Leading scholars from Italy and the United States offer a fresh and nuanced image of the religious reform movements on the Italian peninsula in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. United in their conviction that religious ideas can only be fully understood in relation to the particular social, cultural, and political contexts in which they develop, these scholars explore a wide range of protagonists from popes, bishops, and inquisitors to humanists and merchants, to artists, jewelers, and nuns. What emerges is a story of negotiations, mediations, compromises, and of shifting boundaries between heresy and orthodoxy. This book is essential reading for all students of the history of Christianity in early modern Europe.

How could early modern Venice, a city renowned for its political freedom and social harmony, also have become a center of religious dissent and inquisitorial repression? To answer this question, John Martin develops an innovative approach that deftly connects social and cultural history. The result is a profoundly important contribution to Renaissance and Reformation studies. Martin offers a vivid re-creation of the social and cultural worlds of the Venetian heretics—those men and women who articulated their hopes for religious and political reform and whose ideologies ranged from evangelical to anabaptist and even millenarian positions. In exploring the connections between religious beliefs and social experience, he weaves a rich tapestry of Renaissance urban life that is sure to intrigue all those involved in anthropological, religious, and historical studies—students and scholars alike.

This book covers one of the most controversial subjects in Italian historiography, namely the success or failure of the Church's policy during the counter-Reformation to exert rigorous control not only over theology but over all branches of knowledge. By drawing extensively upon newly-opened sources in the archive of the former Congregation of the Holy Office, generally known as the "Inquisition", it affords a more articulated and objective assessment of the effects of ecclesiastical censorship on religion and culture in early modern Italy.

The concept of heresy is deeply rooted in Christian European culture. The palpable increase in incidences of heresy in the Middle Ages may be said to directly relate to the Christianity's attempts to define orthodoxy and establish conformity at its centre, resulting in the sometimes forceful elimination of Christian sects. In the transition from medieval to early modern times, however, the perception of heresy underwent a profound transformation, ultimately leading to its decriminalization and the emergence of a pluralistic religious outlook. The essays in this volume offer readers a unique insight into this little-understood cultural shift. Half of the chapters investigate the manner in which the church and its attendant civil authorities defined and proscribed heresy, whilst the other half focus on the means by which early modern writers sought to supersede such definition and proscription. The result of these investigations is a multifaceted historical account of the construction and serial reconstruction of one of the key categories of European theological, juristic and political thought. The contributors explore the role of nationalism and linguistic identity in constructions of heresy, its analogies with treason and madness, the role of class and status in the responses to heresy. In doing so they provide fascinating insights into the roots of the historicization of heresy and the role of this historicization in the emergence of religious pluralism.

In the fifteenth century many authorities did not believe Inquisitors' stories of a supposed Satanic witch sect. However, the religious conflict of the sixteenth-century Reformation - especially popular movements of reform and revolt - helped to create an atmosphere in which diabolical conspiracies (which swept up religious dissidents, Jews and magicians into their nets) were believed to pose a very real threat. Fear of the Devil and his followers inspired horrific incidents of judicially-approved terror in early modern Europe, leading after 1560 to the infamous witch hunts. Bringing together the fields of Reformation and witchcraft studies, this fascinating book reveals how the early modern period's religious conflicts led to widespread confusion and uncertainty. Gary K. Waite examines in-depth how church leaders dispelled rising religious doubt by persecuting heretics, and how alleged infernal plots, and witches who confessed to making a pact with the Devil, helped the authorities to reaffirm orthodoxy. Waite argues that it was only when the authorities came to terms with pluralism that there was a corresponding decline in witch panics.

How could early modern Venice, a city renowned for its political freedom and social harmony, also have become a center of religious dissent and inquisitorial repression? To answer this question, John Martin develops an innovative approach that deftly connects social and cultural history. The result is a profoundly important contribution to Renaissance and Reformation studies. Martin offers a vivid re-creation of the social and cultural worlds of the Venetian heretics—those men and women who articulated their hopes for religious and political reform and whose ideologies ranged from evangelical to anabaptist and even millenarian positions. In exploring the connections between religious beliefs and social experience, he weaves a rich tapestry of Renaissance urban life that is sure to intrigue all those involved in anthropological, religious, and historical studies—students and scholars alike.

In this volume the author looks at the rise of a cultivated audience whose skill involved listening rather than playing or singing, in the early 17th century.

The essays within Beyond Catholicism trace the interconnections of belief, heresy, and mysticism in Italian culture from the Middle Ages to today. In particular, they explore how religious discourse has unfolded within Italian culture in the context of shifting paradigms of rationality, authority, time, good and evil, and human collectivities.

This interdisciplinary volume examines the role of sensation in the religious transformations of early modern Europe. Sensation was both central to the doctrinal disputes of the Reformation and critical in shaping new or reformed devotional practices.

In early modern Europe, ideas about nature, God, demons and occult forces were inextricably connected and much ink and blood was spilled in arguments over the characteristics and boundaries of nature and the supernatural. Seitz uses records of Inquisition witchcraft trials in Venice to uncover how individuals across society, from servants to aristocrats, understood these two fundamental categories. Others have examined this issue from the points of view of religious history, the history of science and medicine, or the history of witchcraft alone, but this work brings these sub-fields together to illuminate comprehensively the complex forces shaping early modern beliefs.