Reforms of Christian Life in Sixteenth-Century Italy

Reforms of Christian Life presents a new narrative of the role of the Barnabites and Angelics, the Ursulines and the Somascans (founded in Northern Italy in the 1530s by Battista da Crema, Angela Merici, and Girolamo Miani) within sixteenth-century Italian reform movements. While historiography has considered these companies under the category of ‘Catholic Reformation,’ this book argues that they promoted an ‘unconventional’ view of perfection and of the Church that was alternative to both Roman