In this absorbing, carefully researched book, Riccarda Suitner offers a rigorous new defence of the idea that Protestantism had an important Italian history. Building afresh on the pioneering work of Aldo Stella, she tells a story of Italian heterodoxy that was distinctively Venetian, distinctly radical, yet doctrinally sophisticated and responsive to broader trends in European Reformed thought. This resulting study will be of interest to historians of early modern Italy, European mobility and the Reformation alike.

As her title suggests, Suitner’s major aim and contribution is to place Italian Anabaptism and AntiTrinitarianism within a broader European context. Ever since the publication of Delio Cantimori’s Gli eretici italiani del Cinquecento (1939), the experience of exile has been central to studies of the Reformation in Italy. But Suitner aims to move beyond a story of one-way migration away from the Italian peninsular. Instead, taking historiographical inspiration from the recent turn towards mobility studies, she traces intellectual cross-pollination between Venetian Anabaptists and their Northern and Eastern European brethren. She highlights Italian awareness of broader trends within Reformed European thought, and the mobility of individual believers. Venice and the radical Reformation reveals that it was not uncommon to travel to other centres of AntiTrinitarian heterodoxy (including the Swiss cantons, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or Moravia) before returning again to Venetian territory. ‘The borders between the Protestant and Catholic world’, Suitner summarises, ‘were not hermetically sealed’ (p. 133).

This is an impressive work of archival history, which offers a wide-ranging reassessment based on both better and lesser-known manuscript material. Like all historians of Italian hetereodoxy, Suitner must grapple with the paucity and unreliability of inquisitorial records, a task which requires imagination and caution. She rises to the challenge with measured speculation that brings her sources to life. Through close reading and careful attention to archival gaps or misunderstandings (for instance, the tendency of inquisitors to categories all forms of Protestant heterodoxy as Lutheranism), Suitner pieces together a vibrant account of the Venetian AntiTrinitarian experience. She also contends that this was a wider spread phenomenon than previously thought: Suitner estimates there to have been at least a thousand Venetian Anabaptists over the course of the sixteenth century.

The book includes a probing investigation of the evidence for the Anabaptist Council of Venice (1550). Through a reassessment of the well-known hostile deposition of Pietro Manelfi, Suitner finds new clues to the relationship between Venetian Anabaptism’s dottrina antiqua and dottrina nuova, and offers persuasive speculations on their transmission. Her precise reading of the surviving documents allows her to build a convincing case for the Venetian Anabaptists’ relative doctrinal sophistication. The concerns of Venetian Anabaptists were distinctive – indeed, innovative – but they were not developed in isolation, bearing the mark of exchanges with outside interlocutors. Believers engaged in a ‘shared debate’ on mortalism, expanded on Reformed discussion of the distinction between humans and animals and developed a particular interest in the doctrine of soul sleeping, which Suitner designates the ‘signature doctrine of Venetian Anabaptism’ (p. 186). She suggests that Calvin himself closely associated this doctrine with Italian Anabaptism, plausibly suggesting that Calvin’s polemic against the dormition of souls, Psychopannychia (1542) – a choice of subject that might otherwise seem eccentric – may owe its publication to Calvin’s experience of Italian Anabaptism during his time in Ferrara. On this account, the arguments of the Italian Anabaptists emerge as unexpectedly prominent within Reformed debate.

Suitner places admirable emphasis on both the terra firma and stato da mar, avoiding excessive focus on the Venetian metropole. She pays close attention to the social world which enabled heterodox intellectual exchange. Where did Anabaptists meet, converse and convert? Venice and the radical Reformation charts a ‘landscape of dissent’, which included prisons, galleys, gardens and woods, alongside private houses, churches, the University of Padua and the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. Drawing on a colourful array of archivally-sourced anecdotes, Suitner opens new vistas on to the street-life of Renaissance Italy.

The book also highlights the distinctive experiences of female Anabaptists. In terms of heresy convictions, women escaped relatively lightly: inquisitorial insistence that women lacked reason provided some level of immunity from prosecution. But this did not save women from the economic and social hardships that followed the conviction of their husbands, and some also found themselves instead accused of witchcraft or magic, crimes less closely associated with rationality. Inquisitorial prejudices aside, women demonstrably could play a crucial role in the development and preservation of AntiTrinitarian doctrine. Suitner cites the example of the Poor Clares of Udine, whose cloisters became an incubator in which Anabaptism survived and flourished, free from outside interference. There, the doctrine of soul sleeping retained adherents into at least the second decade of the seventeenth century.

Finally, in perhaps her most provocative intervention, Suitner addresses the relationship between the ‘radical Reformation’ and the early Enlightenment, drawing on her study of the Venetian Anabaptists to challenge what she perceives to be a ‘serious overestimation of the innovative scope of the ideas of Socinianism’ (p. 230). Socinianism, she argues, has too often been employed as an imprecise umbrella term, under which earlier, geographically diverse varieties of AntiTrinitarianism have been subsumed. Suitner stresses the clear distinction between the Venetian Anabaptists and later Socinians (she notes that the Sozzini family cut a relatively insignificant figure in the history of Italian AntiTrinitarianism), and the fact that it was not only Socinianism that inspired doctrinal creativity. Several doctrines often claimed to have originated with the Socinians, such as the rejection of hell, had precedent in Venice. Though not going as far as to trace the precise legacies of Venetian Anabaptism in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Suitner encourages scholars to think harder about the multiple possible sources for the intellectual developments of those eras. She warns us to be wary of teleological just-so stories, in which Socinians feature as the lead agents of Enlightenment and modernity: there was a richer array of precedents available in the varied iterations of the radical Reformation.