Educating the Catholic People: Religious Orders and Their Schools in Early Modern Italy (1500-1800)

In Educating the Catholic People, David Salomoni reconstructs the complex educational landscape that arose in sixteenth-century Italy and lasted until the French Revolution. Over three centuries, various religious orders, both male and female, took on the educational needs of cities and states on the Italian peninsula, renewing the traditional humanist pedagogy. Historians, however, have not attempted to produce a synthesis on this topic, focusing mainly on the pedagogical activities of the Jesuits and neglecting the contributions and innovations of other groups. This book addresses this historiographical gap, providing a new chapter in the comparative study of pre-modern education.

David Salomoni, Ph.D. (2017), University of Rome III and Université d’Avignon, is currently Post-doc researcher for the ERC Project ＂Rutter: Making the Earth Global＂ at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. He has published monographs and articles in the fields of history of education and science, history of religious orders, gender studies, social and political history of pre-modern Italy. In 2017 he was awarded the Galileo Galilei prize for young scholars by the Rotary International.