Charitable Activities in the Sixteenth Century: Early Theatine Identity under Carafa

Abstract

The Theatine order was the first of the new orders of clerics regular founded after the schism provoked by Luther. The dominant historiographical tradition suggests that, immediately following their foundation, the Theatines devoted themselves to charitable work. However, recent studies have revealed that their main founder, Gian Pietro Carafa (later Pope Paul IV), created the Theatines in 1524 because he needed collaborators to promote the sacralization of the Church for his struggle to curb ecclesiastical corruption and then against heretics and heresies. At the same time, however, what emerges is that only after Carafa's death did the second generation of Theatines refocus the order on the “care of the soul,” aligning the order with the latent teachings of co‐founder Gaetano Thiene. This article reinterprets the history of the early Theatines and aims to define their connection with charity work. It investigates the token charitable activities they performed and how even these activities conflicted with the tasks Carafa assigned to them. To better define the order's identity under Carafa, this article also investigates the difficult relationship between the early Theatines and laypeople, in particular, the women who ran various Italian charitable institutions.