Storia delle Chiese di Sicilia (review)

Abstract

General Storia della Chiesa di Bologna. Edited by Paolo Prodi and Lorenzo Paolini. 2 vols. (Bologna: Istituto per la Storia della Chiesa di Bologna, and Bergamo: Edizioni Bolis. 1997. Pp. xv, 402 and 670.) These two handsome volumes make a splendid contribution to the history of the Church in Italy. In a series of carefully researched and beautifully illustrated essays, twenty-five local experts trace the history of the Bolognese diocese from the early fourth-century Bolognese protomartyrs, Vitale and Agricola, down to the early 1960's. As Paolo Prodi writes in his Introduction: the substantial novelty of the project lies not so much in the particular research methods, or the discoveries presented in these volumes, as in their ambition to cover the entire history of the Bolognese church in a way that includes substantial treatments of the questions of administration, pastoral care, parish life, and devotional practices that have attracted much recent attention by historians of the Italian Church, but which are usually neglected in the one-bishop-after-another diocesan histories with which Italy abounds. The first volume gives a basic chronological narrative of the Bolognese church parceled into four essays. Amedeo Benati offers a clear discussion of the evidence concerning the late Roman and early and high medieval periods. His treatments of the boundaries of the diocese and of the local impact of the investiture controversy-Canossa was quite close by-are especially interesting. Augusto Vasina offers a good treatment of ecclesiastical foundations, with particularly thorough discussion of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth centuries. Umberto Mazzone develops much rich material, previously little-explored, on the period from the Council of Trent to the early nineteenth century. Giuseppe Battelli is excellent on the Risorgimento and Fascism, although in the post-World War II period he says not nearly enough on the relations between the local church and the Communist Party, which dominated communal administration beginning in the 1950's. In the second volume, Saints and Devotions in the Middle Ages and the modern period (sixteenth century to the present) are treated in essays by Paolo Golinelli and Gabriella Zarri, respectively; and for Liturgical Life a similar division of labor is observed by Giampaolo Ropa and Enzo Lodi. Essays on Charity, Welfare, and Social Commitment by Mario Fanti, Giampaolo Venturi, and Alessandro Albertazzi are especially rich on the Catholic Reformation and the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One imagines that Fanti's treatment of the late medieval and early modern periods would have been more detailed had he been able to consult Nicholas Terpstra's book on Bolognese confraternities, which appeared in English only two years before these volumes were published. …