Thomas Deutscher

Seminaries and the Education of Novarese Parish Priests, 1593–1627

One of the most important contributions of the Council of Trent (1545–63) to the Catholic or Counter-Reformation was its decree calling for the establishment of diocesan seminaries for the education of the secular clergy. To date, however, the role played by seminaries in the training of parish priests has not been the subject of detailed research. Most Italian diocesan histories, concerned more with the lives and decrees of reforming bishops than with the development of parish life, do not go beyond the institutional aspects of the problem, noting when seminaries were founded and what financial difficulties they faced. Little has been done to investigate the academic content of seminary training and the quality of seminary graduates. Among the few valuable points of reference are a study of clerical education at Rome by G. Pelliccia and brief comments on the seminary curriculum of Bologna by Paolo Prodi. While they have found that seminarians of both cities received practical instruction in the exercise of the cure of souls, they have not uncovered sources pertaining to the books used at seminaries or possessed by parish priests.

A Renaissance Education: Schooling in Bergamo and the Venetian Republic, 1500-1650 (review)

decay; by comparison, parish religious life was more vibrant but (an important point) selectively so. A further chapter looks at the rise of new gentry families from the late Middle Ages, some trained in the law and officiating for religious houses, others linked to Crown administration. Intermarrying and working closely together, they took their functions seriously as local agents of the Crown and as guardians of religious life. From the 1530s they consolidated their own position by becoming chief enforcers of royal religious policies. Both in city and shire the local elite tended to prop up the existing religious order until the Reformation gave them the opportunity to seize church property for themselves and to endow a range of schools and charities—a concrete local version of a Commonwealth program much talked about at the Henrician Court. Lowe emphasizes the broad coalition of city leaders, county gentry, and Court politicians and leading clergy that promoted these initiatives in Gloucestershire.All this was reversed under Mary but at the cost of alienating a large part of the ruling class in both city and county.