Ronald K. Delph - Heresy, Culture, and Religion in Early Modern Italy

Early modern Italian history has emerged as a major field of study over the last few decades. Only thirty years ago, a famous scholar called the era that fell between the Renaissance and the Risorgimento the forgotten centuries. Today, by contrast, early modern Italy has become the focus of intense study in numerous fields: art history, the history of science, the history of the state, intellectual history, and, not least of all, the history of Christianity.

This volume is concerned with struggles within the dominant religious culture of Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In preparing this anthology, we became acutely aware that the traditional framework of Reformation and Counter-Reformationor of innovation and repressionwithin which many scholars had previously approached this period, was no longer adequate. To be sure, few historians have ever doubted that in this period Italy was full of intellectual and cultural energy; but the Roman Catholic Church established the Inquisition, placed suspicious or possibly subversive texts on an Index of Prohibited Books, burned Giordano Bruno in Rome in 1600, and confined the eloquent court astronomer Galileo to house arrest in 1633 for having maintained too forcefully that the earth was not, as many then taught, at the center of the universe, but rather a moving planet that revolved around the sun. Whatever intellectual energies there were in Italy in this period, therefore, were harshly repressed; and France, Holland, and England emerged as the most dynamic cultures in Europe at this time.

The counterpoint between reason and reform on the one hand and repression and intolerance on the other makes for a seductively appealing story, but, as the contributions in this anthology make clear, new research has challenged this perspective. The early modern men and women who appeared to be at odds with one another were often close friends; ideas that were heterodox at one period were considered entirely orthodox at another; institutions that seemed repressive were at times centers of mediation and compromise; and, perhaps most important, the reforms in religion in this period must now be seen in a larger context of social upheaval and vast cultural changes on a variety of fronts: educational, artistic, scientific, and literary. In short, it now no longer seems possible to view the history of Italy in this period as one in which social forces or religious parties were clearly defined.

The essays in this volume represent these new perspectives. The contributors include two generations of Italian and American scholars. And, while there is no [xii] new consensus that emerges from the works published here, we emerge from this project more convinced than ever that each particular reform movement in Italyboth from the perspective of the reformers and from the perspective of those who sought to either repress them or find other ways to bring them back into the mainstream of Italian pietymust be understood within particular social and political contexts. It is our hope, finally, that this new perspective will serve as a guide to the future studies of religion and cultural change in early modern Italy.

We put this anthology together in the age of e-mail and conference calls. In this high-speed world of instant communication, we have nonetheless had a bit of time to reflect on the fact that, despite profound differences from the religious and scholarly world that existed in Italy many centuries ago, we have much in common with the persons we study. Like sixteenth-century humanists, reformers, and church officials, we too are merely trying our best to make sense of the past and, through the study of the past, to make better sense of the world in which we live. It has been a pleasure for us to deepen our friendships while putting this book together, but each of us is also mindful that we have done this not in isolation from life but in the midst of it. One of us, after careful thought and deliberation, made a major change of emphasis in priorities, moving from the large lecture hall of the university to the smaller classroom of a private secondary school; the other two have felt the strain of trying to explain to their young children that they were busy, of all things, working on the sixteenth century. For all our friends and family who have been supportive of this enterprise, we are extremely grateful. And we offer a special note of appreciation to T. C. Price Zimmermann for his help with the translation of Paolo Simoncellis essay.