Madonnas That Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy Since the Fifteenth Century.

Carroll's two previous books (The Cult of the Virgin Mary [1986] and Catholic Cults and Devotions[1989]) looked at various aspects of international popular Catholicism within an explanatory framework of orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis. In Madonnas That Maim he restricts his focus to Italy and, while adhering to the same perspective, he attempts to survey and explain key phenomena of popular Catholicism in a more geographically and historically restricted setting. While such a study in English is overdue and Carroll is to be applauded for attempting it, limitations of size and an over reliance on Freudianism as an explanation make his attempt more provocative than satisfying.

Carroll sets himself three interrelated tasks: to provide an English language overview of popular Catholicism in Italy; to offer English summaries of the most important Italian language works on it; and, having presented some of its distinctive features, to offer "explanations" of them. Carroll identifies three Metacults (Christ, Mary, and the Saints) as being the traditional foci of devotion in Catholicism but insists that in Italian popular Catholicism this "official order" is reversed in practice with the Saints (or one particular Saint) being seen as close and accessible, Mary in various manifestations as being powerful (in fact so ambiguously powerful as to be held at a distance), and Christ as being significantly less "popular." To support this conclusion, he cites the figures for parish, sanctuary and other dedications. While the figures are too varied over space and time to be comprehensive, there is no reason to doubt that parish dedications are predominantly to Saints and then to Mary with very few being to Christ. This is a pattern which is general in the Catholic world and far from unique to Italy. The Catholic church has always encouraged the dedication of churches to particular Saints, stressing rather the universalistic nature of devotion to Christ. The centrality of devotion to Christ in the mass and other regular ceremonies, as well as popular devotions, would indicate that a reliance on figures of dedications alone misses at least some of the point.

As opposed to church dedications to Mary (which average about 20%) sanctuaries are dedicated to Mary 87% of the time. Carroll elaborates to deduce that Mary is viewed as powerful in positive and negative ways and needs to be both worshipped and kept at a distance. The fact that there are fully 1,539 of these Marian sanctuaries would indicate that this physical distance is not as great as Carroll suggests. The existence of altars dedicated to Mary, which are ubiquitous in Catholic churches though neglected by Carroll, also raises a serious question about his argument. Carroll contends that there are more Saints and more apparitions, iconographical traditions and titles of the Madonna in Italy than in other Catholic areas which he adduces to a "tendency of the Italian Catholic mind" (66). While he does provide figures to support his numerical contention, his earlier work (1986, p. 13) indicates that the "most important" Marian shrines are distributed more widely, with France containing more than Italy. Likewise, the universal Catholic church also sponsors many different portrayals and titles of the Madonna. Even the 61 titles for the Madonna Carroll lists for the Diocese of Verona can be replicated elsewhere; the standard "Liturgy of the Madonna" which often accompanies the public recitation of the Rosary includes at least 50 such titles. Overall, what Carroll claims as unique features of Italian popular Catholicism may be different in degree from those which are found elsewhere but they do not seem to be different in kind. Carroll seems to be writing about a "tendency of the Catholic mind" which Italian conditions perhaps allow to flourish to a greater degree. The extent to which these similarities of practice stem from the preponderant influence of Italy on the wider church would be well worth exploring. His further claim that these images and titles of the Madonna represent different Madonnas rather than different aspects or appearances of the same Madonna is supported by only one comment extracted from Banfield's The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958). While an interesting contention, it would seem to be more a requirement of Carroll's theoretical perspective than the material he presents to justify it.

If Carroll's search for a distinct identity for Italian Catholicism as a whole is inconclusive, his overview of specifically Southern Italian practices seems more promising. Southern Italy offers both extreme versions of practices which are found elsewhere and some (such as Blood Miracles and "Tongue Dragging") which would appear to be unique. The two other features which Carroll links with Southern Italian "Tongue Dragging" (moving on one's knees from the threshold of the sanctuary and walking barefoot to a sanctuary) can however be found elsewhere. The reason given for the persistence of "magical" and other practices in the South is usually the ineffectiveness with which the policies of the Council of Trent were implemented due largely to the small size and poverty of southern dioceses. Carroll instead favors the argument that differences in parish organization are the key, specifically the existence of chiese ricettizie. These resemble the standard collegiate church found in other areas but with one important exception, all clergy members not only shared common ownership of property but they had to be recruited locally. These southern parishes were indeed very different from those in the North and, while Carroll perhaps relies too heavily on chiese ricettizie as an explanation for southern differences, he does the English speaking reader a service by bringing this phenomenon to their attention.

Carroll's principal arguments to explain the nature of Italian Catholicism, and especially its southern variant, lie with Freud and Melanie Klein. While he notes the role of psychological uncertainty (i.e. fear of disease and natural disasters) in promoting anxiety and thus the need for religious mechanisms to alleviate it, he believes these are insufficient. What he proposes are classic "defense mechanisms" to explain the alleged "splintering" of the concepts of Madonna and saint in Italy with Italians having a collective historic environment of uncertainty. This activates unconscious memories of the first six months of childhood when the infant makes a "good breast/bad breast" distinction and then "splinters" the image of the latter in such a way that, through processes of projection and reintrojection, "each part of the splintered object acquires a unique identity". It is this mechanism that Carroll believes causes the process of "splintering" which he claims to have detected as a unique characteristic of Italian Catholicism. As to specifically southern practices, Carroll concludes that these stem from a prevalent masochism which in turn is a result of "father-ineffective" families, machismo, and the tie between male honor and female chastity. The resulting brew leads to pervasive guilt and a desire for self-punishment. Klein's (and Carroll's) theories are contentious and of their nature must remain unprovable; their application to the practices of Italian Catholicism seems somewhat extravagant. While the idea that the Madonna and the Saints are viewed as spiritually powerful for good by most Italian Catholics and for both good and bad by some seems plausible, the ideas of Saints as "father surrogates" whose putative unity is "splintered" and Madonnas as "mother surrogates" whose unity is both "splintered" and "separated" are debatable in themselves and, as explanations for phenomena which Carroll has not satisfactorily proved to exist, seem doubly redundant.

In his analysis of southern Catholicism, Carroll is on far stronger ground. Linking southern practices with the particular socio-economic nature of traditional agrarian southern society provides a brief but possible hypothesis. His presentation of Italian language literature on popular Catholicism, though a good attempt, is restricted by its length and obviously misses a lot (Ginzburg is there but not "I Benandanti," Cipolla is there but not "Faith, Reason, and the Plague," there are no references to any material from "Quaderni Storici" etc). The centerpieces of the book, an overview of the "distinctiveness" of Italian popular Catholicism and "explanations" of its practices, would have benefitted from more depth and from a better understanding of Catholicism in a comparative perspective. Popular Catholicism is indeed a rich field for research, but attempting to force it into a rigid Freudian mold does not do justice to this richness. Carroll's work, while interesting, is unsatisfactory and his arguments remain ultimately unconvincing.

Micheal Thompson Carnegie Mellon University