La Riforma protestante nell'Italia del Cinquecento by Salvatore Caponetto

Abstract

La Riforma protestante nellltalia del Cinquecento. By Salvatore Caponetto. (Turin: Claudiana. 1992. Pp. 526. Lire 54,000.) This welcome survey of a subject that justifiably has received increasing critical attention in both Europe and America is the culmination of a lifetime of research and writing. Happily, by no means is it the final contribution from the distinguished scholar's prolific pen. It is hard to imagine a student of the Italian Reformation better prepared than Salvatore Caponetto, an emeritus professor of history in the University of Florence, to attempt its synthesis. Caponetto's career began auspiciously, in true David and Goliath fashion, when, as a neophyte in the field, his first modestly presented investigations on the influential booklet, the Beneficio di Cristo, compelled that giant of Italian culture, Benedetto Croce, to retract in a printed letter to him a mistaken identification Croce had made previously concerning its author. Since that time, more than half a century ago, Caponetto's contributions have ranged over and shed light on multiple aspects of the Italian Reformation. He has produced full-length studies of such a key reformer as Aonio Paleario and edited one of his writings never published before; clarified the circumstances of the clandestine translations into the Italian vernacular of key works by northern reformers; investigated the progress of Reformation currents in his native Sicily and followed the fortunes of the leading proselytizers and converts to Geneva and other transalpine cities of refuge; discerned the appropriation of Lutheran and Erasmian concepts in the thought of such literary figures as Francesco Berni and Ludovico Castelvetro; and produced a massive critical edition of the Beneficio, in a splendid volume containing all its sixteenth-century versions and translations. A lifetime of research is skilly woven into the fabric of Caponetto's La Riforma protestante.The account begins with the Italian situation on the eve of the Reformation and the fertile ground into which Luther's message fell. Attention is paid to the spread of the new religious ideas through the book trade, the influence of Juan de Valdes, and the preaching activity of early Italian champions of the new ideas. The Beneficio, the most celebrated booklet of the Italian Reformation, comes in for its share of obligatory attention. Various modern interpretations of this little work, first published in 1543, have dubbed it, in turn, the quintessential expression of Valdesian spirituality, a weaving together of passages from the writings of northern reformers, and finally an expression of Benedictine-Pelagian spirituality. Much emphasis is placed on the inroads made by Protestant currents in various Italian centers from the Veneto and the Friuli in the north to Sicily in the south. The successes of Calvinism, among the Waldensians in Piedmont, at the court of the French Duchess Renee at Ferrara, and in the Republic of Lucca, which witnessed a mass exodus of its leading families to Geneva, receive separate chapters. So extensive is the diffusion that Caponetto, appropriating an old term coined by Giorgio Spini, dubs the phenomenon *The Calvinism of the Mediterranean,' stretching from Geneva and Lyons through Genoa to Naples and the martyred Waldensian colonies in Calabria and Puglia, to Sardinia and Sicily. …