The Tension Between Religious and Secular Ethics in School Textbooks of the Italian Habsburg Dominions from Joseph II to Political Unification

Schoolbooks are a key source for cultural history as well as for the history of teaching. This chapter focuses on the ethics taught to elementary school pupils in Lombardy under Habsburg dominion; how much this was influenced by Enlightenment models; and how the reading books used became more secularized between Joseph II’s era and Italian unification (1861). Even in Catholic Austria, the adoption of the Normal method and the state control of schools were entangled with the German Enlightened pedagogical models. During Joseph II’s reign, the textbooks by Francesco Soave (1786), a cultivated and enlightened Piarist, were approved for Lombardy. These were inspired by pedagogue and school reformer Johann Ignaz von Felbiger, and therefore of his sources of inspiration such as Rochow, Hähn, Basedow and Christian Felix Weiße, and enjoyed enormous success. A completely secularized model was offered by Little John (Giannetto, 1837), a school reading book by the Lombard school director Luigi Alessandro Parravicini, which emphasized self-help and scientific notions. This book, too, was also a bestseller after Italian unification. Analyzing these schoolbooks highlights that the Austrian re-catholicization in the post-Napoleonic era was less deep-rooted than often claimed.