This lively bibliography will draw readers into a hotly contested subject, largely because of its new ways of seeing and categorising. It is the fruit of sympathy for religion that was Italian, but not Catholic, but also for dissent, dissimulation and atheism. Italians learned from Europeans, especially from Erasmus, but rarely became deep-dyed ‘Lutherans’ or ‘Calvinists’. The range of scholarship reviewed here banishes the dusty, outdated assumptions that all Italian religious ideas came from somewhere else. In a book suffused with a spirit of scholarly cooperation and academic humility, Albertoni and Lavenia acknowledge their debt to the earlier classic, The Italian Reformation of the sixteenth century and the diffusion of Renaissance culture, compiled by John Tedeschi and James Lattis in 2000. They stress, however, that the new work is not intended as ‘an official sequel’, showing how approaches have altered in the intervening twenty-three years. Their new title reveals the changes: ‘Italian Reformation’ (no definite article and by implication much more inclusive), also ‘religious dissent’, an area of scholarship that has seen revolution in the last two decades. There is a cheering spirit of modernity, no outdated priorities, no wringing of hands about change, but instead an easy movement between printed and online works. Albertoni really makes the most of the internet, highlighting the work of younger scholars, and his approach is refreshingly polylingual. He also defends his inclusion of dictionary entries (‘some considerably more innovative than certain monographs’). The chosen categories differ in significant ways from those of Tedeschi and Lattis. ‘Counter-reformation’ appears within Inquisition studies and alongside the toleration controversy – choices which invite reflection. Albertoni notes that the process of gathering material for the greatly expanded section on ‘Men and Women’ has highlighted the bias in scholarship – twenty-two women and 570 men. This is ascribed either to a lack of contemporary sources or to ‘less interest on the part of researchers’. I think many of us would stress the latter – sometimes shamefacedly. Albertoni's wide-ranging entries for many of that intrepid twenty-two will begin the process of correction. Doubters and unbelievers, too, find significant recognition in the work's new categories, as do those who had unclear or purposely ambiguous religious convictions – all are part of this panorama. Albertoni notes ‘how misleading it can be to apply rigid confessional categories to the faithful of the sixteenth century’. Studies of radicalism have flourished in the years between this and the earlier bibliography. That topic finds its place here as a section within ‘Theological and Intellectual Currents’. More could be made, however, of important modern research, which views radicalism as a state of mind, psychological as much as cerebral or intellectual.
Good bibliographies are built on discerning choices about categories and where people fit. Albertoni has Reginald Pole simply as part of ‘Men and Women’, and not forced under dated titles like ‘counter-reformation’ or the once-favoured ‘catholic reformation’. He might have been allowed at least one foot in ‘Nicodemism’ – but that's another story. Two very long lists represent outstanding modern contributions; first, without doubt, is that of Massimo Firpo and his collaborators and second, that of the talented American researcher Thomas Mayer, who died whilst this work was in preparation. Pole, ‘the missing pope’, was an Italianate Englishman and it is encouraging to find many studies here which set him in the European world where he belonged. That greater Europe was also the backdrop for the courageous humanist, Olimpia Morata, who moved as a refugee from the Ferrara court to Bavaria, and then to Heidelberg. The excellent modern Morata studies listed here, many of them in article form, signal the turn towards the influence of women and towards the vital role of humanists in Italy's reform. The editor contextualises Il beneficio di Cristo within a section called ‘Evangelism, Valdesianism’. Thus he avoids setting that contested ‘libriccino’ in a special lonely eminence, as often happens, and as Tedeschi and Lattis did. In Albertoni's work, Il beneficio is encountered at the crossroads of theology and history, Catholicism and Protestantism, no longer the exceptional text of Italian reform, but derivative, disorganised and inconsistent like most other religious works of the period.
Vincenzo Lavenia's historiographical introduction sets the scene perfectly: his own sympathies are clear, but so is his rare understanding as he probes the kaleidoscopic debates of the last two decades, about Italian reform, the recurring religious crises and ‘the post-Cantimori shift’. His words on the complex effects of ‘the global turn’ (pp. 36–7) deserve application to reformation studies everywhere. At times, both Albertoni and Lavenia could have interspersed their comments with more caution about definition, especially of the ‘isms’ – Evangelism, Valdesianism, Radicalism, Waldensianism and Nicodemism: all these appear in the contents list and frequently thereafter. In an English language volume such tortuous words are likely to prompt fretful mutterings about examining terms. These are largely cultural and linguistic matters; they count for little beside the scholarship, wisdom and sheer enthusiasm that created such a challenging volume.
