Jansenism is often confused with Calvinism, and the doctrines formulated by John Calvin.
Yet nineteenth-century “Liberal Catholicism” is incomprehensible to anyone who has not studied the Jansenists. Jansenist Catholicism as Manzoni believed in and practiced, while tolerated grudgingly by some of the Church hierarchy in his day, was very likely heretical (in the strong sense of the term). But what are we to make of its author? Alessandro Manzoni turns out to have been, among other things, a self-described Jansenist. It seems difficult to square all of Colquhoun’s revelations with I promessi sposi itself, which deserves pride of place in every Catholic home.
This leads him to highlight material that many of Manzoni’s more orthodox apologists would prefer to ignore.Ĭatholic readers of Colquhoun’s biography will be taken aback by certain details: Manzoni, for all his piety and devotion to prayer, scornfully dismissed the Rosary as the “psalter of the ignorant.” His political opinions too may surprise self-consciously traditionalist Catholics. Colquhoun was not a Catholic like many of Manzoni’s twentieth-century champions he was skeptical of Christianity. There is no more readable introduction to Manzoni in English. In 1954, Colquhoun followed up his translation with Manzoni and His Times: A Biography of the Author of The Betrothed. Other, more recent versions may be more accurate but Colquhoun’s version feels and sounds like Manzoni in ways that its successors rarely do. If you cannot understand Italian, you should read Archibald Colquhoun’s stylish 1951 translation (reprinted in 2013 by Everyman’s Library). Moore)Īlessandro Manzoni’s novel I promessi sposi (usually translated into English as The Betrothed) was first published in 1827 and is celebrated as both the first modern Italian novel and one of the greatest literary works in the Catholic tradition. Alessandro Manzoni (Translated by Michael F.
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