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Nilanjana Goswami, Refini, Eugenio. Staging the Soul: Allegorical Drama as Spiritual Practice in Baroque Italy, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 61, Issue 1, January 2025, Pages 89–90, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqae085
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Eugenio Refini’s monograph takes a virtually unexplored corpus – the baroque ‘morality play’ in sixteenth-century Italy – and examines how its allegorical and theatrical dimensions interact to produce a theory of performativity instrumentalized by Counter-Reformist discourses for moralizing and pedagogical purposes. This erudite and wide-ranging study inhabits an especially fertile crossroads in the cultural context of Counter-Reformation Italy, intertwining discourses of baroque iconography, allegory theory, anxieties around performativity and the moralizing (and gendered) thrust of Jesuit pedagogical programmes. The monograph is centred around a case study – the obscure sixteenth-century ‘physician, philosopher, playwright’ (p. 81) Fabio Glissenti – where each of the study’s fields converge. Focusing on the theatrical trajectory of the theatrum mundi trope in two genres of Glissenti’s works – a moral and philosophical dialogue and his corpus of morality plays – Refini builds a compelling case for the moralizing deployment of allegorized entities to pedagogical ends for female orphans in the Venetian ospedale.
