Introduction

1The organizers of this conference asked me to sketch out the broad lines of the recent historiography of the French and Italian Reformations: to set the scene and mark out the terrain. My first response was to list the major publications of the participants in this gathering. This list of works grew until it greatly exceeded the wordand time-limits of this paper. Just to describe the most important books – let alone the more than 6,000 items in John Tedeschi’s bibliography of The Italian Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (2000) – is clearly impossible1. Therefore I ask my colleagues’ indulgence if I refer to themes more often than to individuals, to problems and issues rather than particular monographs. The very abundance of scholarship in this area makes such an approach essential.

2General histories of the Reformation (including mine) habitually conjure up an integrated image of a process of «Reformation». This image encompasses all the teachers and preachers, the printer-publishers, artisans, politicians and princes who turned a theological protest into a sociopolitical movement2. By those standards, the Reformation only «succeeded» in France in the sense that a strong minority community came into being in a threatening and mostly hostile environment. It defended its confession and identity in a period of terrible civil strife, gave its witness through long decades of royal hostility, and ultimately assured, through many tribulations, its eventual survival. Even a marginally friendly monarch like Henri IV would saddle the reformed church with the title of the «religion prétendue réformée» or RPR3.

3The story of the Reformation in Italy is even more problematical. It has usually been presented as a heroic but unsuccessful attempt to establish a church. The question to be answered, therefore, has been «why did it fail?» Why was it unable to achieve even the precarious level of establishment won by its French counterpart? Those who try to explain this «failure» usually begin by stressing how ambivalent were the attitudes towards aspects of the Protestant program of those who embraced «reform» with a small «r». They refer to the choice made by so many individuals in later years to avoid, via «nicodemism» or exile, a hopeless and often suicidal confrontation with authority in Italy. They normally assign some significance to the strength and tenacity of the apparatus of religious persecution, especially at certain key moments, in the critical years just after 1542 and the founding of the Roman Inquisition, after 1555 under Pope Paul IV, and after 1566 under Pope Pius V.

4Overall, both the French and the Italian experience seem «problematic» Reformations chiefly if they are compared against some sort of sociopolitical norm derived from the experiences of Swiss or Imperial free cities, German principalities or Scandinavian monarchies. There is actually no reason to treat the Germanic-language-group experience as normative and the French or Italian achievements as somehow «deficient». Nevertheless, to the extent that such sentiments have been expressed or felt, historians of each movement have tended to retreat into national specialization. Such a retreat often generates a sense of exceptionalism: a belief that the Reformation experience of each country or language-area is unique (which it is) and therefore must be incommensurable with those of other countries (which it is not). This conference offers us all a welcome opportunity to lay the putatively «exceptional» features of the French and Italian experiences of Reformation alongside each other.

5First, let us consider some of the common factors and resemblances between the experiences of Reformation in France and Italy. First, in neither country did a substantial «established» reformed church with its own polity arise before 1560. In this respect, of course, France and Italy were no different from the Low Countries or Scotland, though their destinies diverged afterwards. In both countries the boundaries between «reform» and «Reformation», between moderate Catholic «evangelism», justification by faith without schism, on one hand, and full-blown militant anti-papal Protestantism on the other, remained fluid. Interestingly, in the Romance languages there is not the clear lexical difference between «reform» and «Reformation» found in German or English. In each country the ruling hierarchy was either ambivalent, or divided, or both, in its response to the impulse for reform. In France King François I appeared to oscillate between being captivated by «Christian humanism» and appalled by «sacramentarianism», even when these ideas were expounded by virtually the same people. In Paul III’s Rome the «evangelists» who wielded such influence in the Sacred College in the 1530s were closely linked with those who faced exile or the Inquisition between the 1540s and the 1560s. In both countries, repression became sufficiently effective to ensure that (1) so-called dissimulation or «nicodemism» and (2) exile became critical choices for the endangered Protestant believer. In each country (or rather on the frontier lands between the two) a well-entrenched and tenacious dissenting medieval movement, namely Waldensianism, merged in some manner into the main stream of the reformed churches.

The earlier historiography of the subject

6The greater part of this presentation will address the historiography of these two similar but also critically different Reformation movements. A good place to begin, I suggest, is with a few words about the historical traditions of the more remote past, as these have helped to shape more modern writing on the subjects4.

7French Reformation history began with the martyrological tradition, above all Crespin’s martyrology and the Histoire Ecclésiastique of 15805. Reformation history was presented as a series of stories of individual (and occasionally collective) witness, presented with overt partisanship for the reformed cause and a more or less providentialist theology. Secondly, however, there grew up a Renaissance-inspired or politique historical tradition, closer in conception to Sleidan’s Commentaries than to the martyrologists. Leading representatives were moderate Protestants such as La Popelinière and d’Aubigné and moderate Catholics like Jacques-Auguste de Thou6. In modern times scholars of the French Renaissance have interpreted the history of French Protestantism, firstly as part of the struggle to establish «good letters» in the face of the dogmatism of the Sorbonne; and secondly as a struggle for a Renaissance culture of balance and peace in the body politic against the background of the Wars of Religion7. Thirdly, a socioeconomic historical approach, comparable to its German- and Englishspeaking equivalents, looks for the origins of the Reformation in the economic stresses and conflicts of one class against another. This argument, although as old as the work of Henri Hauser, has found some recent expression in the works of Henry Heller and others8.

8In Italy as in France, the roots of the historiography of Italian Protestantism are found in the martyrological / hagiographical tradition. The martyrologies focused on individual places and people, their testimonies, their writings (if any) and their sufferings. They suited well the diffuse and episodic nature of Italian Protestantism and the geopolitical fragmentation of the peninsula9. This tradition, along with its counterpart in the Roman Catholic «history of heresies» genre, continued through into the 19^th and indeed the 20^th century, in the works of scholars like Thomas M^cCrie10. Prosopographical in approach, spatially determined, it generally avoided broad causal explanations11. The confessional tradition finds its modern-day successors among those who read Italian reformation history for the stories of the orthodox Protestants (Mainardi, Zanchi, Lentolo) rather than the freethinkers or eretici12. Another important tradition draws on book 2 of Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Popes. Von Ranke was one of the first historians to study the conflicted internal history of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the 1530s and 1540s as the key to the evolution of Catholic doctrine. For this he used the manuscript life of Paul IV by Antonio Caracciolo (1562-1642) now in the Newberry Library in Chicago. His description of what would later be called catholic «evangelism» anticipated much that was written in the last forty years13. The successors to Ranke’s approach interpret «reform» in Italy chiefly as a struggle for the soul of the Catholic Church. Putatively «catholic» impulses for reform, initially persuasive, were progressively denigrated, marginalized and then expelled from the Church by a politically astute faction within the Curia and the hierarchy at large14. For those who are themselves Roman Catholics, there is an ecclesiopolitical point here: if Catholic doctrine emerged from political accident, then it can be reviewed. Finally, a tradition rooted in both Enlightenment and Romanticism focuses upon Italian cultural and intellectual exceptionalism. It contends that Italian instincts towards free thought and liberal religion must inevitably have burst free from the bounds of conventional Trinitarian and Christological dogmas. The most celebrated 20^th-century manifestation of this approach is of course the classic work of Delio Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento15.

Substantive themes for discussion

9For the remainder of this paper I propose very briefly to address a series of key themes in the literature on both France and Italy. The hope is that, by provoking comparison between the way in which these themes have been handled in the literature on each country’s Reformation movements, we can begin to lay out the ground for our discussions during this conference.

10A good place to begin is with the alleged «pre-reformers». An older historiography envisaged a series of impulses, both disciplinary and doctrinal, that foreshadowed the upheavals of the 16^th century. A classic work of this kind was Augustin Renaudet’s Préréforme et humanisme à Paris pendant les premières guerres d’Italie, 1494-151716. There are several problems with the concept of the «pre-reformer». First, it rests on a pessimistic estimate of the church of the late middle ages, now rejected by many if not most medievalists17. The «reforming» instinct was a constant throughout the middle ages, not a late, desperate attempt to repair centuries of decay. Secondly, to describe the moral, disciplinary or spiritual writers of the 15^th century as «pre-reformers» risks perpetuating the misapprehension that the Reformation was somehow connected with «abuses» rather than theological error, and thereby implying that figures like Gian Matteo Giberti somehow belong in the story of the Reformation. We are well rid of the term «pre-reformer», even if some of the impulses for rejecting the term came from those whose image of the medieval church is arguably too optimistic18.

11Much more substantive questions relate to the other half of Renaudet’s title, «humanism». Renaissance humanism does not suffer the semantic challenges made to «pre-reform». Indeed, it has its own substantial scholarly industries, not quite dominated by Erasmus and his devotees19. Some of the most interesting scholarship in this area (e.g. Denis Crouzet’s La genèse de la Réforme française) draws important distinctions between the humanism of Erasmus, which tried to make all the key religious questions very simple, and that of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples. In Lefèvre the questions that mattered in Christianity could not be easily answered by mere intellectual or ethical exercises20. In France as elsewhere in northern Europe, humanism formed an important preliminary stage in the biographies of many reformers, and of others who never embraced Reform fully or at all. In Italy, however, the characteristics of the Renaissance were different, and the paradox of «humanism and the Reformation» took a different form. Silvana Seidel Menchi suggests that there was very little pre-Lutheran Christian humanism in Italy, and little interest in Erasmus until the news of northern European «heresy» reached Rome. Erasmus was assimilated to Luther, rather than the reverse as in Germany and France21.

12Two crucial thinkers in the early reforming period in France and Italy respectively, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Juan de Valdés, incorporated a level of mystical thought in their complex theologies, neither of which bears reduction to the dogmatic norms later established. The studies of Denis Crouzet and others on Lefèvre and of Massimo Firpo on Valdés have both properly drawn attention to this characteristic. However, an important distinction needs to be made between a thinker like Valdés and some traditional mystics. As Massimo Firpo has pointed out, Valdés’s «path» to God by mystical enlightenment is a divine gift, rather than something that the adept struggles towards by successive stages of elevation22. Intriguingly, this approach bears at least a superficial comparison with some of the northern European reformers. The sense of dependence on the grace of God for illumination – «knowledge by grace alone» as well as «salvation by grace alone» – can easily lead to some very mystical language in the early Luther, as well as in many subsequent Pietists23. On the other hand, in Lefèvre the mystical approach could coexist with a distinctly «synergistic» approach to justification24.

13In France and Italy, Reformation began with a primitive or inchoate phase, in which reforming ideas on grace and justification fluttered around the margins of Catholic orthodoxy in the early decades of the century. While in France the followers of Lefèvre and the Meaux group show a similar ambivalence25, and the studies of Marc Venard illustrate many of the ambiguities elsewhere26, I shall here draw my examples chiefly from Italy. On this subject some of the wisest observations seem to me to have been made by Silvana Seidel Menchi. She has noted that it would make little sense to try to assess the early stages of Reformation thought according to the closely defined confessional schemes of 1560 onwards. Reformation thought was confused and polyvalent in many regions; only after «confessionalization» set in did dogmatic systems gain ascendancy27. In Italy, unlike France, the «confessional» era never came, except for those in exile. It is therefore not surprising that we find it difficult, and contemporaries found it nearly impossible, to see the wafer-thin theological distinctions that supposedly mark a Contarini, Pole, Morone or Flaminio destined to remain within the Catholic fold, from a Vermigli or an Ochino with a quite different fate28.

14The modern historiography on this subject appears to me to divide broadly into a few categories, not entirely irreconcilable with each other. First, some historians’ primary interests lie in what one might call the trajectory of liberal Catholicism: scholars in the mode of Gigliola Fragnito, Dermot Fenlon, Elisabeth Gleason or William Hudon29. For these the roots of Tridentine theology, and the potential for alternatives to it, command attention. Secondly, there are historians whose interest lies principally in the roots of Italian Protestantism of a distinctly confessional cast. Salvatore Caponetto, for one, appears to distinguish the «spirituali» from the «valdesians». The former are regarded as something between inconsistent and naïve for hoping that they might continue to hold their beliefs while staying loyal to the hierarchy and the papacy30. Here I should propose some context to a theological-historical debate that is sometimes conducted in a dangerously insular way. Philip Melanchthon, in the endless debates at the 1530 Reichstag of Augsburg, felt no need to defend justification by faith. For Melanchthon – as for many German liberal catholics studied by Athina Lexutt – justification by free grace through faith was, quite simply, the correct understanding of Catholic theology. To treat justification by faith as «catholic» was not unique to Italy31.

15Some of the most interesting recent ventures in the historiography of the early Reformations belong in the frontiers between historical bibliography and intellectual history. Books were absolutely critical to the «pre-establishment» phases of the Reformation. Reforming ideas were contained and disseminated by printed books and pamphlets. The ownership of a «heretical» book betrayed its owner’s beliefs – to an inquisitor if unfortunate, to a later historian if more lucky32. The problems raised in bibliographic description of the surviving resources are considerable. False imprints, pseudonymous texts, and unacknowledged quotations of forbidden literature abound. Here the French Religious Book project, organized by Andrew Pettegree of the University of St Andrews, promises to be an invaluable resource, building on the earlier work of scholars such as Francis Higman and J.-F. Gilmont33. Just as important is the story of the vernacular Bibles in French and Italian. There is a complex relationship between the Biblical translations of Lefèvre d’Étaples (his New Testament of 1523 and his complete Bible published by de Keyser in 1530/1534/1541) and the first French Protestant Bible, the «Waldensian» Bible of Olivétan published at Neuchâtel in 1535, extensively studied by Bernard Roussel34. The story of the Italian Bibles beginning with Antonio Brucioli’s in 1530/2 is still more intricate35.

16At this point one cannot leave bibliography without some discussion of the most critical and controversial text on the frontiers between «evangelism» and early Italian Protestantism, the Beneficio di Cristo36. While the text is well known to any of us who dabble in the history of Italy, it may be worthwhile presenting a brief summary of the debates surrounding it for those who are not specialists. The «Treatise on the Benefit of Christ Crucified» was published anonymously in Venice in 1543 and was a sudden publishing success. According to later testimony, it was written by one Benedetto da Mantova and elaborated by Marc’Antonio Flaminio, one of the circle of Reginald Pole37. This short work consists of a few brief chapters followed by some longer ones. First come succinct expositions of original sin, the threat posed by the law to sinners, and our utter dependence on Christ for our justification. Living faith (according to the long chapter 4) «unites the soul with Christ». In Chapter 5 (more briefly) the Christian is «clothed» with Christ, in the favourite metaphor of Luther, Melanchthon and Calvin. Chapter 6 offers «remedies for lack of confidence» including the doctrines of predestination and assurance38. Conspicuously, the work does not descend into polemics, nor does it address the implications of its theology for worship, the sacraments or the church. The preferred view among most Italian scholars is to say that it reflects the ideas of the circle of Juan de Valdés (d. 1541), that it is a «valdesian manifesto»39. It is generally accepted, following the work of Tommaso Bozza in the 1960s and 1970s, that Flaminio adapted the original text by inserting paraphrases of Calvin’s 1541 Institutes, though authorities differ as to whether this really altered its character40. Some 20 years ago, an Australian doctoral student at Oxford, Barry Collett, argued further that Don Benedetto’s ur-text derived not so much from the valdesian circle as from the milieu of the Cassinese Benedictine order, many of whose manuscript devotional treatises Collett had discovered in his research visits to Italy41. Where all this leaves the «emblematic» text of Italian reform remains to be determined. There seems to be a clear risk that with Valdés (as with Lefèvre in France some decades ago) the desire to justify the national particularity of the Italian reformed experience may lead some scholars to over-estimate the unique importance of its enigmatic founder-figure.

17Some important debates on both France and Italy hinge on the mentality and attitudes of those in authority. François I was long chastised for a religious policy coloured by inconsistency and expediency, alternating remarkably benign patronage of scholarly humanism with intermittent savagery towards «sacramentarianism», punctuated by sporadic and self-serving overtures to the Lutheran princes of Germany. (Similar accusations have been made against Henry VIII of England and even James V of Scotland)42. The best case for François I’s consistency, made by Robert Knecht, assumes that there was a reasonably clear distinction between harmless, scholarly Renaissance figures and reckless and destructive Protestant iconoclasts43. In fact, while one can find examples of either kind (Lefèvre and Farel, for example) the two kinds were often associates, while many others were harder to classify. In Italy, the place occupied by the doctors of the Sorbonne in Paris was filled by the so-called zelanti or intransigenti led by Gian Pietro Carafa. Carafa almost reveled in being detested by all his colleagues. He concluded early on that «evangelism» was a dirty heretical conspiracy that must be stamped out44. How far the rift between spirituali and intransigenti truly divided the whole Curia and the hierarchy against itself is a somewhat debatable point45. It seems reasonable not to try to be more clear-sighted about the politics than contemporaries were able to be.

18With the clarification of the issues at stake, the committed, confrontational Protestant believers became more easily distinguished from their Catholic «evangelical» counterparts. In France, of course, this process began sooner than elsewhere, under the stimulus of the Placards episode of 1534. While recent scholarship has revised some of the more picturesque legends about the incident46, the publication of this vehement broadside against the idolatry of the Mass clearly did mark something of a turning point. More work on Antoine Marcourt and the early reformers at Neuchâtel will probably shed further light on this movement in France47. In Italy, the process of turning the reform from a theological and spiritual to a social movement was more complex48. To recognize that Catholicism was wrong and must change was one step; to do something to make that happen was another. Vital work has been done here on the handful of cities where some sort of social movement nearly came into being in the early 1540s, at the Lucca of Piermartire Vermigli49, the Siena of Aonio Paleario and his various followers and counterparts50, the Modena of Camillo Renato and Giovanni Morone51, and centres of activity in Lombardy such as Cremona and Bergamo52.

19Comparisons between France and Italy in the late 1540s and early 1550s ought to be instructive. In both countries there was a fierce if intermittent repression by the chambre ardente and the Roman Inquisition respectively53. These mechanisms and instruments of persecution have themselves, of course, received detailed study from Elena Brambilla, Andrea del Col, William Monter, Adriano Prosperi, Pierroberto Scaramella, and others54. Yet in France this made the «Calvinist» movement enter as it were a pupal stage, from which it emerged, energetic and in astonishing numbers, after c. 1555. (The same thing was true on a smaller scale of the «privy kirks» of Scotland at the same time.) In Italy, however, the best one could hope for was to persist in the reading of books and clandestine discussions, and to escape the attention of the various inquisitions. Even in Venice, so fertile in heretical books and discussion groups as John Martin and others have demonstrated, one rarely sees more than the effort to evade or escape detection55. Archival research will undoubtedly yield over time an even more sophisticated picture of the social identities of reformed discussion groups, including the minority who were rural rather than urban, and those who were proletarian rather than middle-class; but it seems unlikely to change the overall picture of a «reforming» movement that did not bring about a reformation56.

20That point brings us to a brief discussion of «nicodemism», a term made notorious by Calvin and now long since accepted into academic currency57. Discussion of how to be reformed under a Catholic regime is older than Calvin. Oecolampadius and Bucer made important statements on this subject to the Waldenses in 1530, on realizing that these survivors of medieval dissent received the sacraments from the Catholic priesthood58. In the light of what was said earlier, however, the whole concept needs reappraisal. A «Nicodemite» believes one faith but practices another, allegedly through hypocrisy or feeble-mindedness. Yet for many people the distinction between a faithful remodeling of Catholicism and polemical or iconoclastic heresy was simply not that sharp. One person’s «evangelism» was another person’s heresy – at least for a time. In Italy, the hardening of divides and the racking up of repression clarified the issues but also made public demonstrations of faith very dangerous. In France some people tried strenuously to resist the pressure to «confessionalize»59. Philip Benedict recently made an important observation. In Lutheran lands believers were not expected to take individual risks for their faith. Communities reformed (or not) en bloc; the discontented left for a more congenial home60. It is a peculiarly «reformed» attitude to worry about concealment or exile as though in some way that implied failure. In reality, of course, much of the history of French Protestants before 1560 and Italian Protestants after c. 1545 must be the history of émigrés. Whether that elevates «refugee» Protestantism to a separate paradigm of Reformation, as Heiko Oberman claimed, is an open question61.

21Wanderings and pilgrimages, of course, could be doctrinal as well as spatial. France, clearly, had its «heretics» and dissenters from the reformed position: Étienne Dolet (long since exhaustively studied by Lucien Febvre), or the aberrant Protestantisms of Jean Morély, Jérôme Hermes Bolsec, or Moïse Amyraut62. However, among Italians (especially those who left Italy) doctrinal free-thinking was so prevalent as to appear a national norm. The epochmaking work in this subject, Delio Cantimori’s Eretici italiani del Cinquecento, deals with the orthodox Reformation in a few pages63. However, it is not clear that Cantimori himself intended the study of eretici to be synonymous and coextensive with the study of Italian reform. In recent years interesting work has appeared on those Italian exiles who remained firmly within the reformed theological mainstream. The scholarly enterprise devoted to the works of Piermartire Vermigli is now issuing much of his monumental exegetical work in English64. Other important figures such as Girolamo Zanchi and Scipione Lentolo also spoke out on the side of orthodoxy, and recent work (e.g. Mark Taplin’s The Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, c. 1540-1620) has shown that the eretici did not always have things their way65. Lentolo, a rather graceless pedagogue to the Waldenses of Piedmont, grew in the Valtelline into a skilful agitator for reformed orthodoxy, and has now received a full-dress biography by Emanuele Fiume66.

22Mention of Lentolo leads me to end this survey on a personal note, with the history of the Waldensian movements. In the later middle ages Waldenses spread across from Valence to the Dauphiné to Provence as well as the valleys of Piedmont67. Yet post-Reformation Waldensian history has been written entirely within the territory of present-day Italy. The work of Céline Borello has clarified the reasons for this asymmetry68. In the south and east of France the former Waldenses merged invisibly into the greater Protestant community. In Savoy, however, the protestants of urban Piedmont remained socially distinct from the heretics of the valleys69. Although the Chiesa Valdese would become and remain as resolutely and perfectly Calvinist as its Huguenot counterpart, its very isolation would ensure that its «Waldensian» identity survived.

Conclusion

23I have only briefly sketched out a few of the many fruitful themes of debate in these two absorbing areas of Reformation history. While looking forward with anticipation to the insights and debates of the next few days, I end with one gentle reminder, as one who has read more inquisitorial protocols than most and confronted the awful consequences of theological absolutism. It is only right that we should struggle and at times debate fervently how to interpret the religious movements of this critical era. We should also never forget that the stakes for us can never be so high as they were for those whom we study. Our disagreements will never cost us our earthly lives, and few if any expect that our eternal destinies will be affected either. The Protestants of France and Italy saw things quite differently. They were seeking correctly to discern the ultimate, essential answers to the human predicament. If they at times may appear unclear or even confused, it is beyond doubt that they cared passionately and deeply about the quest for those answers.