For more than a century the dominant portrait of Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564) has been that of a man undone by his own flight. Karl Benrath christened him in 1884 the ‘Ulysses of the Italian Reformation’, and Salvatore Caponetto later recast the figure as ‘this Italian Odysseus’, consigned to a life of ‘wanderings’ (cited on p. 3). The image has proved difficult to retire. Even Michele Camaioni’s recent and largely revisionist biography, as Andrea Beth Wenz observes, echoes Roland Bainton’s 1941 study in casting Ochino’s destiny as that of the ‘heretic and fugitive’ (p. 3), and closes at the threshold of England with a reformer still hoping his years of movement were near their end, the displaced radical lingering at the edge of an account designed to overturn that very image. Against this inheritance Wenz mounts a threefold case. She recasts exile as a productive condition; she questions whether ‘heretic’ and ‘radical’ fit a figure who moved along the seam between the magisterial and radical Reformations; and she reads his entire itinerant career as evidence of how international the Reformation already was. These three claims do not stand on a level, and the relation among them governs what the book accomplishes. The productivity of exile is the proposition Wenz actually demonstrates, the engine of her chapters and the destination of her archival energy, distilled in the claim that Ochino remained an active reformer across twenty-two years of displacement ‘not in spite of his exile but largely because of it’ (p. 2). The quarrel with the labels and the larger international frame are the ends that this demonstration serves.

Wenz is most persuasive once she leaves the pulpit for the print shop. Jean Girard (d. c. 1557) of Geneva and John Day (1522–1584) of London enter the reconstruction, but the collaborator who carries it is Basle’s Pietro Perna (1519–82), who rose from colportore to printer by ferrying type and forbidden books across the Alps, and who issued Ochino’s prediche from the press that also produced Juan de Valdés’s Considerationi, Peter Martyr Vermigli’s commentaries, work by Martin Bucer (1491–1551), Erasmus’ New Testament and the writings of Sebastian Castellio (1515–63) (p. 75). That exile secured for Ochino what the Italian piazze never could – unobstructed access to the press – is the book’s most clarifying claim, and Wenz lets the reformer narrate his own migration from voice to page in the letter to Girolamo Muzio (1496–1576), where he reports that by leaving he could ‘declare the truth with hope of result’ (p. 6). The press becomes his ‘new pulpit’ (p. 6), a phrase that converts the flight into a change of instrument and recovers the years of movement as years of work.

Finer still is the reading of Anne Cooke (c. 1528–1610), whose English versions of the sermons become, in this account, calculated interventions in England’s own Reformation. The sharpest instance is her handling of the sermon on the two tribunals of God, which she cut nearly in half, excising Ochino’s account of his escape from the Inquisition and his settling in Geneva (p. 100). A translator trading on Ochino’s celebrity might have lingered over that drama. Cooke suppressed it, and Wenz reads the omission as the mark of a woman who wanted her readers schooled in the essentials of faith and undistracted by the romance of Italian exile (p. 100). The point is small yet exactly made, fixing Ochino’s reach in England more convincingly than any tally of editions could.

Much of the conceptual vocabulary, borrowed and coined alike, earns its keep, though it sorts along the same fault line that organises the book. ‘Positive exile’ (p. 49), which Wenz traces through Francesco Filelfo’s Florentine dialogue on exile and through the Exodus typology that Nicholas Terpstra finds recurring across early modern confessions, together with Liesbeth Corens’s ‘confessional mobility’ (p. 47), serves the productivity thesis, setting Ochino’s displacement within a consolatory lineage and treating his movement as an enterprise. The more consequential coinage is her own: the distinction between nicodemism and what she calls ‘covert’ expression (p. 28), by which reformed conviction is lodged inside orthodox-sounding language as a rhetorical hedge rather than the dissembling that Calvin’s term implied. That distinction works directly for the second of Wenz’s claims since it reframes the very behaviour by which Ochino has been filed among the hunted and the hidden. Its companion, the ‘divinity of the commonplace’ (p. 110), carries the same possibility to the layperson whom Ochino set out to instruct, where ordinary labour and charity performed for the love of God might quietly bear reformed meaning.

If the method that yields these gains also marks the outer limit of the book, that limit is the product of a considered choice. Concerned above all with how Ochino circulated his message, Wenz foregrounds the 1561 Catechismo over the Laberinti and the Dialogi XXX that have anchored accounts of his late radicalism. She declines to let the Zurich condemnation of 1563 – what Mark Taplin calls the ‘Ochino affair’ (p. 20) – govern the meaning of the whole exile, and she is right that reading the heterodoxy of the final years backward across the career breeds distortion. Within the bounds she sets, the portrait holds securely. What a particular reader may miss is the Ochino who unsettled the Trinity and appeared to license polygamy, the figure who scandalised his contemporaries and secured his posthumous notoriety; arriving by way of those late controversies, such a reader will register Ochino’s place at the edge of the frame and may wish the book had lingered there. This is a limitation of scope rather than a defect of argument, and it is felt selectively, by those whose questions lie precisely where Wenz has chosen not to dwell. That her case against the labels would have met its sternest test in just these late writings only fixes the boundary of the undertaking, since the recovery of two productive decades, which is what she sets out to accomplish, stands whole within it.

Wenz’s deepest quarrel is with the reflex that Simon Ditchfield named the ‘inquisitorial turn’ (p. 17), the habit of remembering the Italian Reformation through the Holy Office and so reducing its participants to the hunted and the silenced. Here the structure of the book comes fully into view, since the productivity of exile, demonstrated in the print shop and the translator’s study, is marshalled towards an end Wenz herself states plainly in her closing pages, where the effort ‘to restore agency to Ochino and his brethren’ is named as what has been ‘at the heart of this book’ (p. 141). That places the book’s weight on the second and third of her claims, and it does so on the authority of the conclusion. The international thesis supplies the horizon; Wenz advances it as a reality ‘scholars have long known to be true’ (p. 2), offering it as one more vantage on a settled point, so that the force of her intervention falls instead upon the labels, upon the demonstration that a man long filed under heresy and defeat worked, for twenty years, with conspicuous initiative. Ditchfield’s reflex she answers by exhibit, arraying the printers, booksellers and translators who acted at every turn on their own initiative and a Reformation that appears more mobile and more thoroughly international with an Italian exile at its centre. If the late and vertiginous Ochino still awaits his book, this one has attempted something harder than rehabilitation, and has largely achieved it for the years before the labyrinth, leaving the reckoning with the labyrinth itself to another hand.