From Theological Controversies to Political Reformism: The "Apogee" of Italian Jansenism in Modern Historiography

Abstract

Abstract

This article examines how two leading contemporary historians, the American historian Dale K. Van Kley and the Italian historian Mario Rosa, interpret the alleged "culmination" or "apogee" of Italian Jansenism in the late eighteenth century. It compares their approaches to the transformation of Italian Jansenism from a movement centred on theological controversy into one associated with political and ecclesiastical reform. The study also addresses an important gap in Russian historiography, which has yet to publish Russian translations of major classical and recent works on late Italian Jansenism or to develop a substantial body of original research on the subject. Both Van Kley and Rosa regard the Synod of Pistoia of 1786 as a crucial turning point in the intensification of debate over the reform of the Catholic Church, but they interpret its wider significance differently. Rosa stresses the ambiguity and internal diversity of late Italian Jansenism and argues that the movement acquired a distinct political dimension only after Bonaparte’s Italian campaign of 1796–1797. He links its subsequent fragmentation to the defeat of the Jansenists in their struggle with the papacy, the course of ecclesiastical reform in revolutionary France, and the French conquest of Italy. Van Kley, by contrast, places Italian Jansenism within a comparative history of French and Italian Catholic reform and revives the older Italian interpretation of Enlightenment Jansenism as both a precursor and a laboratory of the liberal Catholicism of the Risorgimento. He locates the decisive shift from theological controversy to political reformism after 1786 and illustrates it through the polemical exchange between the Jansenist theologian Pietro Tamburini and the traditionalist Nicola Spedalieri. The article argues that these two interpretations continue to shape scholarly understandings of Italian Catholicism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and therefore merit close comparative examination.