Giovanna Zanlonghi. Teatri di formazione: Actio, parola e immagine nella scena gesuitica del Sei-Settecento a Milano.

(La Citta e lo Spettacolo, 13.) Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2002. xxvi + 398 pp. + 39 b/w pls. index. 34 [euro]. ISBN: 88-343-0678-3.

On 7 June 2002 at a conference on Jesuit culture, sciences, and arts, T. Frank Kennedy, S.J. of Boston College, staged a production of Patientis Christi memoria written by Johann Staudt for the celebration of Holy Saturday in Vienna in 1685. This "drama in music" clearly intended to teach religious virtue, and its performance in twenty-first century North America still managed to convey the didactic nature of baroque theater and its relationship to pulpit oratory. The audience did not simply listen to an operetta, but came in contact with the religious rhetoric of the seventeenth century and its attempt to teach, persuade, and delight. This provides an appropriate context to evaluate Professor Giovanna Zanlonghi's contribution to the discussion of the use of Jesuit theater as a tool for the formation of its audience.

Professor Zanlonghi's thesis is clear enough: Jesuit passion for theater comes from the unified view which it gives to the spectators, allowing them to visualize the values the Jesuits desired to inculcate (13). Of course, the Jesuits were not always enamored of this or other artistic media. Their Constitutions discouraged music (no organs in their churches, no common choral office) for the sake of religious simplicity and mobility. Jesuit moralists questioned the frivolity of professional theater, and early Jesuit educators lamented school plays as distractions from the curriculum and just too much work. Nevertheless the new schoolmasters of Europe could hardly pass up such a fertile medium for communicating their message. Teatri di formazione joins the growing body of research that views Jesuit theater from the interdisciplinary approach of rhetoric, philosophy, and communication. Words, images, music, even the artwork of the stage, all combine to present a coherent message of Christian values to the viewer.

The specific scope of this work is seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Milan, more particularly the theatrical presentations staged by the Brera College to commemorate weddings, funerals, and other passages of the Spanish and Austrian ruling elite. Certainly the narrowness of the focus invites criticism of an insufficient foundation for such broad conclusions. But Professor Zanlonghi has the breadth of research to be able to locate her specific examples well within the more extensive activity of the Jesuit theatrical experience.

Teatri di formazione also bravely breaches seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Milanese history. In doing so it uncovers a significant change in Jesuit theater: with the passage of Milan from Spanish to Austrian control, the Jesuits changed their focus from staging civic events to dramatic activity more internal to the college itself. But Professor Zanlonghi takes issue with those who would label eighteenth-century Jesuit theater (and rhetoric) as stale or decadent. She concludes that Jesuit theater continued to be influenced by the cultural movements of its age. "Jesuit culture was characterized by a 'style of thought' always open to new ideas and ready to evaluate them" (356). In particular she challenges the notion that Jesuits consistently rejected and attacked both the form and content of the Enlightenment. At least some Jesuits (Tomasso Ceva, for example) entered into dialogue with the new line of thought and rhetoric espoused by Illuminists such as Ludovico Muratori. While this historical interpretation is not new to Professor Zanlonghi, her specific examples provide substantial evidence to support this claim

Professor Zanlonghi has demonstrated a remarkable command of the documentation at her disposal, belying a work made up of many years of research in the archives of Milan and Rome. Her interpretation is based on a well-refined understanding of the larger Jesuit mission of the period, so much so that she recognizes the emphasis on "composition of place" in staging as a continuation of the biblical meditations offered by St. Ignatius Loyola in the Spiritual Exercises (229). The effect is a comprehensive analysis of a unique genre of theater that serves to locate for the reader the much broader intent of Jesuit activity.

The illustrations are well-presented and serve to support the analysis and thesis of the book. While Teatri diformazione has been published in a series that focuses on various genres of Italian theater, it could well fit into a collection on the history of philosophy theology, or rhetoric. Like the Jesuit theater that she studies, Professor Zanlonghi's work shows the interdisciplinary nature that is necessary to successfully understand Jesuit culture.

MARK A. LEWIS, S.J.

Jesuit Historical Institute

Rome