LANCE GABRIEL LAZAR. Working in the Vineyard of the Lord: Jesuit Confraternities in Early Modern Italy. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press. 2005. Pp. xv, 377. $80.00

Lance Gabriel Lazar offers a sensitive account of the strategies employed by Jesuit missionaries campaigning for the conquest of souls within Europe. In Italy their targets were not for the most part heresy or paganism but immorality, superstition, ignorance, and the “misbelief” of Jews and Muslims. The book is a study of a new and fashionable form of charity, redemptive as well as supportive, not merely reactive but also aggressive and interventionist. The care of bodies was consciously subordinated to a higher end, the reclamation of endangered souls, and poverty was seen as a source of temptation that threatened to pitch vulnerable creatures—especially children and pubescent girls—into a state of mortal sin. Lazar's focus is on three institutions established during the 1540s in Rome, the head and stomach of all Christendom, as Juan Polanco called it in 1547 (p. 29). These became models for other cities and were widely imitated, thus helping to establish Rome's authority over the Catholic world. Perugia, one might add, had provided the prototype for the famous Christian pawnshops, the Monti di Pietà; Bologna for beggars' hospitals; Milan and Venice for plague hospitals; Siena and Florence for large, centralized general hospitals that looked after pilgrims, sick people, orphans, and foundlings. But Rome now set the pattern for closed, quasi-conventual establishments that aimed at achieving through discipline a complete transformation of character and beliefs. The Casa di Santa Marta was originally a short-stay halfway house that enabled dishonored women to retreat from the world, obtain protection, and make decisions about their own future. Such refuges offered a gentler alternative to the penitential convents for “whores repenting” which had existed here and there in Italian cities since the thirteenth century. The conservatory of Santa Caterina dei Funari was designed to protect girls who entered at the age of ten to twelve years and were deemed to be at high risk, in view of the immoral habits or desperate poverty of their mothers. The Casa dei Catecumeni was a place of education and testing for Jews and Muslims who had expressed some interest in becoming Catholics. As Lazar argues, it provided for Roman eyes an enactment in miniature of the hoped-for conversion of the whole world to Christianity.

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