Vittore Soranzo, vescovo ed eretico: Riforma della chiesa e inquisizione nell'Italia del Cinquecento

Abstract

Massimo Firpo, professor of history at the University of Turin, is well known and justly acclaimed for discovering and publishing the documents of three of the most important Roman Inquisition trials of the sixteenth century: that of Cardinal Giovanni Moroni (co-edited with Dario Marcatto, 6 vols., Rome, 1981–1995: rev. ante, xcix [1984], 877; cii [1987], 479–80; ciii [1988], 728; and cv [1990], 1021–2), of Pietro Carnesecchi (again co-edited with Marcatto, 2 vols., Vatican City, 1998–2000), and of Vittore Soranzo (co-edited with Sergio Pagano, 2 vols., Vatican City, 2004). In his new publication he presents a narrative history of Soranzo. In addition, Firpo sees this study as the culmination of thirty years of research into the influence of, and reaction against, Juan de Valdés and the spirituali in the middle years of the sixteenth century. Vittore di Alvise Soranzo, the son of a Venetian noble, was born about 1500. He may have studied at the University of Padua but there is no evidence of a degree. He devoted himself to letters, became a clergyman (while fathering two sons), and secretary to Cardinal Pietro Bembo, who obtained benefices for him. In Rome and Naples in the 1530s Soranzo came under the influence of Juan de Valdés, who taught an interior Christianity which did not reject Catholicism outright but leaned strongly toward Luther's justification by faith alone. Firpo offers much detail concerning Soranzo's contacts with the spirituali of the Viterbo circle, including Cardinal Reginald Pole, Pietro Carnesecchi, and Marcantonio Flaminio, in the 1530s and 1540s. Soranzo became increasingly Protestant in his views. He read Luther's works and called him ‘my father’. Soranzo held, or at least viewed favourably, such Lutheran positions as justification by faith, consubstantiation, and communion under both species. Thanks to the influence of Bembo, Soranzo was made Bembo's coadjutor bishop of Bergamo with the right of succession. He moved there in 1544 and began a programme of clerical and lay reform. When Bembo died in 1547, Soranzo became bishop of Bergamo.