La «Cetra delle divine lodi» del p. Gregorio Ferrari (1639)

The subject of the study is a devotional miscellany published in Milan in 1639 as the work of a “devout religious”, but which can be attributed with certainty to the authorship of the Jesuit Gregorio Ferrari (1580-1659), a figure at the center of the religious ferments of the city’s community, whose commitment to the spiritual direction of nuns and lay penitents in search of perfection was already known. Based on the continuous alternation between poetic inserts and an apparatus of exegetical-edifying commentary in prose, the corpus of material offered by the Cetra delle divine lodi was intended to meet the support needs of a heterogeneous public, and found a particularly warm reception among female devotees, as is shown by significant documentation on the text’s fortunes