the Annointing of the Sick), sacred images, sacred music, and its reform of religious orders, the training of the clergy, the provision of pastoral care in the parish setting, and the implementation of its decrees. The volume demonstrates that the Council unwittingly furthered the papal centralization of authority by allowing the interpretation of its decrees to be the exclusive prerogative of the Holy See, and entrusting it with their implementation.

Juan de Valdés played a pivotal role in the febrile atmosphere of sixteenth-century Italian religious debate. Fleeing his native Spain after the publication in 1529 of a book condemned by the Spanish Inquisition, he settled in Rome as a political agent of the emperor Charles V and then in Naples, where he was at the centre of a remarkable circle of literary and spiritual men and women involved in the religious crisis of those years, including Peter Martyr Vermigli, Marcantonio Flaminio, Bernardino Ochino and Giulia Gonzaga. Although his death in 1541 marked the end of this group, Valdés’ writings were to have a decisive role in the following two decades, when they were sponsored and diffused by important cardinals such as Reginald Pole and Giovanni Morone, both papal legates to the Council of Trent. The most famous book of the Italian Reformation, the Beneficio di Cristo, translated in many European languages, was based on Valdés’ thought, and the Roman Inquisition was very soon convinced that he had ’infected the whole of Italy’. In this book Massimo Firpo traces the origins of Valdés’ religious experience in Erasmian Spain and in the movement of the alumbrados, and underlines the large influence of his teachings after his death all over Italy and beyond. In so doing he reveals the originality of the Italian Reformation and its influence in the radicalism of many religious exiles in Switzerland and Eastern Europe, with their anti-Trinitarians and finally Socinian outcomes. Based upon two extended essays originally published in Italian, this book provides a full up-dated and revised English translation that outlines a new perspective of the Italian religious history in the years of the Council of Trent, from the Sack of Rome to the triumph of the Roman Inquisition, reconstructing and rethinking it not only as a failed expansion of the Protestant Reformation, but as having its own peculiar originality. As such it will be welcomed by all scholars wishin

Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1700 offers a radical reassessment of the history of early modern papacy, constructed through the first major analytical treatment of papal elections in English. Papal elections, with their ceremonial pomp and high drama, are compelling theater, but, until now, no one has analyzed them on the basis of the problems they created for cardinals: how were they to agree rules and enforce them? How should they manage the interregnum? How did they decide for whom to vote? How was the new pope to assert himself over a group of men who, until just moments before, had been his equals and peers? This study traces how the cardinals' responses to these problems evolved over the period from Martin V's return to Rome in 1420 to Pius VI's departure from it in 1798, placing them in the context of the papacy's wider institutional developments. Miles Pattenden argues not only that the elective nature of the papal office was crucial to how papal history unfolded but also that the cardinals of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries present us with a unique case study for observing the approaches to decision-making and problem-solving within an elite political group.

The reign of Mary Tudor has been remembered as an era of sterile repression, when a reactionary monarch launched a doomed attempt to reimpose Catholicism on an unwilling nation. Above all, the burning alive of more than 280 men and women for their religious beliefs seared the rule of “Bloody Mary' into the protestant imagination as an alien aberration in the onward and upward march of the English-speaking peoples. In this controversial reassessment, the renowned reformation historian Eamon Duffy argues that Mary's regime was neither inept nor backward looking. Led by the queen's cousin, Cardinal Reginald Pole, Mary's church dramatically reversed the religious revolution imposed under the child king Edward VI. Inspired by the values of the European Counter-Reformation, the cardinal and the queen reinstated the papacy and launched an effective propaganda campaign through pulpit and press. Even the most notorious aspect of the regime, the burnings, proved devastatingly effective. Only the death of the childless queen and her cardinal on the same day in November 1558 brought the protestant Elizabeth to the throne, thereby changing the course of English history.

Transnational Catholicism in Tudor England details the relationship between transnational mobility and the development of Tudor Catholicism. Almost two hundred Catholics felt compelled to exile themselves from England rather than conform with the religious reformations inaugurated by HenryVIII and Edward VI. Frederick E. Smith explores how these emigres' physical mobility reconfigured their relationships with the men and women they left behind, and how it forced them to develop new relationships with individuals they encountered abroad. It analyses how the experiences of mobility anddisplacement catalysed a shift in their religious identities, in some ways broadening but in others narrowing their understandings of what it meant to be 'Catholic'. The author examines the role of these emigres as agents of religious exchange, circulating new doctrinal and devotional ideasthroughout western Europe and forging new connections between them. By focussing particularly upon those individuals who subsequently returned to their homeland during Mary I's Catholic counter-reformation, the study also explores the lasting legacies of these emigres' displacement and mobility,both for the emigres themselves as they grappled with the difficulties of re-integration, but also for the broader development of English Catholicism. In this way, Transnational Catholicism in Tudor England deepens our understanding of the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which exileshapes religio-political identities, but also underlines the importance of international mobility as a crucial factor in the development of English Catholicism and the wider European Catholic Church over the mid sixteenth century.