• DOI:10.14315/arg-2009-100-1-193
• Corpus ID: 201096496

The Age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Italian Historiography, 1939–2009

@inproceedings{SeidelMenchi2009TheAO,
  title={The Age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Italian Historiography, 1939–2009},
  author={Silvana Seidel Menchi},
  year={2009}
}

• Silvana Seidel Menchi
• Published 2009
• History

The field known in Italian universities as “Età della Riforma e della Controriforma” [the Age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation] is a history of heretics. Heretics of this period exercised an attraction on historians far out of proportion to their numbers or influence in early modern Italian society. Despite – or perhaps because of – this, over the past seventy years, from 1939 to 2009, the history of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation has moved from the periphery of scholarly attention to the center, from a situation of few and dispersed sources to one of abundant sources, and from methodological unity to a state of permanent methodological experimentation and renewal.1 The seminal work in this field, Delio Cantimori’s 1939 Eretici italiani del Cinquecento, sought to insert Italy into the wider panorama of the European Reformation, while giving it its own particular identity.2 But which Italy was the object of Cantimori’s inquiries? And which Reformation? Italian heretics and the history of the Italian Reformation were already the subject of weighty volumes, not only by Italian scholars;3 the biographies of Italian adherents of reform movements continued in that decade and those that followed to be the subject of careful reconstructions (often ending with condemnation by the Inquisition or exile).4 Cantimori’s goal, however, was at once narrower and more ambitious. His book depicted a diverse panorama of “heretical” Italy teeming