Venetian Upper Clergy in the 16th and Early 17th Centuries. A Study in Religious Culture

This monograph, an approach to the sheer variety of Renaissance Catholic thought, is a study of discourse, confronting the fact there was no such thing as a clerical culture or clerical language in Renaissance in Italy, but rather a gamut of cultures and languages. It presents a cross-section of religious writings, cutting across genres and spiritual or intellectual currents. The study describes an early modern elite, and a phase in Catholic culture; it has a strong emphasis on notions of pastorality and of the culture of persons engaged in the pastoral ministry, and is also an investigation of the rhetorical and argumentative resources of postclassical culture.