Venice's Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City.

Peterson, David S.

As a commercial entrepot and publishing center, Venice stood at the intellectual crossroads of sixteenth-century Europe. By skating between diplomatic pressures emanating from Catholic Rome and the Protestant north, it also maintained a reputation for stable republican government and religious toleration at home. John Martin eloquently probes the myth of Venice - the serenissima - by examining the indigenous and evanescent communities of its "hidden enemies," the evangelicals, anabaptists, and millenarians who, from the imposition of the Venetian Inquisition in 1547, were pursued as heretics. Around a social profile of the 730 individuals denounced to the Inquisition in the ensuing forty years, he has woven together the literatures on Venetian social history, sixteenth-century Italian reform, and the Inquisition, to survey the shifting currents of reformist aspiration, religious dissent, and repression over the course of the century. Aimed at a wide academic audience, the study is also framed as an evaluation of the influence of social and cultural forces on religious conviction. By turning from older questions of Lutheran penetration of Italy and Italy's export of religious radicals, to a specific religious context, Martin challenges traditional notions of the Renaissance and Reformation.

Their social power at home and influence in Rome made Venetian aristocrats such as Gasparo Contarini the best hope of Catholic reform in the early sixteenth century. Though strongly influenced by Luther, they had already developed independently an evangelical spirituality based on Augustine, Renaissance traditions of civic charity and elements of late medieval thought that emphasized the primacy of the individual's relation to God and grace over works in the economy of salvation. But the failure of the Regensburg Colloquy in 1541, followed by the death of Contarini and the flight of other Italian reformers, dashed the hopes of moderate Catholic reform, and the creation of Inquisitions in Rome and Naples drove Italian evangelicals to shelter in Venice. There, nourished by the wide dissemination of popular evangelical literature and the preaching of Franciscans and Augustinians, evangelism acquired a popular base. A community of conventicles grew up in homes, shops, taverns and parishes, often linked by priests.

Further disillusionment came in 1547, when Venice itself cautiously embraced the Inquisition. Though republican in principle, Venice's oligarchic aristocrats had been closing their ranks and tightening their grip on society since the defeat of Agnadello in 1509; and while they mistrusted Roman interference and favored religious inclusiveness, they also regarded religious conformity as a fundamental requirement of the state. Martin acknowledges the "impressionistic" nature of the data on heresy provided by the Inquisition. Nevertheless, he demonstrates that a minority of the most disillusioned evangelicals - mostly artisans and a sprinkling of humanists - took up anabaptism, while a wider spectrum of tradesmen were drawn to Joachimite millenarianism. The Inquisition, however, concentrated on the upper orders of society - with most of the accused being evangelicals (many denounced by their wives) - shaped and here Martin discerns the emergence of three strains of evangelism by two key changes in sixteenth-century Venetian society and culture: the aristocratization and narrowing of the city's elite since Agnadello, and the partitioning of Renaissance civic religion into sharply delimited and tightly controlled spheres of sacred and profane that were central to the Counter-Reformation's "politics of the sacred." Those aristocrats who remained evangelicals kept it to themselves and condescended to others; professionals found in evangelism's elevation of the individual a means of buttressing their threatened social status; artisans found in its egalitarian and corporatist ethic a means of challenging hierarchy and aristocratic efforts to delimit the sacred. By the late 1560s, most anabaptists had removed themselves to Moravia, and after Venice's short-lived victory over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571 the millenarians discredited themselves. The demise of the evangelical community owed less to the Inquisition than to the evaporation of social tolerance that accompanied a surge of popular orthodox Catholicism precipitated by the plague of 1575-77.

Martin's balancing of social and cultural analysis is finely done, although the subject of class remains a sacrament - the "necessary, but by no means sufficient explanation for . . . religious choices" (176) - and perhaps deflected his attention from some of the Inquisition's curious sexual politics. Historians of ideas may find his summaries of leading thinkers rather general, his short-hand use of terms like "Augustinian" at times debatable, and his use of the labels "reformer," "evangelical," and "heretic" a bit random. Martin's analysis nevertheless offers considerable nuance to the notions of Renaissance and Reformation, and illustrates their interplay in the Venetian context: his assertion that they do little to illuminate it is belied by his repeated recurrence to both. It is no easy task to move to the historiographical center a society that understood well the texts of its age and was determined to remain on the margins. Venetian dissent was genuine but - to the exasperation of Protestants - dissimulating: the repression was real, but tepid for Roman tastes. The history of heresy in Venice underscores how powerfully and persistently committed this society was to achieving consensus. Martin is at his very best in evoking the small but excited milieux of Venetian heretics, and his book will evoke lively discussion in seminars on the Italian Renaissance or the Age of Reform.

DAVID S. PETERSON Newberry Library