Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy
Camilla Russell
Harvard University Press, £39.95, 256 pages
What makes this book so impressive is the quality of Camilla Russell’s research into the substantial volume of documents produced by Jesuits of the Society’s five Italian provinces during the later 16th and early 17th centuries. This documentation is housed in the archives of the Society’s general curia in Rome; it is of many types, but all of it is in some way biographical. There are letters, petitions, personnel catalogues, life narratives and confidential reports – some of which were marked “soli”, as they still can be, for the attention of the Superior General alone.
