Matteo Al Kalak publishes a new and revised English edition of a book he wrote in Italian a decade ago concerning the philo-Protestant heresy that spread in the city of Modena in the middle of the sixteenth century. This new edition benefits from the progress that the scholarship has made in the intervening time, and indeed – rather than being a simple translation – much of this book is completely new.
Modena, a key city in the early modern Po valley and a coveted bishopric within the duchy of the Este family, was a lively cultural centre in the sixteenth century. In the 1520s and 1530s, intellectuals like Ludovico Castelvetro opened its Accademia to Erasmian thought and ideals of religious reforms. And it is from within that religiously tolerant milieu that Al Kalak's protagonists emerge: his work focuses its attention on the later period, i.e. on the decades from the establishment of the Roman Inquisition (in 1542) to the apex of the anti-heretical repressions of Pius v in the late 1560s. This community of dissenters – who addressed each other as ‘Brothers’ – progressively deepened in its religious radicalism, moving away from its earlier Erasmian understandings, and closer to a clear Calvinist set of beliefs.
The ‘Brothers’ organised a system of mutual help, in which the community – mostly composed of artisans, tradesmen and ordinary workers (and not a few women) – assisted the poorest and looked after each other. Many had embraced several tropes of Zwinglian theology: for example, a radical view of the priesthood of all believers and, most important, a purely commemorative function of the Lord's Supper. As with the rest of the Italian Reformation, in the 1550s and 1560s some realised that a world of individualised dissent was to be short-lived, and saw in Calvinist ecclesiology the only hope of opposition to repression, adopting a political theology that could encompass theories of both exile and resistance. Others among the ‘Brothers’, mostly influenced by the radical thinker Camillo Renato, progressed even further in their religious journey, linking themselves to the world of radical Anabaptism, and – most important – anti-Trinitarianism. To many scholars these two might appear as very separate worlds, socially, culturally and devotionally: but it was indeed in north-east Italy in the middle of the sixteenth century that the two started to intertwine, not least thanks to a radicalisation of Juan de Valdés's spiritualism, the real glue of the Italian Reformation.
Modena's ‘Brothers’ employed in their preaching and devotion some of the key texts of the Italian Reformation: not only scriptural translations in the vernacular, but also Erasmus' Enchiridion, and the always popular Il beneficio di Cristo. Most significantly, Modena was the destination of Il sommario della sacra scrittura, a Protestant text which originated in the Low Countries. Books often arrived in Modena from Venice and contributed to a life of dissent, but also to the cultural vitality of the city, despite the increasing successes of Catholic censorship.
Heresy in the city of Modena has been the subject of many studies: works by Cesare Bianco, Albano Biondi, Sergio Pagano, Susanna Peyronel and Adriano Prosperi are just some worth mentioning. Al Kalak's book builds on that body of research, but strengthens our understanding, thanks to his close archival analysis. In particular, sources from the local office of the Roman Inquisition enable the author to contribute a wealth of new detail on dissenting figures, seen of course via the lens of the Counter-Reformation's repressive apparatus. Al Kalak's attention to archival detail is second to none. Compared to the previous edition, the book offers a deeper interlinking between the dissenting community and the diocesan bishops, in particular Egidio Foscarari and Giovanni Morone, both of whom had been protagonists of religious heterodoxy in their own right. The recent monumental biography of Morone by Massimo Firpo and Germano Maifreda (Turin 2019) – the culmination of many studies by Firpo of a cardinal who had been one of the key protagonists of Italian religious reform – sets the wider field of interpretation within which Al Kalak's picture furthers our understanding of Modena's religious life. This is no small achievement, given the impalpable and fissiparous nature of Italian Protestant dissent in the sixteenth century.
