\u201cT<\/span>he most influential work of Italian spirituality in these years, the Beneficio di Cristo (published 1543, and apparently selling in tens of thousands before translation into other European languages), illustrates this continuing shapelessness\u2014it was itself a somewhat shapeless work. It was written by a Cassinese Benedictine monk Don Benedetto da Mantova, through whom it gained a characteristically Cassinese colouring of the great Fathers of the fourth- and fifth-century Greek Church like John Chrysostom (chapter 2, p. 91). It was then revised by Benedetto\u2019s friend Marcantonio Flaminio, a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Vald\u00e9s and Pole, to heighten its presentation of the spiritual and mystical themes of Valdesian theology, and it also silently incorporated substantial quotations from the 1539 edition of Calvin\u2019s Institutes!<\/p>\n