On January 26, 1607, Sir Henry Wotton, the English ambassador in Venice, wrote to Giovanni Diodati, the leading personality of the Italian Protestant congregation in Geneva, and professor of Hebrew, who had recently translated the Bible into Italian:
Monsignor Paolo [Sarpi] has informed [Sir Henry] Wotton that this is the time to start any sort of secret congregation in Venice. He says it will be useful to procure from Geneva the services of a learned, modest and eloquent person, familiar with the Holy Scripture, who will stay in the house of Monsignor Paolo and Wotton, and will constantly receive direction from Monsignor Paolo regarding how to behave, and maintenance and protection if necessary from Wotton. It will be better for him to be introduced as a scholar in medicine. We thought to extract a sort of liturgy from the actual Roman missal, deductis deducendis, and to leave aside the most difficult and contested articles of our faith, without any contrasting argument, but building general orthodox foundations, from which everyone will be able to discover the arguments for salvation.Footnote 1
This enciphered communication—Wotton writes in the third person—shows the complexity of the religious panorama in Venice around the Interdict crisis.Footnote 2 Paolo Sarpi, the leading opponent of the Counter-Reformation, a sort of “Montaigne in the habit of a friar” as sometimes described by historians,Footnote 3 was the key figure in an international network of Swiss Calvinists, French Huguenots, and English Protestants. They were committed to a combination of “opening to Italians the doors of the heavenly truth” (which Diodati gave as the reason for a new translation of the Bible)Footnote 4 and the political opportunity of opening a religious front in the peninsula. Without being himself a Protestant—as a consistent historiographical debate on Sarpi's religion over last decades has demonstratedFootnote 5—Sarpi often affirmed that settling a Protestant congregation in Venice could be a useful instrument of political pressure against Rome and the Spanish power.
Particularly challenging in the letter is Ambassador Wotton's approach, probably misrepresenting reality and over-estimating the actual number of philo-protestants on the Laguna. A learned gentleman involved in Court politics and a literary friend of the poet John Donne,Footnote 6 Wotton was in contact with Italian members of Geneva's church and academy, and with leaders of the Huguenot party, in particular with the “pope of the Huguenots,” Philippe Duplessis-Mornay.Footnote 7 He was also the patron of William Bedell, the chaplain of the British Embassy in Venice and author of the Italian version of the Book of Common Prayer, later provost of Trinity College Dublin, bishop of Kilmore and Ardagh, and driving force of the Irish translation of the New Testament, and who later died during the 1641 Irish rebellion.Footnote 8 Wotton had close ties with international Calvinism, the network of “Brethren in Christ” born in the late sixteenth century that played a relevant part in seventeenth-century religious conflicts, as demonstrated by Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Pettegree, and Philip Benedict.Footnote 9 For example, Wotton would also be a strenuous supporter of the Gomarist party at the Synod of Dort in 1618, against the Arminians. But his established-Church background became a fundamental resource in the context in which he served. In need of strong support from Geneva, he soon welcomed to Venice the very same Diodati, under the false name of Giovanni Coreglia, as a sort of plenipotentiary agent of the Genevan Company of Pastors. Diodati himself would later write a long report on his travels in Italy, describing both his hopes and frustrations stemming from Sarpi's religious ambiguity.Footnote 10 While writing that letter, Wotton still believed in a renewed attempt at evangelization within the Venetian Republic, and in the opportunity to extract a liturgy from the Roman missal, focusing on salvation by grace as the only central article of faith. In assuming this attitude, he was conscious that doctrine is connected to social and political contexts, and that what really mattered were those fundamentals of faith that lead people to salvation. It was a sort of religious gradualism. Wotton supported the definition of the article of double predestination; but that was useful in Netherlands, and not in Italy. What really surprises in this correspondence—apart from the reference to a consistent group of religious dissenters in Venice—is the desire not to create trouble, but to lead people to the Protestant faith step by step, starting from a general evangelical persuasion, then to a more defined confession. In the years of so-called confessionalization, this was an unusual perspective.
This and other evidence pose problems: what remained of the Italian Reformation after the Council of Trent? What, if any, relationship existed between Italy and Protestantism during the Counter-Reformation? The usual narrative tells of the disappearance of Protestantism in Italy because of the Inquisition between 1560s–1570s, and of its rebirth during the Risorgimento, with missionary initiatives coming from America, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland in the years of Italian Unification.Footnote 11 The opening to scholars in 1999 of the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly, the Holy Office), and major investigations into pamphlets, cheap books and correspondence, reveal a different situation, in which religious and political propaganda were deeply connected.
This article presents some open questions of research in progress on Protestantism and Italy between the 1550s and 1660. The period examined starts after the peace settlements of Augsburg and Cateau-Cambrésis, and at the end of the Council of Trent; it closes after Oliver's Cromwell death, with the Treaty of the Pyrenees, and with the coronation of Louis XVI of France.
I. Themes and Sources
Since the 1930s, and after a long period of apologetic or controversial studies, the Italian Reformation has been a strong subject of investigation among Italian early modernists.Footnote 12 Delio Cantimori, the historian of early antitrinitarians and socinians, with his definition of heretics as “rebels” to every church denomination, and Federico Chabod, with his interests in the state-building process, became its two modern pioneersFootnote 13 In subsequent years, European and American historians drew closer together on the subject: while often theologian-historians were interested in the thought of personalities like Peter Martyr or Girolamo Zanchi, definitions such as “the Reformation of the exiles” became common. Between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, social issues and new methodologies involved what was finally called the study of sixteenth-century Italian religious life. Well-known historians such as Carlo Ginzburg, Adriano Prosperi, Massimo Firpo, and Gigliola Fragnito started their research journeys working on the Inquisition, and the Reformation.Footnote 14 In the meantime, new American research, led by scholars such as John Tedeschi, increasingly engaged with the subject.Footnote 15 Using different methodologies (“history from below,” editions of sources, the study of religious practices), the debate on the Italian religious crisis in sixteenth-century has finally led to some common agreements.
After decades of studies on Valdesianism (the movement of the followers of the Spanish heretic Juan de Valdés), the expression “the Italian Reformation”—instead of “the Reformation in Italy”—is now preferred. While “the Reformation in Italy” shows the influence of Lutheranism—but mostly of Calvinism—in the peninsula, “the Italian Reformation” highlights the creativity, originality, and fragility of Italian dissent. When we look at Italian history between the sack of Rome in 1527 and the final session of the Council of Trent in the early 1560s, we must point out the role of the spiritualist theology of Valdesianism, or the importance of a book-manifesto like the Beneficio di Cristo.Footnote 16 The Italian Reformation was the intersection of plural impulses of reform, in which it is difficult to establish boundaries of doctrine. It was a syncretism able to combine Luther with the knowledge of Erasmus's works, and the reformism of religious orders.Footnote 17 It had a spiritual creativity that naturally produced many paths to nicodemism. As Delio Cantimori demonstrated,Footnote 18 nicodemism was not just a way of conformity, but was an understanding of doctrine and religious practice as an adiaphoron: as something unimportant to the personal relationship with God, and not relevant to salvation. Because of its peculiar nicodemite character, the Italian Reformation was weak, and, it might be said, destined to defeat. Unlike the traditional historiography, it was not a weakness due to the lack of a sovereign able to support it. On the contrary, one should emphasize the social pluralism of these reform movements, able to involve common people, but also cardinals, a major part of Neapolitan aristocracy, many Venetian patricians, and a consistent group in the Florentine court.Footnote 19
This was a creativity that calls into question not only previous studies on religious dissent, but also those on the Catholic Reformation, rethinking the usual approaches.Footnote 20 This was a Reformation in which religious identities were progressively clarified only in the 1550s, and mostly in the 1560s. Cantimori's research reconstructed heretics’ stories from the time of their exile, not actually questioning their previous identities, or the propaganda in that period coming from abroad.Footnote 21 But while he was interested in the European intellectual legacy of the Italian anti-Trinitarians, the relationship between Italy and Reformation was not yet broken. If normally all these studies concluded during the years of the Council of Trent, then the problem is to understand how Italy was still perceived in those years as an open field for religious struggle.
In considering the experience of Italy as a defeated Reformation, instead of a Reformation that never happened, it became an unquestioned assumption that between the 1560s and the 1580s—the high watermark of heresy trials—the Reformation progressively but inexorably disappeared from the peninsula. Obviously, at the end of the period of immediate religious crisis, in the 1560s and 1570s, the attention of the Holy Office and of local bishops moved in other directions: the control of devotion, the censorship of literature, theology, the redefinition of sanctity models. The control of women, nunneries, and libraries were also a focus of interest. Often, the religious struggle became an internal struggle, between secular and regular clergy, diocesan bishops and inquisitors, with efforts toward greater internal control.
Traditional historiography proclaimed the disappearance of Protestantism from Italy, apart of course from the peculiar case of the Waldensians. There has been a long tradition of erudite studies on the Waldensian community through the centuries,Footnote 22 although these are not always connected to broader Italian social and political history. In any case, some moments have received extensive attention: the effect in Italy of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 by Louis XIV is for example well-known; John Milton's travels in Italy, and his poem in favor of Waldensians, which ensured Oliver Cromwell's support for them; and later, the pensions and donations offered to the Waldensians by William and Mary have also been documented.Footnote 23 But often this material was confined to a quite narrow context. The real historical enquiry, involving new and neglected sources, is about relations between the world of the Reformation and Italy during the actual Counter-Reformation, until the 1660s, with questions as to the religious position of Italy vis-à-vis Protestant powers, and the potential for that to change. The traditional thesis of an unequivocal tale of the Counter-Reformation Church building a new Italian proto-national identity must be reconsidered.
From the 1560s until the 1660s, international Protestantism, especially but not only international Calvinism, connected the aim of fighting the “darkness of papism” with a proper understanding of Italian political contexts. From London, Geneva, the Netherlands and other places, the “propagation of the Gospel” in Italy was a living attempt to convert Italians, or to invite those who converted to flee. That is why it is possible to use the expression “protestant propaganda” in Italy. A deliberate anachronism and a word with a negative meaning in English, it is possible to use it solely in its Latin sense: in 1622 the Roman Congregation de propaganda fide was also founded, for the propagation of the Gospel in the New World and in Asia (and also in places without a Catholic hierarchy, like the British Isles).Footnote 24 Propaganda, because it was organized by minorities conscious of the political situation. It is impossible to describe them as “Protestant missions” in Italy: first, because of the connections between Italy and the exiles communities; second, because of the relationships with political powers. The exiles built strong international networks, with powerful influences in the English Court, and in the Genevan government and church. But in many cases the propaganda was created by influential individuals, and not organized by institutions, as happened in Rome.
For these many reasons the world of the exiles must be carefully investigated. There were in fact important differences between Protestant and Catholic exiles in their relationships with mother-countries.Footnote 25 While Protestants were used to creating national congregations, such as the Italian church established in Geneva in 1552, Catholics in the initial years usually became members of previously existing local churches. Exile was also connected with the self-identity of Calvinism in particular (John Calvin's sermons on Job are the reflections of a French humanist exile in Switzerland, to give one example), and the perception of the new land as a promised land was very common. Places like Geneva became in their narratives a new Jerusalem, the free nation that opposed the Antichrist. Protestant merchants sometimes built economic empires abroad; many of those commercial contacts were held even before their conversion, but their flight was often accompanied by the movement of money to the United Provinces, Switzerland, and London, frequently via Lyon's bankers.
Even if the Council of Trent can be considered a major break in Italian history, it was in the decade of its end that a real Protestant propaganda also started to be directed toward Italy. To clarify the differences between this and the texts previously circulating in the peninsula, it is necessary to analyze Italian Calvinist pamphlet production in Geneva in the early 1560s, as a sort of case study of this research, clearly demonstrating that the advent of Counter-Reformation did not mean the end of Reformation.
II. Italians in Geneva and Their Pamphlets in 1560s
In Geneva in 1555, the publisher Jean Crespin printed an Italian edition of the New Testament. Its main purpose was the spiritual edification of the Italian exiles. Since 1552, on the initiative of Marquis Galeazzo Caracciolo, an Italian church was founded, and was soon entrusted to the pastoral care of Celso Martinengo, formerly a canon. The community has been the subject of much research, and consciousness of their historical position and relevance prompted many heirs of exiles to publish memoirs.Footnote 26 One famous memoir is the Libro degnissimo dei ricordi delle nostre famiglie, written in 1622 by Vincenzo Burlamacchi; individuals such as Pompeo Diodati, or families such as the Calandrinis also wrote down their stories, copies of which still were circulating in the nineteenth century.Footnote 27
For decades, the Italian church was the main non-French-speaking congregation in Geneva, and an eminent center of religious power, especially from the early seventeenth century. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Italian community in the town counted a permanent population of about 200 people, reaching its zenith in the 1560s, with 1,200 people. In those years a significant change happened in Geneva, the result of a rapid rise in population: the number of inhabitants grew from 13,000 people in 1542 to 20,000 in 1550, and increased even further with the outbreak of the wars of religion in France, as Huguenot refugees arrived in the city, especially in the 1560s and 1570s. Although the church gathered exiles from Piedmont, Veneto, Calabria, Sicily, and Naples, emigrants coming from Lucca soon formed the élite. While the former were often from the lower economic strata—frequently craftsmen, such as gunsmiths from Naples or Piedmontese textile workers—the others came from the educated families of merchants of Lucca. They created a compact social group whose alliances were sanctioned with marriages within a restricted circle. For generations they were aware of republican freedom, and accustomed to the world of finance and trade.Footnote 28
The year 1558 marked the turning point in the story of the Italian church of Geneva. Lattanzio Ragnoni, the less conciliatory successor of Martinengo, was commissioned to draw up a confession of faith against the religious radicals. That year was characterized by the explosive Biandrata case. Biandrata, along with Giovanni Alciati and Silvestro da Teglio revealed his anti-Trinitarian doctrine, in an affair which culminated in a stormy meeting of the Italian Consistory. The opinions given by Calvin on the subject were clear (his first clashes with Italians went back to the meeting with Sozzini in 1549). It was now evident the extent of the opposition to the Calvinist model of many among the Italian exile community in Geneva. This inclination would eventually also involve the masters; in 1563 Calvin read the French translation of Juan de Valdes's Cento e dieci divine considerazioni (One Hundred Ten Divine Considerations), and realized the spiritualist nature of Italian reformation.Footnote 29 As stated in the Register of the Italian congregation, those who “had feelings of diversity in faith” were finally expelled in 1558.Footnote 30 The result was a split among the Geneva community of Italians.
As a result, a new season of missionary activities and publications connected with the Italian church started in Geneva. Already in 1555 Gian Luigi Pascale had offered a bilingual French-Italian version of the New Testament, using the same Crespin text; in 1558 he would go among the Waldenses of Calabria as an envoy of the Reformed churches. His mission remains obscure. Surely he distributed the summary of St Paul's letters, Le dotte e pie parafrasi sopra l'epistole di san Paolo a’ Romani, Galati ed Ebrei, non mai più vedute in luce, by Cornelio Donzellini, having been the editor of their Genevan reprint in 1555, following the first edition in Lyon, in 1551. Pascale had also produced a translation of Pierre Viret, De’ fatti de’ veri successori di Giesu Christo et de' suoi apostoli, et degli apostati della chiesa papale (The Acts of True Successors of Jesus Christ and of His Apostles, and Those of the Apostates of the Papist Church), published in 1556. The purpose of these two books was the confirmation of orthodoxy, and doctrinal clarity, which would be particularly useful in the context of a multi-faceted heterodoxy such as the Calabrian-Waldensian one. Pascale was arrested in May 1559 in the village of Guardia. He was executed in 1560 in front of Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome. This story soon became a cornerstone in the hagiography of the Reformation in Italy: his martyrdom in consequence hid the actual differences between the Genevan and Waldensian communities.
Activities in Geneva in the meantime continued. Shortly afterward, in 1562, the Genevan Bible or duroniana (the printer being Francesco Durone) was published by Filippo Rustici. It included Crespin's New Testament and Antonio Brucioli's translation of the Old Testament. It should be considered that only three years earlier, in 1559, the Index of Forbidden Books promulgated by Paul IV included Brucioli's translation, although it still appeared in some new editions in Venice, as well as in Lyon, where it had been printed since 1546.Footnote 31 The Rustici Bible became the most widespread in Geneva, and among Italian expatriates, particularly from the end of the decade onward, considering that no Bible in Italian was printed in the peninsula after 1567, when an edition of Malermi's translation was reprinted last. The new Council of Trent Index (1564) left some little new hopes for Bible translations.Footnote 32 Immediately Sebastien Honorat, publisher in Lyon, printed a small edition of Massimo Theofilo's New Testament version. Just a year later, the publisher Rubio in Venice reprinted the Brucioli edition. As demonstrated by Edoardo Barbieri, Brucioli's 1560 version of the New Testament was also reprinted in small format, with a significant revision by the so-called Anonymous of Todesco (Todesco was the name of the publisher), which included substantial anti-Roman notes, made “by a learned and talented theologian” (unknown to us, and certainly not Theodore de Bèze, as the legend goesFootnote 33).
A text of devotion for the Italian community in Geneva could serve in a few years as a text prepared for religious controversy. An emblematic case is the version of the book of Psalms. In 1560, the publisher Jean Baptiste Pinereul gave to the press an anthology, the Sessanta Salmi di David, tradotti in rime volgari italiane secondo la verità del testo Hebreo, con il Cantico di Simeone e i Dieci comandamenti de la Legge; ogni cosa insieme col canto. Apart from a brief introduction, which was a translation of a commentary by Calvin, there were only a few prayers. They belonged to the Reformed tradition of domestic piety, as in the appendix of the 1542 Geneva Catechism, containing prayers for the morning, mealtimes, and evening. The same commandments were set to music, a clear demonstration of how this volume would serve for family devotion as well as for the Italian public service. But only six years later, in 1566, the printer republished the book with the same title, but now accompanied by a translation of the Catechism, some articles of faith, prayers, and the French reformed “Confession of faith.” Significantly, in 1560 and in 1566, two Italian editions of Calvin's catechisms were also printed.
It has been demonstrated that the greater part of Italian heterodox book production dates back to the 1540s. At the same time, the 1540s saw the birth and growth of Calvin's polemic against nicodemites, although at that moment aimed totally toward the French context (for example, with the Excuse à Messierus les Nicodemites, published in 1544). The break came in 1548, with the case of Francesco Spiera, who died after a long agony after having abjured the reformed faith. In 1549, the Inquisition killed Fanino Fanini; his story left a deep impression among the Italian philo-Protestant community. These two very different examples (the death of the renegade, versus the martyrdom of the faithful), would open up the possibility of new publications, which were now focused on internal debates. On the one hand Spiera's story inspired Pier Paolo Vergerio, at that moment still a bishop, to escape and to print a booklet on the horrendus casus Footnote 34; it caused also the printing of the Esortatione alli dispersi per la Italia, an encouragement to flee. This in turn prompted the publication in 1552 of Giulio da Milano's Essortatione al martirio (The Exhortation to Martyrdom), a cornerstone of Italian controversy against nicodemites, as well as the Tragedia del libero abitrio (The Tragedy of the Free Will) by Francesco Negri. Calvin himself, turning his attention from the French situation, promptly became involved. 1549 witnessed the printing in Geneva of an anthology of his writings against nicodemites, the De vitandis superstitionibus. This book was in fact reprinted in 1551 in Florence (although under a false place of publication in Basel), well known as the Nicomediana. This was the first act of religious distrust toward the court of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, by a heterodox group of Venetian refugees in Tuscany, who denounced the nicodemite subtleties of that environment.Footnote 35 A supporter of this initiative was Ludovico Domenichi, with the collaboration of the same Cornelio Donzellini.
In some ways, the early 1550s represented the loss of hope, the years of the inquisitorial repression, and the crisis of reform: this was reflected in the circulation of books focusing on comforting the suffering brethren. The Peace of Augsburg represented a significant break in this narrative.Footnote 36 If between 1550 and 1600, 45 volumes were published in Italian in Geneva, it is possible to observe a particular period of initiative and enterprise in the early 1560s. But the Peace of Augsburg marked a change in the production of texts of propaganda. The more passive role of the Empire was now clear, with its provisional religious settlement, and its decision to withdraw from the final phase of the conflict, which saw France and Spain as the only protagonists. In Geneva, the exiles were now looking for their place in the new political context. The mid-fifties was thus a time of growth and strengthening for the Italians in the city, with the creation of the church, as well as the emergence of internal conflicts, which exploded in 1558.
The contemporary political situation in the peninsula was particularly difficult, with a solution only achieved in the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. This date represents a decisive change for the production of reformed Italian texts. 1559 saw the death of Henry II of France, followed a year and a half later by his heir Francis II, opening up sectarian French conflicts. Geneva had played a decisive role in this, consistently sending pastors to France. Between 1555 and 1559, forty Huguenot churches were established in France, and a further sixty-nine were under construction. The exchange between Geneva and France was therefore constant; one result of this was the beginning of translations into Italian of books initially produced in French, and aimed at the French context of growing religious division. Publishers such as Francesco Durone, Fabio Todesco, Giovan Battista Pinerolio (Jean-Baptiste Pinereul), and Jean Girard, together with the Italian community as a whole, acted as intermediaries for the spread in the peninsula of French treatises, with a clear flavor of sectarian conflict.
In the early 1560s at least a dozen publications were printed. In particular, the three-year period 1561–1563 was especially fruitful. At that moment, the fortunes of the Protestant party in France seemed to be on the rise, beginning with the release of the Prince of Condé, and with the religious discussions at Poissy. Protestant hopes were tempered by the 1562 riots, finding a temporary agreement only at Amboise in 1563. The texts produced were targeted toward small congregations, and were useful in establishing a theological orthodoxy and uniformity of practice. In 1560 Jean Baptiste Pinereul's La forma delle orationi ecclesiastiche e il modo di amministrare i sacramenti, e di celebrare il santo matrimonio, secondo che s'usa nelle buone chiese (The Form for Ecclesiastical Prayers and the Mode of Administering the Sacraments, and Celebrating Holy Matrimony, According to the Usage of Good Churches) was printed, a further example of standardizing worship. Its 133 small pages contained the order of reformed worship for ordinary Sundays, alongside the liturgy of baptism and the Lord's Supper, as well as one for wedding celebrations, and a prayer to be made during a visit to the sick. This was not a lectionary or a text of devotion, but a small liturgy, and certainly not addressed to the pastors of the Italian community in Geneva. It was in fact followed by a Oratione privata per quelli che si trovano in cattività (Private Prayer for Those in Captivity), containing sentences like: “And be You pleased [Lord] to guide me to a good path, and to reform me in truth to be obedient to your justice”; or “Above all, make me recognise that this wretched captivity where I am under the tyranny of the Antichrist is a right punishment for not having served and worshiped You as I ought.” The faithful were invited to confess their sin: the sin of not having openly expressed their faith. In this narrative, persecution consequently had a pedagogical purpose. However, the prayer continued: “When You will be pleased to open up some doors to me, will not allow me to be lazy and negligent to come out of this damned prison, to seek the freedom and to serve your glory.” The invitation to take the opportunity to escape was clear. “Give me the grace that I can forget all my carnal commodities.” But the invitation to leave significantly followed the order of worship, intended to help a community organize itself in any case.
The French model was actually effective. Again in 1561, the Parlamento de’ protestanti del Regno di Francia, proposto da monsignor Theodoro Beza dinanzi al re di Francia et a la reina sua madre, et al re di Navarra, et a gli altri consiglieri e prelati de la Chiesa come l'huom dice (The case of French protestants, proposed to the King of France, the Queen Mother, the King of Navarre, the councillors, and to the so called Church dignitaries, by Theodore de Bèze) promptly was translated into Italian. The small booklet of 93 pages did not have any indication either of the editor, printer or the place of printing. It was a sort of instant-book: speeches Bèze gave on September 9 in Poissy were published, including some considerations by the Cardinal of Lorraine and Protestant comments. The size and anonymity of the text suggests that theological French controversy could be reused for the Italian situation. In the same year, the Huguenot “Confession of Faith,” also known as “La Rochelle Confession of Faith,” was translated into and published in Italian.Footnote 37 It had been prepared in consultation between Geneva and France, between 1557 and 1559. In 1560 it was then presented to Francis II of France, demanding the cessation of persecution. The Italian version, however, had a significant change. Without the supplication to the King, the Confession was prefaced by thirty small pages of disputation. Topics included doctrinal differences with Catholics and an account of the church in Babylonian captivity. There was also an ecclesiological debate, focusing on condemning the “lie” of apostolic succession, remarking how the true church was only possible away from Rome. The anonymous author speaks of himself and of his community as a victim of injustice, who would have preferred to keep their situation quiet, if it could have led to any results; however, his recommendation was to suffer the evil rather than react. The author's aim was not only to confirm the doctrine of his brethren, but to offer them an exposition of the true beliefs. Somehow, the Italian version of this “Confession of Faith” has a sort of rhetorical mechanism, speaking directly to heterodox Italians like a persona ficta, responding to Catholic pressure but also inviting people to resist and not necessarily to escape. For the author, there was a possibility in being Christian and in living in Babylon. Probably, it was a way to articulate an internal conflict among the Italian community, against both persecution and the religious radicals.
Not only texts related to France came out in 1561. The publisher Fabio Todesco printed in 164 pages the Breve et utile trattato della vita dell'uomo christiano, nuovamente riveduto et stampato dall'autore (Short and Useful Treatise of the Christian Life, Newly Revised and Printed by the Author). In the front page there was only a verse from Romans 12, inviting the brethren to the renewal of their minds. This was apparently a treatise on ethics, although without an examination of virtues. On the contrary, the anonymous author argued that his purpose was to show how a Christian can order his life coherently.Footnote 38 It was in fact a translation of chapter 21 of Calvin's Institutio christianae religionis. A similar operation was carried on simultaneously with the release of “The true mode of Christian peacemaking” (Il vero modo della pacificatione Christiana), also drawn from Calvin's pages and published in the same year. These two treatises were easily marketable and easily spread in the peninsula. They both in fact benefited from a translation a few years earlier.Footnote 39 During the months of the consolidation of the Italian community in Geneva, the notable humanist from Messina, Giulio Caesare Pascali, had translated into Italian Calvin's masterpiece, publishing it in 1557. It was in some ways the demonstration of the exiles’ adherence to Calvin's doctrine, and contained a dedication to Marquis Galeazzo Caracciolo. The work was certainly widespread, but was essentially done for the spiritual edification of the community. Moreover, Pascali was not new to these initiatives. In addition to producing sacred rhymes himself, in 1555 he reprinted the Olivetan Bible in French (the first commissioned by the Waldensians), with an Italian translation of Calvin's preface, entitled Come Cristo è il fine della legge (“How Christ is the purpose of the Law”). The texts published in 1561 were very different, in a small size, and not easily attributable to Calvin. Howewer, in 1561 Francesco Durone printed the Breve e risoluto trattato della cena del Signore, composto da monsignor Giovanni Calvino e tradotto nuovamente in lingua volgare italiana, which was of course Calvin's treatise on the Lord's Supper. In a little over a hundred pages, the book reminded the reader of the words of I Corinthians 11 about examining oneself before eating the bread and drinking the cup. Both in the preface and in a small page entitled Argomento (“Summary Argument”), were spelled out not only the instructions for the Lord's Supper, but also the profound differences between Catholic and Reformed doctrines.
These treaties and booklets were often anonymous. It is quite difficult to find proof of their diffusion at this moment, at least via Inquisitorial records: during the years in which the elaboration of an Index was still ongoing, bearing in mind the difference between the lists of Pope Paul IV and the Council of Trent, the focus of the Holy Office seemed to be totally on actual trials. But these pamphlets tell of the perception of the Italian situation in Geneva, among the exile community. Instead of recovering from a defeat, the first generation of expatriates cultivated a missionary vocation for Italy. It was a vocation that became embedded in the consciousness of the exile community, creating a real imagery and rhetoric, especially among the second generation of exiles (those already born in Geneva). A few years later, Niccolò Balbani, author of a biography of Marquis Caracciolo, printed a new edition of Calvin's catechism. He included, as a preface, a “Letter to Italy.” It was in some ways, now, a political overview of the country.
III. Protestant Propaganda in Italy, c. 1550–1660
Protestant propaganda addressed to Italy since the early 1560s broke inexorably its links with the Italian Reformation. One of its main purposes was in fact putting order within the Italian religious syncretism. It was not anymore a generic diffusion of Protestant texts, but a hope to intervene among Italian philo-Protestants. It was now essentially a Calvinist propaganda, with few exceptional elements. For example, in 1612 a Florentine aristocrat, Antonio Albizzi (1547–1626), converted to Lutheranism and printed in Germany his Decem principia doctrinae christianae, a summary of Christian doctrine influenced both by Melanchton and the Beneficio di Cristo. But this was rather exceptional. On the contrary, the propaganda of the late sixteenth-century was supported by the network of Italian exiles, who were able to maintain a political overview of the country. Exhortations to flee (like those of Antonio Trissino, an exile from Veneto, in the 1570s) were intertwined with encouragements to resist. Still in 1591, a pastor in Valtellina, Scipione Calandrini, introduced the Italian edition of Philippe Duplessis-Mornay's Treatise of the Church, in a new letter to Italy, proposing a coexistence of both confessions (again adopting the French model) fighting together against Anabaptists and radicals.
The start of the seventeenth century opened new perspectives. The conservatism of Paul V led to the Venetian crisis: a religious and political conflict in which the diplomats of Protestant countries played a key role. England, France, and various German princes were primary actors in this international scene; ambassadors like Henry Wotton and Dudley Carleton, dissenting friars (Sarpi, Fulgentio Micanzio), Genevan preachers and French politicians were the main characters of the Venetian drama. But, if traditional historiography tells of the debates between Sarpi and his Protestant correspondents (arguing about his religion), then it is necessary to highlight the Protestant powers’ approach, maintaining an image of Italy as a land of open religious struggle. This was also the purpose of the first translation in Italian of the Book of Common Prayer. Although never actually printed, this was the response to Wotton's request for a liturgy. It was not an attempt to introduce the English Church into Italy, but a possible way to organize the ambiguous heterodox community in the Laguna. This was a community so weak that it evaporated after the death of the King of France, even if the same Henry of France was in turn a weak supporter of the Venetian philo-Protestant cause, because of his need of legitimacy from the Pope himself. The military and political conflict was not in any case coming to an end: the Valtellina massacres of Protestants produced a new apologetic and controversial literature. The start of the Thirty Years’ War of course brought Protestant troops to Italy. But, mostly, after the Battle of White Mountain, the same anti-nicodemite polemic would be revived.Footnote 40 It is possible in this way to analyze the long-durée of the fight against nicodemites, in which religious leaders like Benedict Turrettini (professor of systematic theology in Geneva) were involved directly. Naturally, the long decades of war are fundamental to this story. As Inquisitorial records show, the Holy Office and the Cardinals Barberinis were still worried about the diffusion of Protestant books in the 1640s.Footnote 41 The reactions to the propaganda were in fact strong and constant, as a February 22, 1602 letter by Giulio Antonio Santoro, Cardinal Secretary of the Inquisition, to Cardinal Gesualdo, archbishop of Naples, shows:
[The Holy Father] commanded me to write to Your Lordship to be really vigilant about the booksellers, to check if they carry Bibles printed in Geneva, even if they falsely claim to be printed in Lyon [ . . . ], warning that in the future you must never find similar books, giving the necessary orders to avoid the serious troubles that could follow from reading the Holy Scripture corrupted by heretics.Footnote 42
It is of course quite difficult to determine the social profile of the books’ readers. As Alec Ryrie has shown about England, the importance of printed texts risks being overemphasized.Footnote 43 Often, the anti-nicodemite pamphlets referred to merchants and book sellers. Undoubtedly, the same end of the Italian religious crisis in the 1560s, with the evaporation of any real political hopes for Protestantism in Italy, eroded the social legitimacy of being an Italian heretic. It was not a time for aristocrats or patricians, but for traders with connections abroad, or for people linked to the foreign communities in Italy. In particular, the distribution of pamphlets was concentrated in ports like Leghorn, where contacts with England were constant. But the importance given by inquisitors to the book trade demonstrates its social and religious relevance. Propaganda only stopped after the Thirty Years’ War, with a new international religious situation. If Italy was still in a self-imposed Counter-Reformation isolation, the changing of the English political landscape heralded yet another new moment in Italian Protestantism. While French Protestants were now subjected to Louis XIV's repression, the English Interregnum—with its support for Italian Protestant communities—was coming to an end with the return of the king. International and Italian Protestantism now had to fight against more than the Roman Babylon.
IV. Conclusion
Looking at the Protestant propaganda in Italy between the 1560s and the 1660s is a way of reconstructing the role and perception of Italy within European Counter-Reformation religious conflicts. The consistent number of texts and pamphlets devoted to the Italian situation show how Italy remained an open question for the international Protestant community. Documents of the Inquisition demonstrate the fear that Rome had about propagandistic activity, although it is often difficult to identify the social and religious profiles of the Italian readers of these cheap books. A partial answer could come from the analysis of trials, especially those in Venice (where many records were well preserved), as Federico Barbierato has demonstrated.Footnote 44 Even with this uncertainty, this research offers also a different perspective on a minority community within Italian society. Recent studies by Miguel Gotor on sanctity and by Elena Bonora on those Catholic bishops prosecuted by the Inquisition after the Council of Trent as well as the consistent historiography on the dioceses as shown by the pastoral visits, demonstrates that far from the idea of there being a united Counter-Reformation Church marching against vices, immorality, and ignorance, the situation was instead much more complex in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.Footnote 45 Research on international networks reaffirm that the Italian border was not an Iron Curtain, but instead a porous boundary, with mutual exchanges between Italy and the exiles’ world, and vice versa. In this sense, working on the Protestant propaganda in Italy is another tile in the mosaic of political and religious perceptions of Italy, which indeed cannot be described as totally confessionalized.
The example of Sir Henry Wotton that opened this account points to the way in which the Reformation in Italy had changed by the end of the sixteenth century. It was a small movement that focused on local religious and political contexts, but was ultimately, as a tiny minority, dependent on support from abroad, and so more constrained in matters of theology and the practice of worship: this was presaged by the translations of French texts concerning practice and worship in the 1560s. The creativity of the sixteenth-century Italian heterodoxies had been left behind, in favor of more doctrinally unified initiative, better able to take advantage of and work within political systems and conflicts. In the seventeenth-century sectarian conflicts, Italy remained an open battlefield, at least from the Protestant perspective. Ultimately, hopes of further reform would be dashed in the second half of the seventeenth century, with the renewed repression of Protestants by Louis XIV, and the religious disappointments of the English Restoration, which created a new religious and political landscape in Europe, until the renewals of the nineteenth century.
