Baptista Mantuanus

Baptista Spagnuoli Mantuanus (Italian: Battista Mantovano, English: Battista the Mantuan; also known as Johannes Baptista Spagnolo; 17 April 1447 – 20 March 1516) was an Italian Carmelite reformer, humanist, and poet.

Mantuan was born of a Spanish family that had settled in Mantua, the northern Italian city that gave him his most commonly used English name. He studied there under the humanists Giorgio Merula and Gregorio Tifernate, and subsequently at Padua under Paolo Bagelardi, who was famous for weaving the other liberal arts into his lectures on philosophy. A quarrel with his father and a mystically based sense of calling led Mantuan to enter a reformed branch of the Carmelite order in 1463. During the 1470s he studied theology and taught at the monastery of San Martino in Bologna.

First elected vicar general of his congregation of reformed Carmelites in 1483, Mantuan spent most of the decade in Rome. There he acquired the monastery of San Crisogono for his branch of the order, pleaded for Carmelite reforms before Pope Sixtus IV, and preached in a sermon before Pope Innocent VIII against corruption within the Papal Curia. In 1489 Mantuan traveled to Loreto, a town on the Adriatic coast where a shrine with the reputed house of the Virgin Mary had been put under Carmelite governance.

In 1493 he was appointed director of studies at the reformed Carmelite monastery in Mantua. There he participated in an informal academy founded by Isabella d’ Este, Marchioness of Mantua, and overseen at times by Baldassare Castiglione and other famous humanist writers and philosophers.

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