DUSINA, New perspectives on the Apostolic Visitation to Malta, 1574–75

Description

Few documents have shaped the writing of Maltese history as decisively as the report of the apostolic visitation carried out by Monsignor Pietro Dusina in 1574–75. Sent by Pope Gregory XIII as apostolic visitor and inquisitor a decade after the close of the Council of Trent, Dusina travelled across Malta and Gozo inspecting parishes, chapels, confraternities, religious institutions and ecclesiastical administration, interrogating the clergy, examining liturgical books and church furnishings, and hearing the petitions of the local communities. The record he compiled captures the Maltese Church at a moment of transition, when medieval traditions still stood alongside the first demands of Tridentine reform, and it has served generations of historians as the foundation for the study of sixteenth-century Malta. This volume returns to the visitation with new questions. Its eighteen essays ask not only what Dusina recorded but how his report was produced, whose voices it preserves and whose it obscures, and how it came to shape Malta’s historical memory. Reform emerges here not simply as a programme imposed from Rome but as a negotiation between universal norms and local realities, in which parish priests, confraternities, village communities, religious women, and lay patrons all had a part. Together the essays reveal the visitation not as a fixed inventory but as a living source for the religious and cultural history of Malta and the wider Mediterranean.