Charity and Sanctity: The Ritiri of the Rosine in the Eighteenth-Century Savoyard State

Abstract

This article examines the first years of a charitable institution, the ‘Ritiro o Opera pia delle Rosine’, led by a mystic woman in the eighteenth-century Sabaudian State. Through the analysis of this particular institution, this essay focuses on the so-called ‘Opere pie’ in Savoy Piedmont, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: namely, the charitable institutions, under royal patronage and public jurisdiction, yet administrated by clerics and led by women whose sanctity was the subject of controversy, which had a key role in the politics of devotion in the baroque age.