| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Wietse de Boer. The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan. (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, number 84.) Boston: Brill. 2001. Pp. xxi, 363.

This handsome volume is the latest in a truly distinguished series, the list of whose authors reads like a Who's Who of early modern historians. Wietse de Boer's book is eminently worthy of inclusion in such a series. He has made a great contribution to early modern Italian religious history. 1

The book is a test-case examination of the newest old generalization about the character of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some years ago, I asserted in this journal that the term "social disciplining," often used to describe the cooperation of authoritative early modern political and religious institutions, is nothing other than an updated version of the model of the church in that age—hierarchical, repressive, and driven by the elite against a silent lower class—implied in the term "Counter-Reformation." Until plans for disciplining are tested to determine if real change occurred in the behavior and outlook of those to be disciplined, the term ought to be treated as a hypothesis. De Boer tested the efficacy of arguably the most famous—not to mention far-reaching—social disciplining plan in the history of early modern Italy: that of the Borromeos in Milan. Carlo Borromeo and his cousin Federico, plus Gaspare Visconti, the archbishop who oversaw Milan between the tenures of the other two, hoped to sanctify common parish life by devising rules to be followed and techniques to be employed by priests hearing confessions. . . .

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