Giorgio Caravale, the distinguished scholar of Italian religious culture, here presents a miscellany of essays focused on religious polemics. The research offers an extension of his well-known research into the figure of Francesco Pucci, exploring aspects of Pucci’s career as well as those of his associates. Caravale acknowledges the heterogeneity of the figures in his study: “All however shared an uncommon capacity to articulate, in an effective and provocative manner, significant perspectives on the period’s religious disputes, generating some reaction (at times violent) among their interlocutors” (xix). Several underlying themes help illustrate Caravale’s approach to this diversity of thinkers.
It is helpful to begin with the social life of polemic. For the figures studied by Caravale, the decision to plunge into religious controversy was often linked to unusual personal itineraries. For instance, Ambrogio Catarino Politi abandoned a promising judicial career to join the Dominican order, and afterward, he followed an unusual program of study. Geographic mobility also played an important role in bringing together questing souls. Italian expatriates congregated in such localities as London, Paris, and Lyons. These proved to be good places for inducting people into religious disputation, especially since many Italian expatriates already had ambiguous attitudes toward the institutional churches. While Caravale does not deploy the language of network theory, it is clear that ideas and texts often traveled along the pathways constituted by social networks. Thus, Pucci’s contacts with John Dee and Edward Kelly exerted a profound influence upon his intellectual and spiritual development (chap. X). Yet, these networks were not the whole story. As one example among many: Pucci distributed copies of his major work De Christi servatoris efficacitate (1592) to several highly placed people in France, England, and the Netherlands, many of whom he did not know (207). While social networks were thus crucial for the development of polemics in the sixteenth century, they were by no means determinative – it was the obsessions of the larger culture that gave polemical writing its importance.
The fluidity of religious ideas at the height of the Renaissance constituted a profound threat to the institutional churches. One of the themes of A Suon di Polemiche is how the more freethinking Italians became alienated from not only the Catholic Church but also its Reformed and Lutheran alternatives. Several works were subject to censorship on multiple sides of the religious divide. For instance, Pucci’s De Christi servatoris efficacitate was condemned by the Calvinist François Du Jon, by the Lutheran Lukas Osiander, as well as by the Jesuit Nicolò Serario. Giacomo Acconcio’s Stratagemmi di Satana (1565) was condemned by both the Roman Church (twice) and also by the Presbyterian Westminster assembly in the 1640s. Even a professed Catholic like Politi faced intense pressure from fellow Dominicans who found his controversialist approach too creative, too distant from Aquinas, and too soft on Protestant doctrines on grace (a reminder as well of how the Catholic religious orders had their own mechanisms for policing knowledge production). In general, the effort to identify a core of Christian beliefs, focusing on key passages in the New Testament, threatened the more rigorist and completist approach of the institutional churches.
A third theme is the long legacy of Renaissance humanism. The non-doctrinaire exploration of religious ideas was deeply indebted to Erasmus and the wider tradition of the studia humanitatis. “A subtle thread unites European humanism to the theological reflection of some Italian thinkers of the late sixteenth century, from the positive conception of nature defended by Erasmus to the late-Renaissance exaltation of divine mercy, from the affirmation of free will to the assertion of a natural faith with often radical implications” (227). Among Caravale’s protagonists, the legacy of Florentine Neoplatonism emerges with special clarity, offering a profound alternative to the forms of theological inquiry that remained linked to traditional scholastic practices. The work of Italian heretics helped “sow the seeds of tolerance and religious liberty destined to flourish in the second half of the seventeenth century” (252) – though not in Italy itself. Caravale suggests that the definitive turn against Neoplatonic thought in the 1590s and the wider articulation of the censorship exerted a profound effect on Italian religious culture. Even as formidable a Catholic controversialist as Politi was a victim of the sclerosis – his writings were simply ignored by late Renaissance theologians. When Acconcio’s work saw a resurgence in the 1650s, the Protestants responded with a creative and controversial use of his Stratagemmi di Satana; in its second condemnation of the text, Rome responded with an avalanche of citations from dead theologians rather than by grappling with the text’s central arguments.
In many respects, this volume covers similar ground to Caravale’s prior research. It is deeply indebted to the scholarship of Delio Cantimori, Adriano Prosperi, Carlo Ginzburg, and Massimo Firpo. As one would expect, the conversation with Italian historiography is more sustained than with other international historiographies (though see chap. XI for an exception). Most of the primary works cited are printed controversialist texts, although Caravale also makes occasional forays into his archival finds, to good effect – notably, in the correspondence between Pucci and Thomas Bodley (chap. VIII) and a letter by Pucci recounting his relations with Dee and Kelly (chap. X). Overall, this volume exemplifies Caravale’s meticulous scholarship and will be of interest to anybody working on heterodoxy in the sixteenth century.
