In the last thirty or forty years, many a monograph has appeared – within that larger than often imagined research field that is the history of the sixteenth-century Italian Reformation – with titles such as ‘Luther and Italy’, ‘Calvin and Italy’ or even ‘Melanchthon and Italy’. In this panorama, the role of Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), Zürich’s Antistes and one of the leaders of the Swiss Reformation, has so far been somehow neglected. There comes to the rescue Federico Zuliani, currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Mainz, who offers deep and accomplished research on the impact, legacy and interaction of Zwingli’s work and thought in the Italian peninsula. Differing from the approaches of some of those other books, Zuliani’s research does not offer a simple story of a ‘north to south’ movement of ideas, books and middlemen, but identifies in Zwinglianism one of the crucial ferments within Italy’s multiform early Reformation. Zwingli’s ideas were, yes, imported, but also re-elaborated, mixed up with others, and ultimately employed eclectically by dissenters and Catholic polemicists alike. It is easy to rush to Calvin and Calvinism when we give an account of the Swiss Reformation, perhaps simply focusing in passing on Zwingli’s controversy over the nature of the eucharist (a risk that Bruce Gordon’s excellent biography should caution us against). Within the Italian Reformation the existence of a ‘Zwinglian moment’ has been neglected too, in favour either of more Radical or straightly Reformed beliefs. It is worth perhaps noting that Zwingli had spent some significant time in Italy as the chaplain of Swiss mercenaries, not least at the famous battle of Marignano (13–14 September 1515), which was an actual turning point in the biography of the reformer. But in considering the ‘Prima Riforma’ across Italy – the ‘Early Reformation’ of the 1520s and 1530s – Zuliani shows not only the extent to which Zwingli’s work circulated, but how it became a crucial factor in the elaboration of original belief and theological repositioning of key figures, not least of people like Peter Martyr Vermigli.

It is difficult to summarise the developments of Italian religious dissent in the early decades of the sixteenth century without some crude simplification, but it is perhaps helpful to attempt to do so if we want to understand what role Zwingli’s thought played in it. Building on earlier legacies of Savonarolism, prophetism and anticlericalism, several heterodox currents started to reverberate south of the Alps in the 1520s: there were echoes of the French ‘proto-Reform’ (as studied by Guillaume Alonge), an irenic and potentially disruptive Erasmianism (as outlined by Silvana Seidel Menchi), as well as the circulation of Luther’s actual writings. Separately, a more impalpable but pivotal Spanish influence (the alumbrado tradition) reached Naples, forming what would become one of the connective tissues of the Italian Reformation, Valdesianism (as in the followers of Juan de Valdés), as amply demonstrated by Massimo Firpo. In all this, Zwingli’s thought – often mediated by the work of Basel’s Johannes Oecolampadius – contributed in a two-fold way. Firstly, at an earlier stage, in radicalising those who had been sensitive to Erasmus’ approach to Scripture: meeting up informally, breaking bread and sharing the chalice ‘the Swiss way’, as a simple memorial, signified an early, visible break from Rome. But, secondly, such Zwinglian tradition helped in transitioning dissenters towards either exile or a Calvinism that – in the second half of the century – appeared to many as the only politically sensible religious outcome among those who did not want to conform. What was radical in the 1520s became in some respects moderate in the 1540s, when others were looking at Anabaptism and anti-Trinitarism.

Zuliani, who has an unrivalled knowledge of Italophone Protestantism in the Grisons and the Ticino, outlines with competence and precision an Italian ‘Zwinglian moment’ reconstructed with philological attention, not least discovering a series of characters previously ignored by scholars. Sometimes, the writing goes down some rabbit-holes of erudition, and it is hard to find a sentence shorter than five or six lines in any page. But this is a book that will have a lasting impact within this scholarship, and is a major contribution in describing a new piece in that varied mosaic that is the religion of Italians in the age of the Reformations.