Editorial: Rethinking Catholicism in Early Modern Italy

In 1925, having spent six months on the island of Capri, Walter Benjamin and Asja Lãcis published a short essay on the city of Naples in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Echoing a long tradition of travel writers and Grand Tourists, who had been both fascinated and repulsed by Italian urban life, Benjamin and Lãcis noted the city’s confusing topography and extravagant architecture, its endemic poverty, and the ubiquity of organized crime, all features that made Naples so different from the “capitals” of European modernity. They also commented on the role that Catholicism played on local customs, especially those of the “popular” classes. In particular, they seemed troubled by the effortless blending of the sacred and the profane and the power of Catholicism and its institutions to structure everyday life:

“Some years ago a priest was drawn on a cart through the streets of Naples for indecent offenses. He was followed by a crowd hurling maledictions. At a corner a wedding procession appeared. The priest stands up and makes the sign of a blessing, and the cart’s pursuers fall on their knees. So absolutely, in this city, does Catholicism strive to reassert itself in every situation. Should it disappear from the face of the earth, its last foothold would perhaps be not Rome, but Naples. Nowhere can this people live out its rich barbarism, which has its source in the heart of the city itself, more securely than in the lap of the Church. It needs Catholicism, for even its excesses are then legalized by a legend, the feast day of a martyr. Here Alfonso de Liguori was born, the saint who made the practice of the Catholic Church supple enough to accommodate the trade of the swindler and the whore, in order to control it with more or less rigorous penances in the confessional, for which he wrote a three-volume compendium. Confession alone, not the police, is a match for the self-administration of the criminal world, the camorra.”.

(Benjamin 1986, p. 163)

Despite being a sinner, the priest remains in control of the sacred. The crowd chastises him for his sexual indecency but also reveres his power, finding it deeply meaningful and submitting to his authority. Catholicism both allows illicit practices and disciplines them through the sacrament of confession. The apparent inconsistencies in Italian life that Benjamin and Lâcis observed were hardly new in the early 20th century. The unapologetic blending of the sacred and profane and the power the Church (often portrayed as corrupt and immoral) wielded over the common folk were favored tropes of foreign visitors to Italy since at least the sixteenth century (Burke 1987; Calaresu 2007). From Montaigne to Milton and Goethe, observers from north of the Alps had long pondered over Italian Catholicism and commented on its ability to shape institutions and discipline people’s minds and behaviors. Many of them—such as the English Protestant traveler Edwin Sandys, author of the Relation of the State of Religion (1605)—criticized what they considered Catholic superstitions and lamented that Latin liturgy prevented the faithful from understanding rituals, but also acknowledged that powerfully delivered sermons and beautiful and ornate Italian churches nourished authentic “reverence and devotion” (Sandys 1605).

It was in the early modern period, while confronting Luther and the Protestant Reformations, that the Catholic Church renovated itself and developed new mechanisms and institutions to shape Italian society. This Special Issue goes back to this epoch, commonly known as the “Counter Reformation”, and brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Europe, Israel, and North America to discuss new approaches and methodologies for the study of Catholicism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. In doing so, the volume also considers a methodological problem which Carlo Ginzburg and Lucette Valensi have recently re-examined, namely the relationship between the observer’s and the actor’s categories (a tension between current scholarly interests), inevitably born out of present-day concerns, and the answers historians look for in sources from a different period (Ginzburg 2013; Valensi 2012). The reader will not find a conclusive answer to this epistemological problem but rather a series of specific case studies that aim to verify what contemporary methodologies can reveal about early modern Italy. Indeed, although the past does not change, knowledge of the past is constantly evolving as we ask new questions of the sources that we study.

As is well known, the history of the transformations to Italian religious life has been a battleground for centuries, starting with Paolo Sarpi’s famous definition of Trent as the “Iliad of our age” (Ditchfield 2008; Sarpi 2011). Confessional, political, and ideological commitments have infused and shaped representations both within academia and in the broader public sphere. Historians have argued vehemently about and vacillated between competing and overlapping paradigms, often signaled by the use of specific terms to describe the period. From its coining in 1776 by the German jurist Johann Stephan Pütter, the “Counter Reformation” asserted the reactionary and forced re-Catholicization of Protestant lands and the often draconian suppression of heterodoxy in Catholic lands. Key to and perhaps most emblematic of this approach has been the role of the Roman Inquisition. In contrast, the “Catholic Reformation” first outlined by the German historian Hubert Jedin emphasized the Church’s own internal efforts to reform its institutions, theology, and the morality of the faithful (Jedin 1946; Jedin 1949–1975). In the recent decades of the 20th century, moving beyond the debate over the spiritual drivers of reform, historians such as Wolfgang Reinhardt, Heinz Schilling, and Paolo Prodi turned to the paradigm of “confessionalization”, linking religion and secular politics and asserting convergences between Catholicism, Protestantism, and the rise of the modern state (Reinhard 1977; Schilling 1981; Prodi 1982). Returning anew to the “Counter Reformation”, others have warned against ignoring or de-emphasizing the repressive apparatus of the Catholic Church’s institutions and have illuminated the various mechanisms of “social discipline” that sought to condition the behaviors and mentalities of the laity (Bonora 2001; Bonora 2016; Felici 2009; Fragnito 2011; Firpo 2014; Firpo 2016). The opening of the Archive for the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, the former Holy Office of the Inquisition, in 1998 marked a turning point in historiography, enabling scholars to recover the workings of the Roman Inquisition and its wide-reaching impact on Italian spiritual, intellectual, and social life (Tedeschi 1991; Prosperi 1996; Fragnito 2001; Prosperi 2003; Black 2009; Mayer 2013; Mayer 2014; Firpo 2014; Aaron-Beller and Black 2018; Caravale 2022). Most recently, scholars have adopted the capacious and flexible yet elusive terms “early modern Catholicism” or “the World of Catholic Renewal”, seeking to emphasize the diverse early modern and globalizing features of the faith, its practitioners, and institutions (O’Malley 2002; Po-chia Hsia 1998; Bamji et al. 2013).

Today, all these terms coexist, often uneasily, and continue to shape research projects. Instead of taking sides in the never-ending controversy over how to label, research, and tell the story of religious change in early modern Italy, the goal of this Special Issue is to collect some of the most innovative recent work on the period by a new generation of scholars approaching our topic from the perspectives of diverse fields. The volume showcases the plurality of approaches used today to study the period still traditionally referred to as the “Counter Reformation”. Our aim is to bring to the fore the new research trajectories that historians, literary scholars, musicologists, and art historians are pursuing, as well as the new approaches they are employing to refashion our understanding of Catholicism in early modern Italy. Reflecting the different backgrounds of the two editors, the issue was also born out of an effort to bridge the gap between Italian and Anglophone scholarship, which often run on two parallel tracks, ignoring each other. In this respect, it is perhaps not just a coincidence that many of the conversations that led to this Special Issue began in an ideal scholarly “contact zone”, Villa I Tatti, where we were both fellows in 2015/16.

This Special Issue consists of fifteen articles arranged into three overlapping sections (Gender, Space, Mobility), and concludes with an epilogue by Stefania Tutino, which ties together the main threads of the preceding essays and situates them in the new wave of scholarship on early modern Catholicism. The first section, Gender, focuses on women’s experiences of social and religious change and the power dynamics that shaped them. Authors investigate how women navigated post-Tridentine restrictions on spiritual and intellectual pursuits (Mailes, Rolfe Prodan) and how they experienced persecution and abuse, often at the hands of celebrated Catholic authorities (Herzig, Pomara Saverino, Valente). The second section, Space, investigates how space (material and symbolic, public and private, urban and domestic) facilitated and foreclosed spiritual engagement and religious interactions between diverse groups and actors. Authors study how ecclesiastical visitors evaluated sacred images (Harper), the rise of Catholic antiquarianism (Di Manno), as well as the ways in which non-Catholic groups (Jews and Protestants) experienced space and circumvented Catholic norms (Aron-Beller, Celati, Michelson). Finally, the third section, Mobility, investigates how the boundaries between “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy” were articulated and implemented, both in Italy and across the Catholic Mediterranean. By adopting the conceptual lens of “mobility”, admittedly a term that risks imprecision, this section explores, on the one hand, the individuals and objects that challenged and defied the “frontiers of heresy” (Amato, Lavenia, Nelles) and, on the other hand, the institutions and powers that tried to police them, such as the Roman Inquisition, the Council, and the Index of Prohibited Books (Dursteler, Marcus).