Italian Cardinals, Reform, and the Church as Property, 1492-1563

"In the heart of her book Hallman performs an amazing feat: patiently tracing the acquisition, trading, subdividing, leasing, and renting of pieces of property that also happened in most cases to carry with them the cure of souls. She does so without losing the reader in a mass of detail by combining quantitative generalizations with examination of aptly chosen individual cases. . . . In short, she demonstrates that the sixteenth-century Italian Church, to alter slightly the epithet used by Ginzburg's Menocchio, was increasingly "a prelates' business."   This is a very important book. Not only will it serve those scholars in various disciplines who wich to trace the patronage networks of individual Italian cardinals. As I have indicated, it will also stimulate those interested in reformulating existing paradigms and periodization schemes in early modern European history."   --Anne Jacobson Schutte, Lawrence University, in Renaissance Quarterly, Volume 40, Number 2, Summer, 1987.


"In the heart of her book Hallman performs an amazing feat: patiently tracing the acquisition, trading, subdividing, leasing, and renting of pieces of property that also happened in most cases to carry with them the cure of souls. She does so without losi

Barbara McClung Hallman attended Wellesley College, Cal State Los Angeles and University of California, Los Angeles, where in 1974 she received a PhD for her research in Italian Renaissance History. Dr. Hallman was a history professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo for over 20 years.