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Reviews of Books
other scholars who have noted that worship of the
Madonna has deeper popular roots in Italy than
devotion to any Christ figure. While others have
referred to this as marian worship, however, Carroll
finds such terminology misleading. Official church
rationalizations to the contrary notwithstanding, he
asserts, Italians viewed each separate image of the
Madonna as an independent, powerful, supernatural
force and not merely as a representation of the one
Mary. Accordingly, Carron refers to this as madonnine
worship, and he chronicles its multitudinous expressions in Italy.
For Carron, the history of Catholicism in Italy is the
history of a continuous tension between an official
church, with its theology and ritual system, and a
populace having its own, deeply rooted views of the
supernatural realm. It is a struggle in which, in his
view, the illiterate masses long enjoyed the upper
hand. As Carroll sees it, the Catholic Church in Italy
was a major beneficiary of these folk beliefs at the time
of the Reformation, for at the center of the new
Protestant orthodoxy was the rejection of sacred images and all that went with them. By coopting relic
cults and madonnine devotion, the Catholic Church
was able to present itself as the embodiment of
popular religiosity in Italy and turned the population
against the Protestant threat.
How does Carron explain the Italian propensity
toward religious practices of this sort? He does so first
by positing an Italian "national character," one element of which is the tendency not to draw a sharp line
between the natural and the supernatural. This, in
proper psychoanalytic fashion, he links to childrearing
experiences in Italy through which the child is impeded
from distinguishing clearly between the self and the
external world. From this, Carroll concludes that the
tendency to blur the line between the natural and the
supernatural "derives from strong unconscious oral
erotic desires that predispose Italians toward modes of
thinking that emphasize incorporation" (p. 233).
Along the way, he uses the argument to account for the
great popularity in Italy of representations of the
Madonna con bambino, the mother with her nursing
child.
What evidence does Carron produce to support this
oral fixation of Italians? He points to the practice of
sending newborns out to paid wetnurses in fifteenthcentury Florence and to infant abandonment, both
presumably resulting in babies who suffered from poor
milk. Yet among the peasant masses-the very population who in Carron's account were the originators of
popular Catholicism in Italy-sending children to paid
wetnurses was never common. Moreover, infant abandonment, while common enough in Italian rural areas,
was probably no less common in countries such as
France. How could it explain the peculiarities of
Italian national character?
This book provides a readable and useful summary
of the results of recent Italian studies of popular
religion in Italy and argues provocatively for the
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
primacy of folk religion over the religion of the church
hierarchy in explaining major aspects of popular participation in religious practices. Carroll's attempts to
explain the peculiarities of Italian popular religion, on
the other hand, remain less than convincing.
DAVID I. KERTZER
Brown University
MARTA PETRUSEWICZ. Latifundium: Moral Economy
and Material Life in a European Periphery. Translated
by JUDITH C. GREEN. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1996. Pp. xviii, 289. $52.50.
From the late 1700s to the late 1800s, Italian agricultural writers concentrated on the great land properties
(latifundia), seeing them as efficient and economical in
contrast to small-scale farms, which were viewed as
inefficient, uneconomical, and moving toward extinction. After the economic depression of the 1880s and
1890s, these views were reconsidered; many argued the
merits of a peasant agriculture, although others continued to see rationality in the latifundia.
Agriculture in general suffered from the economic
depression at the end of the nineteenth century, and
latifundism became associated with the environmental,
agricultural, and social ills of southern Italy. Specifically, inefficient monoculturalism, social injustice, polarization of social classes, and the degradation of the
physical and social environment were viewed as reactionary by-products of latifundism. The latifundia were
perceived to be disinterested in innovation while striving to preserve domination.
This is the context within which Marta Petrusewicz
sets her thesis that the latifundium was not a rigid,
uniform, reactionary, monocultural system. She argues
that there were a variety of contractual agreements
and judicial institutions, much crop diversification, and
production for the market as well as for direct consumption. Petrusewicz examines the "golden age" of
the latifundium, when it was a well utilized, stable
system maintained by efficiency and justice. Its decline
came just as the "Southern Question" arose. The
method of exposition is by a case study of the Barracco
estate, the largest in Calabria. Petrusewicz insists that
her case study is not intended to be a general representation of latifUlldism in southern Italy, nor to draw
conclusions about latifundism in general. Rather, it is
intended as a "reconstruction" of the economic and
social processes that were used in the latifundist
system. While tracing the development of the estate,
Petrusewicz keeps a larger question in mind: what role
did latifundism play in the transition from feudalism to
capitalism?
The formation of the Barracco estate through purchases of former feudal estates and expropriated
lands, foreclosed properties and the settling of other
debts, and encroachment is described in much detail.
This particular estate, and latifundism in general,
remained a stable system through the 1860s. According
to Petrusewicz, the stability of the system was espe-
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cially maintained by what she calls a "guarantee system": a set of noncontractual, informal and traditional,
mutual expectations based on reciprocity. The owners
expected the workers to be loyal, grateful, and good
workers. The workers expected from the owners job
security, gifts, and help meeting family and other
needs. The result was social and economic stability and
security.
What changed this relationship? Modernization, according to Petrusewicz. The latifundisti were not rigid
and could not afford to be so. They had to introduce
modern machinery and methods to generate sufficient
income to meet increasing social and political costs;
they also had to compete for markets with the agricultural capitalism of the north during a time of economic
hardship. The owners' relationship with workers was
modified by the resulting revisions in workers' contracts and unemployment, and these in turn destabilized society. Thus, the traditionallatifundist practices
did not lead to the "Southern Question." Rather,
changes in those practices coincided with the rise of
southern Italian social ills.
Ultimately, Petrusewicz concludes that latifundism
had little to do with feudalism or with capitalism.
Despite some similarities with both, latifundism neither evolved from feudalism nor evolved into capitalism. It bridged a gap in the agricultural changes in
southern Italy.
Discussing the context and thesis of Petrusewicz's
book does not do justice to its detailed descriptions of
the economy and society of the latifundium as well as
of the personal relationships among the Barraccos and
the personalities of individuals. Although the author is
correct in stating that the book is not a general
representation of latifundism during its golden age,
clearly there is much here to build on.
NICHOLAS J. ESPOSITO
EMERITUS
State University of New York,
Cortland
FULVIO DE GIORGI. La scienza del cuore: Spirtualita e
cultura religiosa in Antonio Rosmini. (Annali
dell'Istituto storico italo-germanico, number 25.) Bologna: Mulino. 1995. Pp. 628. L. 60,000.
The history of ideas has a peculiar challenge in attempting to assess a well-known philosopher admired
by contemporaries and remembered by historians for
writings and positions seemingly unrelated to the
concerns at the core of his philosophy. Antonio Rosmini Serbati is usually recalled as one of the Lombard
intellectuals of the early Risorgimento. Admirer of
Ludovico Antonio Muratori, friend of Alessandro
Manzoni and Niccolo Tommaseo, in touch with many
of the leading reformers and patriots of his day, he is
often cited as evidence of the accommodation that
ought to have been possible between a reasonable
church and a moderate state. His biography reinforces
this impression of a potential sadly unrealized. In 1848,
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Rosmini was in Rome counseling reform and, when
the revolution there turned radical, loyally accompanied the pope to Gaeta. Once there, however, he was
effectively ostracized; a number of his writings were
put on the index, including his most famous work,
Della cinque piaghe della Santa Chiesa (1848), and his
(very moderate) essay on constitutions and social
justice. When Camillo Cavour sent Rosmini to explain
to Pius IX that Piedmont's legislation on church-state
relations was not anticlerical, the pope was not convinced.
All of this was peripheral, however, to Rosmini's
major concerns. His great project (which resulted in
widely cited, multi-volume treatises marked by a wideranging, erudite, and often arcane eclecticism) was a
philosophic system that reconciled the German philosophy of his day, from Kant to Hegel, with Catholic
theology. More central still, Fulvio De Giorgi argues,
was his spirituality, which focused on a particular
conception of the Sacred Heart. In ma'ny respects a
reclusive philosopher, Rosmini was also the director of
a charitable institution and confessor to several prominent religious orders of women. De Giorgi makes a
weighty case that the strands that connect Rosmini's
intellectual friendships and public activities with his
philosophic work and religious life all pass through his
devotion to the Sacred Heart (contrasted with the
Jesuit use of the Sacred Heart as militant symbol).
Di Giorgi takes more than five hundred pages of
dense prose to do it, and his method is as eclectic as
Rosmini's philosophy. He explores Rosmini's old regime roots, including his ties to the work of Filippo
Neri and Alfonso di Liguori and his admiration for
Joseph de Maistre. But Rosmini's debt to Muratori
and the Italian and French writers of the Enlightenment receives comparable attention. Rosmini straddled the eras before and after the French Revolution,
De Giorgi concludes. Citations from his correspondence with leading Catholics famous for their independence of church discipline are used to establish that
spiritual matters were among their mutual concerns,
just as they were the concern of the bishops, clergy,
nuns, and pious lay people with whom Rosmini also
corresponded. The study's admirable larger ambition
is to trace the entire web of connections and influences
that constitute Rosmini's intellectual environment.
There are numerous references to Saint Simonianism
and Mazzinianism, to Rent~ de Chateaubriand and
Antonio Fogazzaro, and to dozens of others. These
connecting webs extend beyond contemporaries to
Plato, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of
Assisi, and Thomas Aquinas; the complex intersections
of their thought within that of Rosmini are given
erudite and elliptical theological labels by De Giorgi,
who attributes touches of Vincentianism, Salesianism,
Eudism, and Jansenism to various positions and attitudes. Influences are traced into the future (to Bertrando Spaventa and Giovanni Gentile) as well as the
past, and it comes as no surprise that the book
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