Memoirs of Seventeen Boarders

Description

This volume is the critical edition of a seventeenth-century manuscript about youth and education in Italy, Memoirs of Seventeen Boarders at the College of Nobles in Parma (1670), preserved at the Biblioteca Comunale “Passerini Landi”, Piacenza. A later manuscript at the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu was part of a publication project that never went ahead in the 1820s, shortly after the papal restoration of the Society of Jesus. Memoirs of Seventeen Boarders is filled with insights into college life, seen through the eyes of the author: its operations; the Jesuit educational method; the relationship between the Jesuits and boarders, and their families; the conduct of the students, and the recorded affective and spiritual experiences of these youths. Edited by Miriam Turrini, the book includes the full transcribed text of the Memoirs in the original Italian language, with extensive annotations and a substantial Introduction in English that places the work and its author in context and traces the manuscripts’ fortunes between the Old and New Society.