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A learned Dominican friar caught up, in the Rome of Pius IV, in an Inquisition trial. An entire religious order involved, at the dawn of the seventeenth century, in a European-wide clash between ecclesiastical and civil powers. A Benedictine congregation struggling, throughout the modern age, to define its cultural identity, caught between the opposing influences of eremiticism and monastic life. A debate among censors, members of the Order of Preachers, who, in the climate of eighteenth-century erudition, questioned the procedures of ecclesiastical scrutiny over texts, before the Church's battle against the Enlightenment pushed them toward positions of rigid resistance to the century's novelties. These are the figures and themes brought to the forefront in the research collected in this volume, which delves into a phase of the history of orders and congregations spanning from the religious crisis of the sixteenth century to the rise, after the mid-eighteenth-century turning point, of state jurisdictional policies. During this pivotal period, the "regular republics," subjected to closer oversight by the popes, saw their privileges and roles within the structures of the Roman Church confirmed, while simultaneously—amid recurring conflicts—strengthening their integration into society and the cultural organization of the Italian states. The reconstruction of a series of events and experiences related to individuals, groups, and individual orders allows us to focus on some crucial developments that marked the final season of the extensive presence of the conventual and monastic network in the political spaces of the peninsula, contributing to the distinctive characteristics of Italian Catholicism.

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