BOOK: Jessica M. DALTON, Between Popes, Inquisitors and Princes. How the First Jesuits Negotiated Religious Crisis in Early Modern Italy (Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2020). ISBN: 978-90-04-41382-5, €121.00

(Source: Brill)

ABOUT THE BOOK

Series: St Andrews Studies in Reformation History.

In Between Popes, Inquisitors and Princes Jessica Dalton uses extensive, original archival research to provide the first history of a unique and controversial papal privilege that allowed the first Jesuits to absolve heretics in sixteenth-century Italy without involving bishops or inquisitors. 

Dalton uses the story of this remarkable privilege to reconsider two central aspects of Jesuit history: their role in the Counter-Reformation and their relationship with the papacy. Dalton convincingly argues that, in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, the Jesuits were valued collaborators of popes, inquisitors and princes not for their obedience and subservience but rather because they worked with an autonomy and flexibility that allowed them convert heretics where political barriers and popular hostility hindered inquisitors and prelates.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jessica M. Dalton, Ph.D. (2018), University of St Andrews, is an historian of religion and politics in early modern Europe, particularly the role of the Catholic Church. She has published articles on the early Jesuits and the Roman Inquisition.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements 

Conventions 

Introduction 

Chapter One: The Confident Society: Mission Building 1540-1555 

Chapter Three: Between the Prince and the Pope: Pius V and the Rise of the Roman Inquisition 

Chapter Four: Bargaining for Autonomy: Challenges and Change at the Close of the Sixteenth Century 

Chapter Five: All Roads Lead to Rome: Jesuit Agents and Rebels at the Close of the Sixteenth Century (1587-1605) 

Conclusion 

Bibliography

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