Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Early Modern History)

Myths of Renaissance Individualism John Jeffries Martin Early Modern History: Society and Culture General Editors: Rab...

Author: John Jeffries Martin

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Myths of Renaissance Individualism John Jeffries Martin

Early Modern History: Society and Culture General Editors: Rab Houston, Professor of Early Modern History, University of St Andrews, Scotland and Edward Muir, Professor of History, Northwestern University, Illinios This series encompasses all aspects of early modern international history from 1400 to c.1800. The editors seek fresh and adventurous monographs, especially those with a comparative and theoretical approach, from both new and established scholars. Titles include: Robert C. Davis CHRISTIAN SLAVES, MUSLIM MASTERS White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 Rudolf Dekker CHILDHOOD, MEMORY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN HOLLAND From the Golden Age to Romanticism Steve Hindle THE STATE AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND, 1550–1640 Craig M. Koslofsky THE REFORMATION OF THE DEAD Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700 John Jeffries Martin MYTHS OF RENAISSANCE INDIVIDUALISM A. Lynn Martin ALCOHOL, SEX AND GENDER IN LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN EUROPE Samantha A. Meigs THE REFORMATIONS IN IRELAND Tradition and Confessionalism, 1400–1690 Craig Muldrew THE ECONOMY OF OBLIGATION The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England ´ Ciosáin Niall O PRINT AND POPULAR CULTURE IN IRELAND, 1750–1850 H. Eric R. Olsen THE CALABRIAN CHARLATAN, 1598–1603 Messianic Nationalism in Early Modern Europe Thomas Max Safley MATHEUS MILLER’S MEMOIR A Merchant’s Life in the Seventeenth Century Clodagh Tait DEATH, BURIAL AND COMMEMORATION IN IRELAND, 1550–1650

John Verberckmoes LAUGHTER, JESTBOOKS AND SOCIETY IN THE SPANISH NETHERLANDS Claire Walker GENDER AND POLITICS IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE English Convents in France and the Low Countries Johannes. C. Wolfart RELIGION, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICAL CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN GERMANY Lindau, 1520–1628

Early Modern History: Society and Culture Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71194–7 (outside North American only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Myths of Renaissance Individualism John Jeffries Martin

© John Jeffries Martin 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–64308–9 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Martin, John Jeffries, 1951– Myths of Renaissance individualism/John Jeffries Martin. p. cm. – (Early modern history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–64308–9 (cloth) 1. Philosophical anthropology–History–16th century. 2. Self (Philosophy)–History–16th century. 3. Individualism–History–16th century. 4. Philosophy, Renaissance. I. Title. II. Early modern history (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm)) B780.M3M37 2004 141¢.4¢09031–dc22

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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For Dorothy

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Contents Prologue

ix

1. ‘“Individualism” – a Word Unknown to our Ancestors’

1

2. The Inquisitors’ Questions

21

3. Spiritual Journeys

41

4. A Journeymen’s Feast of Fools

62

5. Possessions

83

6. The Proffered Heart

103

7. Myths of Identity – an Essay

123

Notes

135

Bibliography

161

Acknowledgements

177

Index

181

vii


Prologue ‘Know thyself’, the ancient oracle from Apollo’s temple at Delphi, has always invited a search for self knowledge. But what the self is, or is made of, has remained a matter of debate for centuries, involving not only priests, philosophers, and psychologists but also historians, literary critics, and students of art and art history. In this book, my aim is to contribute to this debate through the exploration of the ways in which Renaissance men and women experienced and understood the relation of inwardness or interiority to the equally vast social, political, cultural, and religious worlds outside themselves. My focus is not only on how men and women in the Renaissance thought about themselves or presented themselves to others but also on the more abstract (if tacit) assumptions they held about the self – that elusive ‘thing’ that we tend to believe, correctly or not, is at the core of each of us, making ‘me’ me, ‘you’ you, and ‘that fellow over there’ that fellow over there. Frequently, when we think about these issues in our own time, we cast our discussions in psychological terms. Almost all of us, as the historian Peter Gay has observed, ‘speak Freud’ and are therefore familiar, uncannily so, with distinctions between the ‘ego’ and the ‘id’, and the ‘conscious’ and the ‘unconscious.’ Through novels, movies, and the popularization of psychology, moreover, terms and phrases such as ‘the Oedipus complex’, ‘transference’, and ‘projection’, once almost exclusively the preserve of psychoanalysis, have entered our everyday speech. At the same time we also wonder about the relation of our selves to our cells. Indeed most of us, at some point or another, have been involved in one of those heated, late-night conversations over the question of whether we are products of nature (our genetic makeup) or nurture (the particular environments in which we have been raised and live) – a debate that has grown all the more pressing with virtually daily reports of ever-more effective antidepressants and a bio-technical revolution that promises (or threatens) designer-babies, cloned soldiers, and a superabundance of gifted musicians. In such a climate our understanding of identity evolves rapidly. Until recently, our popular culture – from the novels we read and the movies we watched to the way in which we chose our lovers and our political leaders – was predicated on certain modern notions of the self as a willful, individual protagonist. By contrast, more recent representations ix

x Prologue

of identity – in works of science fiction and the cinema especially – have challenged these more traditional ideas through the figures of the replicant, the android, and the cyborg. In our day-to-day activities, we may act on the premise that the self is something well-defined, fixed, or even transcendent, but as soon as we start thinking about the self, it takes on a new shape and appears as something far more complex and contingent. We may even doubt this protean thing has any substantive reality at all. Perhaps it is not selves that make up society; perhaps societies create or ‘fashion’ selves. This book makes the case that the assumptions men and women made about identity in the European Renaissance were not only radically different from our own, but equally varied and dynamic. At least this is what I believe my research into the ways identities were constructed, experienced, and understood some four or five hundred years ago makes plain, highlighting the gulf between our vocabularies of identity (whether modern or postmodern) and those of Renaissance men and women. Yet these findings fly in the face of the notions, deeply ingrained in our culture, that it was in the Renaissance that the modern individual was born or that the postmodern self first emerged. This is why I have entitled this book Myths of Renaissance Individualism. Throughout I will be emphasizing not the similarities of Renaissance to modern and postmodern notions, but rather the differences. This is a work of history, not of genealogy.

1 ‘“Individualism” – a Word Unknown to our Ancestors’

What has been especially striking in recent times … is the rise of new philosophies challenging the very idea, ensconced since the Renaissance, of a core (if elusive) inner personal identity. Roy Porter, Rewriting the Self, 1997 July 18, 1573. Paolo, a painter, has been summoned to the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Venice. The judges are asking him about an enormous canvas (nearly 40 feet long and 17 feet high) on which he has depicted The Last Supper. Paolo completed the painting earlier that year, in April, for the refectory of San Zanipolo, the city’s great Dominican house. In an earlier period, it is unlikely that anyone would have objected to the work. But the atmosphere in Italy has changed. In 1563, the Roman Catholic Church, at the conclusion of the Council of Trent, had issued a decree on religious art. From now on – the decree was explicit – paintings of religious themes were to reinforce the Church’s teachings and be strictly in accordance with Scripture without extraneous representations of profane matters that could detract from the sacred purposes of the image.1 It is in this climate that Paolo is asked to explain why he has depicted figures in the painting who were not mentioned in the Bible. Whoever is posing the questions knows the work well. He asks Paolo why he has included a ‘man with a bleeding nose’, ‘armed men, dressed in German style’, ‘a clown with a parrot on his fist’, and several other figures, including ‘dwarfs, drunkards, and other lewd things.’ Paolo explains that these were inventions, and he adds that he had made these additions ‘as I saw fit.’ The Inquisition orders him to change the painting, to ‘correct it.’ He never does so. But he (or someone else in his family workshop) changes the title. It is no longer The Last Supper; it is The Feast in the House of Levi.2 1

2 Myths of Renaissance Individualism

Feast in the House of Levi. (Detail.) Veronese, Paolo. Courtesy of Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

‘“Individualism” – a Word Unknown to our Ancestors’ 3

About this Paolo we know many things. He was Paolo Caliari or Paolo Veronese, one of the master artists of the Renaissance. The near equal of Titian, against whose work he measured himself, Veronese was greatly admired for his skill; he received coveted commissions; he was revered for his piety. In a good library you can find dozens of books devoted to his life and works; you can still see his paintings in Venetian churches and in many of the great museums of Europe and the United States. His whimsical, decorative murals in the Barbaro villa at Maser are among the most delightful creations of the age. But what interests me here is not Veronese as we might encounter him in a text on art history or in one of his works on display in a museum or a church. What interests me is a puzzle about personal identity, about the understanding of identity in the Renaissance that Paolo’s brief encounter with the Holy Office raises. Like many others, when I first read this trial, I saw Paolo as a strong, willful individual, prepared to defend his own point of view, his craft, and his discretion before the Inquisition. I especially admired his wellknown argument for artistic liberty. ‘We painters take the same license as do poets and madmen’, he said in defense of his decision to include two German soldiers in the scene. Like artists in the Romantic age, Veronese seemed to portray himself as a creative force, giving expression to his own artistic vision. But, returning to these trial records now – some 25 years after I first read them – I am no longer so sure of how to understand Paolo’s identity. His artistic productions were not, in fact, his own. They were commissions; his patrons specified what he was to paint. To be sure, he might take a few liberties in the margins of his work, but he is hardly painting from the heart. Moreover, as we have just seen, he painted The Last Supper, but a legal action by the Church in the early 1570s changed the painting into The Feast in the House of Levi, the name by which it is known down to the present time.3 We might even ask if he means the words he speaks before the Inquisition. As he realizes he is trouble, he begins to reach for explanations that seem absurd. The figures he had invented are really not in the main grouping of the painting, he explains to the inquisitor. He is making excuses. He appeals to authority, but weakly, in noting that Michelangelo too had taken liberties by painting nudes in the Sistine Chapel. From this perspective, Paolo’s works seem less and less expressions of his own making – of some genius within – and more and more as though they are the products of largely impersonal forces much greater than himself: the wealth and tastes of his patrons; the cultural climate of Venice in a particular decade; the authority and expectations of the Church.


In recent years, historians and other scholars have grown increasingly sensitive to the problem of identity in the Renaissance; they have begun to ask new questions about the meaning of the word ‘individualism’, about the ‘self’, and about the ways in which selves were fashioned four or five hundred years ago. In a rather old-fashioned view, of course, most of us would be likely to view Paolo Veronese, as I did upon first reading his responses to the inquisitor, as a strong individual who, in much of what he painted and said, expressed himself. But close attention to the social, political, and religious context may make us reconsider this basic assumption. Perhaps Paolo was not so free – perhaps it does not make sense to think of him as an ‘individual’ in the modern, common-sense meaning of the term. On this later view, the Renaissance self seems suddenly more complex than we might at first suspect. And yet, if we are to understand the Renaissance, we need to know far more about it than who its great artists and writers were, or about the discoveries of the period, or the major social and political structures or events in which it occurred. We also need to know at least something of how Renaissance men and women viewed themselves; how they constructed, experienced, and understood their identities. As Paolo’s uncomfortable encounter with the Holy Office on a hot summer day suggests, the question is not as simple as it first appears. The most famous statement on Renaissance identities was developed by the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt in his celebrated book The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, first published in 1860.4 This ‘essay’, as Burckhardt called it, has become and remains one of the genuinely seminal works of history written in modern times. Both from Burckhardt’s youthful, enthusiastic, and imaginative immersion in the historical culture of Italy and from his intense, passionate study of the sources, literary and artistic, such figures as the dynamic Florentine humanist Leon Battista Alberti and the brilliant artist and engineer Leonardo da Vinci emerged as well-rounded, accomplished, almost preternaturally creative men or virtuosi – larger than life. And while Burckhardt does not mention Veronese in his Civilization, he praised him for his luscious creativity in his Cicerone, his learned guidebook to the art works of Renaissance Italy that he had published somewhat earlier in 1855, and made it clear that he saw this Venetian artist as one of the great imaginative forces of the age.5 Thus Veronese certainly fits in with the sort of creative genius who was both attractive to Burckhardt and who represented an entirely new kind of self, previously unknown. ‘In the Middle Ages’, Burckhardt wrote, ‘[m]an was conscious


of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation – only through some general category.’ He then added that it was in Italy, above all because of changing political structures, that ‘man became a spiritual individual (geistiges Individuum), and recognized himself as such.’ To Burckhardt and, indeed, to millions of his readers, the Renaissance Italian was ‘the first-born among the sons of modern Europe.’6 It was an era defined by a wealth of remarkably gifted and creative humanists, sculptors, painters, architects, engineers, and poets. It has been a subject of thousands of studies, yet no one understands why so many exceptionally creative people crowded the cities and the courts of this era. No one understands how such a relatively small population produced so many great men. Nonetheless, Burckhardt’s basic assumptions about identities have seemed persuasive. Even now, images of Renaissance individuals – their portraits, their biographies, their letters, even their signatures – strike us as importantly familiar. From the age of Petrarch and Giotto until that of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Rembrandt (from about 1350 until about 1650), the individual appears to have developed as a salient, well-defined force in the western world. Unlike their medieval ancestors, Renaissance men and women seem to have placed new value on the will and on agency, on expressiveness, prudence, and creativity, and to have done so self-consciously. Inevitably we feel that we recognize such individuals (or their robust, three-dimensional representations in the paintings and sculptures of our major museums and galleries) as autonomous, self-contained, psychologically complex persons much like ourselves. They make a powerful impression, especially when the Renaissance is viewed as the inauguration of modern western culture. But scholars are no longer so sure that Burckhardt’s account of Renaissance individualism is valid. New interpretations of the Renaissance ‘self’ or ‘subject’ have begun to emerge in many important studies of the period, especially among students of literature. Such scholars – largely in the wake of new philosophical or postmodern ideas that have tended to redefine radically what it is we mean by ‘self’ – have begun to see the Renaissance ‘individual’ not as an autonomous agent or a willful protagonist or an artistic genius that would become a stock character in Romantic interpretations of the era (Burckhardt’s included) but rather as the harbinger of the postmodern ego: fragmented, divided, even fictitious.7 As the literary historian Douglas Biow has recently observed of this contemporary scholarship, the importance of the Renaissance now stems not so much from the idea


that it was ‘the bright moment when … individualism found widespread nascent expression but as the far darker moment when the modern fragmented self … [was] painstakingly born.’8 Within Renaissance studies, Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, which first appeared in 1980, is the Ur-text of this postmodern interpretation. To Greenblatt, the self is not an expressive individual but rather a cultural artifact which, much like a painting or a book, is the product of social, economic, and political forces. In a moment of selfreflection about his own exploration of identity in his writing of Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Greenblatt remarks: When I first conceived this book … [i]t seemed to me the very hallmark of the Renaissance that middle-class and aristocratic males began to feel that they possessed … shaping power over their lives, and I saw this power and the freedom it implied as an important element in my own sense of myself. But as my work progressed, I perceived that fashioning oneself and being fashioned by cultural institutions – family, religion, state – were inseparably intertwined. In all my texts and documents, there were, so far as I could tell, no moments of pure, unfettered subjectivity; indeed, the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society. Whenever I focused sharply upon a moment of apparently autonomous self-fashioning, I found not an epiphany of identity freely chosen but a cultural artifact.9 This radical reinterpretation of the Renaissance self has proven enormously influential, even spilling over into historical studies and many other humanistic disciplines. To many, Burckhardt’s Renaissance individual, as one social historian has recently remarked, now seems ‘[l]ike an ancient flying machine in a provincial air museum, … [that] dangles by wires in simulated flight and is visited only by the occasional graduate student who marvels that anyone could have thought such an invention might ever leave the ground.’10 But it is in cultural history where the influence of this new model is strongest. As one literary historian has written, ‘[t]he freely self-creating and world-creating Individual of so-called bourgeois humanism is – at least in theory – now defunct.’11 And, indeed, we might also place Veronese within such a framework. From the perspective of his encounter with the Inquisition, he hardly seems a ‘world-creating Individual.’ Rather he himself looks more and more – especially in his confrontation with the


naked power of the Church – like something created by the culture in which he lived – ‘the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society.’ In this book, I attempt to approach the history of the Renaissance self from a new angle, neither Burckhardt’s nor Greenblatt’s. On the one hand, I wish to make the rather straight-forward point that there were multiple models of identity in the Renaissance; on the other, I wish to demonstrate that, if there was a constant in the Renaissance experience of identity, it had to do with different ways of thinking about what we might call, provisionally at least, the relation of the internal to the external self.* My focus is largely on Italy in the fifteenth and especially in the sixteenth century. Above all, my goal – one that I hope to meet – is to understand the history of the Renaissance self on its own terms. This can’t be easy. As my brief discussion of Burckhardt and Greenblatt has already made clear, when we think about the history of Renaissance identities, we tend to hold them up as mirrors to ourselves, and what we see depends almost entirely upon where we stand. For Burckhardt, the Renaissance witnessed the birth of the modern individual; for Greenblatt, glimmerings of the postmodern self. I know that my own analysis is also shaped by my experience, but I am hopeful that my fascination and engagement with both literary theory and social history might at least provide a new perspective. Before I delve into my analysis, I think it important to describe something of the background from which I approach this theme. In my work on an earlier book, a study of popular heresies in the sixteenth century, I carried out most of my research in the archives of the tribunal of the Roman Inquisition in Venice. It was, in fact, in the course of that research that I first encountered Paolo Veronese. For the most part, scholars have explored and continue to mine this rich and enticing collection of documents for evidence of the religious history and practices of those who were accused of heresy in northern Italy in the age of the Reformation, and this is more or less what I did as well.12 But, as I read further in the trials of the Inquisition, I was increasingly intrigued both by the ways in which the inquisitors posed their questions and in

* This characterization is necessarily provisional. As I will argue below, it is misleading to conceive of an ‘internal’ as opposed to an ‘external’ self. The self was and is inevitably a relation between what is perceived as inner experience (emotions, beliefs, thoughts, and so on) and the outside world (society, culture, politics, and so on).


which the heretics or those suspected of heresy responded. Inevitably, the issue of identity emerged as a salient historical problem. The courtroom was, after all, a site hyper-charged with issues of self-revelation and concealment, with pre-existing assumptions about the receptivity of certain groups such as cobblers, printers, weavers to new religious and possibly heretical ideas and the predisposition of other social groups such as poor, widowed, or immigrant women to various forms of witchcraft. Gradually I came to see that to study the inquisitorial records as a means of trying to deepen our grasp of the question of identity in the Renaissance would be both valuable and original. Such study would offer a new perspective on a problem that many have discussed through the lens of literature and especially such canonical works as The Book of the Courtier and Hamlet, on the one hand, and that others have examined from the perspective of social history, with particular emphasis on the history of the family, on the other. To be sure, my own focus is not entirely archival. I too make use of important printed texts from the sixteenth century – some, like Stefano Guazzo’s Civil Conversation, relatively well known, others like the treatises on exorcism by Girolamo Menghi, Guazzo’s contemporary, nearly forgotten. Nonetheless, the records of the Venetian Holy Office, in the end, serve as the center of gravity in the narratives and analyses that follow. As I read more and more trials, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that modern and/or postmodern notions of the individual first emerged in the Renaissance. Both views struck me as hopelessly teleological, especially since so many changes – the growth of European power throughout much of the western world, the development of Puritanism, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the American and French Revolutions, industrialization, the romantic movement, and the explosive expansion of information and medical technologies – have intervened so consequentially between the age of Veronese and our own. It seems absurd to try to connect the developments in western Europe five hundred or so years ago to either nineteenth- or twentieth-century ideas about identity. In short, I became acutely aware that we have tended – whether we are modernists or postmodernists – to treat the Renaissance self as the origin of our own notion of identity. Before turning to the history of Renaissance identities, it is also crucial to say something about these myths, both what they are and how they came into existence. The term ‘individualism’ is a relative newcomer to English and other European languages. It first appeared in French in


the 1820s and 1830s. In its earliest known appearance, the Catholic and arch-conservative Joseph de Maistre, a prolific writer, lamented in a text published in 1821 what he saw as a ‘deep and frightening division of minds, this infinite fragmentation of all doctrines, political Protestantism carried to the most absolute individualism (individualisme).’13 Ever since the term came into fashion, nearly two hundred years ago, it has, of course, meant different things to different people. Often – especially in the first few decades of its use – it had a negative connotation and pointed to the breakdown of community, as de Maistre’s quotation makes clear. Alexis de Tocqueville – who did much to popularize the term – generally shared with his French contemporaries a negative view of individualism, though in his Democracy in America he took a somewhat more optimistic position, since he believed that in the United States voluntary associations such as churches, town meetings, literary guilds, and civic groups both protected the individual from a potentially overbearing state and became themselves guarantors of liberty by serving as miniature republics in which self-interested individuals would be transformed into ‘orderly, temperate, moderate, and self-controlled citizens.’14 In Germany, by contrast, the Romantic tradition tended to embrace the values of individual genius and represented individuality as something which included ‘uniqueness, originality, self-realization.’15 Burckhardt, a Swiss scholar, drew on both these perspectives – German and French – and resolved the tension between them from a patently elitist perspective.16 Among the well-educated, the wellrounded, and the wealthy, he celebrated the individual. But he feared the swarming individualism of the masses, and his book on the Renaissance is filled with conflicting images. Certain ambiguities continued to haunt the term for a long while, but throughout most of the twentieth century (especially in liberal democracies such as the United States and the United Kingdom), it acquired and preserved a positive connotation. Writers saw individualism as foundational to political and legal freedoms, as well as to culture and capitalism. Ambition, entrepreneurship, competition, and the self-made ‘man’ were dominant, uncontestable values in search of an origin story. Only recently have scholars and political activists, philosophers and social critics begun to question the viability of the individual as the foundation of political, cultural, and social life.17 Already when Burckhardt was writing his famous book, he became one of several major historians, philosophers, and social theorists who located the origins of the modern notion of the individual in the late


medieval or the early modern world. The nineteenth century was, in fact, largely defined by the growing recognition that traditional solidarities – communal, familial, and religious – had broken down. The rush of workers into the cities in the midst of the Industrial Revolution – and the demands for democratic institutions in the wake of the American and French revolutions – made the question of the individual and his or her role in society one of the most pressing issues of the day. Romantic writers especially connected the dissolution of their own society with the breakup of the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance emerged as a natural candidate for the site of the emergence of individualism, an individualism condemned by many as evidence of the erosion of traditional institutions of authority such as the (Roman) Church and the Crown but gradually embraced by others as a form of liberation. Even before Burckhardt published his celebrated book on the Renaissance, the great French historian Jules Michelet had offered a positive view of the emergence of individualism as a value in this period, while in England, before Burckhardt’s book found a large readership there, both John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater viewed Renaissance individualism in a positive light.18 In The Old Regime and the French Revolution, first published in 1856, de Tocqueville observed that the ‘word “individualism” which we have coined for our own requirements was unknown to our ancestors, for the good reason that in those days every individual necessarily belonged to a group and no one could regard himself as an isolated unit.’19 By ‘those days’, de Tocqueville was, of course, referring to what was for him the relatively recent past, the period before the French Revolution when privileges and rights were generally secured by membership in a corporate body – the Church, the aristocracy, a guild, a village, and so on. De Tocqueville recognized with clarity that the French Revolution had dismantled this system and shifted rights increasingly to the individual – the very foundation of modern society: in economic life, in politics, and in laws guaranteeing personal liberties. De Tocqueville’s observations about individualism are in exquisite conflict with many of the most basic assumptions Renaissance scholars have long made about their field. After all, traditional Renaissance scholarship – whether focused on society and politics or on literature and/or art – has often made claims about the rise of individualism. This scholarship has been particularly inclined to locate modern notions of individualism in portraiture and biography and, even more strongly, in self-portraiture and autobiography.20 It has discerned something of the outlines of the modern individual in changing social


and cultural patterns: in the rise of new forms of trade and commerce, in new notions of government, and even in new religious practices and beliefs. It has also found seemingly powerful evidence of its existence in great literature: in Petrarch’s Secretum, Montaigne’s Essays, or Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Traditional Renaissance scholarship has often made the case for the significance of the Renaissance on the grounds that this period constituted a dramatic watershed in western history during which not only individualism but also several other major defining traits of the modern world – capitalism and republicanism, realism and humanism – first made themselves felt.21 Paradoxically, these claims – now often discarded as constituent parts of the modernist version of the myth that portrayed the Renaissance individual as a relatively autonomous and humanist self – have been preserved by many postmodern critics who find in the Renaissance ‘subject’ a precursor to our own contemporary views of the self as divided, fragmented, even illusory. Both the modern and postmodern narratives, moreover, have proven enormously powerful in shaping not only the way scholars continue to view the period we study but also the general shape of western history as well; and these studies, in turn, have exercised considerable influence over popular views of both the Renaissance and history in general.22 But, as my allusion to de Tocqueville suggests, traditional claims about Renaissance individualism are by no means uncontested. In fact, no other single aspect of the modern view of the Renaissance has been subject to attacks from so many different quarters. For one thing, as many medievalists have observed, the study of Renaissance notions of identity has often been based on a baffling indifference to what came before. Indeed, much scholarly writing – in history, in art history, but perhaps especially in literary theory – has tended to assume that questions of identity and interiority developed for the first time in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. In an important critique of this trend, the Yale medievalist and literary scholar Lee Patterson took aim at Greenblatt’s Renaissance SelfFashioning. What was disturbing to Patterson was Greenblatt’s decision to ignore any writer prior to Sir Thomas More (1478–1535). To Patterson, this decision constituted a deliberate use of the Middle Ages as ‘premodernity, the other that must be rejected for the modern self to be and know itself.’ ‘That medieval texts do not figure in these discussions’, Patterson continues, ‘is precisely the point: the Middle Ages is not a subject for discussion but the rejected object, not a prehistory whose shape can be described but the history – historicity itself – that


the modern must reject in order to be itself.’23 At the very least, it is crucial that we approach the subject of the Renaissance notion of the self with an awareness that representations of interiority or inwardness, not to mention ideas of agency, willfulness, and integrity, were richly developed among medieval elites, especially within literary, monastic, and scholastic circles. More than 50 years ago, Richard Southern, in his influential The Making of the Middle Ages, alluded to ‘the emergence of the individual from his communal background’ as one of the characteristic changes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a view that many medievalists continue to maintain.24 If, therefore, we intend to write about Renaissance notions of the self, it would be a false problem to assume that it was in fifteenth-century Italy or sixteenth-century England that issues of interiority and identity were first articulated.25 We may often portray Renaissance humanists as the heirs of antiquity, but Renaissance humanists also knew well the works of their medieval antecedents. For even more than their medieval ancestors, they read and studied the writings of St. Augustine; and they were familiar with major medieval writers such as St. Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Lombard, and St. Thomas Aquinas.26 But it is not only medievalists who have dismissed the Burckhardtian view of the Renaissance individual as a myth; many postmodern critics have done much the same, without, however, recognizing that much of their own work is patently genealogical. For, paradoxically, the postmodernists have been equally preoccupied with uncovering in the Renaissance world the origins of the postmodern self, even if at times the genealogy is explicit, as when Greenblatt writes, ‘We continue to see in the Renaissance the shaping of crucial aspects of our sense of self and society’, adding ‘[t]o experience Renaissance culture is to feel what it was like to form our identity, and we are at once more rooted and more estranged by the experience.’27 When I use the term ‘myth’ here (and in my title), I use it quite selfconsciously in a moderate sense. That is, I do not believe that it is useful to dismiss the idea that something did change in the ways in which it became possible to think about the self in the Renaissance – and that the something that did change does have certain affinities to both modern and postmodern representations of identity. It is not my claim, therefore, that myths of the Renaissance individual are entirely false. I am not arguing for the total divorce of history from myth – a move that is likely to fail in any case. Nonetheless – and here my thinking has been informed primarily by the anthropological study of


myth – I believe that the ‘truth value’ of the Burckhardtian myth lay above all in the function it served in the late nineteenth and throughout most of the twentieth century: it provided an explanation, a seemingly plausible one, for the origins of modern notions of individualism and explicitly linked those notions to broader economic, political, cultural, religious, and artistic formations.28 In a similar fashion, the postmodern version of the myth preserves the significance of the Renaissance as a major turning point in western history while nonetheless offering an account of identity that resonates deeply with our current postmodern condition. Both of these myths often overlap with history. But neither is history. The history of the Renaissance self – or rather, a historical description of Renaissance notions of selfhood – is another matter altogether – and it is this matter that I attempt to address in this book. Paradoxically, if the concept of ‘Renaissance individualism’ is now much in dispute, the history of identity in this period has grown all the more compelling and all the more interesting.29 That is, the effort to make sense of how Renaissance men and women thought about themselves and their place in the larger social order (or even in the larger cosmic order) has become a salient and compelling historical question that is at the center of much of the research on this period. This book reaps something of the harvest of this new research and at the same time attempts to examine the history of identity (or more properly ‘identities’), with special attention to the sixteenth century. I hope to show that by exploring the history of identities in the Renaissance from a new perspective – in particular, from over the shoulders of inquisitors – that the formations of the self we encounter in the Renaissance are radically at odds with not only Burckhardt’s but also Greenblatt’s authorized version. Unlike the culture of the seventeenth century – when western European culture, at least among its elites, finally had been transformed in its most basic assumptions not only by the growth and spread of Protestantism but also by a revitalized Catholicism – the culture of the Renaissance never fostered a sense of a clearly bounded self. To the contrary, Renaissance identities (no matter which particular form they assumed) were almost always anxious identities, uncertain about the nature of the boundaries between what not only well-known writers and artists but also ordinary men and women viewed as a kind of wall between the inner and the outer ‘self.’ Was this boundary – often identified either literally or metaphorically with the skin enveloping the body – something that linked one person, by the logic


of resemblance (facial features, hair color, and so on), to family, craft, city, and nation? Or was this boundary a screen, by contrast, behind which one should (or should not) conceal one’s thoughts and beliefs? And, if it was a screen, were there ways of penetrating it, whether through performances or through sincerity, or by trying to connect with others, to overcome a sense of isolation or alienation, and to forge a sense of community? Or, finally, was the boundary, as still others seemed to think, something remarkably permeable – a fleshy but porous membrane through which demons and spirits could pass almost of their own will or through the deliberate manipulations of a witch or a magus? Renaissance identities, that is, were less about adopting a particular stance to the world than about the question of how different stances might affect one’s relations to the world and, in particular, one’s relation to other human beings. To approach the history of Renaissance identities in this fashion enables us, I believe, to grasp something of the history of Renaissance selves on their own terms and not as anticipations of more modern or postmodern forms of selfhood.30 In a closing ‘Essay’, I will return to the issue of the ‘myth of Renaissance individualism’, suggesting some of the reasons why this myth remained so important through the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, and why new myths of Renaissance identity, as we entered the late twentieth century, seemed to be taking its place. Here my objective is not to explain the myth but rather to offer a historical account of the Renaissance self. In the study of the history of Renaissance identities that follows, I approach the self not as a thing (the soul, the heart, the mind, the res cogitans, or the like) but rather as a relation. The self, on this account, is not ‘a ghost in the machine’ or a puppeteer directing our outer movements and expressions. It is even less substantial than the diminutive man Dorothy and her companions discovered, when Toto pulled back the curtain, in one of the closing scenes to The Wizard of Oz. We might open the body, but we will find no ‘self’ within. The self has no physical location; it is not our ‘core’; rather, it is discerned most clearly as a relation between those dimensions of experience that people describe as internal (conscious or unconscious thoughts, feelings, beliefs, emotions, desires) and those they describe as external (speaking or writing, hating or loving, praying or blaspheming, laughing or crying, stealing or buying, and so on).31 And, in positing such a topography of experience, the body invariably plays a fundamental role; for it is the outer covering of the body – its skin – that serves as a


privileged frontier between these two distinct spheres of experience. The notion that the self is relational is, of course, not a novel idea. In Renaissance France, Montaigne wrote in his Essays that ‘we are all patchwork … and there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.’32 In several of his more philosophical works, Marx analysed the self as a Gattungswesen, a social being; but the most familiar and most influential formulation of the relational self is undoubtedly Freud’s.33 To Freud, the self is the dynamic set of relations. He envisioned the ego not as a thing in itself but rather as that often powerless ‘charioteer’ that struggles to negotiate the conflicting demands of the id (our sexual and aggressive instincts) with the imperatives of the superego (the ethical demands of culture or civilization itself).34 As Peter Gay has observed, ‘Freud made it plain that psychoanalysis, for all its uncompromising individualism, cannot explain the inner life without recourse to the external world.’35 But Freud’s representation of the self is, ultimately, only one of many different possible descriptions of the relation between the experience of interiority and the external world, albeit one that has had powerful claims on how many have understood this relation since the beginning of the twentieth century.36 Furthermore – and this is a point central to my argument – both modern and postmodern notions of the self are similarly themselves simply two of the many possible permutations of the relational self, though we might add that they are the single two most distinctive forms of this relation as it has developed over the last five hundred years. Reading Burckhardt in this light, we might say that to him the modern individual is one in which the ‘subjective’ or the internal side of one’s identity is that of an active and willful agent, a maker, and a relatively autonomous and self-conscious person endowed with the ability to make important choices as it navigates the external world, often with an eye to its own advantage. This is the ‘individual’ of bourgeois humanism – indeed, it is what most of us still mean when we use the word ‘individual’ in our everyday speech – and it was certainly the most prominent representation of modern ‘man’ in Burckhardt’s own day. But I do not understand why we should continue to believe that it is a useful model for understanding the Renaissance self in which the relation between interiority and society generally assumed radically different and variegated forms, and identity was not about individuality but rather explicitly about the problem of the relation of one’s inner experience to one’s experience in the world. Moreover, when we read more recent postmodern interpretations of Renaissance identities in light of


the relational self I propose here, we find a similar limitation. The postmodern self is one in which the social world not only takes priority but actually dominates any experience of interiority or inwardness. Thus, rather than viewing the self as a free subject shaping his or her world, the subject becomes an artifact or a fiction, and a sense of inwardness is viewed as an illusion, even a fantasy. For self-fashioning, to Greenblatt, is not the way in which autonomous subjects fashioned themselves but rather the way in which specific political and religious centers of authority (the monarchy or the church, for example) created the fiction of individual autonomy and/or interiority. Several other postmodern literary critics hold this or similar views.37 But, again, I do not see how this postmodern model of identity, which may have some validity for illuminating the construction of the self in our own time, elucidates Renaissance identities more accurately than did Burckhardt’s modern interpretation of the self, since – to reiterate – the relation of interiority to the social world in the Renaissance developed on its own terms. The historical study of identity – and this is the foundational assumption of this book – should not begin from the presupposition that the self in a given historical period is either modern or postmodern – unless, perhaps, it is either the modern or the postmodern world that we are seeking to understand. Historical study should begin with the sources – a humanist move ad fontes – and examine the ways in which they explain or describe the relation between the internal dimensions of experience, on the one hand, and its external dimensions, on the other. This may at first seem a daunting task, but Renaissance texts – published and archival, religious and secular – are filled with efforts to make sense of this relation. It is certainly a recurring, if not the dominant theme in the Renaissance theater, in contemporary spiritual writings, in anatomical writings, and, as I shall show in this book, in inquisitorial proceedings as well. Indeed, it is the thesis of this book that the Renaissance self, while protean, was almost always understood as the enigmatic relation of the interior life to life in society. The dynamic I am proposing presumes neither the priority of the internal to the external life nor the priority of the external to the internal life. What seems to have been at stake in the Renaissance was rather the fundamental question of how the relation between these two realms should be understood or, when there was conflict between them, resolved. To be sure, some writers in the Renaissance did argue for the priority of the internal dimensions of identity, as we see, for example, in humanist treatises on the will, or on


authorship. But this emphasis was the exception, not the rule. When Renaissance people grappled with the question of identity, they rarely thought of it either as an expression of a shaping self from within or as a distillation of social forces. On the contrary, they were aware of multiple possible permutations that the relation between the internal and the external dimensions of experience could assume. The presence of interiority was felt in many spheres: when a courtier was pressured to conceal his thoughts at court, when a demon took possession of one’s faculties or desires, when a man seduced a woman, or when a sinner was confronted by temptations and a struggle of the will ensued. It was also possible to experience the loss of interiority. In the Renaissance we find descriptions of such loss both in literary descriptions of certain forms of madness and in a variety of treatises on melancholia. In his famous book on this second theme, the eccentric English clergyman Robert Burton described certain of the insane as those who ‘wake, as others dreame’, while in Lodovico Ariosto’s sixteenth-century epic Orlando Furioso, madness is described as, among other things, a state of alienation, in which the self becomes ‘divided from what it once was.’38 Or madness might include delusions, such as those of the baker from the Italian city of Ferrara who believed his body was made of butter and stubbornly refused to sit in the sun out of fear that he would melt.39 To Renaissance observers, as to us, the loss of selfawareness could be a catastrophic event. It was, after all, the loss of a sense of inwardness, one of the two essential elements that go into the make-up of the relational self. In the argument that follows, therefore, I start from the presupposition that social experience and a certain experience of inwardness are both crucial to understanding Renaissance notions of identity. The result is an account that points, first, to far more variegated forms of identity in Renaissance Europe than either Burkhardtian notions of individualism or the more recent ideas about ‘self-fashioning’ are capable of embracing. The sorts of selves we encounter in the Renaissance were not the calm, well-demarked, accomplished, autonomous selves that the Burckhardtian myth implies; and they were far more willful and autonomous and far less fragmented and illusory than many postmodern critics have claimed. First, most Renaissance men and women were not detached from social groups and networks, from the family and the parish or the guild and confraternity, and, even when they were, they generally felt compelled to enter into associations in which it would be possible to find some mooring for their beliefs. Identities, that is, could be defined by social


location but also by a self-conscious awareness of the complexity of community. Moreover, Renaissance people were never as certain about their identities as the term ‘individualism’ implies. They lived in a culture that valued theatricality and emphasized the importance of self-presentation, performance, and rhetoric, but not, as many postmodernists have tended to assume, at the expense of a selfconsciousness about interior experience or inwardness or the tensions that existed between such inwardness and one’s stance in the world. Finally, many Renaissance men and women had little sense of the self as a necessarily bounded and well-demarked thing: a single body containing a single soul. On the contrary, in their religious beliefs and in their notions of witchcraft, they saw the self as something extremely fluid or migratory, not even necessarily connected to one particular body. They had, as we shall see, a porous notion of the body, one in which the soul or the spirit – in a magical act, in an act of erotic or divine love, or in a case of possession – could easily slip into another’s body or, on occasion, escape from one’s own. What was porous in such beliefs was, of course, the skin, the flesh, or the body itself. Ultimately it was this anxiety about the boundaries of the body – about the frontier between the internal and external dimensions of experience – that enabled the development of an elaborate discourse in the Renaissance about interiority. To be sure, Renaissance people may have imagined inwardness in a culturally-specific fashion. But the Renaissance experience of inwardness was not purely a cultural construction. On the contrary, inwardness was and is a necessary dimension of embodiment. Our hearts, which throb, and our brains, which are eerily silent, are inside us; our cells are either inside us or cover us; and these organs invariably give shape to the notion that in our experience in the world we, like young Prince Hamlet, ‘have that within which passes show.’ Like many Renaissance men and women, we too are most likely to confront the essential role of that which is within when it is lost. Of course, what precisely is lost and the degree to which it is biologically-determined are both matters of debate; what does not seem to be a matter of debate is that it is something humans possess and that it can be lost. Most of us have likely witnessed its disappearance. I personally have observed its loss too many times: in a parent who, in the terrifying aftermath of a heart attack, fell into a coma; in an autistic child; and in a loved one suffering first from dementia and then from Alzheimer’s disease. Clearly, on a personal level, the apprehension of such losses is inevitably painful, but it is precisely by studying such impairments that cognitive psychologists and


neuroscientists are enabled to offer certain explanations of the biological bases for at least a certain degree of self-consciousness in all humans.40 But even without scientific training, it is often quite plain that once these faculties are lost in their entirety that the self is lost also. Cultures accordingly may interpret the experience of inwardness in different ways, but the scripts are not written onto a blank slate; they are written onto a complex organism already capable of thought, feeling, emotion, and desire. It would be a fallacy to argue that there is something within (the soul, the spirit, the psyche) that represents the self. But it would equally be a fallacy to argue that the self is determined purely by one’s experience in the world and by the social forces one encounters from early childhood to the end of one’s life. As Caroline Walker Bynum has noted in her study of identity in the Middle Ages, it is useful and important to find ‘images to think with that do not force us to chose between mind and body, inner and outer, biology and society, essence and agency.’41 The analysis I present below of ‘scenes’ from the inquisition will also, I hope, make the dualism implicit in so many of the recent discussions of Renaissance identities seem equally misleading. This book, then, does not look back to Renaissance in order to understand the origins of either modern or postmodern notions of the self so much as to understand fifteenth- and sixteenth-century people on their own terms. I have approached this world, therefore, in much the same manner that an anthropologist might study a foreign culture. I have tried to ‘listen’ to the voices and decode the performances of both men and women from this distant age, and I have attempted to find the characteristic ways in which they made sense of their identities and their relations to others. In the end, the selves I portray are not the apparently modern or postmodern figures that we often assume were the norm in this age. Sixteenth-century selfhood was, in fact, something far more elusive – indeed it is something tantalizingly difficult to grasp. To be sure, for many, one’s identity was largely prescribed by the larger social groups (family, guild, community) to which one belonged. Nonetheless, European culture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was shaped to no small degree by struggles over questions of identity, even questions of collective identity. This was as true among popular groups as it was among the elite. And if we intend to understand this period, we need to know not only about the deeds and ideas of great men (princes, humanists, artists, and great writers) but also the ways in which ordinary men


and women, rich as well as poor, understood themselves and their place in the world. You might approach this book therefore as a kind of retrospective cosmology of the vast majority of men and women who lived in the sixteenth century, a book that you might like to read if indeed you intended, through the magic of time travel, to visit Europe as it was some five hundred years ago and actually make sense of the conversations that you might have with the people you would meet there. My assumption is that the past is a foreign country and that we do better approaching it on its own terms. Finally – since the topic is vast – what I offer here is not a systematic cosmology so much as a number of case studies of Renaissance ideas of the self.

2 The Inquisitors’ Questions

But how, in a time without photographs, with few portraits, without tape recorders, without fingerprinting, without identity cards, without birth certificates, with parish records still irregular if kept at all – how did one establish a person’s identity beyond all doubt? Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983 In 1529 or 1530 Lorenzo Lotto, one of the most engaging and prolific artists of the Renaissance, completed a portrait of the jeweler Bartolomeo Carpan, a successful man who had a shop in the Ruga degli Orefici not far from the Rialto Bridge and who would become a major figure in the evangelical movement in Venice for over thirty years.1 On one level, it is precisely such vivid and strikingly realistic portraits as this one that have led many scholars to see in them evidence of the Renaissance discovery of the individual. And, to be sure, such portraits were intended as likenesses of particular persons. Bartolomeo’s family members, friends, and acquaintances would have recognized him in the painting. Moreover, the artist Lotto had used his craft to point to a sense of psychological depth. Bartolomeo’s eyes, wide open, do not meet our own, but it is difficult not to read them as external reflections of some interior trait; though what that trait is – sadness or thoughtfulness, arrogance or intelligence – we simply do not know. But this painting is not a portrait of an individual isolated from the larger social context. To perceive it in such a manner is to miss many of the social dimensions evoked in this representation, to overlook the social framework into which the artist went out of his way, as he always did in his portraits, to place his subject. First, the portrait, by its 21


subtle display of an expensive small box of rings in the center foreground, identifies Bartolomeo with his craft; secondly, the high collar of the delicate silk shirt signals the jeweler’s wealth and relatively high station in Venetian society; third, the presentation of the jeweler in three views links him simultaneously to his family and his city. The three figures seem to allude to Bartolomeo’s family; he was one of three brothers. But the reference to the city seems certain. As Józef Grabski first suggested, the presentation of Bartolomeo with three faces – tre visi in Italian – is likely a rebus (a pictorial riddle) that an astute viewer would have read as a reference to Treviso, Bartolomeo’s birthplace.2 From Lotto’s perspective, it seems, Bartolomeo’s identity was largely defined by his place in society. Indeed, what we might call the social self was fundamental to the Renaissance understanding of identity. Virtually every inhabitant of a Renaissance city or town belonged to and was shaped by a network of overlapping groupings. Some, such as the guild, the confraternity, or the parish, were formal associations. Others, such as the family and the neighborhood, were more loosely defined. Given the importance of such associations, it is not surprising that the questions inquisitors posed were often intended to elicit information about the social position of those men and women suspected of heresy. Indeed, most inquisitors clearly viewed such knowledge as essential to the conduct of their investigations. As the Directorium inqvisitorum, the most widely-used manual for inquisitors in the late sixteenth century, stipulated, the inquisitor will ask the accused ‘where he lives and where he is from; … who his parents are and if they are living or dead; … where he was raised and the places he has frequented; … if he has ever lived in areas infected with heresy, and, if so, why?’3 In the early seventh-century manual, the Sacro Arsenale, the author Eliseo Masini gave similar directions to those conducting the trial: the heretic is to be asked ‘to give an account of his life, to say what he has done since childhood, in what places he has lived, who his teachers have been, what his education is, and with whom he has friendships and familiarity.’4 In addition to these specifics, the notaries who recorded the proceedings of the Inquisition also frequently wrote down a physical description of the accused, in which details of clothing and appearance, within the social imaginary of the day, were also indicative of the suspect’s status. At times the descriptions were quite colorful. When tried for heresy in the late 1560s, for example, Bartolomeo Carpan, now no longer the young man Lotto

The Inquisitors’ Questions 23

Portrait of a Goldsmith in three Views, 1530–1535. Lotto, Lorenzo. Courtesy of Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

had painted almost forty years earlier, was described as a ‘man tall in stature, with a white beard and white hair, dressed in a beret with a cape that reached down to his feet; and he was, both in appearance and as he himself stated, about sixty-four or sixty-five years of age.’5 Of Paolo Gaiano, a silk weaver who had immigrated to Venice from Modena, the notary observed that he was ‘a man of average height, with a black beard and an ashen face, dressed in a short cloak with a cape, and as one says, poor in appearance; and he was, as he appeared and as he affirmed, fifty-two years of age.’6 But such verbal portraits, along with a general overview of the accused’s social background, were only first steps. The Inquisition also went out of its way to establish the connections or associations that the accused had with others in Venice and elsewhere. The Directorium inqvisitorum made it plain that certain forms of social interaction might be signs of heresy. Thus lodging a person known to be a heretic or having a romantic attachment to a heretic could indicate that the host or the lover was guilty of heresy as well.7 But it was also common practice for the inquisitors to try to discover the names of those with whom a known heretic was associated, with the assumption that his or her coworkers and friends might also be guilty of heresy. We see this with


special clarity in the trial of the silk-weaver Paolo Gaiano. When Paolo was interrogated in 1569, the inquisitor Aurelio Schellino da Brescia spent considerable time probing the nature and extent of his connections to others in Venice, others who might be seen as guilty by association. To some degree, Paolo may have brought this line of questioning upon himself. At one point early in the trial he asserted that, if the inquisition would simply let him walk freely through the city, he could show them ‘un mondo di eretici’ – ‘a world of heretics.’8 The Holy Office was, in any case, zealous in pressing Paolo to name his associates and to provide names of those he knew both in Modena and Venice. They asked about the taverns he frequented, the shops where he worked, and the names of those with whom he associated.’9 Yet the Holy Office also looked not merely to particular associations but also to society as a whole – the social world that the inquisitors tended to imagine as a body threatened, in an age of intense religious change and reform, by an internal plague of diseased organs and parts – by heresy. In 1532 Gianpietro Carafa, the future Pope Paul IV, used this image in his celebrated memorial On the Repression of the Lutheran Heresy, in which he spoke explicitly of heresy in Venice as a pestilence, spread by books and friars.10 A few years later Girolamo Aleandro, the pope’s ambassador to the republic, made use of the same metaphor, noting in one of his first letters to the newly-elected pope that, especially because of the large presence of German merchants in the city, ‘countless others – cittadini and the popolani – are infected with this plague, and, among them, there are not a few gentlemen who who offer support to the others … And this infection has spread so much that many speak about it publicly and keep [prohibited] books in their homes, and gather together in conventicles.’11 In 1546 the Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto also made it clear that Venice was ‘very infected’ with this pestilence.12 And in 1560, the Venetian ambassador to the papal court made a similar argument, noting in a letter to the Senate that it was crucial not to ignore this pestilence (‘questa pestilenza’) of the heretics, since it is well known that the latter are set on the subversion of governments.13 In an age of deadly pandemics, the representation of heresy as a plague (or a contagion or an infection) was a powerful one; inevitably it did much to shape the thinking of inquisitors about the social identity of heretics, especially those who – through their sermons, their teaching, their writings, and even their conversation – were likely to spread the new ideas of the day. In particular, this image of heresy focused the attention of the inquisitors on what we might call the external acts of


proselytizing: above all on the preaching of Protestant or philoProtestant ideas, the teaching of suspect doctrines, and the smuggling of contraband volumes into the city. The plague metaphor itself tended to lead to the identification of certain groups of individuals as more likely to be involved in heresy than others. In his memorial, for example, Carafa had singled ‘this accursed nest of conventual Franciscans’ as one of the groups most responsible in Venice for the spread of heresy, and Franciscans became one of the most carefully watched groups in the city.14 Other prelates pushed for the careful supervision of teachers (always a potentially subversive group); and one of the first actions the Holy Office took was to summon the maestri di scuola (the school teachers and tutors in the city) to warn them to be sure to convey good and sound doctrines (‘bona et sana dottrina’) to their students and to make it clear that the Holy Office had its eyes on them.15 The following year, the papal nuncio Giovanni della Casa – remembered today primarily as the author of Il Galateo, one of the most important early modern works of etiquette – quietly warned preachers of suspect ideas to be careful about the possible heretical messages in their sermons.16 Della Casa was even more active in efforts to suppress the circulation of heretical books. He orchestrated a bonfire of such vanities on the piazza San Marco in 1548. Additionally, throughout the next several decades, inquisitors sent inspectors around to bookshops and harassed printers on a variety of fronts – from the increased surveillance of books passing through customs to the occasional trials of individual printers – in a concerted effort to protect the city from the new plague of heresy.17 These official perceptions explain in part the relatively high percentage of preachers, tutors, and printers accused of and tried for heresy in the sixteenth century. It was these men, after all, through whom religious ideas were most likely to reach and infect others in Venice, though it is important to point out – briefly in this context – that the inquisition itself was, on occasion, the first to defend individuals from such accusations when they were groundless – when, that is, they were motivated by certain popular prejudices (the belief, for instance, that all Frenchmen were Protestants) rather than based on the genuine knowledge of a particular person’s beliefs.18 Among those responsible for the carrying of new ideas into the city, the inquisitors were, of course, most familiar with those in religious orders, especially the itinerant friars of the Renaissance world. Some of those interrogated must have struck them as much like themselves. For example, the inquisitor fra Marino da Venezia, who was active in Venice in the mid-sixteenth century, spent much of his time interrogating his


fellow Franciscans whose sermons or writings had raised suspicions about their orthodoxy. His conversations with them came easily, even as he tried to persuade them to recast their words in ways that would not be interpreted as heretical in the increasingly chilly theological climate of Italy in the mid-sixteenth century.19 But priests and friars were only a small percentage of those the inquisitors encountered. They also examined aristocrats and merchants, printers and weavers, workers and vagabonds, courtesans and prostitutes, artists and humanists. Their encounters, consequently, offer an ideal perspective from which to examine questions of identity in the late Renaissance. Heretical beliefs may have been – in theory at least – an individual matter, but the ability of the inquisitors and other ecclesiastical authorities to place a particular person within a certain sector of Venetian society, on the basis of such external clues as his clothing, his accent, his trade, his residence, his family, and perhaps especially his associations, went a long way in helping to make sense of whether or not he was or was not caught up in the heretical movements. And recent research bears this out. In these largely hierarchical societies, as the inquisitors themselves were aware, heretics tended to be found overwhelmingly among privileged groups, men and women who were literate, who traveled, and who were not only easily exposed to but were inclined to show an interest in new ideas. In Lucca, patricians constituted the single most receptive group.20 In Venice, those most receptive to the new ideas included relatively few patricians; most were professionals (doctors, lawyers, and notaries), skilled craftsmen (printers, jewelers, apothecaries), and workers in certain crafts in which immigration and collective work was a central dimension of the experience of the workers (for example, among weavers and cobblers). In France and Germany as well, we find a similar pattern.21 In this sense, a figure such as Bartolomeo Carpan, tried for heresy in the 1560s, along with Alessandro Caravia, another jeweler most often remembered for his poetry, were largely typical of the sorts of individuals most likely to be active within the clandestine world of religious dissent in Venice in the middle of the sixteenth century.22 By contrast, at either extreme of the social hierarchy, heresy was much less common. To be sure, some nobles were accused of heresy in the sixteenth century, but this was an insignificant minority; and, among the working poor, heresy also appears to have been relatively infrequent.23 Yet, as the inquisitors themselves well understood, there was no one-toone correlation between one’s social environment and one’s beliefs. By


definition, social history, which examines general patterns and not specific cases, can offer only a partial explanation. Membership in a certain family, employment in a particular workshop, or a particular ethnic background did not mean that one necessarily conformed to the dominant values of the larger social group. To the contrary, in this period of intense spiritual upheaval, particular families were frequently divided over religious questions, with sharp differences often arising between husbands and wives, while workshops often turned into centers of heated debate among co-workers. Nor was one’s place of origin determining. Some French immigrants to the city were Huguenots or Protestants, but others were devout Catholics. Similarly most of the German residents of the city were Lutheran, though not all of them, since as many as 200 out of 900, according to one contemporary, had remained loyal to the Roman Church.24 Thus, while social location may have played an important role in shaping one’s outlook on the world, it would be overly reductive to see identities as a reflection either of one’s family background or of one’s work experience, especially when these are examined in isolation from one another. As the historian Ronald F. E. Weissman has argued in a series of compelling essays, it makes little sense to reduce Renaissance notions of identity to a function of one particular social location. Instead Renaissance identities, especially in the towns, were inevitably defined, in part at least, by the overlapping loyalties that particular ‘individuals’ had to family, to guild, to parish, to the workplace, and to patrons. In an explicit counterpoint to Burckhardt, who saw the development of Renaissance individualism as the result of the decline of traditional solidarities, associations, and forms of community, Weissman notes that [i]f anything, the Renaissance town suffered from too much community, rather than from individualism or anomie. In a society whose social relations were overlapping, in a society in which intense loyalty continued to be demanded by one’s intimates and associates and of them as well, the problem of managing commitments to diverse groups and individuals was not without significance.25 Yet there is another important sense in which identity is not reducible either to one’s social location or even to the multiple social groupings in which one was embedded. For, as I have argued in the introduction, Renaissance identities were never exclusively a function of social life. Rather they always involved some form of negotiation between one’s thoughts and beliefs, on the one hand, and one’s words


and deeds, on the other. We see precisely this tension in inquisitorial practice. Social location mattered, but the inquisitors were also constantly attentive to the fact that beliefs and convictions were held internally. In fact, Renaissance inquisitors, along with theologians and canon lawyers, conceived of heresy above all as an internal set of beliefs that were knowingly and willfully held in contradiction to the teachings of the Catholic Faith. As the canonist Gratian, following St. Augustine, had written in the twelfth century, ‘heretics are those in the Church of Christ who conceive morbid and depraved ideas and who, if corrected to hold healthy and upright ideas, nonetheless stubbornly resist emending their pestiferous and deadly doctrines (pestifera et mortifera dogmata) and persist in defending them.’26 Thomas Aquinas also located heresy in the will and the heart. These ideas carried over into the sixteenth century. ‘Non est hereticus, qui male vivit, sed qui male credit – a heretic is not one who lives improperly but one who believes improperly’ was the formula the Spanish jurist Simancas presented in his De catholicis institutionibus of 1575.27 Peña’s edition of the Directorium inqvisitorum, also of 1575, picked up on the views of St. Thomas: Two conditions must obtain before one is considered a heretic in the proper and complete sense. The first is if one holds in the intellect or the mind erroneous views concerning the faith, and this is the beginning of a disposition towards heresy; the second is if one stubbornly clings to these errors in the will or the affect, and this act fulfills or completes the heresy. These two conditions, that is, render one a heretic in the full sense of the term.28 This model of heresy was important. It focused the attention of the inquisitors on the heretic, on trying to understand a particular individual’s underlying beliefs – the convictions he (or she) held in his heart, often beneath a series of stratagems of prudent dissimulation. 29 In fact, both theology and canon law, in their views of heresy, privileged the individual believer and, as a consequence, took an extremely subtle approach to the detection of heresy. This does not mean that inquisitors ignored the social contexts in which heresy was most likely to flourish – on the contrary, those ecclesiastical leaders who were delegated the responsibility of rooting out heresy wherever they might find it paid close attention, as we have seen, to the social worlds of the accused. But the theological teachings of the Catholic Church represented heresy as a choice and,


therefore, as an interior act of the will through which an individual elected to follow a set of beliefs or practices that were at odds with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. In the sixteenthcentury edition of the Directorium inqvisitorum, the editor Francisco Peña, who provided an extensive gloss on the work of his fourteenth-century predecessor Nicolau Eymerich, the original compiler of this work, observed that the term ‘heresy’ derived from the Greek verb for ‘choice’, but that, over the course of time, the word ‘heretic’ had become ‘hateful and infamous (odiosum … & infame), since it designates those who believe or teach things contrary to faith in the Lord Christ and in his Church.’30 Strictly speaking, therefore, heresy was a crime that took place, as the canon lawyers emphasized, within the conscience of the individual. Remarkably Peña and many of his contemporaries believed that it was possible to deduce the internal state of a suspect from external signs. While Peña recognized that there would be certain exceptions – ‘heresy which is concealed entirely and not revealed by any evidence is to be left to the judgment of the divine tribunal’ – his manual for inquisitors provides a battery of techniques through which, in his view, external signs could be used as evidence of internal states of mind.31 Peña by no means believed that such detection was straightforward. He recognized that heretics would use many ruses – from equivocation to the pretense of insanity – to dissimulate their beliefs, and he proposed counter-ruses that the inquisitor could use to ferret out the truth.32 In a sense, his entire treatise is a manual for trying to discover the beliefs the accused often concealed under a cloak of innocence. Masini, in his Sacro Arsenale, held similar views about the dilemmas the inquisitor faced. For Masini too recognized that beliefs against the faith resided ‘in the soul’, into which ‘only God is able to see and make a judgment.’ Nonetheless, he added, ‘from words and deeds that are heretical’ the inquisitor may presume ‘error and bad faith in the mind’ of the accused. Here we see an important emphasis on the interiority of faith and the dilemma that this aspect of belief posed for the inquisitor.33 Thus, for Masini, the inquisitor must recognize from the outset that his role required him ‘to make every effort to uncover all the errors and heresies that were hidden within the most secret part of the heart.’34 But making these determinations was extremely difficult. There was no window onto the soul; others were, by definition, opaque. As several prominent Renaissance humanists, Leon Battista Alberti among them, had observed in a powerful metaphor borrowed from the ancients, the


gods had omitted to make an opening in the human chest through which men and women might be able to see into one another’s hearts. The Italian intellectual historian Lina Bolzoni has noted that the Renaissance discussion of the idea of such a window, picked up from various classical Greek and Latin texts that were becoming again wellknown in this period, ‘expressed the dream that one is able to visualize directly the internal dimension where, according to an ancient topos, truth has its place.’35 Such a view was hardly confined to the elites. In his testimony concerning Bartolomeo Carpan in the late 1540s, the draper Vincenzo acknowledged that Bartolomeo had recently been going to mass, but he added an important qualification: ‘whether he does this with his heart, I don’t know, since one cannot know the heart of another person.’36 One wonders how inquisitors ever believed they could possibly penetrate this barrier? It was a relatively easy thing for the accused person to say one thing but mean another. Words and thoughts needed not coincide, nor did actions and beliefs. We find, therefore, in the practice of the Inquisition an important clue to the nature of identity in the Renaissance. The inquisitors were continually aware both of the importance of social location and of the inevitable opacity of beliefs. They attended to social experience and they knew that the social location of a particular person accused of heresy was an important clue in an investigation, but they recognized at the same time that to know the beliefs and religious convictions of another was virtually impossible, since, by definition, beliefs were held in the mind which was, by definition, opaque. Nonetheless, starting from an awareness of this tension, we can – especially if we look over the shoulders of the inquisitors and follow them in their questioning and investigations – begin to identify at least some of the ways in which the internal dimensions of identity were related to its external dimensions in Renaissance Italy. In fact, by examining this fault line between the internal and external dimensions of experience and the various ways in which the relation between these two dimensions were understood, it becomes possible to identify at least five different ways in which men and women in the Renaissance generally understood the self. The first of these modalities was what I call the social or the conforming self. In all likelihood, this was the form of identity that was most widespread. The conforming self was one in which identity was largely determined by social location, and in which there was relatively little tension between the role one assumed in society and one’s beliefs, worldview, attitudes, religious faith. In a city such as Venice, this notion of identity, which


was likely more typical of the Catholic than of the heretical population, was most widespread among those men and women who were natives of the city, who tended to marry into other local families, and whose trades were closely linked to the city. This was especially the case, for example, among the shipwrights, stevedores, and other workers in the Arsenal, the enormous and bustling Venetian shipyard that dominated the eastern end of the city. As one recent student of this vast early modern industrial complex has argued, the arsenalotti or Venetian shipbuilders were residents and workers in what was essentially ‘a company town.’ They lived in close proximity to one another and to the shipyard that had come to employ some two thousand of them. They shared in festivities, religious and secular, wore distinctive clothing, married within the trade, and even had way of speaking that was characteristic to their community – the linguaggio arsenalesco.37 Another example of such a trade could be found at the opposite, western end of the city, among the smaller but equally distinctive community of fishermen, the nicolotti, who took their name from the parish of San Nicolò de Mendicoli, the neighborhood where most of them resided. These men, who risked their lives on the sea, appear to have had a particularly intense devotional life in which their parish and their confraternities played a central role. They were also a largely endogamous group, marrying within the trade, passing the skills of fishing from generation to generation, and, like the arsenalotti, speaking to one another in their own distinctive dialect, the ‘lingua nicolotta.’38 It is not my argument that men and women who inhabited these relatively closely-knit worlds were not ever discontented with the expectations that their families or their work placed upon them. But we can at the very least be reasonably certain that few found any reason, for example, to reject Catholic teachings. Few of the accusations for heresy in sixteenth-century Venice were directed against members of these communities. Indeed, something of the opposite was the case, with some evidence suggesting that workers in the Arsenal, for example, deeply disapproved of the new religious ideas and would not tolerate them.39 For these men – given their own rituals and beliefs, the relatively high degree of marriage within the shipbuilding trades, and the intense confraternal life in this area of the city – there was thus little tension between belief and social experience. To the contrary, we might even say that in such cases belief and social experience essentially reinforced one another. Moreover, it was upon the notion of the self as social or conforming that Renaissance polities counted upon civic or communal values. The larger connections that


wove the lives of individuals into families, neighborhoods, patronage systems and confraternities served as foundations for larger civic identities as well. Accordingly the social self was by no means always limiting; it also enabled the cultivation of a larger sense of community, since without some sense of shared values and expectations, Venetians would have had a much more fractious existence than they in fact had. But, if many men and women in the Renaissance experienced relatively little tension between belief and social life, the social or conforming self was nonetheless only one of the types of identity that we find in this period. Perhaps the most familiar of these other forms of identity, which I will explore in much greater detail in the next chapter, was the prudential self. The prudential self was especially widespread among heretics. After all, it was often a matter of survival for those who held heretical beliefs to dissimulate, to conceal them, to be prudent about exposing their internal convictions to others. Such heretics were not only careful in the courtroom of the Holy Office but in their daily activities as well. Outside the courtroom, a heretic was generally a shadowy figure, hidden in the rapidly moving world of immigrants who made their way into and out of the city, according to shifts in the labor market; or, if a Venetian, even more likely to have learned the importance of discretion, speaking of ‘heretical’ ideas only in close groups of individuals who were likely to share similar views. And inside the courtroom, many heretics must have mastered the ruses about which Eymeric and Peña had warned in the Directorium inqvisitorum. That is, they were able to conceal many aspects of their religious beliefs, opening up and speaking ‘sincerely’ only when absolutely necessary. As an itinerant silk-weaver from Modena, Paolo Gaiano, for example, who often moved back and forth between Venice and his native city, took advantage of the cover the textile industry provided to men who, like him, were highly critical of the Roman Church and very sympathetic to the ideals of religious reform. Heretical identities in the less mobile world of prosperous Venetian artisans and professionals required, in all likelihood, a greater degree of caution. The notary Girolamo Parto, first tried for heresy in 1553, was self-conscious from that point on about concealing his beliefs. He attended mass and went to confession. ‘In this city’, he said, ‘you have to live as others do.’ After all, he had a family to support, and certain compromises were necessary. But inwardly as well as within the contours of a clandestine network of friends and acquaintances who shared his beliefs, this Venetian notary led a different life. He often carried an evangelical text hidden under his sleeve, and he would talk quietly with those who shared his views about


the need for reform. Parto was profoundly committed to evangelical teachings and in his head rejected the saints whose praise he was compelled, on several occasions when drawing up wills, to record. It was a compromise he could justify on the basis of Saint Paul’s statement, ‘You are the temple of God, and the spirit of the Lord dwells in you.’ ‘God lives among us’, Parto once said, ‘and not in rock, wood, or metal.’ Thus, much like the silk-weaver Paolo Gaiano, he downplayed the importance of external and material arrangements. His emphasis was decidedly on the internal world: ‘The spirit that has strength in us, which is the Holy Spirit, does great things in our hearts.’40 But perhaps the most celebrated example of the prudential self was Francesco Spiera, a lawyer from the town of Cittadella on the Venetian terraferma, the mainland territories subject to the city’s dominion. Spiera struggled with the question of whether or not he should reveal his beliefs to the inquisitors or conceal them. ‘At times he seemed to want to declare his beliefs openly and hide nothing’, the Italian reformer and exile Pier Paolo Vergerio wrote in a recollection of Spiera’s trial, adding ‘[f]inally, after a long internal battle, he decided upon dissimulation. He would keep his opinions firmly but secretly in his heart and with his mouth say something else, namely, exactly what the legate [or the inquisitor] wished him to say.’41 The views of Paolo Gaiano, Girolamo Parto, and Francesco Spiera were not merely a function of their social location. They also reflected the significance, in the Renaissance, of what we might call the prudential self. As the Florentine humanist Leon Battista Alberti put it in his famous treatise on the family – in language that is a striking anticipation of Machiavelli: How can anyone dream that mere simplicity and goodness will get him friends? … The world is amply supplied with fraudulent, false, perfidious, bold, audacious, and rapacious men. Everything in the world is profoundly unsure. One has to be far-seeing in the face of frauds, traps and betrayals.42 Other contemporary texts (memoirs, books of etiquette, and sermons) show how widespread was the pressure to perform. Yet even in the absence of a literature that articulated the need for prudence or that decried the duplicity of Renaissance men and women, conflicting social roles and tensions – between men and women, masters and servants, parents and children, lords and tenants, and so on – undoubtedly created some spaces in which people at all levels of Renaissance society were able to negotiate and, to some degree, protect their inter-


ests. The wives of patricians self-consciously and effectively carved out new social spaces for their daughters; artisans protected their social and economic interest by deliberately cultivating relations with fellow workers from their homelands; and, at the bottom of the social hierarchy, servants protected their dignity and honor through subtle and not so subtle acts of disobedience.43 In short, social life alone was never entirely determining of one’s identity within the social hierarchies of Renaissance Europe. At the same time, strategies of self-presentation reached a new level of intensity in the early sixteenth century. This was particularly evident in the flourishing literature on civility that developed in this period. One of the inaugural texts in this genre was Erasmus’s On the Civility of Children, published in 1530, but the three works that had the greatest significance in the fashioning of the prudential self were Baltassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528); Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo (1555), and Stefano Guazzo’s Civil Conversation (1574). Each of these texts would enjoy enormous popularity and would be read in vernacular translations throughout western Europe during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The texts undoubtedly met a need in a society in which power was becoming increasingly concentrated in the personage of the prince (duke or king). In such environments, courtiers grappled constantly with questions of language, silence, decorum, and dissimulation. Life at court was necessarily studied and anxious. One was expected to give the appearance of spontaneity but, in fact, be calculating at all times, since even a seemingly innocent misstep or misstatement could lead to a fall from the prince’s grace. In Castiglione’s book, for instance, one of the interlocutors, the humanist Pietro Bembo, states that one should never trust anyone, not even a dear friend, to the extent of ‘communicating without reservations all of one’s thoughts to him’, while the diplomat Federico Fregoso explicitly recommends ‘una certa avvertita dissimulazione’ (‘a certain studied dissimulation’) in one’s conversation.44 But we should not assume that only aristocrats read Castiglione. Copies of the book have been found in the libraries of wealthy merchants as well.45 And not only prominent aristocrats but a wide variety of gentlemen and ladies also came to value the art of conversation in this period. Speaking well was a mark of status; it ensured one’s credibility; and it opened doors that might have otherwise remained shut. But if the courtly literature of the period played a key role in shaping the prudential self, new religious ideas and communities – from evangelical to Protestant to Anabaptist – played an even more powerful


role. New beliefs (Erasmus’s, Luther’s, Valdés’s, Zwingli’s) had proliferated in the early sixteenth century, shattered a previously unified sacred landscape, and made religious identity increasingly problematic. As we have already noted, Protestants residing in Catholic lands both dissimulated their beliefs and simulated those of their Catholic neighbors, in a practice that has come to be known as Nicodemismo after the Gospel figure of Nicodemus who had gone to Jesus ‘by night’ to conceal his beliefs from his neighbors (John III: 1–3).46 Catholics in Protestant lands did the same. Jews also often found it necessary to assume a Christian identity in one place and a Jewish identity in another, living life, like a ‘ship with two rudders’, as Enriques Nuñes, a Portuguese Jew living in Venice, put it during his interrogation by the Inquisition in 1580.47 Dilemmas of self-presentation even penetrated the countryside, at least this seems to have been the case in sixteenthcentury Artigat, now famous as the home of the great impostor Arnauld du Tihl, who assumed the role of Martin Guerre, taking up with his wife Bertrande, raising his children, and tilling his fields until his deception was discovered some three years later and Arnaud was put to death.48 Similarly deliberative and self-consciously assumed roles were central to the making of the performative self. While the prudential self was cautious, watchful, reserved, one in which one took great care about what to reveal or not to reveal to others, the performative self was a self that was self-consciously acting, self-consciously theatrical. Inside the courtroom, there was ample opportunity for such theatrical representations, as both inquisitors and those brought to trial were well aware. In a section of the Directorium inqvisitorum entitled ‘Of the ten ways in which heretics try to conceal their errors’, Eymeric and Peña provided several examples of the strategies heretics used to deceive their judges. They might, for example, ‘show surprise’ or ‘pretend that they had been overtaken by a sudden physical weakness’ or ‘pretend to be mad’ or, finally, ‘take on the appearance of holiness or sanctity.’49 It is no accident that many in this age saw the courtroom as a theater in which not only the accused but also the witnesses and the judges played the roles that best suited their cases. There was, of course, a broadly-held view in the Renaissance of the world as theater and of life as performance in general. This was certainly true of the Renaissance stage, well developed not only in Shakespearean England but throughout much of western Europe as well. And, indeed, in many parts of Italy theatrical performances were by no means limited to the stage but took place on the streets, in


public squares, inside of and just outside of churches, and in private homes and palaces.50 Tomaso Garzoni’s compendious Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, first published in Venice in 1585, conveys in a particularly lively fashion something of the chaotic, the spontaneous, and the irreverent theatricality of the public square, which he envisioned as full of life and entertainments.51 At the same time, confraternities and other religious and civic groups presented themselves in performances not to disguise but to enhance their identities.52 The performative self, that is, was not always a self involved in deception, though this was always a possibility. For performance was also a means through which men and women were able to forge a sense of community or belonging. In Renaissance politics, performance was a central dimension of the strategies of rule. Machiavelli, for instance, offered such an argument in the Prince, a treatise that radically severed the ruler from a prescribed social role and stressed the importance of fictions in the shaping of a political power. But performance was also increasingly part of the everyday. Books of etiquette such as those by Castiglione, della Casa, and Guazzo reinforced this notion.53 Their readers were invited to reinvent themselves, to play the proper role at the proper time. An individual’s social self even seemed less significant than the particular role he or she assumed. Courtiers were not merely prudential; they also became artful performers. And artists too engaged in performances. Dürer, Raphael, Parmigianino, in their works, explored the different social roles an individual might assume. In these works, the self was often represented not as a member of a larger group but as isolated, self-reflective, preoccupied with roles and decorum.54 In many ways the three forms of identity that I have introduced thus far – the social or conforming self, the prudential self, and the performative self – were all based on a relatively straightforward understanding of the relation between beliefs and role. We might think of the three not so much as distinct forms of identity as permutations of a Renaissance self that was always defined in part by the degree to which the internal convictions corresponded to one’s selfpresentation. That is, we might well find that the same individual was largely defined by a social or conforming self under certain circumstances – perhaps Paolo Gaiano was much like this among his fellow weavers from Modena – but a prudential or a performative self among others. In each of these three formations of identity, moreover, it is clear that there was at least an illusion of control on the part of particular persons over matters of self-presentation. But the


Renaissance world was not merely defined by such seemingly ‘modern’ notions of identity. For there was another notion of identity – what I call the porous self – that was continually present and that constantly threatened to subvert the forms of identity I’ve examined thus far. Recent studies, especially those concerned with the histories of mentalités, popular religion, magic, and folk culture, have unearthed curious fragments of a Renaissance culture defined in part at least by a view of the self that was anything but autonomous or self-contained – of a self, in short, that had little psychic or psychological integrity. This form of identity was not only a popular, it was also an elite phenomenon. Late medieval and Renaissance mystics, for example, made powerful arguments about the reality of divine immanence with the result that it was often difficult to discern the boundaries between their own selves and that of God. But, among the learned, it was especially among the neo-Platonists that we find examples of a porous self. To the Florentine Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), for instance, melancholia was not so much the state of an individual psyche as the result of a failure to make use of beneficial astral influences.55 Ficino’s own influence was widespread. In the sixteenth century Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) in Germany, John Dee (1527–1608) in England, and Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) in Italy were exponents of Hermeticism – a corpus of late antique magical doctrines that Ficino had done much to popularize – and their ideas did much to propagate the view that the self was in the grip of larger, cosmic forces.56 There was also a widespread belief in the conjuring of spirits and the invocation of angels, practices that betrayed an underlying assumption that psychic forces were not to be understood on purely individualized grounds. In this context, moreover, witnesses asserted that they had seen spirits in the most bizarre forms – appearing disembodied in a crystal ball or in the well-preserved skull of dead man, or even in the shape of an animal (usually a cat). As the Renaissance astrologer and physician Girolamo Cardano observed of demons, ‘they make some think they are entering their bodies’ – a view to which Cardano himself proved uncomfortably prone.57 It is, however, on the level of popular culture that the very category of the self has been discovered to be most porous. Natalie Zemon Davis has pointed to such widespread instances of possession by another’s soul or subjection to the curse of a witch to underscore the porous or permeable nature of identity in this period.58 Cases of possession were most frequent in convents, as the famous examples of the Devils of


Loudun (1634) and the experience of the Venetian nun Cecilia Ferrazzi (1609–84) suggest.59 As Henrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger wrote in their Malleus Malificarum, the infamous Hammer of Witches published at the end of the fifteenth century, ‘devils can … enter our bodies.’60 Witchcraft especially provides many examples of one person using a curse to influence another – one crucial aspect of what Guido Ruggiero has called ‘binding passions’, and it is clear that these practices and beliefs were widespread in the Renaissance period.61 Many early modern writers were skeptical of such claims, but often they were taken seriously. In 1566 the religious authorities in Picardy, as part of their anti-Huguenot propaganda, exorcized the fifteen-year-old girl Nicole Obry who was said to be possessed by as many as thirty demons. Her possession had begun, Nicole explained, when the devil, disguised as the ghost of her grandfather, had entered her body with the alleged goal of having his heirs say masses and undertake pilgrimages to speed his release from Purgatory.62 Nicole’s own experience of being taken over by multiple beings was undoubtedly genuinely felt and reflected a widespread belief in diabolical possession that endured throughout the Renaissance, not only in Catholic but also in Protestant lands. Luther fought constantly against the devil, as did many seventeenth-century Puritans. Finally, we find in the Renaissance – especially in the second half of the sixteenth century – the emergence of a new form of identity, the sincere self. If the prudential or the performative self were both formations of identity that concealed one’s beliefs and convictions, the sincere self was one that made the revealing of one’s beliefs and convictions a matter of great urgency, even an ethical imperative. Sincerity was, as I will argue in Chapter 6 below, an important new ideal in the sixteenth century – one that was shaped to a large degree by the ideals of the Reformers. Other scholars have noted a growing concern with this ideal in this period, though they have tended to associate sincerity with European culture north of the Alps and in England in particular.63 But, as I will try to show, it was a major concern in Italy as well. There, it was a problem grappled with more conspicuously in the visual arts than in theology or philosophy, though, curiously, as we shall see, it has as a cameo role in Guazzo’s Civil Conversation. The Renaissance self, therefore, was a protean thing – now conforming, now prudent, now performative, now porous, now sincere. What was constant in this era’s understanding of identity was not these particular permutations but rather the underlying problem of the relation between the internal and the external dimensions of experience. We


must understand Renaissance notions of identity, that is, on their own terms. Some Renaissance writers, artists, courtiers, and religious and political leaders may well have had a fairly well-articulated notion of an ‘individualist’ self. But in many other respects, identity appears to have been fluid, protean, without the sharp lineaments of a centered, unitary self that we associate with Descartes mid-seventeenth-century description of the self as an internal res cogitans – an internal thing doubting or thinking. Even if the anthropologist Clifford Geertz were correct in his observation that the ‘western’ view of the individual privileges the ‘person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center or awareness, emotion, judgment, and action, organized into a distinctive whole’, we would be hard put to find such ‘individuals’ as the norm in Renaissance Europe.64 What we find instead is a self that assumes different modes in the relation of internal to external aspects of experience. It was thus the question of the proper relation between these two dimensions of experience that was central to the understanding of Renaissance identities. The emphasis on these various forms of identity makes it clear that neither Burckhardt’s notion of the relatively autonomous ‘individual’ nor Greenblatt’s postmodern subject offer a compelling or comprehensive understanding of Renaissance identities. What we find in the Renaissance rather is a continuing fascination neither with the subject in the traditional sense of a clearly-defined self expressing itself (though there are adumbrations of this in the new ideal of sincerity) nor the subject in the more radical postmodern sense of an artifact shaped entirely by outside forces. Rather we find a continual play upon the boundaries between beliefs and thoughts, on the one hand, and the way one presents oneself in the world, on the other. The boundary was, in fact, even at times identified with the skin, which was, as we will see below, often interpreted in this era as a zone fraught with anxiety and danger. Finally, while it is useful analytically to distinguish among these different forms of identity, in fact they often overlapped. The artist Lorenzo Lotto conveys some sense of this complexity in his portrait of the Venetian jeweler and heretic Bartolomeo Carpan. We have already noted how the portrait derives much of its power from a certain tension between inwardness and social identity. The jeweler’s eyes subvert any effort to claim that we can understand Bartolomeo purely on the basis of knowing something about his provenance (Treviso), his profession (the craft of jewelry), or his station (wealthy). But Lotto goes


further. By presenting a likeness of Bartolomeo from three different angles, it is difficult not to think that the artist was referring, at least obliquely, to his subject’s prudence, studiously cultivated in a city in which a person of his convictions had always to be careful, had always to look out in different directions while quietly keeping his own counsel. A measure of performance was also present in the painting; Carpan is presented as a dignified, self-composed presence. In this sense Lotto appears to explore what we might call the layered self – at once social and conforming, prudential, and performative. On the other hand, it is doubtful that Lotto thought of the self as porous; but did Lotto think that Carpan was sincere? Is there any indication of a concern with Carpan’s sincerità in this painting? Perhaps. Carpan is shown as serious, sober, straight-forward; there is nothing ceremonial about the pose. But it is unlikely that Lotto would have thought of sincerity in these terms. As we shall see, the ideal of a sincere self would only emerge as a major issue in the mid-sixteenth century – well after Lotto had made this painting – and this relatively late emergence of sincerity as an ideal is itself evidence that the self is never without a history. The emergence of this new ideal suggests as well that it was at the end of the Renaissance, in the years around 1600, that we see the first indications of the modern notion of the individual now choosing to reveal, now to conceal his or her deepest longings and feelings from within – in the startling gesture of the proffered heart.

3 Spiritual Journeys

I am constrained to wear a mask, in as much as one can do no less, if he lives in Italy. Paolo Sarpi, ‘Letter to Jacques Gillot’, 1609 Towards the end of December 1552 Lorenzo Tizzano – a medical student at the University of Padua and for the past two months a prisoner of the Venetian Inquisition – wrote out in his own hand a confession in which he provided, as he put it, a narrative of ‘all the errors and heresies which I have held in the past.’1 The document Lorenzo produced provided the papal legate to Venice with a detailed account of an intense and variegated spiritual journey. A former Benedictine monk at the Abbey of Monte Oliveto, Lorenzo had sought and had been granted permission in 1530 or so to leave his order and to serve as a chancery priest in Naples. Like many others who eked out modest incomes reciting masses and hearing confessions, Lorenzo moved frequently from church to church until some years later he received a prized position as chaplain to Lady Catherina Sanseverina, the sister of the Prince of Bisignano. Here, in this courtly world in the south of Italy, he first met Juan de Valdés, the celebrated Spanish reformer, whose conversation and writings would eventually lead Lorenzo to break with the Roman Church and to embrace a complex array of heresies. ‘And in order to distinguish better among my opinions, which have been diverse’, he wrote at a crucial juncture in his confession, ‘I distinguish them in a threefold manner: the first I will call Lutheran; the second I will call anabaptist; and third, since I know of no name more fitting, I will call diabolical.’2 Perhaps Lorenzo’s theological education made it possible for him to offer the Venetian Holy Office such a lucid typology. He went on to 41


describe how Valdés’s writings and other ‘Lutheran’ books as well as his conversations with a number of prominent Neapolitans had led him not only to reject the papacy, purgatory, the cult of saints, and sacerdotal confession but also to embrace Protestant views on predestination and the relationship between grace and works. But, for Lorenzo, as for many others, these beliefs proved to be merely the first step towards more radical notions. After Valdés died, Lorenzo came under the influence of the Spaniard Juan de Villafranca and Abbot Bruno Busale. Now he not only denied the real presence; he even went so far as to deny that Jesus was the eternal son of God born of the Virgin and maintained instead that he was simply one of Joseph’s and Mary’s children, born as others are born. This last claim was an especially radical view that rejected both Protestant and Catholic doctrines of the Trinity, the belief that God consists of three substances – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – in one Person. But his heresies did not end here. Some two years later, under the influence of Francesco Renato, Lorenzo came to believe that Jesus had not been the Messiah, but that the Messiah was yet to come. And to this decidedly millenarian belief, Lorenzo added that he had also become convinced that the soul dies with the body until God raises it up from the dead at the Last Judgment. Lorenzo might well have persisted in these views had it not been for don Pietro Manelfi, a fellow antitrinitarian and Anabaptist, whose confession in October 1551 prompted the Venetian government to repress the widespread network of Anabaptists in the Republic.3 Frightened by the arrest of four friends with whom he shared a house in Padua, Lorenzo had fled, first to Venice, and then through Ferrara and Piacenza before reaching Genoa where ‘[he] resolved to return to Padua and his studies, and to start going again to confession and to mass.’4 Back in Padua Lorenzo at first made his peace with the Catholic Church on the basis of a confession to his parish priest. But two years later – on the verge of receiving his medical degree and in all likelihood with rumors still circulating about his earlier ‘errors’ – he sought absolution from the Inquisition in Padua. When Geronimo Girello, the father inquisitor, read Lorenzo’s detailed confession, he immediately recognized its importance and forwarded it to his superiors in Venice. From there the papal legate notified Rome and in the meantime held Lorenzo in jail. The Holy Office’s request that he write out in his own hand a second confession was likely a strategy to ensure that Lorenzo was telling the truth. His testimony, after all, had implicated a wide range of Italian courtiers and humanists in the most compromising heresies of the day.

Spiritual Journeys 43

Lorenzo’s confession not only provided the inquisitors with a compelling typology of heresies, it also makes it clear that the relation between belief and identity could be far more fluid than we might expect.5 In sixteenth-century Italy many individuals passed first from Catholicism to evangelical or Protestant positions; and, of these, several would take the further step of becoming Anabaptists and antitrinitarians; and, indeed, some would become millenarians. Others, after entertaining or embracing Protestant or other heretical ideas, would return to the Catholic Church. Again and again in the records of the Inquisition, we encounter individuals who, much like the Neapolitan Lorenzo Tizzano, passed not merely from Catholicism to a form of Protestantism or evangelism; rather we encounter individuals whose religious identities were never fixed, never completed. This aspect of the Italian reform is apparent in the lives of such celebrated figures as Bernardino Ochino and Fausto Sozzini – both of whose religious beliefs were continually evolving, carrying them from evangelical to increasingly radical and antitrinitarian ideas – as well as in the experience of a wide range of less well-known dissidents and reformers. Significantly, the journeys did always involve a progressive radicalization of beliefs as we see, for example, in the notorious vacillations of Francesco Spiera, who moved from Catholicism to Calvinism, who renounced his heresies, and then, after expressing remorse over his abjuration, died convinced he would go to hell. We see something of this also among those heretical figures who were able to conform outwardly to Catholicism while harboring Protestant beliefs or tendencies secretly within. Contemporaries were certainly aware of the extremes to which such religious particularism could go within the context of the reform movements in Italy. In one of his Venetian sermons, Ochino drew the attention of his listeners to the gran confusione of his time. ‘Almost everyone’, he asserted, ‘has his own set of beliefs. Articles, sects, heresies, faiths, and religions have so multiplied that everyone wishes to treat faith after his own manner.’ In 1542 another reformer – a layman by the name of Baldassare Altieri, who was active in dissenting circles in Venice – also lamented the religious particularlism of his times. ‘We do not have public churches’, he lamented, ‘everyone is a church unto himself, according to his own particular him and will.’ And in 1570 Alessandro Trissino – a member of one of Vicenza’s most distinguished noble households, who lived in Venice from 1558 to 1561 and who, after his trial for heresy in 1563, fled to Chiavenna in the Italian Alps, where he eventually became pastor – echoed these views. ‘But observe, most dear brothers, by


remaining outside of God’s church, you are still deprived of the Word of God … See how many Anabaptists, how many Arians, how many Servetans, Libertines, and other heretics there are among you.’6 There was, in short, something extremely malleable, or restless about many of the reformers or heretics in Italy. In the Italian reform, I am suggesting, it is not enough to line up figures on one side or another of the religious battle lines of the sixteenth century. For very often we find them passing over these lines, drifting from heresy to heresy (what St. Augustine centuries earlier in his ‘confession’ had called the ‘circuitus errori mei’). Furthermore, these were neither marginal nor exceptional figures. To the contrary, the prominence of these figures in the Italian reform was one of its defining characteristics.7 In a famous observation on the Reformation, the great French historian Lucien Febvre remarked, ‘[a] fertile, elementary age was bound to produce something more than an opposition between a well-co-ordinated Protestantism on the one hand a well-expurgated Catholicism on the other.’8 Yet we still have little understanding of this aspect of the religious life and identity in the sixteenth century. In this chapter, accordingly, it is my goal to examine some of the ways in which the experiences of these Italian heretics, so restless in their beliefs, both illuminate certain aspects of how men and women thought about questions of identity and the self in the sixteenth century and highlight the extraordinarily fluid religious situation in Italy in this period. In part, of course, religious beliefs were shaped by social location – a factor that, as we saw in the previous chapter, the Inquisition itself recognized as playing a major role in coloring religious beliefs and in predisposing certain groups of people more than others to heresy. By social location, I do not merely mean a level of wealth, though this certainly was and is fundamental to the concept; I also mean the particular cultural world in which one lived, worked, married, and raised one’s children, with the understanding that the conditions of comfort and stress under which different groups lived, along with their access to economic and political power, varied significantly. Within the heretical communities in Venice, such influences resulted, among patricians and prominent merchants and professionals, in a decidedly conservative and elitist evangelism that made no demands for changing either the social or the political order and, among shopkeepers and skilled craftsmen, in a popular sentiment that appealed to the ideal of equality. Similarly, social location was at work in shaping the Anabaptist vision. To be sure, the Venetian Anabaptists came from


diverse social backgrounds. Within the Anabaptist movement in northern Italy as a whole, a certain elite, made up of humanists and tutors, former priests and friars, notaries and physicians, constituted a visible and activist minority. But workers, primarily poorer workers at the lower end of the social and economic hierarchies, formed the overwhelming majority. For the most part these men were cobblers, textile workers, tailors and sword smiths (or former sword smiths). And a sizeable percentage (at least in contrast to the evangelicals) was illiterate. As a consequence, they belonged to a social world with few connections to the more powerful and privileged members of their society. Moreover, their immediate political experience made the passage from evangelical to more radical positions in the late 1540s relatively easy: the disillusionments that came with the collapse of the evangelical hopes for reform combined with an experience of poverty and a reading of the Gospel that led them to place their hope in fundamentally alternative political and religious arrangements. Salvation was to be a matter of special communities of true believers, whose baptisms would be a sign of their willingness to share with and to assist one another in every way.9 Yet, while social history both allows us to grasp something of the interplay of social life and religious ideas and offers at least a plausible characterization of the Venetian heresies – one that doesn’t reduce the Venetian movements merely to the influence of the new religious ideas of such major reformers as Erasmus, Valdés, Zwingli, Luther, and Calvin – it does not, as I have already suggested, succeed in grappling with a central aspect of the history of heresy and reform in sixteenth-century Italy: namely, the extraordinarily restless and the apparently protean character of many of the lives of particular reformers. For one thing, the sources make it clear that these kinds of shifts regularly took place not only in Venice but also elsewhere in Italy, where social and political forces were quite different. For another, traditional approaches to social history are, by definition, limited. Some years ago the German historian Bernd Moeller drew attention to this aspect of social historical analysis in his famous essay ‘Imperial Cities and the Reformation.’ ‘Who would assert’, he wrote, ‘that human decisions, and especially decisions regarding theology, law, or church politics, can be explained simply with sociological data? Instead, these decisions were motivated by both personal and impersonal factors, like temperament, the sense of responsibility and spontaneity, as well as external influences and constraints of various sorts, in such a way as to form an inexplicable nexus.’10


Moeller’s observation is of great historiographical interest first because it underscores the fact that social history has traditionally drawn a clear, if artificial distinction between social life on the one hand and ideas on the other; and, secondly, because it nonetheless gestures – albeit vaguely – to a sense that social and religious life are more tightly bound up with each other than traditional sociological models suggest. In this context I wish to suggest that, while we might not be able to cut, at least we might begin untying Moeller’s Gordian Knot – his nicht auflösbares Geflecht – by approaching the study of religious identity through an emphasis on particular forms of the relational self – that is, through exploring the ways a number of heretics attempted to negotiate the tensions between their beliefs, convictions, even longings, on the one hand, and the constraints that they felt from fellow courtiers or even fellow merchants and artisans to conform (or not to conform) to one or more of the often conflicting religious ideals of the day, on the other. As I argued in the opening chapter, it is not my assumption that we should examine these heretics either as Burckhardtian individualists willfully and deliberately choosing when to reveal and when to conceal their beliefs; nor is it my assumption that it is useful to think of these heretics under the rubric of ‘self-fashioning’ in which their interior experience was itself, primarily if not entirely, defined and constructed by the social and political contexts in which they found themselves. Rather, it is my view that we should approach the Renaissance self as highly textured, layered, and even divided, but certainly constantly aware of the tensions between one’s interior beliefs, thoughts, and feelings and the particular ways one faced or related to the outside world. As many examples in this book will show, one of the most striking features of Renaissance notions of the self was its explicitly layered quality – a layering that represented a sense not only of inwardness or interiority but also a sense of mystery about what Renaissance writers, drawing on a long tradition, imagined as their inner, spiritual landscapes. A concern with the question of interiority had been one of the salient traits of the spirituality of the twelfth century.11 By the fourteenth century, it was manifest above all in Petrarch’s writings, especially the Secretum in which, under the influence of Augustine, Petrarch examined the depth and the shortcomings of his own soul.12 But it was in the sixteenth century that this concern reached a new level of intensity in both Protestant and Catholic circles. John Calvin, in language that substantially expanded the topography of interiority, encouraged his readers to look more deeply into themselves: ‘[t]he


human heart has so many crannies where vanity hides, so many holes where falsehood lurks, is so decked out with deceiving hypocrisy, that it often dupes itself.’13 Montaigne, one of the preeminent architects of inwardness in the sixteenth century, made a similar observation: ‘I, who make no other profession, find in me such infinite depth and variety, that what I have learned bears no other fruit than to make me realize how much I still have to learn.’14 And the works of the Tudor poet Thomas Wyatt are marked both by their ‘inwardness’ and their ‘intensely personal’ nature.15 Indeed one can point not only to author after author from the Renaissance – Petrarch, Erasmus, Luther, More, Montaigne, Shakespeare – who made issues of interiority central to his discussion of the human situation but also to the way in which this dimension of experience was registered beyond the realm of great letters as well. An especially poignant series of examples of this derives from the inquisitorial records and the martyrologies of this period. The Acts and Monuments of the English martyrologist John Foxe, for example, are filled with examples of Protestant saints who vacillated over the question of whether or not they should reveal their beliefs and convictions to the Catholic prelates who examined them before finally electing to make their ‘inner’ convictions known.16 Inquisitorial archives provide examples of similar issues, the most celebrated of which was the case of the Italian lawyer Francesco Spiera, who struggled with the question of whether or not to dissimulate his beliefs as he was led into the tribunal in Venice only to abjure his convictions before the Inquisitor and later to regret it so deeply that he starved himself to death, convinced that he was going to hell.17 John Calvin, who was himself familiar with this case, doubted that Spiera was an isolated example; he must have heard of many other Spieras from the religious refugees who had come to Geneva. The Catholic lands, he wrote in a series of treatises and letters, were filled with those he called (in reference to the early Christian Nicodemus who, according to the Gospel of John, had come to Jesus ‘by night’) Nicodemites – men and women, that is, who were Protestant by belief but who continued to attend mass and make a show of being Catholic to protect themselves and their families from persecution.18 And, in the Renaissance court as well, the issue of the representation of the self was a central dimension of the life of the elites in this period. The very popularity of Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier not only in Italy but throughout Europe provides evidence of this.19 The Italian humanist and historian Francesco Guicciardini gave simultaneous expression to courtly and religious concerns when he


observed in his Ricordi: ‘[a]nd yet the position I have filled under several Popes has obliged me for personal reasons (per el particulare mio) to desire their greatness. But for this I should have loved Martin Luther as myself.’20 The experience of personhood in the Renaissance world was, therefore, often the experience of a divided self, of a person who was frequently forced to wear a façade in public that disguised his or her convictions, beliefs, or feelings – an experience that often led in the Renaissance and in the sixteenth century in particular to a new emphasis on inwardness. To be sure, there was nothing new about the notion of interiority per se. As I argued in the opening chapter, a certain sense of self-awareness or self-consciousness is always at play in the construction of the self. This was certainly true in the ancient worlds, as texts as diverse as Scripture, Plato’s dialogues, and the writings of the Stoics make clear. In medieval society as well, especially in the wake of the cultural and monastic revivals of the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries, numerous writers and theologians elaborated a deep sense of inwardness and interiority. Bernard of Clairvaux’s mystical theology, which was even diffused in vernacular translations, elaborated the most complex psychology of the soul since Augustine. Peter Abelard’s ethics shifted the attention of moral judgment away from deed to the intention that lay behind it. The Cistercian Aelred of Rievaulx underscored the importance of inwardness in his celebrated treatise on spiritual friendship. And in this same period medieval penitential theory and practice began to stress contrition – genuine sorrow for one’s sins – over external acts of penance.21 But the stressful fragmentation of religious beliefs and the anxieties about salvation that developed in the Renaissance, especially as the Reformation began to make itself felt, complicated the issue of identity for many of those men and women who were caught up in the religious ferment of the period. In such a climate it is not surprising that many men and women adopted a prudential stance towards the world, taking great care about revealing their thoughts and beliefs to those around them – to their lords, their fellow workers, their neighbors, even their friends and members of their own families.22 Prudence is an ancient virtue, with classical roots. It played a central role in Aristotle, who viewed prudence (phronesis) as the practical reason that guided one’s choice in the process of ethical decisionmaking. In Late Antiquity, a number of authors – most notably St. Augustine – would link this classical ideal to the Christian concept of Providence. Indeed the two terms prudentia and providentia both


derived from the Latin providere (‘to foresee’, ‘to take precaution’, ‘to provide for’). As a result, throughout most of the Middle Ages, prudence was viewed as Christian wisdom and it took its place alongside temperance, fortitude, and justice as one of the four cardinal virtues. As the twelfth-century theologian Alan of Lille stated in his treatise on the virtues, the de virtutibus, ‘prudence is the discernment of those things that are good, evil, or mixed, with the avoidance of evil and the election of the good.’23 In Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, prudence is represented as a principle of order, one that is decisive, when properly developed, in holding the passions and the appetites in check when these threaten one’s ability to obtain happiness or salvation, as these are known to human beings through reason and revelation. ‘Prudence’, Thomas writes, ‘is a virtue most necessary for human life. For a good life consists in good deeds. Now in order to do good deeds, it matters not only what a man does but also how he does it; to wit, that he do it from right choice and not merely from impulse or passion.’24 Yet this ideal would undergo a significant shift in the Italian Renaissance, especially in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when humanists began reading and interpreting Aristotle’s works – above all his Nicomachean Ethics – outside a strictly theological context. In the hands of such humanists as Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Giovanni Pontano, and Lorenzo Valla, prudence was no longer the equivalent of providence but rather an ethical strategy that gave new emphasis to the will. And in the early sixteenth century, in the work of Machiavelli, prudence would be divorced entirely from ethics.25 As Machiavelli argued in a famous passage of The Prince, after noting that a ruler should know when to behave like a fox and when like a lion, ‘a wise ruler (uno signore prudente) cannot, nor should he, keep his word when doing so would be to his disadvantage and when the reasons that led him to make promises no longer exist … But one must know how to disguise this nature well, and how to be a fine liar and hypocrite (simulatore e dissimulatore); and men are so simple-minded and so dominated by their present needs that one who deceives will always find one who will allow himself to be deceived.’26 Finally, Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier also places great emphasis on the notion that dialogue is an art. As Federico states at the beginning of Book II: [o]ne should consider carefully whatever one does or says, attending to the place where one does it, in whose presence, at what time, and the motive for one’s actions, one’s own age, profession, the ends one is striving for, and the means that can lead there, and thus,


with these things having been taken into account, let him accommodate himself discreetly for all he wishes to do or to say.27 A concern with this virtue was also present in Renaissance art, perhaps most famously in An Allegory of Prudence by the Venetian artist Titian. What is most striking about this painting is, of course, the portrayal of three faces – one of a young, the next of a mature, and the last of an elderly man – each one of which is placed over the face of a particular animal: a dog, a lion, and a wolf. Art historians generally agree about the identities of the figures portrayed.28 It is the iconographic mysteries that have fascinated them. The inscription ‘ex praeterito, praesens prudenter agit; ni futuram actionem deturpet’ – which we might translate ‘he, who has knowledge of the past, acts prudently in the present lest he spoil his future actions’ – makes it clear, as does the portrayal of three heads, that this is an emblematic work that provides a visual analysis of the virtue prudence. What is original in the work is the inclusion of the faces of the animals. It was the great art historian Erwin Panofsky who first identified these as ancient Egyptian symbols of time, which were transmitted to western Europe by the Roman author Macrobius’s Saturnalia as well as in Pierio Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica (1556), an emblem book that Titian certain knew.29 While there is no evidence that Titian knew the portrait, the painting seems oddly familiar, as though it is an evocation of Lorenzo Lotto’s portrait of Bartolomeo Carpan that we examined in the previous chapter. Certain differences between the two works underscore two contrasting notions of identity in Renaissance Venice. To Lotto, questions of social identity dominated his painting. To Titian, by contrast, social identity is secondary to psychological identity. Prudence points to a self-consciousness that one should know how to take on different temperaments at different times, recalling quite explicitly Machiavelli’s famous counsel in The Prince that a prudent ruler should know when to live like a fox and when like a lion. But Titian’s view of prudence also makes it plain that it derives from experience, from memory, and from one’s sense of the trajectory of life. A young man should look forward to the future, drawing on the knowledge that, to survive, he will have to make use of both the strength of the lion and the wisdom of the wolf at different stages in his life. Prudence, therefore, is intrinsically related not merely to the immediate circumstances in which one lives but to one’s past and one’s expectations for the future as well. On this view, identity is never purely something immediate and timeless; it is rather something that evolves and that plays a role in the shaping of

51

Allegory of Prudence. Titian (Tiziano Vecelli). Courtesy of National Gallery, London.


layered self, a self with memories as well as with different aspects, temperaments, and strategies for survival.30 This new understanding of prudence was widely diffused.31 Bartolomeo Carli Piccolomini’s Trattato della prudenza (1537–38) is one example of the importance of this new ethic, as was Lucio Paolo Rosello’s Ritratto del vero governo del principe dall’esempio vivo del gran Cosimo de Medici, in which the author observed of the courtly life: But I submit that there is a great difference between the prudent man, about whom I wish to speak, and the flatterer; because the latter, of his own accord, and not because he is pushed by necessity, approaches others in a deceptive manner and with false blandishments, but the former is compelled by necessity … and accommodates himself to the times, now concealing, now revealing, as circumstance allow.32 This prudential ideal reached across class lines. Testifying in 1566 before the Inquisition in Modena, for example, a witness noted that there were many Protestants in the city, ‘but they go about with prudence (prudentemente) and in secret in order to avoid being accused of heresy.’33 And in the following year in Venice the silk-weaver Marcantonio Varotto reported having received advice from a fellow heretic in Mantua that he maintain the greatest of caution. ‘If you know the truth’, he was counseled, ‘give thanks to God, but attend to your own affairs, keep the truth within (in voi), do not go about revealing it because it is not now the time to discuss these matters.’34 Even in the fifteenth century the Franciscan Bernardino of Siena, to whom the traditional ideal of prudence remained central to his understanding of ethics, attacked a similar duplicity. ‘There are those’, he preached, ‘who speak with two tongues, who hold one thing in their hearts while they speak another with their tongues.’35 A prudential rhetoric was, moreover, an increasingly important dimension of the everyday. In a variety of venues, great emphasis was placed on the importance of cultivating a certain ambiguity about one’s beliefs in daily interactions. Renaissance books – from Paolo da Certaldo’s Libro di buoni costumi to Alberti’s Della famiglia to Francesco Guicciardini’s Ricordi – recommended a certain caution in revealing one’s convictions or feelings. To a large degree, it is not surprising that the demands of everyday life, both in the cities and the courts of Renaissance Europe, tended to collapse the traditional distinction between prudence and dissimulation. Though our sources are limited,


we do have some sense of the history of the self in urban contexts. In their efforts to maintain their honor in the eyes of their neighbors and fellow workers or to negotiate the demands of their own sexuality against a backdrop of seemingly impossible religious demands, for example, it is evident that lay people in the late Middle Ages often viewed the self as a complex entity, involving the negotiation of desire and/or belief with social and cultural expectations. For the early Renaissance, the evidence for this is most pronounced in such settings as Florence, where patricians, merchants, and artisans began keeping diaries (ricordanze or libri di famiglia) that often provide us with revealing glimpses of these internal conflicts.36 And a recent study of sexuality in Renaissance Venice has made it clear that adult Venetians, while posing publicly as moral members of a Christian society, often selfconsciously engaged in a variety of sexual practices beyond the expected boundaries of proper behavior – clear evidence that the question of what to and what not to reveal was a central issue in the lives of townspeople as well as those of courtiers.37 The Renaissance preoccupation with prudence was a symptom of an acute sense of concern with the question of identity in this period. Both the emphasis on deliberation – as we see, for example, in the popularity of the dialogue as a favorite genre among the humanists – and the practical divorce of prudence from ethics point in this direction. To be sure, there was much in Aquinas’s thought that had invested the self (whether understood as intellect or will) with a significant role in decision-making, but Aquinas’s emphasis consistently fell upon the need to bring the appetites and the will into conformity with properlydetermined ends. In the Middle Ages it was the role of the virtues both to hold the passions in check and to encourage thoughtful deliberation about the proper ends of one’s actions. From the fifteenth century on, by contrast, the will is seen as increasingly free of these external (and internal) constraints and more emphasis is placed on the feelings and emotions – above all on the question of whether or not one should share such internal thoughts and feelings with others. Certainly the question of prudence played a central role in the experience of Gasparo Contarini, perhaps the most prominent Venetian to embrace evangelical ideas. Born in 1483, Contarini studied philosophy and theology at the University of Padua, where he came into close contact with Tommaso Giustiniani and Vincenzo Quirini, like him members of the Venetian patriciate. All three young men felt profound malaise over the crisis in spiritual values and religious institutions in


early sixteenth-century Italy. Whereas Giustiniani and Quirini chose to leave Venice and enter the monastic life in a Camaldolensian house near Arezzo in Tuscany (where they would write their celebrated proposal for the reform of the Church, the Libellus ad Leonem X), Contarini searched rather for a new spirituality that would allow him to remain in the world, and he found it – in ways strikingly similar to those that Luther was about to discover and to render so familiar – in his recognition that his own efforts alone would never be enough for him to achieve salvation even if, as he wrote in a letter to his friend Giustiniani, ‘I did all possible penance and much more besides.’38 Contarini died in 1542, only one month after Pope Paul III established the Roman Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.39 As a result, he was never constrained to choose, as many of his younger contemporaries were forced to do, between Luther and the pope. To the contrary, he was able to fashion a far more ambiguous persona. And it seems likely that the intensity of his experience as a young man, faced with the challenge of his friends’ decision to enter a monastery and of his resolution finally that he could go on living in the midst of the city and participate fully in its political life, gave Contarini the resolve – a relatively clearly defined internal identity – which, paradoxically, made the need to mask or to equivocate all the more tolerable. In an early letter to Giustiniani, Contarini described something of the process by which he forged precisely this confident, relatively strong sense of identity that would serve him so well in his later struggles. With disarming honesty, he laid out the nature of his dilemma to his friend. He was painfully aware of the gulf that separated his outer from his inner life. ‘Although outwardly I seem to you to have qualities for which I desire to be loved’, he wrote, ‘alas, if you knew me inwardly as I really am (nel’intrinseco come son in effecto), and as even I don’t know myself, you would not judge me [as favorably] as you do.’40 But Contarini also described how he had come to reevaluate the relationship of his own inner concerns to hopes for salvation. In the course of a long conversation with his confessor just before Easter at his parish church in Venice, Contarini had come to see that ‘the way of salvation is broader than many people think’, that Christ had died for the salvation of the sins of all ‘who desire him for their guide and want to be members of the body of which Christ is the head.’ 41 It was an insight that led to a fundamental adjustment in Contarini’s sense of himself and of his ability to act in the world. In the balance Contarini had struck between his outer and inner life, divine grace became a guarantee that he would


not lose his soul in the life of the city. He could carry out his duties faithfully first as Venice’s ambassador to the imperial court of Charles V, later to the papal curia, and, from 1535 on, as a cardinal of the Roman Church, all the while knowing that his spiritual life could not be compromised by his public duties. Such an identity, at once confident and well-defined, provided the ballast necessary (and much ballast was needed) to navigate successfully in the treacherous waters of the courts of Renaissance Europe where the pressures to compromise one’s convictions were so great that prudence had become the leading virtue of the day. For the prudent Contarini, evangelism made a public life possible, both because he needn’t question his own identity and because he had defined his own sense of self in a profoundly personal, almost private way. For many Italian reformers, especially those whose lives were spent in the courtly orbits of Renaissance popes and princes, evangelical ideas must have served just such a function, allowing them to fashion public personae that could be worn rather lightly over private identities. Such a prudential self allowed for the preservation of one’s integrity even within the intricate webs of patronage politics at the Italian courts. In the century of Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo, and Stefano Guazzo’s Civil Conversation – each of which, as we have seen, proved to be enormously influential works of etiquette – Italian aristocrats and patricians were more than a little conscious of the necessity for prudent dissimulation. The Sienese nobleman Bartolomeo Carli Piccolomini’s Trattato della prudenza, in its stress on the need for the individual ‘to project an impressive image of himself, training himself to be all things to all men, while at the same time preserving his own inner freedom and remaining detached from the world in spite of his dealings with it’ forms an exact parallel to Carli’s explicitly nicodemite argument that the reformed Christian should ‘conform to what others [do] on the outside but internally to do whatever the spirit inspires [one] to do, addressing everything to Christ.’42 As the example of Contarini and others suggest, Protestant and especially evangelical ideas facilitated this goal. They did so not only because of the way they positioned themselves in relationship to the praxis of power – that is, not only by their opposition to Catholic tradition on the one hand and their submission to Scripture on the other. To be sure, both of these elements were essential components of Protestant and evangelical thought. But equally important was the stress the early reformers – and here I have in mind individuals as diverse as Luther, Valdés, and Contarini –


placed on grace. From this vantage, one’s identity was beyond one’s control; it was a gift from God, a continually replenished foundation of forgiveness that made action in the world, the vita activa, possible. Such an identity – let me be clear – was itself a construction, but a self so constructed could withstand the pressures of court even when one’s external role was a constant object of observation, of approval and disapproval. After all, Gasparo Contarini did not define himself purely in relationship to his roles as ambassador and as cardinal. He also carried within himself a set of convictions forged in an earlier struggle over the question of whether or not it was possible to reject monasticism and yet be saved. There is, in short, a personal history or an archeology of the constructed self that makes it difficult to view identity purely as a function of one’s relation to external authorities – to the pope, for example, or to another prince even in such an authoritarian age as the sixteenth century. Not everyone could embrace a prudential ethic easily. In fact, it was precisely the studied ambiguities of courtly self-presentation that most aggravated Lorenzo Tizzano. Here was a young man who deeply desired to know what those around him stood for. In the manuscript confession he prepared for the Venetian Holy Office in December of 1552, he described the frustration he felt in his dealings with his fellow heretics: I was not able to gather from them whether they believed these things or not, because they are very cautious individuals, who don’t make their views known … and about fra Geronimo, for example, I wouldn’t know how to tell you what he has resolved, because he seems very inconstant, and that which he seemed to believe one day, he doubted the next.43 Later, when interrogated by the Holy Office, Lorenzo made a similar point in his description of the bishop of Pozzuolo who had exasperated him in much the same way: He used to ask me about these Lutheran and even Anabaptist opinions, and I would answer him and tell him what I believed, and at times he would remain quiet, and at times he would laugh about it, and I just don’t know how to judge if he accepted or consented to these things or not, because he is a person who is always joking and bantering in such a way that one cannot gather what it is he feels in his soul.44


Indeed, though it is only a glimpse, Lorenzo provides evidence that he had always sought a life that allowed its external manifestations to express or at the very least not to be inconsistent with his internal convictions. This had also been the central dilemma of his life as a monk. He was not meant, he wrote in his confession, for the monastic life (‘non poteva comportare quella vita’). He had become a monk, he continued, ‘to please his mother’ (‘per satisfare a mia madre’). It was only after her death that Lorenzo was released from the monastery and was given license to serve as a secular priest in Naples. Lorenzo, therefore, placed enormous importance on the transparency of identity. Thus, in contrast to Contarini, his spiritual journey was largely a quest for a religious idiom and a community in which he might present himself without compromise, without equivocation. Lorenzo’s goal, that is, was a transcendence of the need to preserve a prudential self. Indeed, many of the Italian reformers who passed from evangelical to more radical positions shared Lorenzo’s view that faith required such transparency, the stripping away of all pretense and all the social fictions that courtly evangelicals willingly accepted. Though his confession is less explicit, Giovanni Laureto di Buongiorno, who had been a monk at Monte Oliveto at Naples at the same time as Lorenzo, appears to have been looking for a similar way in which he could express his identity publicly. After embracing Protestant and evangelical ideas in Naples, he hoped at first to go to Germany but he wound up instead at Piacenza, in the court of Isabella Bresegna. While there he was converted to Anabaptist views by the Abbot Bruno Busale; subsequently, while studying Greek and Hebrew in Thessalonica, he made himself a Jew. Perhaps he believed that circumcision would serve as an even more unequivocal marking of membership in a well-defined religious community than adult baptism had.45 Don Pietro Manelfi appears to have been on a similar quest. At least, as Manelfi represented his spiritual journey to fra Lorenzo de Albertis, the inquisitor at Bologna, his earlier ‘conversions’ were not the result of sudden inspirations. To the contrary, in each case social pressures appear to have played a prominent role. It had been Bernardino Ochino and two of his fellow Capuchins who had originally convinced Pietro that the Roman Church was corrupt, even diabolical. In Florence some years later don Pietro would have a similar experience with a group of Anabaptists. He portrays himself as the reluctant convert, finally persuaded that their beliefs were true. His antitrinitarian position likewise grew out of a meeting of northern Italian Anabaptists in Venice in 1550. Perhaps it is not an accident that


both Giovanni Laureto di Buongiorno and don Pietro Manelfi were spontecomparentes – heretics who volunteered their confessions to the Inquisition. This ritualized confession, with its opportunity to record in narrative form one’s errors and heresies and to beg for the Church’s mercy, allowed repentant heretics to identify themselves with a particular, visible spiritual community or church. Their experience suggests that it is usually other communities and other faiths – and not one’s own community and faith – that seem to allow for the open expression of the individual’s beliefs. Although he did not volunteer to make a confession before the Venetian Holy Office, the Anabaptist Francesco della Sega, originally from Rovigo, nonetheless provided the Inquisition there with a rich narrative of his life. Francesco had the bad luck to be arrested in the port city of Capodistria (Koper) on August 27, 1562 just as he was leading a group of Italian Anabaptists out of the Venetian Republic to Pausrum in Moravia where, for the past several years, he and his fellow Italian Giulio Gherlandi had been living in the Bruderhöfe or religious communes established there by exiles from Switzerland, Germany, and the Tyrol. Francesco’s original interrogation before the Inquisition had not gone well. Accordingly, he was pleased, he wrote in his memorial to the Venetian Holy Office, that it had granted him ‘the opportunity to write about his faith’, though in the very next paragraph (in one of several rhetorical moves that shifted the legitimate authority to judge an individual’s soul away from worldly authority), Francesco added that the ‘grace, favor and memory that allowed one to write about one’s faith and life’ came directly from God.46 As a young man, Francesco continued, ‘my father put me in Padua that I would study law and become a man of reputation (homo da reputation) and do what I could to enlarge the family lands. And at the same time I didn’t let up from having a good time and enjoying all the pleasures of the flesh such as dancing, partying, whoring, feasting, drinking, and other foolishness.’47 Yet this life was not for Francesco; he recognized this during an illness when he began to read Scripture earnestly, seeking salvation. At first he was unable to reform himself, ‘because I had grown to despair in myself and there was nothing I enjoyed doing.’48 It subsequently became clear to Francesco that he had to make a radical break. He left the university and lost friends and family: My father chased me out of the house because I had left off studying law and I told him that it was better to learn a trade and earn a


living with one’s hands and by the sweat of one’s brow than to do so through litigation and contention. And those who had at first been my friends became my enemies, because I did not wish to go out with them anymore, or be like them, and as a result they all started to make fun of me.49 It is of course impossible to know if events unfolded precisely as Francesco recalled them. But what is of interest here is that in his presentation of himself to the Holy Office, he chose to stress the degree to which his religious choices had set him off from his father and his friends. Contarini had achieved some sense of self – of identity – in his conflict with Quirini and Giustiniani; and Lorenzo Tizzano’s sense of self had been shaped to a large degree through his own conflict with the monastic vocation – a life imposed on him more by his mother than out of a sense of calling. But we have no evidence in either of these cases of a break so total with the individual’s past as we see in the story Francesco tells about himself. Contarini’s process of defining himself, of fashioning an identity, may have exacerbated the tensions between himself and some friends, but it certainly did not cost him his family. Conversely, Lorenzo’s efforts to fashion his own identity may have stemmed to a certain extent from the misperception he believed his mother had of him and his role, but there is no suggestion here that he needed to sacrifice friends in this process. Both these men carried a relatively strong sense of who they were into their adulthoods. Both, that is, were enabled by their experiences – internal and external – to become prudential selves. But Francesco’s break with his past was total, and it is perhaps this that explains why ultimately he felt compelled, first, to try to forge a new identity for himself as an exile among the ‘fratelli’ of Moravia and, secondly, to chose martyrdom as the final means of defining and asserting who he was and what he stood for. As useful as it is to analyze the relationship of identity to religious beliefs and practices in the lives of such figures as Garparo Contarini, Lorenzo Tizzano, and Francesco della Sega, the historian faces a decidedly more difficult task in trying to understand the nature of the self and the problem of identity among merchants and artisans, or even among the majority of those schoolteachers and physicians who took up heretical beliefs, themselves often passing from ‘error to error’. While the inquisitorial sources are often somewhat helpful, they rarely allow for a direct analysis of how these individuals defined or fashioned themselves in the


context of Renaissance Venice. Sources that are as immediate, for example, as Contarini’s and della Sega’s letters, or even the detailed confessions Tizzano and later della Sega prepared for the Holy Office in Venice are unfortunately the exception, not the rule. Nonetheless it seems likely that religion was increasingly a central means by which Venetian merchants and artisans, much like their counterparts elsewhere in late Renaissance Europe, self-consciously represented themselves to one another. Even when they did not denounce heretics to the religious authorities, traditionally Catholic craftsmen often came together to complain of the ramblings of a heretic. And, in so doing, they set themselves apart quite clearly from those who chose to criticize or even break with Rome. Heretics, in turn, often made conscious decisions to set themselves off from their Catholic neighbors and fellow workers. Furthermore, since the world of heretics was itself fissured, the heretics drew rather sharp distinctions among themselves. When questioned by the Inquisition, the Venetian cobbler Giacomo da Sacile, for instance, appeared more upset that his own conventicle had been conflated with the Anabaptists than he was to have been brought before the Holy Office in the first place.50 And we learn also of tensions between evangelicals and millenarians, whose basic outlooks on the nature of religious experience also clashed sharply. But such groups not only set individuals off from others, they also brought groups of artisans together and provided a sense of belonging. We see this with special clarity in the case of a group of evangelical craftsmen that met frequently in the parish of San Moisè; its members had come to know and to trust one another in the course of practicing their trades, as well as in such social settings as the tavern and the confraternity. A prominent member of the conventicle at San Moisè was the goldsmith Iseppo. When the inquisitor asked him if he knew others who had also been named as heretics, he responded that he did. Together with Antonio delle Celade, he had served as an officer in the Scuola di San Fantin or della Giustizia (the confraternity whose members accompanied the condemned to their executions); he had made a gold chain for the cobbler Bortholo; exchanged services with the turner Jacomo and his son Bernardo; and purchased various goods from the jeweler Alvise dalle Crosette. Such business ties evidently provided these men with a measure of mutual trust; but it is equally possible that shared religious convictions led these individuals to do business with one another.51 To be sure, there was little that was new in the important role religion played in defining the social and political lives of Italian merchants and


artisans. What was new was the profusion of heresies, the increase in the number of religious possibilities, and the consequent difficulties of apparent choice and self-definition that artisans and merchants faced in this early modern city. In the city as in the court, evangelism had the advantage of a certain ambiguity. An evangelical, that is, could trade and work with both Catholics and heretics, probably with impunity, at least in the sense that such choices spoke quite plainly about how they viewed their own position in Venetian society and how too they wished to be seen. Thus, the identity of artisans and merchants, like that of their better-known counterparts, was a function simultaneously of their own personal history, their social and political experience, and the highly variegated mosaic of early modern European culture. In a city as marked by social and economic change and at the same time as cosmopolitan or as multi-cultural as sixteenth-century Venice, it is hardly surprising that traditional Catholic institutions and patterns of religious belief and behavior could no longer serve to unify the Venetians as successfully as they once had. It was this cluster of forces that made the Italian heresies fertile ground for the development of the prudential self and its critics.

4 A Journeymen’s Feast of Fools

When we cannot get a proverb, or a joke, or a ritual, or a poem, we know we are onto something. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, 1984 No one knew precisely what was going on behind closed doors at no. 27 Calle Sporca in the Venetian parish of San Luca, but whatever it was upset several people. The landlord had seen the paper hats. A fellow tenant had overheard the singing and even seen the makeshift altar, as well as a number of other religious items – candles, a censer, and several pious paintings – in the room of the two journeymen next door. Lady Lucretia Salomono, a noblewoman who resided across the way, saw much more. From her window she had observed two young men wearing strange hats and garments. One young man, she said, bowed down before the other’s feet, while the latter held a censer. But she had not tarried at her window for long and she could provide few further details.1 Whatever it was got people talking. The landlord Giorgio Bresciano, a wine merchant, didn’t like it at all. He told the two young journeymen to get rid of their hats (to burn them) and to stop whatever it was they were up to. They told him to leave them alone, they were not bothering a soul. Giorgio then told Pier Paolo Demetrio, the parish priest, about it. Padre Demetrio, in turn, informed two of his superiors, the Patriarch Giovanni Trevisan as well as the Papal Legate Alberto Bolognetti – both of whom, it happened, served alongside the Inquisitor and three Venetian noblemen on the tribunal of the Venetian Inquisition. The Legate asked the priest to inquire around his parish, to get to the bottom of these rumors, and to find out just who was involved. The Inquisition was interested in a religious ceremony or performance that was anything but orthodox.2 62

A Journeymen’s Feast of Fools 63

Inquisitors, as we have seen, were no strangers to performance; they were keenly aware that the men and women they interrogated – not merely the accused, but witnesses also – could twist the truth either by making false statements about their own beliefs (to protect themselves) or by making false allegations against others (to cause them harm). As we have seen, such equivocations and misrepresentations raised key questions in the Renaissance about identity. But the report that reached them in 1582 described an entirely different sort of performance – a performance that was intended not to conceal one’s beliefs but rather to forge a sense of community or belonging among three journeymen immigrants who had come to make their livings in Venice. There was little, it should be pointed out, that automatically made such matters as this a concern of the Inquisition, a tribunal that had originally been established to ferret out heretics and bring people who had gone astray back into the fold of orthodox Catholicism. But by 1582 heresy was not nearly the burning issue it had been in the forties, fifties, and sixties, and the interests of the tribunal were beginning to shift to other matters: to superstitious practices of all sorts, to clerical concubinage and irregularities, to hints of witchcraft and magic. Protestantism had made the Catholic world far more sensitive about the need to define what was superstitious and what religious.3 This had been a preoccupation of the Holy Fathers who convened at Trent. In 1581 Martino de Arles’ Tractatus de superstitionibus, a treatise that sought to clarify the subject, had been reprinted in Venice. In the same year, moreover, the Venetian parish clergy experienced the first systematic visitation or inspection by Roman officials of all the city’s parishes.4 Padre Demetrio, like his peers throughout the city, was no doubt beginning to feel the need for greater compliance with the hierarchy’s expectations of religious conformity. Not surprisingly, he followed through on the legate’s request. His preliminary investigation turned up several details about the activities of the two young tenants in Giorgio Bresciano’s flat. These two young men – Fabio and Bortholo – the priest reported, were both journeymen mercers, from L’Aquila in the Abruzzi, a small city in the Apennines just to the northeast of Rome. Together with a third mercer, a journeyman by the name of Evangelista, they had been enacting some kind of religious ceremony that the priest called a ‘vespers.’ In the room were an altar and six candles, two large and four smaller ones, which they would light during the service. But the most peculiar part of the ceremony was the fact that they dressed up


in clerical vestments. They put on white frocks. Two of them wore red cardinal’s hats while the third dressed as the pope, wearing a paper mitre. It was the journeyman pope whose feet were kissed. The members of the Inquisition could not help wondering what in the world these young men were up to, and although Padre Demetrio could supply a preliminary description of the ritual, he really had no idea why the journeymen enacted it.5 Among the some half dozen witnesses the Inquisition examined, the most informative was the landlord’s son Alberto, a boy probably no more than fourteen years of age, whom the journeymen had actually conscripted on occasion to serve as a kind of acolyte. Alberto, therefore, was not only an eyewitness. He had participated, even if only halfheartedly, in their suspicious rites and was willing to describe them fully. When Evangelista said vespers – so Alberto told the Tribunal – he would paste on a false beard, wrap himself in a red and green vestment, and put on a cardinal’s hat. Bortolo wore a white shirt, but he too had a cardinal’s cap, while Fabio, also in a white shirt, wore the papal mitre, a white conical hat on which various trifles, possibly obscene, were scribbled in black ink, and on the top of which there was a paper cross. So dressed, they sang vespers. They followed the office from a book opened on the altar. On one occasion at least, Evangelista had preached a sermon on the Good Samaritan. They also had a censer and three chandeliers, one of which they placed up high and the two others below. Those who wore the cardinals’ hats kissed the feet of the one who played the pope, and they censed him, and he gave them the benediction, making the sign of the cross with his hand.6 With the rumors confirmed, the Inquisition summoned and then interrogated the journeymen carefully. Quite understandably, Evangelista, Fabio, and Bortholo stressed their innocence. To be sure, they had been secretive – whenever they had performed their ceremony, they had taken care to shut the door, to put down a carpet, and to sing softly – yet they insisted that they had no idea they were up to any mischief. Asked why they did it, Fabio assured them that they did not do it ‘out of disrespect but merely to avoid leaving the house and to stay out of trouble.’ According to his and his friends’ accounts, the whole affair had evolved quite naturally. At first Fabio had used the little altar for his private devotions. Then Evangelista had had the idea of the three of them saying vespers. Finally Evangelista, always the prime mover, had brought the paper hats and other paraphernalia and urged his friends to dress up along with him


in an increasingly elaborate affair, in which, the Inquisition learned, Evangelista and Fabio took turns playing the pope. Although everything had begun quite innocently, the journeymen were finally willing to admit that things had got out of hand.7 It was a plausible story, but it did not satisfy the Inquisition. In an age of upheaval – when men and women were experimenting with new religious identities – it was not a light matter for laymen to play, however seriously, with religious symbols. The tribunal, therefore, ordered all three journeymen imprisoned and then took the unusual step of drawing up a summation of the case for submission to outside experts (theologians and canon lawyers) for their advice. This memorial offered a brief description of the ‘vespers’ itself and noted, as evidence of probable guilt, that the journeymen, upon learning of the Inquisition’s interest, had hidden from the authorities for several days before turning themselves in. Yet, the Inquisition recorded, the journeymen had insisted that they did not know they were acting improperly. ‘Should these men’, the document queried, ‘abjure as formal heretics or de vehementi or de levi’ – that is, were they to be considered, according to the definitions of canon law and the traditions of inquisitorial practice, heretics in the strict sense (those who willfully and knowingly acted against the teachings of the Catholic Church) or did they fall into that more ambiguous category of being either strongly or lightly suspected of heretical beliefs and practices?8 The learned opinions of the consultants drew upon such authorities as Thomas Aquinas, Jean Gerson, Tommaso de Vio Cajetan, and Alfonso de Castro, the author of de iusta hereticorum punitione of 1547. But there was little agreement in their recommendations. The Jesuit Martino Fornario was the most lenient, dismissing the matter lightly, arguing that the mercers had not acted impiously so much as ‘out of frivolity and ignorance’ and advising that they abjure as lightly suspected of heretical activity. The canon lawyer Pietro Vendramin, a Venetian nobleman who had edited an inquisitor’s manual in 1575, offered a somewhat sterner view, recommending that they abjure ‘de vehementi.’ He granted that they may have acted out of ignorance, but he was disturbed by the fact that they had performed the ceremony repeatedly. The final two authorities, the Franciscan Pietro Rodolfo, regent at the Frari, and the Patriarch’s vicar Desiderius Guido, took much harsher views. Rodolfo argued that the journeymen were guilty of the contempt of sacerdotal vestments and of premeditated, scandalous, and heretical behavior. He made no specific recommendation, but urged, as a way of getting to the bottom of the whole affair, that


they be tortured or at least threatened with torture. Desiderius Guido was also harsh. He urged that they abjure as formal heretics. His logic was rigorous and uncompromising. He dismissed the idea that their actions constituted either a game or a mockery. He took them at their word that their ceremony had been motivated by piety. And he argued that the very fact that the accused insisted that they did not believe they were doing anything wrong demonstrated that they believed they themselves were priests. (In the minds of the judges, this was a manifest heresy, with, as we shall see, possible ties to the Lutheran doctrine of the priesthood of all believers.) They may deny this, Desiderius continued, but actions speak more loudly than words. Nor did their humble status exonerate them. The spirit, good or evil, travels among the poor as well as among the educated.9 As in so many cases of religious experimentation that arose in this period, a learned cleric sought to impose order on a chaotic and confusing world a little too quickly. Desiderius’s brief was nonetheless impressive, and it had the greatest impact on the subsequent questioning. Its evident appeal to the inquisitors lay in its reasonably coherent explanation for the actions of the journeymen. It doubtless alleviated the frustration of the bewildered inquisitors, whose appointed task, after all, was to define and then label the crime. In the inquisitors’ minds, the mercers’ bizarre performances of some kind of religious ceremony was transformed into evidence of belief in the priesthood of all believers. The legal and theological logic of the Inquisition had rendered the unusual familiar. On October 18, the interrogations were systematic and summary – each of the three mercers was asked if he believed that all men were priests. To us, such a line of questioning appears absurd. The journeymen mercers were engaged in a ceremony that was the very antithesis of the Lutheran teaching which had emphasized simplicity of worship and which scoffed at the elaborate ceremonies of Catholicism. But to the inquisitors, this theory was quite a different matter. Given the Venetian Holy Office’s preoccupation with checking the spread of Reformation ideas in the Republic over the previous forty years, it was an easy conclusion to reach. Moreover, it was a theory that resolved the inquisitors’ uncertainties in the face of the unexplained as surely as a learned concept of witchcraft resolved the confusion of some of their counterparts in the Friuli who, at about this same time, confronted a bewildering array of popular beliefs and customs that were meant in all innocence to ensure fertility of the villages and the crops.10 Although Desiderius’s views did the most to shape the Inquisition’s interpretation of the ceremony, the sentence reflected the effort to


establish a consensus among the conflicting views of the experts about the severity of the ‘heresy.’ On October 26, 1582, the Patriarch Giovanni Trevisan, together with the inquisitor Angelo Mirabino, the legate’s auditor Roberto Tannio, and the patrician Nicolò Venier (the other two lay members of the Tribunal were absent), determined Evangelista, Fabio, and Bortholo to be strongly suspected of heresy and required them to so abjure. In addition, the three young mercers were to carry out a variety of penances. Over the course of the next year they were to make their confessions and take the Eucharist on two occasions, at Easter and at Christmas, and to show proof of having done so to the Holy Office. Moreover, they were to fast every Friday. Finally, for the following six months, they were to recite the seven penitential psalms every Saturday (or, if illiterate, say the rosary) and to present themselves once a month to the Holy Office during this same period. On October 28, the tribunal’s chancellor read their sentences and abjurations from the pulpit of the parish church of San Luca during high mass. As the various briefs of the theological consultants make clear, a key element in the evaluation of a performance was the intent of the participants. Was their action in jest? If so, the punishment was likely to be light. But if a performance was taken seriously, then the consequences too were likely to be serious. This distinction is suggestive, for, as I have already argued, performances were not always about concealment; they also played a major role in the forging of relations and bonds among workers and neighbors. For this reason the journeymen’s ceremony at San Luca is a precious text. It promises to reveal as much about popular notions of identity as The Book of the Courtier, for instance, might tell us about issues of identity in aristocratic culture. This is all the truer, since, as the exemplary studies of both Carlo Ginzburg and Robert Darnton have shown, the apparently inexplicable can provide invaluable clues about the past. ‘When we cannot get a proverb or a joke, or a ritual, or a poem, we know we are onto something’, Robert Darnton has written, albeit optimistically. Yet it is precisely through our conjectures about the significance of historical evidence – the meaning of which is often at first opaque – that we come to grasp the past on its own terms.11 Our first goal, therefore, is to try to figure out what really was going on behind the closed doors of Bortholo’s and Fabio’s flat at San Luca. To this end, neither the journeymen nor the inquisitors and their consultants offer much help. The journeymen, after all, did their best to


present a favorable interpretation of their activities. And the Inquisition was too quick to label the crime, providing us with a categorization that fails to tell us much about the actual meaning of the seemingly bizarre rites Fabio, Bortholo, and Evangelista enacted repeatedly at vespers. To make sense of what they were up to, we must turn elsewhere, especially to the history of ritual in medieval and Renaissance Europe, but also to social anthropology and the possible significances of rites of inversion for our understanding of identity. The study of this ceremony as a clue to the nature of Renaissance identities is not without difficulties. First, only recently have students of Venetian history begun to turn away from the study of its elites and to focus on the experience of ordinary men and women in the city.12 And secondly, while other studies of notions of identity in Renaissance Europe are suggestive, they tend to examine the history of popular notions of identity in isolation from those of the elite. For what is most striking about the ceremony I examine here is, as I shall argue below, both its novelty and its dependence on official cultural forms. In the Renaissance world, the lives of the poor – the layered qualities of their identities – were far more complex than many historians have assumed. Their reconstruction requires more than the identification of popular values and traditions at odds with those of the elites, an approach to popular culture which Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World – with its recovery of unofficial cultural values that existed alongside the official culture of churchmen and elites – has tended to foster.13 To be sure, it is possible to identify alternative values and traditions at the popular level in early modern cities, but historians must be cautious about exaggerating the autonomy of those traditions both in relationship to elite culture and to broader economic, social, and political changes under way in society as a whole. Otherwise they risk a historical idealism that, ironically, imputes to the culture of the people an autonomy they themselves would be among the first to deny to the culture of the elites. In the argument that follows, therefore, I shall first attempt to decode the journeymen’s performance or ritual. The antics of Evangelista, Bortholo, and Fabio were possible, I believe, only in a city where traditional rituals tied to parish, to guild, and to neighborhood had begun to break down and where the state had begun to take an increasingly strong hand in the orchestration of ceremony. Renaissance Venice was, in short, a world in which many traditional rituals were no longer possible. Moreover, as immigrants, men like Evangelista, Bortholo, and Fabio faced an especially difficult challenge


in finding a sense of community. Consequently we find them creatively and resourcefully inventing traditions, cobbling together a meaningful sense of identity and of place from the fragments of a culture that had begun to disintegrate around them. One clue to what was going on in their ceremony lies in the status of the three principal figures involved. Each was a journeyman, working in the mercer’s trade. The Venetian mercers whose trade gave its name to the Merceria, the winding, shop-lined street that stretches to this day from the Rialto Bridge to the Piazza San Marco, were merchants and retailers who sold a wide variety of goods, from needles and tacks to hats and gloves, brocades and silks, and, significantly, vestments and items made from brass and paper. Their shops, then as now, were where many Venetians and visitors shopped for the latest fashions or for a new purse or hat. Among the masters, some were wealthy merchants, involved in international trade; others were poor local shopkeepers who owned next to nothing. In 1568, there were 444 masters in the mercer’s guild in Venice. About one hundred of them had more than 1,000 ducats (a very handsome sum) tied up in their businesses; but one and a half times that many had less than 100 ducats invested. It was hardly a guild that promoted solidarity even among masters.14 Journeymen could hope to have a shop of their own, but in this trade capital, not skill, probably accounted for most of the ability to rise. The divisions within the craft, moreover, were probably more acute than ever immediately following the Plague of 1575–77, that is, just in the period we are examining. The epidemic had killed nearly one quarter of the Venetian population, severely reducing its work force at a point when the city’s economy was increasingly dependent on local businesses and crafts. The government took the traditional steps to open up the guilds, and in March 1577 the Senate passed a law allowing anyone, ‘whether a native or a foreigner … to practice in any guild of the city’ without the payment of the traditional entry fees. And at the beginning of the following year, the government allowed masters in all the guilds to take on as many apprentices in their shops as they wished.15 The hierarchical, diversified guild of mercers, therefore – especially in these years following the plague – offered little in the way of community to either its masters or its journeymen. These circumstances – together with the secretiveness of the activities of Fabio, Bortholo, and Evangelista – suggest that their performances were perhaps geared towards providing them some sense of community and possibly even


economic leverage in an otherwise alien world. Bortholo’s lament ‘I am a poor journeyman; I leave for work in the morning and I am not back until two or three o’clock at night’, makes it plain that he was not without financial worries.16 Moreover, ritual had been used before in sixteenth-century Venice to enhance the economic standing of artisans: in 1556 Venetian shearers had enacted a secret ritual, swearing on a crucifix that they would all cease work until their employers met their demands.17 Perhaps the journeymen mercers had similar goals in mind. Possibly, therefore, their ‘vespers’ served as the centerpiece of a kind of journeymen’s lodge, an Italian version of those workingmen’s organizations known in early modern France as compagnonnages. The hypothesis has some merit. From as early as the late fifteenth century French journeymen in a variety of trades had begun to form networks of lodges that provided them not only with crucial information about the markets for their labor and a place to stay when they entered a new city but also with a sense of solidarity and organization that made it possible for them to withhold their labor from masters who underpaid or mistreated them.18 Certainly, comparable structures, at least on an informal level, existed in early modern Italy. In the 1560s, for example, Paolo Gaiano, the silk-weaver who was so cautious about revealing his religious convictions, helped his fellow Modenesi, his paesani find work in Venice as they arrived at Rialto.19 While there is virtually no evidence that the Venetian journeymen were organized for economic purposes, certain parallels between their activities and those of the French compagnons are striking. Rites of initiation into the French compagnonnages of shoemakers, hatters, tailors, and saddlers generally involved secretive ceremonies, closely modeled on Catholic liturgy. An early eighteenth-century description of the initiation rites of journeymen hatters contains many parallels to the Venetian case. Like the mercers, the hatters set up an altar (‘une table, sur laquelle ils mettent une Croix’), and representations of the passion (‘tout ce qui sert à representer les instrumens qui ont servi à la Passion’). Moreover, they performed this ritual secretly, in a lodge.20 To be sure, there were differences. The hatters’ ritual was an initiation rite, meant to bring a journeyman into a well-defined organization. By contrast, the activities of the young immigrant mercers appear inchoate and much less purposeful. Yet in both cases the rituals gave the journeymen a sense of belonging. In this sense, we might say, the performative self became the threshold of a social identity. Finally, there is some evidence that the activity of the Venetian mercers was threatening to their masters.


Upon hearing of their antics from an officer of the Inquisition, Carlo di Negri, Evangelista’s employer at Rialto, reacted strongly. ‘Bisogna castigarli – they must be punished for this!’21 The Venetian case, therefore, may represent an early (and abortive) effort in Italy to form an organization comparable to compagnonnage in early modern France. Itinerancy among Italian artisans was extremely high, and in periods such as this one, when governments were encouraging immigration, journeymen may have felt a special need to create their own forms of association.22 Perhaps, but the economic and social context doesn’t explain the performance itself. The ceremony involved appears to have been carnivalesque. Carnival was the classic occasion for turning the world upside down in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and there is certainly much about the antics of the journeymen that recalls Carnival, an important festive occasion in Venice. Unhappily, most of what we know about Carnival in Venice derives from official sources, and it is difficult to glimpse even a minuscule portion of the popular Carnival in the city. We know nonetheless that all but the poorest classes in Venetian society participated in a cycle of festivities ranging from the sophisticated staging of classical and contemporary comedies to the ritual slaughter of a bull and the Rabelaisian celebration of the figure of Carnival himself, acted out by a fat man, with a vat of macaroni at his side.23 Fireworks were set off in the Piazza San Marco, and men and women of all classes disguised themselves with masks as they crowded the city’s campi, calli, and balconies. Moreover, despite the increasing efforts of the city’s magistrates to repress the excesses of the season and to bring the festivities more and more under the control of the patriciate, the popular dimensions of the celebration flourished throughout the century. In 1533, one report reads, a group of popolani dressed themselves as lords, with some imitating commanders and others trumpeting as though theirs was an official procession. And a heresy trial from 1571 nicely illustrates how popular and patrician dimensions of Carnival could coexist. The case stemmed from a denunciation against Giacomo Zorzi, a young nobleman, and Zaccharia Lombardini, a young lawyer, both of whom, wearing clerical vestments, had been overly boisterous in their mocking of Catholic rituals the night of Giovedi Grasso (equivalent to Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras elsewhere). The testimony of the trial makes it plain that Venice was filled that night with festive, indeed libidinous and even violent activities, in which the popolani were fully involved. Antonio di Piero, jeweler at the Pappagallo, admitted to having masqueraded as a buffoon, and he was


only part of company that included a carpenter’s apprentice, two gunners from the Arsenal, and a merchant – all in costume.24 Certainly Evangelista, Fabio, and Bortholo would have been recognizable as carnivalesque personages to the participants and spectators of the events of 1571. But the actions of the three journeymen took place in the summer and early autumn, well after the pre-Lenten, winter season of Carnival. While I have no doubt that the activities of the journeymen were shaped in part by their economic experience and enhanced by the themes of Carnival, the description of the ritual is quite specific and suggests, upon closer scrutiny, a lay version of the Feast of Fools. In its origins, the Feast of Fools (variously called the festum stultorum, the festum fatuorum, and the asinaria festa, and, in Italy, the festa dell’episcopello or the festa del vescovino) was a clerical affair, a celebration of the new year by the clergy of a cathedral or canonry, in which the lesser clergy – those in minor orders – mocked their superiors and burlesqued or farced the religious services. The feast usually fell on one of the three great feast days immediately following Christmas – Circumcision, Epiphany, or the Octave of the Epiphany – though, in someplaces, it fell on either the Feast of the Innocents or St. Stephen’s Day. The primary participants were subdeacons, inferior clergy, or ordained members of the choir. To them fell the responsibility of installing a lord of the day, whom they usually called their bishop, their boybishop, and, on occasion, pope. From some of the earliest documentation concerning this feast, we learn that the central point in the feast was the Magnificat, especially the Deposuit (God ‘has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away’), which the lower clergy recited over and over again, apparently with great joy, in celebration of the reversal of status that was taking place in the ceremony.25 Unlike compagnonnage, moreover, which was a largely French phenomenon, the Feast of Fools was practiced throughout Europe. One of the best early descriptions of the feast in fact is from thirteenth-century Padua (only 35 kilometers from Venice).26 There, on the Eve of Holy Innocents at vespers, it was the custom for the priests of the Cathedral to remove their surplices during the Magnificat, and then for two acolytes (one of whom would serve as the vescovino, or boy bishop) to put them on. The vescovino would lead the service. Together with other boys dressed in surplices who preceded him and bore a crucifix, a censer, and candles, he would process to the altar. Once there, he took


the thurible, censed the altar, then passed the thurible back to the second acolyte, who censed him and the other acolytes and then the other clerics and scholars in the Cathedral. Vespers closed when the boy-bishop gave the blessing to both the clergy and the people. Although the primary participants in the performance were clerics, the ceremony involved many laymen, directly and indirectly, in the festivities. After vespers (where laymen had been in attendance), the boy clerics processed to the episcopal residence, where an inversion of the ecclesiastical hierarchy took place, a reversal that was especially pronounced when the vecovino or boy-bishop ritually asked the bishop (and laymen were present here as well) if he had properly administered the church properties that year. Evidently considerable joking accompanied the query, and festive drinking capped the evening’s activities. Lay participation intensified the following day. The Feast of the Innocents itself began with a matins celebrated in much the same manner as the vespers of the evening before. But the central liturgy of the day was the mass, a service that, on this day, became the framework and setting for a representation – indeed, a re-enactment – of the Massacre of the Innocents and the Flight of Mary and Joseph from Egypt. Armed men, in the role of Herod’s soldiers, ran through the Cathedral searching for children, and a woman playing the role of Mary sat on an ass which a man in the role of Joseph led out of the church. The mass ended with an offering given to the boy-bishop, who then gave the benediction to those present. The day’s activities, however, were not over. The vescovino processed through the city, giving his blessing to the citizens and collecting a tribute from the religious houses subject to the Cathedral. The cycle of festivities, begun the evening before at vespers, closed with vespers. Although we have no direct evidence for the continuation of this ritual in the sixteenth-century Veneto or the Abruzzi, it was wellknown in other parts of Europe. In France, it continued well into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, lasting in Troyes to 1595 and in Sens, at least in a reduced form, to 1634. In Sicily, there is evidence of the Feast of Fools being performed in Palermo in 1555, in Catania in 1668, and in Troina as late as 1736. But the feast also took place closer to Venice. In Lucca a celebration that closely resembled the one in thirteenth-century Padua was suppressed in 1575 by Monsignor Giovanni Battista Castelli, the bishop of Rimini, during an apostolic visitation of that year. And in 1587 the Venetian Patriarch Giovanni Trevisan published a decree forbidding noise-making and rowdiness in Venetian churches during the celebration of holy offices on Christmas


night. The language of the decree is lapidary and vague, but it may indicate that the Feast of Fools was practiced in Venice itself down to the very period we are examining.27 Was the performance of the journeymen an imitation of the Feast of Fools? Very probably. The literary historians E. K. Chambers and Paolo Toschi, for example, have maintained that a wide variety of lay festive life grew out of this feast, with town-dwellers taking over the enactments from the clerics as the activities of these latter were suppressed. And while the social historian Natalie Zemon Davis has warned that it is important to avoid locating the rituals of artisans in imitations of behavior by their social betters, the case for imitation in the affair of Evangelista, Fabio, and Bortholo is quite strong, though I should note at once that imitatio does not, quite clearly, detract from inventiveness.28 As in the Feast of Fools, after all, so in the room of the journeymen at San Luca, vespers became an occasion for inverting and parodying the ecclesiastical hierarchy. While there were certain exceptions to the Paduan paradigm, it must be recalled that variations on the feast were common. In mid-fifteenth-century Paris, for example, we know that laymen dressed themselves up as priests and other religious during the festivities.29 Thus we should not be surprised by a lay version of the ceremony. Moreover, in lands subject to papal authority, it was often the pope and not a bishop who was mocked during the ritual. And while there is no direct evidence of the practice of this feast in the Abruzzi, the home of Fabio and Bortholo, the region had close ties to Rome.30 Moreover, the use of the censer and altar, the mocking of the lay pope by the lesser ‘clergy’, the centrality of vespers, the use of the Magnificat – all this recalls the Feast of Fools. Granted, there were differences. For in San Luca, not only were the humble exalted (as in the Cathedral Chapter at Padua) but also an egalitarian set of relationships among journeymen was redefined by precise hierarchical distinctions. Moreover, the world was turned upside down recurrently, on feast days, and not merely once a year, as on the Feast of the Innocents. Despite these distinctions, however, a specific tradition accounts for the form of the journeymen’s celebration. A journeymen’s Feast of Fools, therefore, in sixteenth-century Venice. But what does the enactement of such a performance reveal about the nature of identity at least as it was experienced or understood by these three journeymen? Some, of course, may deny that the performance had any social significance. During his final interrogation before the Holy Office, for example, Bortholo revealed that Evangelista had been fascinated by


such ceremonies ever since he was a child. In the early fifteenth century, the Dominican Giovanni Dominici had advised parents to present their children with toy altars and toy vestments, and to encourage them in the imitation of priests – a practice that was quite common at least down to the mid- and late fifteenth century, and probably later. Similar domestic rituals may have exercised a special fascination on Evangelista, and he had simply carried them into his adulthood. Moreover, he himself confessed that he had always hoped to become a friar – a vocation his mother, for reasons we cannot know, forbade him to enter.31 Perhaps the ceremonies at no. 27 Calle Sporca were unique, with no connection to other aspects of festive life in sixteenth-century Venice. But other clues suggest that the isolation of this event from a broader context is misleading. The mocking of priests by laymen was a broadly diffused practice in the early modern world. This was especially true (as we saw in the 1571 case of the young nobleman and young lawyer who dressed up as priests) during Carnival, but it occurred on other occasions as well. In 1579 Alvise Capuano, a Venetian merchant, accused his father-in-law Iseppo Felini, a confectioner on the campo San Luca, of (among other things) frequently and quite vulgarly burlesquing the mass. As in the case of the journeymen, the mockery took place in private, among friends. Moreover, Iseppo appears to have mocked the relationship between the celebrant and his assistant, inverting the hierarchy by having the latter ask the former (Ser Felini apparently played both roles) ‘to lick his ass.’32 There were, however, important differences between the acts of the confectioner and those of the journeymen: it was part of the mass and not a vespers that was imitated, and no imitative ecclesiastical paraphernalia appear to have been involved. Nonetheless, this second case is significant. It confirms that the actions of the journeymen mercers were not isolated. Furthermore, even were such evidence lacking, it would probably make sense to assume that the journeymen’s Feast of Fools was meaningful on a broader cultural level. The performance of a ritual, however mundane, never exists outside a social context. Indeed, as historians and anthropologists have begun to emphasize in recent years, rituals constitute the lived and living equivalent of texts – if we can learn to read them, we can learn something about the specific worlds which ‘compose’ them.33 But what did the ritual in Calle Sporca mean? In medieval society, such ceremonies served primarily as inversions of the social order. During the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, the Feast of Fools provided a momentary release from the rigidly defined constraints of orders within the clergy. Moreover, given


the vicarious quality of medieval piety, the feast served also as a symbolic inversion of the social hierarchy to laymen and women who observed their priests and acolytes playfully exchanging roles. The ceremony was, above all, a rite of inversion, a complex ritual of status reversal. As the anthropologist Victor Turner has observed, such rituals provide an opportunity for men and women in all cultures to escape temporarily from the hierarchical and often harshly structured realities of their daily lives and to create a more egalitarian sense of community, an experience Turner calls communitas. Paradoxically, however, such rituals do not subvert but rather strengthen the received hierarchies. ‘By making the high low and the low high’, Turner has observed, ‘they reaffirm the hierarchical principle.’ Peter Burke has argued that this model is meaningful for early modern Europe as well, and even quotes some fifteenth-century French clerics defending the Feast of Fools with a late medieval version of this safety-valve explanation of rites of inversion. ‘We do these things in jest and not in earnest’, the clerics argued, ‘so that once a year the foolishness innate in us can come out and evaporate. Don’t wineskins and barrels burst very often if their air-hole is not opened from time to time?’ Such rituals, therefore, both provided an alternative, more egalitarian model of society and offered an outlet for pent-up emotions and frustrations.34 Such an interpretation is compelling as well for Carnival in the late medieval world and even, I believe, in the relatively modern Renaissance cities of northern Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In both Florence and Venice, for example, groups without political power were the most prominent in the celebration of Carnival. While the Florentine merchants who held political power celebrated themselves and their city in rather sober processions on the midsummer feast of their patron Saint John, both the Tuscan aristocracy (whom the bourgeois regime had pushed to the fringes of Florentine political life in the early fourteenth century) and the working poor (who had only once briefly gained access to power in the city during the Ciompi Revolt of 1378) tended to center their festive energies on the winter celebration of Carnival. Nobles formed brigades and the working poor formed potenze or neighborhood signorie – in both cases mock kingdoms that gave these groups the opportunity to parody established authority and also, even if only fleetingly, the experience of ‘freedom, equality, and abundance.’35 Carnival served a similar function in Venice, though there the guilds – which, unlike their Florentine counterparts, had no political power – organized the games and processions associated with the festival.36 Social groups with little or no


power (and this often included lay parodies of official ecclesiastical practices) used Carnival motifs to express their discontent, and their festivities constituted explicit commentaries on the social order. Thus at the height of the Renaissance, Carnival derived its significance from its ability to represent the concerns of well-articulated social groups – defined by class, craft, and neighborhood – and the way in which these groups were embedded in society as a whole. In the sixteenth century, however, the public meaning of both Carnival and the Feast of Fools appears to have broken down; for, as the state struggled to gain greater and greater control over ritual life, the craft, neighborhood, and kinship bases of ritual declined. In Florence, urban ritual became increasingly tied to the political cult of the Medici, the city’s ruling family, while in Venice a more abstract notion of the state demanded the loyalty of its subjects and mobilized ritual toward increasingly political ends. And although in Venice the guild of the fabri (the smiths) continued to enjoy an official role in the sixteenth century – it was the lot of its members each year at Carnival to slaughter pigs and a bull in a symbolic execution of rebellious subjects on the eve of Lent – the Venetian government relied increasingly on the noble youth organizations known as the Compagnie delle calze, the city’s equivalent to noble Abbeys of Misrule elsewhere, to organize and tame festive behavior.37 These transformations doubtless grew out of explicitly political forces. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, popular Venetian entertainments came increasingly under the control of the authorities. In some cases the Venetian government actually abolished popular rituals; in others it merely attempted to co-opt them, subjecting them to greater and greater supervision from above. But the major changes came in the sixteenth century and amounted to what Edward Muir has described as an assault on popular culture: The official disgust with popular festivities and the concerted attempts to enhance the aristocratic bearing of the republic, revealed first by [Doge Andrea] Gritti and the Council of Ten and later by the institutional commitment of the Rason Vecchie, disclose the widening cultural separation so evident in the last three-quarters of the sixteenth century between many of the Venetian nobles and the lower classes.38 The evidence we have, moreover, suggests that such efforts to reform popular culture continued down to the end of the century. In part, this


was an outgrowth of the Council of Trent. In 1567 Carlo Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan, attacked the excesses of the Carnival season in his diocese, and in the same year, Roberto Bellarmine spared no criticism in his attack of Carnival in Venice. And in 1581, only one year before the case we are examining, the Council of Ten, under pressure from the Jesuits, suppressed the performances of comedies in the city.39 But these transformations were structural as well. As long as the major political structures and concerns of Venice had been municipal, the guild and the parish had played significant roles in providing men and women, from all classes, with a sense of identity. But with the expansion of Venetian interests onto the terraferma, the growing detachment of the nobility from civic affairs, the explosive growth of manufactures, and the ensuant intensification of immigration into the city itself, the importance of these traditional sodalities was diminished.40 Given these shifts in official cultural life, shifts in popular culture were inevitable. The rhetorical grandeur of official urban ritual left little room for traditional expressions of the carnivalesque. Not only had the guild and the parish or neighborhood lost much of their capacity to organize festive behavior apart from the interest of ruling groups in both cities, what had been the earlier tolerance of explicitly political parody was diminished. The state no longer sanctioned Carnival as a political commentary, and guilds and guildsmen were now expected to make their loyalty manifest. It was a profound change. It meant that such men as Evangelista, Bortholo, and Fabio were increasingly alienated from the ritual life of the city. They were left in a vacuum, and they needed, at least as early as the late sixteenth century, to begin to create rituals or to participate in ceremonies of their own devising – ceremonies in which their own performances would give them a sense of solidarity with others. What is most striking about the journeymen’s ceremony is its ingeniously contrived nature. The ritual, after all, stood in an entirely artificial relationship to the group. It was not part of a guild or parish tradition. Granted, it was, on one level, an imitation of a traditional medieval feast. But what is of interest is not that their ritual was imitative, but how it was imitative. For Evangelista and his friends were not simply aping their betters; they were playful and inventive. They turned shirts into surplices, the drapery of a painting into a cope, and a goblet into a chalice, and they fashioned hats from paper. And, evidently, they purchased from the shops of other mercers in the city brass candlesticks and a censer. This entailed not only a complex orchestration of everyday objects, many of which were closely associated with their own


trade, but also a transformation of those objects into precisely defined religious symbols, whose meaning derived from their traditional place in the Catholic liturgy. This playfulness, moreover, drove home a serious point: their ritual was a parody of hierarchies in the mercer’s guild. The journeymen were no longer lowly retailers of mercer’s goods; they were also virtuosi in the use of sacred items, thereby repossessing commodities of their trade in a radically altered context and one ovér which they, and not their guildmasters or churchmen, exercised control. In part, therefore, their actions represented a simultaneous inversion of guild and ecclesiastical hierarchies. But the ceremony also served as a protest against the ‘consumerist’ values of the early modern world that the Merceria in Venice epitomized. There, wealth alone was power, and nobles, merchants, and prelates enjoyed an access to prestige closed off to the poorer classes. Indeed, it is likely that, to these journeymen in their workaday lives, the Church seemed reduced to its role as a consumer and that their ritual, on one level at least, was not only an effort to sacralize everyday objects but also to re-sacralize religious objects. The material intermingling of trade and religious symbols – a feature of their ceremony that would become characteristic of compagnonnage as well – allowed them to retrieve their dignity. But they were not only playing; the ritual clearly provided them with a sense of collective and individual identity denied them by the highly competitive and master-dominated mercer’s guild. Appearances to the contrary, the journeymen did not engage in a performance that reinforced hierarchy. Rather theirs was a selection of a rite of inversion that reinforced their own quotidian experience of relations among equals. For rather than the direct inversion of a hierarchy, the journeymen first moved from a set of essentially egalitarian relations among friends to a highly structured set of rankings, entering what Turner has called ‘a liminal hierarchy’, a temporary hierarchical ordering of relations that, again paradoxically, was in no way ‘inconsistent with real communitas. These groups [and, significantly, Turner is focusing here primarily on youth groups] are playing at the game of structure rather than engaging in the socioeconomic structure in real [sic] earnest.’41 The Feast of Fools was a perfect vehicle for this purpose, allowing the journeymen to mock the most visible and exaggerated of European hierarchies, and by placing a burlesqued mitre on the ‘pope’s’ head, to see foolishness at the very summit of cultural pretense and, by implication, elsewhere in society as well. The representation of a Feast of Fools, therefore, was an expression, albeit a private one, of their own


desire for belonging, for equality, and for a diminution of the demeaning emphasis placed on the boundaries between the sacred and the profane. Thus we should perhaps learn to read the rituals of the sixteenth century not so much as the unconscious expression of popular traditions as deliberative performances, as the efforts by particular individuals in a particular social location to make sense of their identities and to forge a sense of community. That the Venetian mercers were engaged in a kind of cultural bricolage, borrowing elements of their ritual from the Christian liturgy and cobbling them together with artifacts from their own craft, in no way detracts from their creativity. To the contrary, it enhances it. For, despite the shifts in the organization of ritual in late Renaissance Venice and the increasing puritanism of the Counter-Reformation Church, these journeymen mercers developed an innovative ritual whose symbols explicitly subverted the official hierarchies of Church and craft. Moreover, though the exploitation of everyday objects for sacred purposes may have seemed random and chaotic to observers as diverse as the landlord’s son Alberto and the members of the Venetian Inquisition, it is probable that it had a certain logic as bricolage, a process which, as anthropologists have argued, ‘orders, classifies and arranges … by means of a “logic” which is not our own. The structures, “improvised” or made up (these are the rough translations of the process of bricolage) as ad hoc responses to an environment’, both make sense out of the world and make it more livable.42 In the late Renaissance, therefore, the carnivalesque no longer derived its meaning from a well-defined social structure in which the politically disenfranchised could mockingly and expressively turn their world upside down and claim, even if only momentarily, a place in the sun. Rather, the carnivalesque had become something to perform and to improvise out of the fragments of a formerly coherent culture – a fundamental precondition for the provisional sense of identity in this period. This is not to deny a subterranean logic. In a society so hierarchically defined as was Renaissance Europe, it is not surprising that both language (one has but to think of the subversive qualities of contemporary blasphemy and billingsgate) and rituals of inversion (in Carnival, in skimmingtons, in the celebrations of the Abbeys of Misrule, frequently known in Italy as Abbeys of Fools, and in commedia dell’arte) so often served as vehicles for popular representations. But the social and political transformations of the late Renaissance had altered the meaning of these representations. In an earlier period, their significance had


derived not only from the fact that much popular ritual was embedded in parish and guild life but also from the fact that popular inversions constituted direct commentaries on the social order. Rituals were mirrors, however distortive, and men were able to use them to turn the world upside down. By the late sixteenth century, however, such inversions (the commedia dell’arte was emerging as a fixed dramatic form in precisely these years) had become deliberative performances or inventive ceremonies, and their references were less direct. Hats could be made of paper and a shirt could be turned into a surplice. Moreover, the carnivalesque could be extended outside its customary temporal boundaries. And finally, the Feast of Fools itself, traditionally tied to the cathedral chapter, could become the form of a journeymen’s celebration. It was as though the mirrors had been shattered and the resulting fragments gathered into the base of a kaleidoscope where they became susceptible to infinite variations. Thus, the significance of these later representations lies not so much in their ability to reflect and mock existing social relationships as in their capacity to establish correspondences among disparate phenomena, to invest a fragmented world with meaning, to transform the quotidian into the sacred and the sacred into play, and to provide three journeymen with a sense of place and belonging in one of the largest, most crowded cities of Europe. Finally, the analysis of this case points to another form of Renaissance identity: the performative self. As this ritual makes clear, performance did not always involve a kind of role-playing that was at odds with one’s thoughts, beliefs, or feelings. To the contrary, the performance itself often transposed these internal states as the participants entered into a community of equals and of those who temporarily, at least, shared their values. The performative self was not, therefore, merely a means of concealing one’s thoughts; equally significantly it was a way of eradicating the distinction between one’s internal and external dimensions of experience – a distinction that was, as we saw in the previous chapter on the prudential self, often painful and alienating. The journeymen’s Feast of Fools in short gave three poor journeymen an opportunity to be part of something larger than themselves, while at the same time demonstrating the provisional nature of their own identities in what was undoubtedly a very fluid world. For a short while at least, these journeymen mercers, a small group of friends, could close their doors and do as they wished. Their actions were devout, but their ceremony was also an act of mockery and leveling, a


subversion of hierarchy, a symbolic deflation of the pomposity of guildmasters and prelates. Finally and paradoxically, their decision to dress up in imagined roles provided them, at least fleetingly, with the opportunity to be themselves and to give expression to some of their deepest longings and concerns.

5 Possessions

I would like to propose, not the death of the author, but the dissolution of the ‘demonologist.’ Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons, 1997 In 1582 Elena Crusichi, known as ‘la Draga’, appeared for the second time before the Inquisition. Elena was a well-known healer in Venice, and in her earlier trial in 1571 she had spoken openly and expansively to her examiners about the invocations and rituals she used to cure those who came to her for her help.1 To us, the most striking thing about Elena was her claim that she was possessed. Indeed, it was from one of her spirits – ‘the dragon’ – that she derived her nickname. ‘I am called “la Draga”,’ she told the Inquisition, ‘because I have a spirit called “il Drago” (“the dragon”) in my body.’2 The possession was not an easy matter for Elena, even if the spirit that inhabited her also invested her with preternatural powers. On one occasion after receiving communion, she told the Inquisition, ‘this awful beast which I have on me gives me so much pain that I feel like I am finished. He eats my guts and destroys my legs, my throat and he takes my memory and he does not let me eat and he wishes to kill me and I hide the knife.’3 Having taken the body of Christ into her own, Elena seemed to be saying, the demon that had possessed her felt threatened and took revenge. Clearly, unlike many of the other figures we have encountered in this book, Elena’s was a universe in which the body failed to serve as a barrier between her internal and her external self – rather it was porous flesh through which spirits, good and evil, could pass. And the demons within her made it possible for her to make some sense of her physical suffering, her otherwise inexplicable loss of memory, and her troubling desire to take her own life. 83


At least this is how Elena and many other men and women in the age of the Renaissance perceived the relation of spirit to body. The body was porous. Spirits, benevolent and malevolent, could pass into a person, taking possession of his or her body, memories, and, above all, imagination. But it was also possible for the soul to leave the body. This is the way the benandanti, the good-walkers, described their own experiences to the Inquisition in the Friuli, when they engaged, as they did four times a year, in battles against witches for the fertility of the crops. ‘And if by chance while we are out’, one of the benandanti explained in a matter of fact way to an inquisitor at the end of the sixteenth century, ‘and someone should come with a light and look for a long time at the body, the spirit would never re-enter it until there was no one left around to see it that night, and if the body, seeming to be dead, should be buried, the spirit would have to wander around the world until the hour fixed for that body to die.’4 In the sixteenth century, as Natalie Zemon Davis has observed, ‘the line drawn around the self was not firmly closed’, and she points to such widespread instances of possession by another’s soul or subjection to the curse of a witch to underscore the porous or permeable nature of the body in this period.5 Both the case of Elena Crusichi and that of the benandanti point to a formation of the Renaissance self that, at first at least, seems entirely at odds with the forms of identity that we have examined in the previous chapters. Renaissance identities, as I have examined them thus far, appear to have been defined primarily by the relation men and women experienced between the inner world (their thoughts, their beliefs, their convictions) and the social world in which they lived, with little apparent sense that one could invade the other. The self, from this perspective, was defined by the relation (which could vary) between this inner and the exterior world along the relatively well-demarcated boundaries of particular persons – boundaries that were clearly, even unambiguously defined by the body’s own self-enveloping membrane of skin as well as by clothing, posture, and pose. But Elena and the benandanti did not view the body in this way. To them, what appeared to be at the very least an opaque screen in the ordinary lives of others was in fact something profoundly permeable, open, porous.6 The skin was not a barrier but rather a kind of frontier across which spirits, whether benevolent or demonic, could cross (entering or exiting) with relative ease. And possession was not something extraordinary or necessarily very often pernicious. Rather it was part of the everyday experience of Renaissance men and women. Not everyone believed it took

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place or could take place, but the evidence suggests that most Renaissance people believed in it. It was, thus, part of a view of the world that, while at first seeming to complicate if not unravel the notion of the Renaissance self as we have examined it thus far, in fact complemented and extended the Renaissance understanding of identity. Ultimately its pervasiveness, as I shall argue, both helps unlock some of the mystery behind the Renaissance fascination with boundaries and illuminates the peculiar Renaissance understanding of the relation people in this period perceived as existing between their inner worlds and the broader social world in which they lived. In western Europe, possession had long been part of a vocabulary of the preternatural – an expansive vocabulary that covered diverse phenomena including madness, various illnesses, bad fortune, and witchcraft in a cosmos that Christians envisioned as thickly populated by demons. In Italy as in Europe in general, moreover, demonology had a venerable tradition that could be traced back to the Bible.7 Had not Jesus himself been an exorcist, casting out demons, and passing this power on to his followers? ‘And when he called together his twelve disciples’, the Gospel of Matthew reads, ‘he gave them the power against unclean spirits, to cast them out.’ (Matthew X:1) Both learned and popular theories of possession played a salient role in late antiquity when demons became locked in visible and well-publicized struggles against the early Christian saints – battles that Peter Brown has called ‘the one demonstration of God that carried unanswerable authority.’8 Similar beliefs persisted throughout the Middle Ages; and in the Renaissance demonologies continued to help men and women make sense of a range of otherwise seemingly inexplicable misfortunes, desires, and behaviors that befell them. The attribution of misfortune to the work of demons did not mean that men and women did not also have naturalistic explanations for such phenomena. Villagers, for instance, knew full well that crops failed as a result of drought; and urban dwellers understood that there were natural causes for a wide array of illnesses. Nonetheless, few Renaissance thinkers, whether learned or unlearned, saw any contradiction between naturalistic and demonic explanations for suffering. At times they saw the two as intrinsically related. The Italian demonologist Francesco Maria Guazzo made it clear that both natural and demonic forces were to blame for melancholy. As he wrote in his influential Compendium maleficarum, published in the early seventeenth century, a demon ‘induces the melancholy sickness by first disturbing the black bile in the body and so dispersing a black humour throughout the brain and the inner cells


of the body, and this black bile he increases by suspending other irritations and by preventing the purging of the humour.’9 Accounts based on the appeal to divine or demonic forces were not, therefore, inconsistent with the medical science of the time. Accordingly we should not confuse the language of possession with a failure on the part of Renaissance people to understand their world rationally. Rather Renaissance men and women appealed to what was to them the possibility of demons and, at times, angelic spirits, taking over their bodies in order to give public meaning to their experience and to make sense of why they or their loved ones were losing control or suffering in some tangible way.10 Because these beliefs are so foreign from our own – and, indeed, so radically at odds with our expectations about what we think Renaissance culture looked like – they are extremely difficult to understand. Some scholars accordingly have viewed cases of possession as evidence of mental illness or as evidence of the use of hallucinogenic medications. Even in the sixteenth century Johann Weyer, physician to the Duke of Cleves, argued that those who confessed to witchcraft were mad or delusional.11 Some have also suggested that possession was an early manifestation of what has been described, since the late nineteenth century, as multiple personality disorder.12 Still others have explained them as fragments of a traditional culture – a culture that would largely be rendered irrelevant by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. But it seems equally possible that belief in the reality of possession was related to a fundamentally different notion of the self. With the widespread belief in the possibility of demonic possession, in particular, it becomes clear that in the Renaissance the boundary that divided an internal sense of experience – one’s thoughts, and memories – from the outside world and that brought the internal and external in relation to one another was a locus of danger. In the Renaissance there were demons and witches not because there was no science. There were demons and witches because the Renaissance self was not yet individualized, not yet predicated on the assumed existence of an ego safely and securely ensconced in a protective container of skin.13 Of course possession was not the only evidence of the Devil’s efforts to subvert Christian society. A far better known, more intensively studied, and related phenomenon was witchcraft. In many cases there was less concern with demons than with those men and women who, it was believed, had voluntarily entered into a pact with the Devil in order to

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carry out his pernicious purposes within human society. Nor was it a coincidence, as we shall see, that it was in precisely the same period that possession came to be an especially salient problem in Europe (the late sixteenth century) that the horrific persecutions which collectively have come to be known as the witch craze took off. Judges in both secular and ecclesiastical courts in this period often sent witches to the stake for their demonic activity; the historian Brian Levack observes that ‘[i]t would not be unreasonable to conclude … that European communities executed some 60,000 witches in during the early modern period.’14 Typically historians have understood this disturbing persecution of witches – for the most part poor, older, widowed women – as the result of both increasingly sophisticated judiciaries, whether ecclesiastical or secular, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the contemporaneous development of an elaborate theory of demonology that judges and inquisitors imposed on what were in fact traditional folk customs or magic. What was new in the witch hunt were not the customary beliefs of ordinary people that led them, for example, to a cunning women to help recover a lost object, to a village healer to cure a disease, or even to a witch to inflict harm on an enemy. Europeans had, after all, engaged in such magical practices that were an amalgam of archaic Roman, pagan, and Christian beliefs for millennia. What was new was the growing consensus among a relatively large segment of the ecclesiastical and secular elites that the power of maleficent witchcraft was real and that it derived from the willingness of many in the Christian world to renounce their faith in Christ and to enter into a pact with the Devil, making themselves his servants and minions. A key text in the creation of this demonology was the Malleus malificarum or Hammer of Witches by the Dominicans Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, first published in 1486 and frequently reprinted throughout the Renaissance. In this compendium readers could find a rich and to us seemingly credulous description of a terrifying satanic anti-world of witches – a world that many, even among the most learned, believed to be real. In their varied and often elaborate demonologies, it was God’s fallen angel Lucifer who was behind much of the evil that they encountered. To the demonologists witches were not merely folk practitioners; they were men and women who had willfully renounced their Christianity and given their allegiance to Lucifer, entering into a pact with him. From him they received horrific powers. They killed and devoured children; raised hailstorms; caused sterility in men and animals; startled horses; aborted babies in the


womb.15 Moreover, while the Malleus itself made no mention of the Devil’s nocturnal games, other treatises on witchcraft, some of which had begun to appear in the fifteenth century, did; and these treatises, produced now in the early age of the printing press, were rapidly distributed and appear to have played a decisive role in diffusing the witch-stereotype among the elites of Europe.16 There was a flowering of such works in early sixteenth-century Italy: Bernardo da Como’s De strigiis, Bartolomeo Spina’s Quaestio de strigibus, and Paolo Grillando’s Tractatus de hereticis et sortilegiis – works that coincided with an early but short-lived outbreak of witch trials in Italy in this very period: at Como in 1505–10, at Breno in 1518, at Modena in 1518–20, in Reggio Emilia in 1522–23, and at Sondrio in 1523.17 Witches covered their bodies with magical ointments, flew off to a sabbat (variously known in Italy as the ‘congregazione notturna’, the ‘giochi del Diavolo’, and the ‘strighozzo’), where they worshipped and cavorted with Lucifer. The witches who gathered there kissed the Devil’s ass, fornicated with him, had intercourse with other demons, and pleasured each other. They danced and laughed and drank and trampled upon crucifixes; and they feasted upon enormous quantities of food. Upon returning to their homes and villages, they would serve as the Devil’s minions and bring his evil back to their own communities, recruiting others to his cause. As many scholars have observed, the witches’ sabbat represented a rite of inversion in which the Catholic mass was scorned and mocked, but its ludic elements also offer a tantalizing parallel to the Feast of Fools. Both were rites of inversion in which the participants expressed a certain scorn towards the ideal Christian order. To be sure, the devil’s games posed a far greater threat to society. But, like the Feast of Fools, the sabbat was a logical expression of dissent in a highly hierarchical society.18 Yet, apart from a few sporadic and highly localized outbreaks of witch persecutions, in Italy there were relatively few instances in which what began as an accusation for witchcraft ended up with the execution of a witch, either for entering into a pact with the Devil or for her participation in the sabbat. In Italy, stregoneria (witchcraft) was generally viewed by the inquisitors as a far more mundane affair, involving the use of magic for practical ends: for ensnaring lovers, for finding lost objects or treasure, for warding off wolves, storms, and other dangers, and for protecting the crops or sailors. To be sure, in this magical world, there were those who used witchcraft to inflict harm (maleficium), and inquisitors were, of course, always attentive to signs of diabolism among those who were accused of necromancy, divination, and the conjuring of demons.

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Nonetheless, of the hundreds of surviving trials regarding magical practices and witchcraft from Venice, Milan, Modena, Naples, and Udine, only a handful found evidence or reason to believe that the accused witch had anything at all to do with the Devil. In fact, in Venice, in each of the six cases in which there was a charge that the accused witch had participated in the sabbat, the Holy Office never took this allegation seriously.19 This relative moderation casts doubt on those interpretations which hold that Italy in this age witnessed an attack on magical practices in popular culture, though there is little question that the Church was seeking, probably in vain, to reassert itself as the sole intermediary between Christians and the spiritual universe. In this sense, Guido Ruggiero is absolutely correct to stress the ‘desire of the leaders of the sixteenth-century Church to withdraw spiritual power, to take that power back into the Church and out of the hands of lay people, especially women.’20 Moreover, given the generally moderate approach of the Inquisition to witchcraft, Carlo Ginzburg’s story of the benandanti, those good-walkers who believed that they went out four times a year to do battle against the witches with the goal of protecting their crops, seems to be the exception that proves the rule. Over the course of their interrogations of the benandanti in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, several of the inquisitors involved in their trials did impose a pre-existing theory of witchcraft upon what turns out to have been a traditional fertility cult, even convincing some of those tried that they were not antiwitches but actual witches themselves.21 However, in general, just the opposite happened. That is, in most cases when accusations were brought against a strega with allegations that she had a pact with the Devil or that she attended the Devil’s games or sabbat, the Italian inquisitorial courts dismissed the charges. Why the Italian inquisitions were ‘soft’ on witchcraft has been the matter of much debate. Several factors were undoubtedly involved. Certain Renaissance humanists and philosophers expressed considerable skepticism towards the types of claims that the Malleus maleficarum, for example, put forward. Among the most influential skeptics were Pietro Pomponazzi, the Paduan Aristotelian, Erasmus, and Montaigne.22 But especially important were the legal constraints imposed upon the inquisitors. The wide-spread use of the Directorium inqvisitorum itself played a significant role. The first version of this text had been written in the fourteenth century well before a demonological theory of the witches’ sabbat had taken hold, with the result that its approach to witchcraft was, on the whole, relatively moderate. The


Directorium, that is, tended to interpret witchcraft not as a diabolical pact but rather as an abundance of superstitious practices that became of special interest to the Inquisition only when there was evidence of the invocation of demons or the misuse of the consecrated host.23 But even Masini’s Sacro Arsenale – which was composed after the idea of the sabbat had taken hold in Italy, especially in the wake of Guazzo’s Compendium maleficarum of 1608 – incorporated language that made witchcraft cases and especially charges of formal witchcraft almost impossible to prove. Drawing in large part on the Cardinal Desiderio Scaglia’s manual Prattica per provedere nelle cause del Tribunale del Sant’ Offitio, that had circulated widely in manuscript over the previous two decades, Masini stipulated first that the fiscale (the prosecutor) not only had to establish the corpus delicti (the fact that someone had been harmed); the prosecutor also had to demonstrate that there were no natural explanations for the disease from which the allegedly bewitched person was suffering.24 Furthermore, if supernatural explanations seemed likely, proof of maleficium still remained extremely difficult. Neither the discovery of oils or powders in the home of the suspect was evidence that she was a witch or possessed. And possession itself could be faked; demons could deceive the exorcists seeking to rid the afflicted of her unwelcomed ‘spirit.’ Masini even cautioned against allowing a woman’s reputation to be used against her. But he went further. Even if the accused confessed to sortilegi (spells and charms), this was not evidence that she was guilty of maleficium. Above all inquisitors refused to accept accusations by a ‘witch’ against others she had seen at so-called gatherings with the devil.25 As one of the members of the Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome explained to an inquisitor in 1604, ‘you are not to give credence to the deposition of the accused woman against the other persons she claims to have seen at the sabbat’, a perspective that reflected the reigning legal theory in the Italian courts of the time.26 But cultural factors were also at work. Protestant England in roughly the same time period provides an instructive contrast. There, the same or similar folk beliefs prevailed, and the same theory of the witches’ sabbat circulated among the elites. But English courts, where witchcraft was viewed as a criminal offense, did not exercise the same skepticism towards the accused as did the Italian inquisitions; and the people themselves, as the historian Keith Thomas has demonstrated in his magisterial study of witchcraft, were more likely to turn in hostility against a sorcerer when they suspected him (or her) of doing harm. They did so, Thomas argues, because the Reformation had taken away

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many of the more traditional ways through which, by appealing to their faith and their priests, they might protect themselves. In Catholic England – the England that essentially vanished in the Reformation – the church, Thomas writes, ‘had provided a measure of protection against the depredations of the Devil and the maleficence of witchcraft.’ Believers could make use of ‘holy water, the sign of the cross, holy candles, church bells, consecrated herbs, and sacred words worn next to the body’ to keep harm away. But most of all they could rely on exorcism.27 While Thomas’s theory does not hold up with perfect consistency, since there were, it turns out, many Catholic courts (especially in Germany) where witches were readily burned, his insight about exorcism does bear directly on the situation in Italy. There a widespread interest in and practice of exorcism developed in precisely these years. The battle lines between witchcraft in Italy, it turns out, were not fought by inquisitors bringing elaborate charges of participation in the sabbat against those engaging in traditional folk practices. Rather they were fought in thousands of individual acts of exorcism carried out in private homes and chapels, on the streets and in the piazza, and in parish churches and cathedrals by a growing army of exorcists, licensed and unlicensed, clerical and lay, for whom the fight against witchcraft and the devil followed a decidedly different vector than it did, say, in Germany, France, Switzerland, and England. In Italy an individual who believed herself bewitched or possessed was more likely to turn to an exorcist than to a court.28 The exorcist, after all, could both meet her immediate needs – provide some relief for her suffering – and could do so whether her vexation was the result of witchcraft (in which an enemy had caused a demon to enter her body) or of demonic mischief in general (in which a demon, at the devil’s behest, without a witch as intermediary, had entered her body). In this sense Italian ecclesiastics tended to view possession as an affliction (the possession of the body of the demoniac by a demon) that they could treat rather than as a crime that needed to be punished, with the result that, in Italy, curing the possessed by ridding bodies of unwanted demonic tenants became the major concern. These dramas rather than witch trials became the privileged means in Italy both of demonstrating publicly the Church’s power over Satan and of ensuring the Church’s virtual monopoly on access to the sacred. Demons, after all, seem to have been the primary cause of mischief and evil. They inflicted harm, brought down deadly storms, and were even blamed for cases of the pretence of sanctity.29 If the Italian courts took a relatively moderate stance towards the persecution of witches, it was largely because the


Italian Church was able to respond to the threat through a renewed emphasis on exorcism. And, though this is a topic that has not yet been examined sufficiently by scholars, Italian exorcists appear to have been carefully monitored. Charlatans were brought to trial; Venice had a ‘public exorcist’; and there was a Ministry of Exorcists in Rome. The pivotal, animating figure in the success of this initiative was Girolamo Menghi, a Franciscan theologian trained in Bologna who, from the late 1550s down to his death in 1609, was a celebrated exorcist. Menghi traveled extensively in Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, freeing the possessed of their demons. It is likely that he personally performed hundreds if not thousands of exorcisms, and he had such fame for his prowess as an enemy of demons that the inscription on his tomb in the Church of San Francesco in Viadana, his birthplace, noted ‘the joy of the infernal hosts at the death of their most rigorous assailant.’30 But Menghi’s influence stemmed not only from his impressive performances but also from an indefatigable publishing program. In his career he produced what proved to be several best-selling compilations of exorcisms and accounts of successful efforts in which he had freed the possessed from the demons that occupied them. His Flagellum daemonum of 1577 was his most popular work, but he produced several other books on this topic as well: the Fustis daemonum of 1584, the Eversio daemonum of 1588, and the Fuga daemonum of 1596.31 His goal in these works was three-fold: to demonstrate the errors of those who doubted the reality of possession; to make it clear that the serious business of exorcism was not for charlatans; and to offer a practical form of exorcism, which he sought to bring back under the control of the Church.32 Menghi’s work, in turn, seems to have inspired other works of similar natures. Some, such as Alessio Porri’s Antidotario contro li demoni, nel quale si tratta come entrano ne’ corpi umani, published in 1601, and Giorgio Polacco’s Pratiche per discerner lo spirito buono dal malvagio of 1638, were even written by Venetians, with long experience in the city. Porri was a ‘public exorcist’ and Polacco a secular priest and confessor to many Venetian nuns.33 Other contemporary texts on this subject included manuals by Zaccaria Visconti, Alessandro Albertino, Candido Brognolo, and Floriano Canale.34 This popularity of such manuals is evidence of a widespread belief in possession in Venetian and indeed Italian society at this time – a period that indeed scholars have long recognized as the great age of exorcism in Europe as a whole. The manuals themselves were directed at establishing the proper and canonical procedures exorcists were to

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follow and, above all, keeping the practice squarely under the control of the Church. Arguably the emphasis the Church placed on exorcism was entirely consistent with its other efforts in precisely this period to bring the sacred more fully under its control – an emphasis that had become increasingly pronounced in the years immediately following the Council of Trent.35 In his writings, Menghi frequently argued that the best defense against witchcraft is the proper observance of Catholic rituals, frequent prayer, and the habit of signing oneself with the cross. His program, therefore, was entirely consistent with efforts of the Roman Church after Trent to protect its institutions and traditions. But Menghi’s most important work was undoubtedly his Compendio dell’arte essorcistica, first published in the 1570s.36 Unlike his other texts that served as manuals for practicing exorcists, the Compendio was a summa of demonology, a theoretical and polemical work that made the case for the usefulness of the art of exorcism in the dangerous times through which Menghi and his contemporaries were living. It was, he states in the preface ‘a tempestuous age in which our cruel enemy prevails more than ever … by making use of witches to assist him in carrying out those wondrous things that he used to do on his own.’37 And it was in fact on this work that the famous Italian encyclopedist Tomaso Garzoni drew in his brief chapter on exorcists in his Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo.38 Witches, that is, had come to the assistance of the Devil. Menghi himself saw the work of exorcists as an essential remedy to diabolical possession, and, in this sense, his book was largely traditional. But Menghi also helped carve out a new role for the exorcist as the implacable enemy of witchcraft. The immediate context of the composition of his work seems to reinforce this. The late 1560s had witnessed in many parts of Italy – in Siena in 1569, in Lecce in 1569–70, in Rome in 1572, and in Liguria in the late 1580s – a new wave of witch trials, though they tended to be highly localized and relatively minor affairs.39 Nonetheless, it was in this very period that the European witch hunt gathered steam; and many in Italy, including Menghi, had reason to believe that witchcraft was on the increase, posing a greater threat than ever. At the same time Menghi had reason to fear that the Italian courts were not going to tackle the cases with the rigor he believed warranted. As he notes at one point in the Compendio, it would be a ‘a grave sin to allow these wicked witches to continue living among us.’40 Given his emphasis on the reality of witchcraft, it is likely that Menghi would have liked to have seen the Church, as the historian Giovanni Romeo has suggested, take a harsher


line against witches. Yet Menghi was also a realist who recognized that an uncompromising assault on witchcraft was unlikely. Given the relatively moderate approach of the Italian courts to the crime, therefore, he made the case that the best defense against diabolical witchcraft was exorcism, since in his view, it was clear that witches, Lucifer’s servants, multiplied the devil’s malice. Already in the preface he had alluded to the fact that possession was becoming an increasingly widespread phenomenon largely because of the Devil’s practice of making use of witches as his instruments to accomplish those horrifying things that he was customarily able to do on his own. While he devotes Book I of the treatise primarily to the ways in which demons could act on their own, he turns in Book II to the ways in which the Devil made use of witches as his allies.41 Again in again in the text, he will stress the fact that demons are able to carry out ‘wondrous things’ as well as ‘various cruel and criminal deeds’ not only on their own but also through the assistance of witches whom they recruit to their cause.42 The art of exorcism in Menghi’s mind, therefore, was not merely a response to the demonic in the traditional sense; it was equally a response to the growing fears of witchcraft towards the end of the sixteenth century. Certainly he viewed witches as a terrifying reality. Indeed, Menghi’s Compendio actually offered a highly-detailed description of the witches’ sabbat. He was as frustrated by his contemporaries who doubted its reality as he was by those who doubted the reality of possession. And he drew in particular on Silvestro de Priero’s De strigimagarum daemonumque mirandis (1521) to argue that the sabbat did not only occur in the imagination but in reality as well. After offering an account of the view of those writers who – on the basis of the Canon episcopi, a medieval text that denied the reality of witchcraft – held that such gatherings were imaginary, he wrote, ‘there is another, more accurate view which maintains that witches are able to be transported truly and in reality in their bodies’, a view that he supported with appeals to the authority of Thomas Aquinas, Alfonso de Castro, and Peter Damian as well as a vivid description of the means by which witches are initiated into the Devil’s service and the sabbat. This latter Menghi described as a ‘nocturnal gathering’ to which the witch is to come whenever summoned by his own companion demon that had been assigned to him. The witch travels to the sabbat by magical flight. There he finds ‘a large, well-attended gathering of men and women’ who worship the Devil, dance, and indulge in ‘amorosi piaceri carnali’ (‘the amorous pleasures of the flesh’) and in sumptuous feasts.43

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The inclusion of a discussion of witchcraft in a treatise on exorcism, however, may at first seem surprising. Romeo even argued that this was a novelty, claiming that ‘the only instance of contact between exorcists and witches’ before Menghi occurred in certain judicial settings when the question arose about taking the testimony of a demon in someone’s body and whether or not such testimony could be used to bring charges against a witch.44 But this is not the case, since, in fact, the connection between witchcraft and exorcism had been clearly established in the Malleus malificarum, the text from which Menghi unabashedly lifted most of his own Book II with the recognition that this work provided him with a powerful case for the role of exorcism in the struggle against both demons and witches. To be sure, this aspect of the Malleus is often overlooked. The work lays out in specific ways the harm that witches bring to the world and serves also as a handbook for judges and inquisitors that specified the procedures they were to follow in witch trials from the interrogation of witches and witnesses, to the use of torture, and to the types of sentences that could be imposed. It was the inclusion of a judicial manual for those dealing with witchcraft that made the Malleus such an important work in the creation of the witch hunt. Yet, tellingly, Menghi largely ignored this final section of the work. Rather he drew extensively on Book II, in which Kramer and Sprenger had actually devoted an entire chapter to exorcism as an important remedy against the possessions brought about through witchcraft. This editorial decision to ignore Book III is revealing. Menghi, in keeping with the views of many of his peers in Italy, simply did not view witchcraft as a judicial matter. Rather he viewed it above all as a spiritual crisis. As a consequence, the Compendio became one of the cornerstones to a peculiarly Italian approach to witchcraft. It was a battle that would not be fought in the courts and the inquisitions; rather it was to be a battle carried out by exorcists, who would do all they could to counter the work of the Devil, wherever they might find it. Ultimately, then, the Compendio, while recognizing the horrific harm that witches were able to inflict on others, essentially decriminalized witchcraft by representing it not as the work of the witches (humans) but rather as the work of the Devil (a fallen angel). And in battle against the Devil, in Italy at least, it was the exorcist rather than the judge or the inquisitor who was to occupy the front lines. Such an approach also freed up the inquisition to focus on witchcraft not as a diabolical phenomenon but rather as a series of folk practices. Inquisitors, in this context, largely restricted their activity to correcting abuses that smacked of heresy, as


when the witch had made use of the host in her ministrations; they meted out relatively mild punishments; and they too essentially decriminalized the sabbat. As Romeo has judiciously written: [t]he authorities of the Roman Inquisition avoided a bloody persecution of witchcraft not only because they were not thoroughly convinced of the existence of witches and their crimes, but also because, especially in the late sixteenth century, they knew they could count on a renewed, sophisticated, and protective armature that constituted the anti-diabolical activity par excellence: namely, exorcism.45 And Menghi seems to have understood which way the winds were blowing. In all his subsequent writings on demons, he focused on exorcisms; he never again mentioned the witches’ sabbat.46 That this paradigm was successful is proven by the fact that, towards the end of the sixteenth century, inquisitors began to look upon witches as persons who were themselves involuntarily possessed. This emphasis even eventually made itself felt in the Friuli, where new research has shown a far more nuanced picture than the one provided by Ginzburg. For not only were some of the witches discovered there treated with compassion and ‘exorcized’ rather then persecuted; it is quite clear that the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the Friuli tolerated the fact that many of the benandanti – who were traditionally healers and enemies of witchcraft – were themselves lay exorcists, carrying out rituals that differed marginally from those of their clerical counterparts.47 Garzoni also discusses lay exorcists, and allows that, on occasion, such exorcisms are appropriate. But, in a rare autobiographical passage, Garzoni also cast light on how easily the frontier between exorcisms sanctioned by the church and those that had more in common with witch beliefs could be crossed. As a Lateran canon, Garzoni was himself a practicing exorcist. One day, he writes, after he conjured a demon in the Basilica of Santo Ubaldo in Gubbio, a man from Monte Falcone, who had a reputation as an especially successful exorcist, took Garzoni to the side to tell him certain ‘secrets’ about his art. He made use, he told Garzoni, of certain herbs and substances to aid him in his cures – of horseshoe vetch and a mixture of mercury and charcoal.48 Garzoni’s point was that such practices were superstitious and deviated from appropriate procedures. But the casual way in which he relates this anecdote makes it clear that the boundaries between formal or orthodox exorcisms and more popular practices were fuzzy at best.

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Exorcisms, therefore, were common occurrences in Italy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. They were undoubtedly experienced as spiritual dramas, and Menghi himself underscored the importance of performing this rite, publicly in churches, for the spiritual benefit of the people – ‘for the spiritual benefit that the faithful derive from it.’49 The drama proved compelling because it was simultaneously personal and cosmic, and much of its curative power appears to have derived from the way in which this rite enabled the suffering, possessed Christian to interpret his or her pain or madness as part of divine history, with the struggle between God and the Devil displayed in a concentrated and highly individualized way in the involuntary gestures and utterances of a particular person. As several scholars have emphasized, exorcisms were in fact forms of theater, stage-plays in which the exorcist himself ‘coached’ the demoniac in a drama whose purposes were often political. Certainly many of the much publicized exorcisms in France, including the well-known case of the young Picard girl Nicole Obry, served as propaganda for the Catholic faith.50 At roughly the same time in England the Anglican opponents of exorcism attacked the ritual precisely because they viewed it as a form of theater, stage-craft, and fraud – their goal was to bring the control of the sacred more fully under the control of the Church of England.51 But the emphasis on the theatrical dimension of exorcism, while useful, misses the importance of exorcism as yet another Renaissance strategy for exploring the relation of a broad range of disconcerting inner experiences – madness, excruciating pain, melancholy, illnesses – that those who suffered often could neither understand nor explain to their friends and loved ones. At times, these interior states appeared to provoke involuntary external gestures – jabbing movements, involuntary ticks, or the ejaculation of obscenities – that must have both baffled and frightened those who witnessed them. Exorcisms, therefore, were performances; but their performative dimension enabled the persons who were suffering to have articulated to themselves and to others the meaning of their pain. We might think of exorcists, therefore, as experts in restoring the self through the reaffirmation that one’s internal experience – one’s thoughts, feelings, emotions – could be re-possessed as one’s own and that the traditional boundary between interiority and the outside world could be restored. From this perspective, it is possible to see why possession was such a major cause of anxiety and of madness in the Renaissance, precisely because it constituted a violent transgression of the distinction between one’s internal thoughts, beliefs, and emotions, on the one hand, and one’s external


utterances, gestures, and expressions on the other – those two spheres of experience – one internal, the other external – that formed the essential elements in the making of the Renaissance self. But exorcisms did not take place at any time. As Stuart Clark has argued, possession in this period was often inscribed in a heightened sense of eschatology, a sense that Christian history was coming to an end. ‘The extravagant disorders and terrible signs of strife apparent during attempts to exorcize [demoniacs]’, Clark writes, ‘were perfect illustrations of the notion that the devil’s final attacks on mankind would stem essentially from a raging fury, and not merely from his traditional enmity.’52 And yet we must not assume that every exorcism was always a means of demonstrating the Church’s power to a larger public. Many must have been relatively private events that the demoniac found comforting. In her ‘autobiography’, the seventeenthcentury nun Cecilia Ferrazzi described her exorcism that had taken place in ‘a little courtyard’ adjacent to the home of a group of Dominican tertiaries in the parish of San Martino. A priest and several friars gathered around her. Cecilia writes that ‘all of them whispered in my ear that God give me patience and exhorted me to suffer willingly for the love of God’, and she adds ‘[d]uring this exorcism I felt the greatest consolation and throughout I saw the Most Holy Virgin nearby for it seemed I was in paradise.’53 Exorcism was therefore not always and not only spiritual theater. It was also profoundly physical. If we compare the exorcist to the inquisitor, we note immediately that he confronted many of the same problems of opacity that inquisitors also faced. Accordingly he too was trained to find signs on the outside of the body of whether or not a demon really had taken possession of the person. He was trained to look for the marks of the Devil – the Devil’s hoof prints or the witch’s teat. He sought to have the Devil speak, tell him its name; or, if there were multiple demons, to learn the names of all of them. He attended carefully to the reactions of the demoniac as he placed various holy objects – holy water, pieces of paper on which the name of Christ was written, crucifixes, and the relics of saints – on his or her body. Did these objects force the possessed person to convulse? If not, the exorcist may have suspected the possession was faked. If yes, then the exorcist often made use of various herbs, fumigations, and oils along with the sign of the cross and prayers, confidently pronounced, to try to drive the demon out. The proceedings may well have lasted one or two hours, or even longer; often the exorcist needed to repeat them many times, when the possessing demon was especially stubborn, clever, or

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recalcitrant. But the exorcist could also monitor signs of progress. Many of those who were possessed vomited up impossible things – nails, needles, and other sharp objects – as they began to be cured. Again, what is striking in this process is its physicality. Menghi was not describing a purely spiritual world but also a highly concrete one. As one recent student of the Compendio dell’arte essorcistica has noted, in Menghi ‘a peculiar sense of the concrete, of the embodied, and of the material emerges.’54 After all, much of his work had been to prove that demons did not merely delude the demoniac; rather they actually entered the body. Menghi warned his readers – most of whom must have been exorcists themselves – how this took place. Demons were especially likely to be found in dark, solitary places.55 Then, just ‘before entering the bodies of humans’, he writes in his Fustis daemonum, ‘[they] usually appear in some terrifying, deformed, or horrifying shape, whether they appear as men or as animals. They seem to disappear suddenly, but in reality they enter into the body … they get into the possessed person through the mouth, or the nose, or the ear, either taking on the shape of a draft of wind or a small mouse.’56 And often more than one enters the body.57 And even once in the body, they could move about. Another of the demon’s tricks, he writes, ‘is to pull away from the mouth of the possessed person, where he had been speaking, and to hide himself in the heart or another part of the body beneath the neck.’58 In his popular Flagellum daemonum, Girolamo Menghi described one of the possible ritual prayers or commands that the priest might use at the end of an exorcism. At the close of the ritual, the priest was to lay his ‘hands upon the head of the possessed person and say this prayer.’ Expel, oh Lord, the devil from this your creature, [name], from his head, from his hair, from the crown of his head, from his forehead, from his eyes, from his tongue, from the parts beneath the tongue, from his ears, from his nostrils, from his neck, from his jaws, from his teeth, from his throat, from his gums, from his mouth, from his palate, from his brain, from the folds of his brain, from his eyelashes, from his eyebrows, from the hair on his body, from his feet, from his tibias, from his knees, from his shins, from his shameful parts, from his kidneys, from his sides, from the upper and lower intestines, from his thighbone, from his belly, from his stomach, from his heart, from his shoulder blades, from his shoulders, from his chest, from his breasts, from his arms, from his hands, from his fingernails, from


his bones, from his nerves, from his veins, from the marrow of his bones, from his lungs, from the structure of his body, from all the joints, from all his body, inside and outside, from the five senses of the body and soul. May the devil find no more place in this creature, either inside or outside, so that he will be safe and sane by invocations of the most holy name of your only-begotten Son and by the invocation of the Holy Spirit, co-eternal with you.59 What is striking in this passage is the way in which Menghi envisions the body. To be sure, elsewhere in his writings, he alludes to the way in which the devil might, through a particular opening, take possession of a person. But now he makes it clear that openings are not the exception; rather they are the rule. In Menghi’s anatomy, the body – as this list makes clear – is remarkably porous or permeable. To be sure, he does seem to recognize that the body has surfaces on which a demon might settle (perhaps this helps explain Elena la Draga’s comment that ‘I have a devil on me’) such as the forehead, the shoulders, and the hands, and that these and other surfaces enclose other parts of the body entirely such as the brain, the folds of the brain, the heart, and the marrow. But by far the largest list of body parts here suggest that the body is full of openings through which a demon might enter. The digestive system (the mouth, the teeth, the stomach, the intestines, the anus) is highly vulnerable, as are the sexual organs (which Menghi calls the ‘shameful parts’). At first such a topography threatens a subversion of the other notions of identity that were widespread in the Renaissance. For whether we think of the self as predominantly social and conforming, on the one hand, or as predominantly prudential and/or performative, on the other, each of these formulations appears to have been based on a clear demarcation between what was inside the body (one’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs) and what was outside (interactions with others, statements, gestures). But it seems equally likely that the Renaissance experience of the self as relational – as a dialogue between what was perceived as interior and what exterior – made the surface of the body (its self-enveloping membrane of skin) a site of the age’s most unsettling anxieties about identity. For Venetians these anxieties reached a new level of intensity as word reached the city in 1571, during the War of Cyprus, that the Turks had flayed alive Marcantonio Bragadin, one of the republic’s imperial administrators in the eastern Mediterranean. It was in the aftermath of hearing this news that Titian created his disturbing painting of the flaying of

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Marsyas, the mythical satyr whom Apollo had subjected to this horrific form of execution for having been so bold as to challenge him to a musical contest. Traditionally scholars have interpreted Titian’s work as a depiction of the luminescent self within.60 But, in an important and suggestive re-interpretation of Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas, the German art historian Daniela Bohde has observed that a neoplatonic reading of the painting, one that stresses the flaying as the revelation of an inner truth, is difficult to maintain. Rather, in her view, the painting captures the fact that Renaissance men and women would have viewed the boundary

The Flaying of Marsyas. Titian (Tiziano Vecelli). Courtesy of Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.


provided by the skin ‘not as something secure and stable, but as something exposed to danger.’61 Given the emphasis in the Renaissance on the porous quality of the body – with disease, love, and demons capable of entering it through various openings – it becomes increasingly clear that notions of identity in this period were based only in part on the dialectic between the experience of inwardness or interiority, on the one hand, and experience in the world, on the other. Equally important was a profound awareness of the fragility of this imagined distinction, one that could be undone not only by demons or astral influences but also by religious practices involving the preservation of the internal organs of the holy dead and by medical practices involving the opening of the body and, as we have just seen, by flaying, all of which required pulling the skin away in order to look within.62 For what the flayed body made explicit was the disconcerting reality that the absence of the presumed boundary between the interior and exterior aspects of the self did not record a luminescence within but, to the contrary, actually threatened the very existence of the self. The body’s fleshy surface, in this view, was the corporal precondition for thinking of the self as a relation between its inner and outer aspects. Long before the Renaissance the Roman poet Ovid, who was much loved in Titian’s day, had captured something of this idea in his Metamorphoses when he has Proteus ask, as he is about to shed his skin, ‘quid me mihi detrahis’ – ‘why are you taking me away from me?’63

6 The Proffered Heart

… I propose the idea that at a certain point in its history the moral life of Europe added to itself a new element, the state or quality of the self which we call sincerity. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 1972 In 1593, an arresting image of Sincerity, painted in words, appeared in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, a work that would prove to be one of the most influential emblem books of the Baroque age.1 Sincerity, Ripa writes, is to be shown as: a woman dressed in gold, who holds in her right hand a white dove, while, with her left hand, she proffers her heart in a gracious, beautiful gesture. The dove and the white clothing represent sincerity in its pure form, without any falsity of appearances or artifice. The proffered heart represents integrity, since, when a man’s will is without vice, he does not conceal the recesses of his heart but rather makes them visible to all.2 Then, in 1603, the Iconologia, which had included many emblems or images of the virtues in its first edition, appeared with a representation of Sincerity. The drawing is straightforward. A young woman dressed in white holds a dove in her right hand; in her left hand, which is raised just above her shoulder, she proffers her heart. It is an image that emphasizes transparency; and it proved deeply influential. Early in the seventeenth century, the Florentine artist and engraver Raffaelo Schiaminossi depicted Sincerity in a print that drew directly on Ripa. Later in the century Carlo Dolci, also a Florentine and one of the most sought-after portraitists of the age, produced an Allegory of Sincerity for 103


an unknown Venetian patron, and his daughter Angelica made a charming drawing based on her father’s painting. In 1662, the irascible Neapolitan artist and poet Salvator Rosa included the figure of Sincerity in his painting The Genius of the Artist. Finally the Florentine Lorenzo Lippi also explored this theme, at least obliquely, in one of his most beautiful paintings, his Simulazione or Pretence, which he produced about 1645. Unfortunately, while we know the sources of many of Ripa’s emblems, the origins of his ‘Sincerità’ are not known.3 But, like all artistic inventions, it was not developed in a vacuum. Ripa himself tells us that he knew and used Pierio Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica in which he would have seen an emblem of a man wearing his heart on a chain around his neck and, therefore, outside his body as a model of probity in language – an idea that Valeriano himself explicitly related to the notion of sincerity. And it is possible to identify a few other artistic precedents as well.4 But Ripa’s presentation of Sincerity among his emblems is also evidence of a more general shift in Italian and European culture and morality in the late sixteenth century – a shift towards the ideal of the proffered heart or the value of expressing one’s thoughts, feelings, convictions openly, candidly, frankly. We have only to recall the emphasis that earlier writers had placed on the importance of prudence – perhaps above all Castiglione in his Book of the Courtier – to recognize the magnitude of this change, one that offered a new idiom of identity, in which the emphasis began to shift towards viewing the heart as the center of one’s moral being, a notion that would prove to be an essential element in the development of the modern idea of the individual. With the emergence of the ideal of sincerity, in short, a new form of the self took its place among the other possible forms of identity at the very end of the Renaissance. As is well known, it was still possible for a writer such as Castiglione, working in the early sixteenth century, to believe that the court could offer a modicum of security and balance to an Italy ravaged by war and invasion. In an age when republican forms of government seemed less and less viable, Castiglione was optimistic that the courtier could exercise a moderating and constructive influence on his prince through art, grace, and sprezzatura. But by the end of the sixteenth century, another courtier, Stefano Guazzo – secretary to the Gonzaga dynasty in Mantua and Monferrato – articulated a profoundly different perspective in his Civil conversazione, first published in 1574. Like Castiglione’s work, Guazzo’s too would prove enormously influential. Some fifty editions of the book appeared within the first fifty years of its life, and it was

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Emblem ‘Sincerità’, p. 456, from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, Rome: Appresso Lepido Facij, 1603. Typ. 625.03.746. Courtesy of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.


translated into English, French, German, Latin, and Spanish.5 Perhaps the most striking difference between the two works was Guazzo’s use of a more straightforward and less ornate style. His words have an immediacy and simplicity. His text was also, to my knowledge, the first widely-read secular work in Italian explicitly to emphasize sincerity as an important value in social life.6 It is certain, moreover, that Cesare Ripa was familiar with this work and made use of it in his development of his emblems.7 The text may have even played some role in Ripa’s depiction of Sincerity. In Book II of the dialogue, one of the two speakers, the philosopher and medical doctor Annibale Magnacavallo, provided a description of the virtuous noblewomen of Casale Monferrato, Guazzo’s own city. The passage is a portrait in words of virtue made explicit in the comportment of a beautiful woman. Of the virtues, one of the first Guazzo mentions is sincerity of speech (la sincerità delle parole).8 In fact, in Guazzo’s text, sincerity emerges as a salient theme from the outset; and it is closely related here – as it is in many works from the late Renaissance and the early modern period – to the problem of alienation at court. Sincerity, that is, was both the dream of transparency and the wish for connectedness in a setting dominated by the uncomfortable sense that one could never trust one’s fellow courtiers, open up to them, or reveal one’s thoughts to them. Inevitably, for some, this was more than they could bear. This was certainly the case with the Cavaliere Guglielmo, Guazzo’s younger brother. As the dialogue opens, he makes it plain that the very falseness and artificiality of the court had made him melancholic, and he expresses a strong desire for a solitary and contemplative life, while Annibale Magnacavallo, the physician who has come to reason with Guglielmo and to help him out of his depression, urges the young man to participate in the civic life. The tension between the contemplative and active life was, of course, itself a traditional theme, but Guazzo developed it in an especially forceful way by drawing on Marc Antonio Vida’s De rei publicae dignitate, a humanist text that, because of the forcefulness of its critique of human society, was one of the most radical works of the Italian Renaissance. Vida, who served as bishop of Cremona and had participated in the earlier sessions of the Council of Trent, wrote the dialogue on the republic as the ‘record’ of a conversation that took place in the summer of 1545 just on the outskirts of Trent, as the prelates and humanists who had gathered there were waiting for the council to get underway. Vida set the scene of the dialogue at the villa of his host Cardinal


Madruzzo, the bishop of Trent. Present also were some of the leading humanists of the day, several of whom had close ties to the evangelical movement in Italy in the middle of the sixteenth century: Cardinal Reginald Pole, who had left England after King Henry had broken with the papacy over the matter of his divorce and established himself as head of the English (Anglican) Church; Alvise Priuli, a Venetian nobleman who had close ties to Contarini and others sympathetic to the reform; and Marcantonio Flaminio, a poet who had been deeply influenced by the teachings of Juan de Valdés in the 1530s. While the two main speakers were Flaminio and Vida, the dialogue nonetheless preserved something of the relatively open religious climate just prior to the meeting of the great Council.9 What matters to Guglielmo, who largely takes up Flaminio’s position in Vida’s dialogue, is his belief that it was only by removing onself from society that one could be assured of salvation and preserve one’s purity of heart – something, he argues, that would be utterly impossible in a courtly setting.10 But Flaminio is not merely recapitulating the traditional value that many early humanists had placed on the contemplative life. He is uncommonly passionate and delivers not so much a speech in favor of the solitary life as a diatribe against the corrupting influences of civilization – a passage that provides, in fact, a rough anticipation of Rousseau’s writings two hundred years later.11 Annibale, whose views reflected those of Vida’s, responded by arguing with equal passion for one’s continuing involvement in society, for the active life, and, with striking novelty, for the ideal of sincerity. In his argument Annibale drew both on the Aristotelian concept of man as a social being, who must be active in society, as well as on the CounterReformation emphasis on lay service to the poor and the sick. Participation in society is therefore necessary, even a Christian obligation. But Annibale gives the argument a new emphasis, for implicit in his call to the vita activa is an emphasis on sincerity as a virtue. Annibale reminds Guglielmo that ‘the tongue is the mirror and the portrait of our soul.’12 He encourages Guglielmo to flee false appearances, urging ‘sincerity not only in works but also in words (sincerità nonché nell’opere ma nelle parole).’13 And Annibale links sincere speech to emotion as well, noting that ‘it is necessary that the sweetness of words be born from sincere feeling.’14 Indeed, Annibale gives considerable emphasis to the importance of connecting internal affect to one’s speech, especially if the later is to be effective in moving others. ‘But above all’, he states, ‘it is necessary that whoever wishes to move others with his actions, first feel himself moved and that he draw out


the feelings of his heart.’ Annibale then reasserts his main point that ‘[I]nternal actions should preceed external ones in such a way that the sound of words and the movements of the person be pushed by the affects of the soul.’15 Ultimately, Guglielmo will agree with Annibale. After all, he too had desired purity of heart; Annibale, whose role is to guide and instruct a younger man, merely convinces him that he can achieve this ideal in society. The emphasis on sincerity is new in Italian culture in this period. But how do we explain this? In part, Guazzo’s text and the new ideal of sincerity no doubt reflected a growing disenchantment with the court.16 Italian society had, over the course of the sixteenth century, become increasingly a society of courtiers, and Castiglione’s optimism about the court as a political and cultural institution had gradually given way to a growing pessimism about the new political realities of Italy. The court, in short, had gradually evolved into a seemingly fixed and permanent institution. And it was in this setting that Guazzo developed his analysis of court culture. Yet there is also much about Annibale’s argument for the active life that suggests a familiarity on Guazzo’s part not only with the writings of the Counter-Reformation bishop Vida but also with evangelical and even Protestant ideas that had played a major role in the intellectual life of Italy in the previous generation. The clearest link to this culture was the preservation of Marcantonio Flaminio as one of the two main interlocutors.17 As I have already noted, Flaminio was at least for a while closely associated with the teachings of Valdés; he was also suspected, after his death, of having in fact been a heretic; and some believed that he had been the author of the Beneficio di Cristo, the enigmatic masterpiece of the Italian reform. In fact, it is even possible that Guazzo was at one point drawing quite directly on the text of the Beneficio, a text that the Catholic Church had not only banned but had been especially effective in repressing. It is in the celebrated opening debate in the Conversazione civile on the whether it is better to lead one’s life in solitude or to enter into society, into conversation and engagement with one’s world, that Guazzo offers an epitome of the Beneficio – a text to which Annibale seems to point as he sums up his arguments, recalling that Christ, in the end, ‘had spilled his most innocent blood for our salvation and our benefit (beneficio nostro).’18 It is not only this final phrase that evokes the Beneficio.19 In fact, the entire paragraph, while suppressing the explicitly Calvinist doctrine of predestination, appears to build upon the Beneficio, especially its final


chapter, where the author calls upon sincerity of intention in one’s prayers and works, puts forth the imitation of Christ as the highest ideal, and describes hypocrisy as the carrying out of seemingly Christian acts ‘beneath the mantle of exterior works.’20 And other aspects of Annibale’s arguments also seem informed by a familiarity with Italian evangelical teachings: his emphasis on Christ’s commandments that the faithful visit the sick and care for the poor as well as his assertion that the Christians need not confine prayers to the Church, but may pray ‘in any place.’ But Guazzo’s knowledge of Calvinism did not derive exclusively from the Beneficio – often seen as the work that did the most to introduce Calvin’s ideas, albeit tacitly, to Italian readers. As a courtier attached to the Gonzaga dynasty, Guazzo had spent much time in France in the second half of the 1550s in the service of Lodovico Gonzaga, the Duke of Nevers, the younger brother of Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga of Mantua and Monferrato and a strong supporter of the French crown. It was precisely in this time period that Protestant ideas were making their most rapid headway in France, touching virtually all levels of society, perhaps especially the nobility, and laying the groundwork for the horrific decades of religious warfare that would break out shortly after Guazzo’s return to Italy in 1561.21 It is no coincidence that Guazzo opens his dialogue with a reference to the horrors of these wars; and there can be no doubt that he encountered Calvinists first-hand while he was abroad.22 It was, therefore, through Protestant, especially Calvinist, and evangelical ideas that the ideal of sincerity developed in Italy, both from Guazzo’s direct encounters with proponents of these new ideas while he was in France and from his familiarity with evangelical teachings. Like many of his contemporaries in France and England, moreover, Guazzo appears to have seen in Calvinist and evangelical ideas a language that enabled him to fashion a critique of court culture – to place an emphasis, that is, on the ethical imperative to make one’s beliefs known in a culture that made transparency dangerous for courtiers throughout Europe at this time. Indeed, much evidence points to the Protestant and, above all, the Calvinist origins of a concern with the ideal of sincerity. Like many words that would eventually gain a wide currency, sincerity had and has many significations. Before the sixteenth century the word ‘sincere’ had generally referred to something (often a material substance such as a liquid or a metal) that was pure or unadulterated, but in the sixteenth century, as the eminent literary historian Lionel Trilling argued


in a famous essay, sincerity became a moral category, referring, as Trilling put it – concisely but usefully – ‘to a congruence between avowal and actual feeling.’23 That is, in the midst of the sixteenth century (though there is some evidence that this new moral meaning of sincerity had begun to appear in Renaissance writers as early as Petrarch and Valla) we discover a growing moral imperative to make one’s feelings and convictions known.24 And, indeed, it is my argument as well that to state that someone is sincere or isn’t, to see particular utterances and works of art and literature as essential expressions of individual selves, and to desire to connect speech with feeling are characteristically modern concerns – concerns that were first beginning to emerge in the second half of the sixteenth century, at the end of the Renaissance. Of course, from the twelfth century on, medieval authors had also developed an ideal of the proper relation between what they described as the internal self (homo interior) and one’s words and actions. But significantly they did not use the term ‘sincerity’ to describe this relation. Turning to language that had in fact developed much earlier, within early medieval monasticism, they cultivated the ideal of concordia (harmony or agreement) and related expressions (consonantia, harmonia, concors, concordare, accordare, and so on) to describe the proper interplay between self and one’s words and deeds. A key text was the Rule of St. Benedict, in which the interior self was to be fashioned to correspond to the language of the Psalms that punctuated the monk’s daily life, as when Benedict counseled monks to pray in such a way ‘ut mens nostra concordet voci nostrae – that our mind be in agreement with our voice.’25 In his Life of Aderaldus, a canon of Troyes in the tenth century, the author praised the way in which Aderaldus’s teachings were in harmony with his life and his works: ‘he did not live differently than he taught, but his work was in agreement (concordabat) with his voice, and what he taught in words, he put forth with examples.’26 But it was especially in the twelfth century that this ideal would take hold. Hugh of St. Victor, in his commentary on the Rule of St. Augustine, for example, cited Benedict when he wrote: ‘of those chanting in church, that their mind should be in agreement (concordare debet) with their voice.’27 Concordia was the central thread of the universe in Bernard of Sylvester’s neo-Platonic Cosmographia. It bound the earth to the heavens, and the soul to the body.28 Later in the twelfth century, the prominent theologian Alan of Lille, in a discussion of liturgy, would define symphonia as ‘a concordant harmony of one’s speech and acts with one’s mind.’29 And at the end of the twelfth century, the


Premonstratensian canon Adam of Dryburgh recommended that in prayer, the reader should ‘[p]ay attention … that you experience in your heart what you say with your mouth, so that your voice may be in agreement with your mind (ut concordet vox tua cum mente tua), and the latter may think about the former sounds.’30 Indeed, over and over again in the texts from the Middle Ages concordia was viewed as the ideal around which one should structure one’s language and life in relation to one’s beliefs and convictions. In the early thirteenth century, St. Francis wrote that one should pray in such a way that ‘one’s voice was in agreement with one’s mind’, and the ideal of concordia or consonantia would persist through Dante and Thomas à Kempis.31 In the late fifteenth century, we find it as well in the Platonic writings of Marsilio Ficino. ‘Nulla consonantia magis delectat, quam cordis et linguae – no harmony gives greater delight than that of heart and tongue’ is the title Ficino gives to one of his letters. And like the other neo-Platonic writers Bernard of Sylvester and Alan of Lille who had come before him, Ficino too made it clear that the concord between heart and tongue was only one aspect of a larger divine plan. As he wrote in his letter on music, ‘a man is not harmoniously formed who does not delight in harmony … for God rejoices in harmony to such an extent that he seems to have created the world especially for this reason, that all its individual parts should sing harmoniously to themselves and to the whole universe.’32 As an ethic, then, concordia or harmony placed the greatest emphasis on the agreement of one person with another in relation to the worship of God. But the shift to the ideal of sinceritas was not merely the result of shifts in social and economic structures, with the consequences these new arrangements had for collective life. The shift was primarily the outgrowth of an intellectual revolution that was central to the rise of Protestantism. Like many other dimensions of medieval life, the ideal of concordia had rested on the assumption, widespread in the monastic and Catholic culture of this period, that the human person was fundamentally similar to God. Indeed, as Robert Javelet has demonstrated in his masterly Image et ressemblance au douzième siècle, medieval writers – especially beginning in the twelfth century – strove to model themselves on Christ. Convinced that the human person was created in the image of God, they viewed the spiritual life as preeminently a quest for the recovery of that image within themselves. The Delphic Oracle – ‘Know Thyself’ – became, in their understanding of the human person, not a command to discover a unique personality but rather an ideal to recover the image


of God within the self.33 As Caroline Walker Bynum has observed, ‘[t]he twelfth-century person … converted to the Christian life by adopting a model that simultaneously shaped both “outer man” (behavior) and “inner man” (soul).’ Timothy J. Reiss made a similar point in his observation that in the writings from this period, ‘human “self”-awareness … is quite inseparable from a sense of participation (“knowledge”) in the Divine.’34 But in the late Middle Ages, beginning with Ockham, nominalist theologians began to develop arguments that would eventually erode, especially in work of Martin Luther, the anthropology upon which this ideal of concordia had been based.35 For, unlike earlier medieval theologians and mystics, Luther could not accept the principle that man was essentially similar to God. To the contrary, Lutheran anthropology was based on a principle of dissimilarity. The human person was fundamentally sinful, a concept that would be reiterated with special force in Calvin’s recurrent emphasis on the majesty of God and the depravity of man. The implications of this shift to a new anthropology were manifold, but at the very least they undermined the possibility of concordia. The human person was no longer viewed as in a (potentially) harmonious relation to God, the cosmos, and to him- or herself but was viewed as an inevitably sinful portion of Creation, whose value in God’s eyes was largely a mystery.36 But if the ideal of concordia had begun to lose its force, how were men and women to conceive of the ideal relation between what they viewed as their internal selves (their thoughts, their feelings, and their convictions) and the broader world? In the sixteenth century, as we have seen, this relation took on many forms – conforming, prudential, performative, and porous – but it also added a new notion: the ideal of the sincere self. Crucially, the terms concordia and sincerity were not fully synonymous. Concordia, as we have seen, was based on a complex assumption about the potentiality of harmony throughout the universe – a harmony that ideally would be reflected in the way the individual Christian modeled him or herself on the image of God. By contrast, the sincere ideal could not appeal, at least not for long, to the image of God within the individual person. To be sure, for Luther, grace to some degree substituted – at least in the elect – for the medieval ideal of similitudo (likeness). But, in general, the sincere ideal could not appeal to a common notion of the internal self. Once the idea of similarity or likeness between God and the human person had been ruptured, it became increasingly difficult to express a common Christian ideal. A particular person’s actions and words were viewed as


expressing something far more limited: the internal, particular, and even unique ‘self’ within. To be sure, not all writers held that one’s words and deeds should be a genuine representation of one’s beliefs or feelings at all times. As we have noted, the Renaissance period is largely defined by the ascendancy of a doctrine of prudence that held the contrary: that there are numerous occasions on which particular men and women should conceal what is in their minds and hearts. Nonetheless, in both discussions of sincerity and counsels of prudence, a new understanding of the human person – one that placed greater stress on the internal self as agent or subject, as director of one’s words and deeds – emerged. And though the Protestant attack on the medieval view of the human as a representation, however flawed, of the divine was only one factor in the discovery of the individual, it is nonetheless clear that the development of the individual in the Renaissance had little to do with the cultivation of a sense of interiority per se. What was novel about sixteenth-century views of the self was not, that is, the stress on the importance of the interior life but rather a new understanding of the relation of one’s thoughts and feelings to one’s words and actions. On the one hand, as we shall see, Renaissance writers, especially by the sixteenth century, placed new emphasis on differences between individual and individual. On the other, overturning the medieval ideal of prudent restraint on one’s emotions, Protestant reformers gave a new legitimacy to the expression of one’s emotions – an expressiveness of feelings that would, increasingly, be subsumed under the ideal of sincerity. Luther, Calvin, and other early Protestant reformers played a pivotal role in articulating this new concern with sincerity. Luther was especially forceful in his praise of this virtue in his ‘Preface to the Psalms’, which he published in his German Bible of 1528. The Psalter, Luther argued, far surpassed the lives of saints and other moral tales because it ‘preserves, not the trivial and ordinary things said by the saints, but their deepest and noblest utterances, those which they used when speaking in full earnest and all urgency to God. It not only tells us what they say about their work and conduct, but also lays bare their hearts … it enables us to see into their hearts and understand the nature of their thoughts.’37 But what is especially noteworthy is the degree to which Luther’s endorsement of sincerity is linked to a new valuing of the human passions: The human heart is like a ship on a stormy sea driven about by winds blowing from all four corners of heaven. In one man, there is


fear and anxiety about impending disaster; another groans and moans at all the surrounding evil. One man mingles hope and presumption out of the good fortune to which he is looking forward; and another is puffed up with a confidence and pleasure in his present possessions. Such storms, however, teach us to speak sincerely and frankly, and make a clean breast. (Solche sturmwinde aber leren mit ernst reden und das herss öffenen, und den grund eraus schütten.) For a man who is in the grip of fear or distress speaks of disaster in a quite different way from one who is filled with happiness; and a man who is filled with joy speaks and sings about happiness quite differently from one who is in the grip of fear. They say that when a sorrowing man laughs or a happy man weeps, his laughter and his weeping do not come from the heart. In other words, these men do not lay bare, or speak of things which lie in, the bottom of their hearts.38 Clearly Luther’s view of the proper relation of the emotions to human action and expressiveness marks a radical departure from Aquinas’s ethics which had appealed to prudence and reason to restrain the passions and emotions in the shaping of human acts and speech. To Luther, earnest speech found its model in the David of the Hebrew Psalms – an ideal that would be reiterated in the writings of Calvin. For Calvin too would draw a new connection between the affections and speech. Much like Luther, he saw the Psalter as a model of sincerity. In his Preface to his Commentaries on the Psalms, published in Latin in 1557 and the following year in French, Calvin made his own special fondness for this part of the Bible clear: I am wont to call this book, not without cause ‘The Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul’, for not an affection will a man find in himself, an image of which is not reflected in this mirror. Nay, all the griefs, sorrows, fears, misgivings, hopes, cares, anxieties, in short, all the troublesome emotions with which the minds of men tend to be agitated, the Holy Spirit has here offered a vivid picture. The other scriptures contain the commands which God enjoined His servants to bear to us. But here are prophets themselves talking with God, because they lay bare all their inmost thoughts (interiores omnes sensus, toutes les affections interieures), invite or hale every one of us to examine himself in particular, lest any of the many infirmities to which we are liable, or of the many vices with which


we are beset should remain hidden. A rare and surpassing benefit, when, every lurking-place having been explored, the heart is brought into the light cleansed from hypocrisy, that most noisome pest.39 The commentaries themselves underscored the value Calvin placed on sincerity, a theme that emerges in his remarks on Psalm XII: For as those that purpose to deal faithfully with their neighbours, set open their whole heart as it is; so the false and deceitful persons keep back a part of their meaning to themselves, and cover it with the varnish of dissimulation, so that no certainty can be gathered from their talk. Therefore must our talk be sincere (simplex), that it may be the very image of an upright mind.40 And Calvin’s gloss on Psalm XV made much the same point, though here the ideal of sincerity is seen not merely as the opposite of deceit but rather as a mark of God’s people. David ‘requires sincerity (sinceritatem)’, Calvin wrote, adding that by ‘to speak in the heart … [David] denotes such a concord and harmony of the heart and tongue (cordis et linguae consensum et symphoniam), as that the speech should be the lively image of the inward affection (viva latentis affectus effigies).’41 This last passage is especially revealing. In the first part, in his stress on ‘a concord and harmony of the heart and the tongue’, Calvin’s ideas were consonant with those of medieval writers. But the second part of the passage, in its emphasis on the ideal of speech as ‘a lively image of the inward affection’, presents a profoundly new ideal, rooted in the new, late Renaissance emphasis on the expressive subjectivity of the individual. Luther’s colleague Philip Melanchthon was equally outspoken about the need to recognize the power of the emotions in shaping personality. He attacked classical and scholastic authors for dismissing the affections as a ‘weakness of nature’ that had little bearing on human freedom. He insisted on a new vocabulary for understanding human action. Rather than the will, which previous writers had seen as capable of free choice, Melanchthon, like Calvin, privileged the heart. ‘And why do we not use the word “heart” instead of “will” (voluntas)?’ he asked. ‘For the Scriptures call the most powerful part of man the “heart”, especially that part in which the affections arise.’ ‘When an affection has begun to rage and seethe’, he concluded, ‘it cannot be kept from breaking forth.’42 ‘Thus’, as William Bouwsma has written,


‘[Melanchthon] saw that the consequence of control over the affections (if such control were truly possible) would not be rationality but insincerity, the presentation not of a higher and rational self to the world but an inauthentic self.’43 Turning to the subject of prayer in his Institutes, Calvin had made much the same point. ‘[U]nless voice and song … spring from deep feeling of heart’, he wrote, ‘neither has any value or profit in the least with God.’44 In Renaissance Europe many men identified themselves with a personal emblem. Calvin designed his as a hand-held heart, presented as a kind of offering to his readers and to God – the inscription read: prompte et sincere.45 We can only wonder if Ripa too knew this image. The refashioning of the ideal of prudence, which I explored in Chapter 3 above, and the emergence of the sincere ideal were both woven – as two threads among many – into the complex web of causes that led, in the late Renaissance period, to the emergence of a more bounded sense of identity, though the emergence of sincerity is particularly revealing. For, unlike concordia, which insisted on identity or similitude between God and the human person, on the one hand, and between the heart and the tongue, on the other, sincerity was an ethic of difference. To be sure, it preserved the ideal of harmony between the heart and the tongue, but the heart was now viewed not as a microcosm of a greater whole but rather as an individual entity, which, while perhaps similar to other hearts in its proclivity to sin and to selfdeception, was above all characterized by its own irreducible individuality, its particular desires and affections that set it apart from other persons. Luther’s image of the diverse passions (fear, anxiety, hope, etc.) of men at sea, tossed about ‘by winds blowing from all four corners of heaven’, underscores this new sense of individuality. In his Loci communes, Melanchthon was more explicit: ‘we see that in some characters, some affections rule, and that in other persons, others hold sway. Each is drawn by his own desire.’46 Similarly Montaigne emphasized that he was writing not of men in general but of ‘a particular one.’47 In a world cut off both from a communion based on similitude with God and an implicit anthropological identity with other Christians, even the most sincere individual could appeal to no truth greater than that based on the his or her feelings, emotions, passions, or affections. As an ideal, therefore, sincerity may have seemed to preserve something of the traditional medieval concern with the need to bring expression and behavior into harmony with one’s internal beliefs. In reality, this harmony was profoundly limited, or individualistic. It reached out precariously from an individual speaker’s or writer’s heart. One’s language,


therefore, may have resonated with the feelings of a friend or lover, or perhaps, fleetingly, with those of one’s readers. Writing of his friendship with La Boétie, for example, Montaigne observed that their very souls had communicated with one another ‘the very depths of our hearts.’48 But ultimately, no matter how sincere one was, such expressions, precisely because they were based on feelings and emotions, were unable to establish consensus or a sense of community. Where God once was, the individual now stood alone, faced with an increasingly complex dilemma of not knowing if those whom one addressed would ever understand one’s deepest feelings, concerns, or hopes. To a large degree, therefore, the emergence of a more bounded sense of identity was the result of fundamental shifts in the ethical visions of Renaissance humanists and Protestant reformers. In fashioning their religious, social, even personal identities, Renaissance men and women could draw on two distinct, even opposed virtues. On the one hand, there were those who embraced what I have described in Chapter 3 as a Renaissance notion of the prudential self (a rhetorical posture that subordinated honesty to decorum); on the other, there were those who favored what we might call the ideal of sincerity (which subordinated decorum to honesty). Guicciardini exposed the conflict between these two virtues in his Ricordi: ‘Frank sincerity’, he wrote, ‘is a quality much extolled among men and pleasing to everyone, while simulation (simulazione), on the contrary, is detested and condemned. Yet for a man’s self, simulation is of the two by far the more useful; sincerity (realtá) tending rather to the interest of others.’49 To be sure, for the overwhelming majority, life was lived in the gray areas between, as Polonius’s counsel to Laertes in Hamlet suggests. Polonius not only reminded his nephew to be true to himself but also to ‘give [his] thoughts no tongue.’50 But this tension between two conflicting ethical models points, in my view, to a vital and dynamic aspect of the understanding of the human self that, by the late sixteenth century, was relatively widespread. For, despite the very real differences between them, both prudentialism and the sincere ideal played pivotal roles in the late Renaissance in shaping the notion of the self as an individual and expressive subject. It was only such a self that could be called upon, as circumstances shifted, to choose whether to project a faithful representation of its concerns, its feelings, its beliefs to the outside world or whether to hold them in check, concealing them. This is not to say that what contemporaries imagined as the inner self was, as we are often inclined to believe, ‘truer’ than the ways one chose to represent


it, either in the city or the court. Nor were these virtues the only two that provided solutions to the problem of the tension that existed between interior and external experience. As I have made clear throughout this book, there were multiple ways in which this relation could be represented. My point rather involves the fact that this assumption points to a new sense of the human being as agent, subject, or author – as someone, that is, responsible for his or her actions and assertions. Moreover, the very existence of such a duality (between prudence and sincerity) in the discourse of the late Renaissance is itself revealing. It provided a kind of ethical field upon which many men and women in this period negotiated the demands of everyday life, whether in the court or in the city. And over time it sharpened contemporary notions of the self as a unique, complex entity. We see this sense of particularity or individuality with special clarity in the case of Montaigne. Much of the scholarship on Montaigne has connected his emphasis on self-knowledge and on the individual with his decision in 1571, at the age of 38, to retire from public life and to devote his leisure to the study of himself – a project he ultimately realizes in the Essays.51 To be sure, there is much that lends support to this thesis. Montaigne himself memorialized his retirement with a Latin inscription engraved on the wall of his study; he only rarely returned to public service (twice as mayor and briefly in 1588 as a go-between in the negotiations between the King and Henri of Navarre in the course of the French wars of religion); and, in his Essays, he reiterated the value that the private sphere had assumed for him in the course of his life. Indeed he is perhaps best known for his image of the need for the individual to cultivate his freedom entirely on his own. ‘We must reserve a back shop (arriereboutique) all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.’ ‘Here’, Montaigne continues, our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place … We have a soul that can be turned upon itself; it can keep itself company; it has the means to attack and the means to defend, the means to receive and the means to give: let us not fear that in this solitude we shall stagnate in tedious idleness: In solitude be to thyself a throng. [Tibullus] Virtue, says Antisthenes, is content with itself, without rules, without words, without deeds.52


Not surprisingly, several scholars have tended to view this passage as calling for a split between the public and private self in a world of emerging capitalism.53 Yet this emphasis misses an equally fundamental tension in Montaigne’s thought: namely, his deeply-felt desire to be both prudent and sincere. Indeed, in my view, we can also read the Essays as an effort to negotiate the tensions between these two ideals. For Montaigne’s praise of sincerity applies to both the public and private spheres, just as his own sense of the importance of prudence does. This does not prevent him from condemning prudence in the sense of needless dissembling and dissimulation (though he more often uses this term in the more traditional sense of a kind of practical reason); nor does it mean that he is himself fully sincere.54 But it does imply that Montaigne’s sense of self is largely shaped by his consciousness of the degree to which the pressure to dissemble can conflict with the ideal of sincerity. Indeed, the desire for, as well as the impossibility of, sincere speech can be seen as one of the threads that tie the Essays together. For this work gave poignant expression to a widely-felt need, in the age of the court, to find certain spaces – in one’s own room, or library, or friendships, or writings – to provide a comparatively honest or sincere account of oneself and one’s feelings.55 But this virtue is not only to be practiced in private, among friends, but in public as well. Of course, Montaigne himself is anything but private. He writes his book for a broad public. He never really retreats to the backroom. And he tells us again and again that he rejects dissimulation. Contrasting his temperament with others who served, as Montaigne himself did, as a facilitator in the political negotiations, Montaigne, writes, ‘I have an open way … I do not refrain from saying anything, however grave or burning … This is what makes me walk everywhere head high, face and heart open.’56 Or again, he writes, ‘[i]t is painful for me to dissemble’, noting that this ability is not in his nature.57 Repeatedly he lashes out against dissimulation (‘among the most notable qualities of this century’).58 He favors, he tells us, a more direct, a more sincere speech. But ‘as for this new-fangled virtue of hypocrisy and dissimulation, which is so highly honored at present’, he writes, ‘I mortally hate it; and of all vices, I know none that testifies to so much cowardice and baseness of heart. It is a craven and servile idea to disguise ourselves and hide under a mask, and not to dare to show ourselves as we are … A generous heart should not belie its thoughts; it wants to reveal itself even to its inmost depths (jusques au dedans).’59


Unlike the Protestant theologians who connected sincerity (sincérité, ernst reden, sinceritas, Aufrichtigkeit) with the need to express one’s emotions, the Catholic and stoic Montaigne based his ethic of sincerity on the need to be true to one’s nature or temperament. And, in doing so, Montaigne took some pleasure in critiquing the courtly ethos of the Renaissance: Now for my part I would rather be troublesome and indiscreet than flattering and dissembling. I admit that a touch of pride and stubbornness may enter into keeping me sincere and outspoken (entier et descouvert) without consideration for others; and it seems to me that I restrain myself a little less whenever it would be appropriate to restrain myself more, and that I react against the respect I owe by growing more heated. It may be, too, that I let myself follow my nature for lack of art. When I display to great men the same extreme freedom of tongue and bearing that I exercise in my own house, I feel how much it inclines toward indiscretion and incivility. But besides the fact that I am made that way, I have not a supple enough mind to sidestep a sudden question and escape it by some dodge, or to invent a truth, or a good enough memory to retain something thus invented, and certainly not enough assurance to maintain it; and I put on a bold face because of weakness. Therefore I give myself up to being candid and always saying what I think, by inclination and by reason, leaving it to Fortune to guide the outcome.60 Thus his project – especially in the essays written before 1580 – may have had the stamp of self-fashioning, but as Montaigne grows older he is less confident in his ability to shape himself. ‘Others form man’, he writes in an essay of 1585, ‘I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I should really make very different from what he is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it is done.’61 To be sure, the tension in this sentence is enormous. Montaigne doesn’t form or fashion himself, he tells us – only to add that this is something he has already done. But we needn’t conclude a contradiction or an aporia. Montaigne’s understanding of self allows for a complex interplay between nature and culture; and indeed it was part of Montaigne’s humanist strategy to link his understanding of individualism with his view of nature. 62 ‘Natural inclinations’, he observes, ‘gain assistance and strength from education; but they are scarcely to be changed and overcome.’ ‘We do not


root out these original qualities’, he continues, ‘we cover them up, we conceal them.’ And then he provides – perhaps somewhat disingenuously – a compelling (though equally contradictory) example: Latin is like a native tongue to me; I understand it better than French; but for forty years I have not used it at all for speaking or writing. Yet in sudden and extreme emotions, into which I have fallen two or three times in my life – one of them when I saw my father, in perfect health, fall back into my arms in a faint – I have always poured out my first words from the depths of my entrails in Latin; Nature surging forth and expressing herself by force, in the face of long habit.63 Here, of course, the contradiction lies in the fact that a particular language is not a part of nature but rather of culture, something taught and instilled. But Montaigne’s point is rather obvious. There are multiple layers in the make-up of a particular person: a natural temperament, a cluster of (often conflicting) emotions, a primary language, a particular family and education, as well as broader political, social, and cultural forces – all of these go into shaping us, making us who we are. Accordingly we are never purely the roles we play, though there is the possibility, which Montaigne himself acknowledges, that we can become our roles. ‘The whole world plays a part’, he writes, citing Petronius, and adds: [w]e must play our part duly, but not as the part of a borrowed character. Of the mask and appearance we must not make a real essence, nor of what is foreign what is our very own. We cannot distinguish the skin from the shirt. It is enough to make up our face, without making up our heart (poictrine).64 And here the construction – above all Montaigne’s insistence that our mask need not shape our interior selves – is sharply at odds with the present-day view that, in the Renaissance period, ‘there is no layer deeper, more authentic, than theatrical self-representation.’65 To be sure, Montaigne’s Essays often point to the prevalence of such selffashioning in Renaissance culture. But he also manages to suggest the existence of a complex array of other forces that shape our identities – forces which are often inevitably in tension or in conflict with the roles we choose to play. That he was able to do so lies, I believe, in the growing importance placed on the questions both of prudence and of


sincerity at the end of the Renaissance. For both these virtues emphasized the need for the individual to fashion the public self from within, to know when it was most appropriate to present in his or her expressed life a reflection of his or her ‘true’ feelings (as in the case of the Protestants) or his or her ‘true’ nature (as in the case of Montaigne) or when, by contrast, it was more appropriate to project or to wear a mask, to dissemble – in short, to exercise prudence in one’s affairs, whether public or private.66 Among the books in Montaigne’s magnificent library – a large, circular room on the fourth floor of the tower of his château in the French countryside near Bordeaux – was a copy of Guazzo’s Civil conversazione.67 Guazzo’s direct influence on Montaigne’s Essays was significant, and there can be no question but that Montaigne would have found Guazzo’s dialogue appealing, even comforting. Both men, after all, were profoundly disturbed by the religious strife of their day, and both sought to find ways of fostering a kind of polite or civil conversation that would enable their contemporaries to interact well with one another, with a certain integrity, in a society that had rendered dissimulation and pretence almost prerequisites for survival. It is no accident, furthermore, that both writers put considerable emphasis on sincerity. Neither did so in a simplistic way. Both were deeply conscious of the complex ways in which one’s interior experience was related to the outside world. ‘We are all patchwork (nous sommes tous de lopins)’, Montaigne had written, ‘and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others. Consider it a great thing to play the part of one single man.’68 Guazzo had made much the same point in his famous dialogue. And Calvin’s writings too are overflowing with a new emphasis on expressive, heartfelt speech. Not one of these three writers ever simplified the understanding of the self – each envisioned the interior landscape of themselves and their contemporaries as vast and unknowable. Yet all three made room in their writings for the new ideal of sincerity.

7 Myths of Identity – an Essay

The body has a great part in our being; it holds high rank in it. Those who want to split up our two principal parts and sequester them from each other are wrong. On the contrary we must couple and join them together again. We must order the soul not to draw aside and entertain itself apart, not to scorn and abandon the body (nor can it do so except by some counterfeit monkey trick), but to rally to the body, embrace it, cherish it, assist it, control it, advise it, set it right and bring it back when it goes astray; in short to marry it and be a husband to it, so that their actions may not appear different and contrary, but harmonious and uniform. Michel de Montaigne, Essays In his essay ‘On Presumption’, Montaigne insists on the embodied nature of identity. While it is possible to read this passage as a critique of popular and elite beliefs about demons and witchcraft, it is equally possible to read it as an expression of one of Montaigne’s deepest longings: the desire to establish a sense of integrity between the natural and both the public and the private self.1 Again and again in his Essays Montaigne, as we have seen, comes back to the ideal of integrity. Distressed by the rampant displays of artificiality and theatricality that he saw woven into the social conventions of his time, Montaigne called upon his readers to return to their own natures and, above all, to be ‘entier’ – to strive for consistency between the internal dimensions of their identities, on the one hand, and their words and deeds, on the other. Montaigne thus played a major role towards the end of the sixteenth century in offering one version of the ideal of a more unified self. He viewed his beliefs and feelings not as ethereal substances that 123


could pass out of the body but as essential components of an embodied self; and he had nothing but disdain for popular superstitions that saw the body as something porous through which the soul or a demon ‘by some counterfeit monkey trick’ (‘par quelque singerie contrafaicte’) might slip. Montaigne’s work, therefore, appears to signal a shift towards a more centered and less porous self at the end of the sixteenth century. Indeed, before Montaigne – before the end of the sixteenth century – prevailing notions of the self, as I have tried to convey throughout this book, were far removed from that of the ‘individualist’ self that strode confidently onto the European stage in the seventeenth century – a self evident in early modern court literature, in religious and especially Puritan sermons and tracks, in the writings of the neo-Stoics, and in the philosophical work of Descartes.2 From this perspective, the idea that the Renaissance and, in particular, the Italian Renaissance was the era in which the modern individual first emerged no longer seems compelling as an account of how identities were experienced and understood in this period. To the contrary, both the traditional Burckhardtian idea of the Renaissance discovery of the individual and more recent postmodern interpretations of Renaissance subjects as cultural artifacts are best read not as historical accounts of the nature of identities in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe but rather as myths, extremely powerful ones that have shaped and continue to shape both scholarly and popular thinking about the history of Renaissance Europe. The nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt was deeply aware that an Old Order in which traditional political structures had limited the role of the individual was breaking up. Yet – unlike his contemporary Alexis de Toqueville, who viewed these transformations through the lens of the French Revolution, a sudden and cataclysmic event, and who, therefore, looked upon individualism as something radically new – Burckhardt’s views were shaped and colored by an entirely different historical and cultural context. Burckhardt was a citizen of the Swiss city of Basle, a city-state, in which the ruling elite had celebrated the role of the accomplished and well-rounded individual artist or humanist since at least the sixteenth century, when Desiderius Erasmus and Hans Holbein the younger had, briefly at least, made Basle their home and when the Renaissance merchant-rulers of the city had been both the privileged beneficiaries of humanistic educations and generous patrons of the arts. The political

Myths of Identity – an Essay 125

revolution that shook Basle came in the build-up to 1848; and the movement was one of democratization that, from Burckhardt’s conservative perch, did not so much usher in individualism as threaten the particular conservative and elitist ideal of individualism that Burckhardt valued. Burckhardt, within this context, saw the democratic movements of the nineteenth century not as the first manifestations of individualism – the view held by his contemporary de Tocqueville – but rather as a threat to the traditional role of the well-educated merchant individualists and the highly-accomplished intellectuals and artists whose works they commissioned and supported – lynchpins in Burckhardt’s view of a cultured and creative civilization.3 It was from within this context that Burckhardt approached the Italian Renaissance. As a Swiss city, Basle had long and close associations with Italy, and it was an easy step for Burckhardt to find parallels both between the merchants and humanists of Renaissance Italy, on the one hand, and those of Renaissance Basle, on the other, and between the society and culture of the Renaissance and his own time. Accordingly, Burckhardt made the case that the creative energies of the individual had first been unleashed in the break-up of the feudal order of northern Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. And while a certain vagueness surrounds Burckhardt’s notion of the individual, there can be no doubt that, by this term, he often meant someone accomplished and well-rounded: an Alberti or a Leonardo. Burckhardt’s approach to the development of individualism located it in the stratosphere of elite culture. He deplored what he viewed as the blinder and potentially demagogic forces of mass democratization and industrialization. Individual freedom for the masses, he argued, would ultimately be no freedom at all. Rather he feared that new forms of conformity and even political intolerance would emerge in the wake of the break-up of the traditional city-state of which he was a citizen. He had only to look to other great capitals of Europe – to Paris and to Bonn, for example – to find what he saw as horrific evidence of his fears in the revolutions of 1848. Early readers of Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy would not have missed the conservative, nostalgic, and romantic emphasis of the author. And by the early twentieth-century this text had become a cult classic among some of the more radically conservative movements in western Europe. It would play a key role in shaping the cult of the individual, for example, in Weimar Germany; and it was against what he viewed, with justification, as the excessive individualism of early twentieth-century Germany that the great German scholar


Hans Baron offered his own celebrated revision of the received historical interpretation of Renaissance culture, stressing not its individualism, as Burckhardt had done, but rather what he saw as its ideals of civic humanism or the responsible participation of citizens in the affairs of the republic.4 Yet, paradoxically, despite Burckhardt’s own pessimism about mass democratic movements and the fundamental divergence of his understanding of the origins of individualism from that of de Tocqueville, liberal historians would ultimately favor Burckhardt’s narrative. After all, in it they could find a gently progressive rather than overly violent shift (that is, a non-revolutionary shift) towards the emergence of individualism, and they could link ‘the development of the individual’ with the emergence of capitalism, republicanism, realism, and secularism. Burckhardt’s narrative fell neatly in line with a whiggish or progressive view of western history in which the Italian Renaissance served as a dramatic but also self-celebratory and unthreatening turning-point.5 Moreover, as high art itself – whether the works of Michelangelo and Raphael or those of Petrarch and Dante – became increasingly democratized, the conservative emphasis of Burckhardt’s interpretation of the emergence of individualism became muted to the point that he was increasingly read in a liberal key, one that played a major role in shaping not only the late nineteenth- but also the twentieth-century view that the Renaissance had ‘discovered’ the individual.6 The story Burckhardt told became, therefore, an extremely powerful one. It provided an intellectual anchor for many aspects of modern capitalist societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like many myths, it took on a life of its own insofar as it justified a certain version of liberal democracy which, while tacitly egalitarian, was nonetheless deeply hierarchical and which would give up power to non-elites only gradually and reluctantly, almost always in response to massive movements of civil unrest, while at the same time developing new strategies to ensure that political power (the right to vote) would be no guarantee of access to economic or social power.7 Indeed, it is for this reason that Renaissance scholars educated either in the midst of or in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s have generally been disenchanted with Burckhardt’s serene indifference to social history. After 1968 in particular it became increasingly difficult to read Burckhardt without being aware that his notion of the individual was patently elitist and left out the experience of the overwhelming majority of men and women in late medieval or Renaissance Italy.8


Despite these limitations Burckhardt’s story has had a remarkable afterlife, to the point of continuing to shape discussions of Renaissance identities around the question of individualism. Even the works of Stephen Greenblatt, the New Historicists, and the cultural materialists, while ostensibly in revolt against Burckhardt’s conservatism, have been conditioned by the force of his fundamental idea that the Renaissance did in fact witness the emergence of new forms of human subjectivity. The paradox here, therefore, is enormous, since the postmodern discussion of Renaissance subjectivities – while profoundly anti-Burckhardtian in inspiration – took form largely within a Burckhardtian framework that it was in the Renaissance that individualism or questions of identity first began to matter.9 Yet this paradoxical connection between the modernist focus on the Renaissance ‘individual’ and the postmodern fascination with the history of the Renaissance ‘subject’ does not explain why the postmodern view of the Renaissance self as all artifice and surface, devoid of interiority and inwardness – as something contingent, constructed, and ‘fashioned’ – has been so successful in pushing the Burckhardtian myth to the side. While it may be too soon to offer a definitive explanation of the reasons why so many students of literature, art, science, and culture over the last thirty or so years have embraced a postmodernist interpretation of the Renaissance self, it does seem possible to have at least a general sense of the larger environment in which postmodern ideas have developed. In general, scholars concerned with this issue have stressed the immediate context for the development of postmodern thought. To Frederic Jameson and David Harvey, for example, postmodernism is the ideological formation of a particular kind of late capitalism that developed towards the end of the twentieth century in which power, while in fact rooted in the massive accumulation of wealth by the very few, began to legitimate itself through new cultural forms, especially mass culture: theme parks, sports franchises, virtual realities, television programming, and other forms of soft fascism.10 In such a system signs and images simply overwhelmed substance, and language (in the minds of many) became a more repressive institution than property. This insight explains the appeal of such major theorists as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan to postmodern critical practice. For in the ideas these figures developed about power and language in the mid-twentieth century – ideas that finally burst onto the international stage in the streets of Paris in May 1968 – a number of radicals, especially in Europe, found powerful tools that enabled the deconstruction of the intellectual underpinnings of


various authoritarian regimes, whether these were regimes of capitalist or communist societies. In the United States, the postmodernist critique of patriarchy was especially powerful, and Foucault’s ideas in particular enabled activists to emphasize the historically constructed nature of various forms of cultural and linguistic repression – sexism and homophobia, for instance – that tended to hold women out of higher paying jobs and keep gays in the closet. Rather than social class, it was now culture and language that served as obstacles to equality. Perhaps, given this emphasis, which downplayed questions of economic inequalities, it is no wonder that postmodern critical practice would quickly lose its radical edge.11 Postmodernism’s own, often arcane language also played a role in its cooptation; it has proven to be of marginal interest to political activists and has found its most congenial setting, ultimately, in the humanities departments of our major colleges and universities. It is even arguable that postmodern thought – in its infatuation with signs and language – has not served as a basis for liberation but has rather contributed to the mystification of social and economic forces. Finally, within postmodernism, the attitude towards ‘individualism’ remains as ambivalent and as vexed as ever. Many postmodern theorists were radical individualists in the sense of attempting to free the ‘individual’ from traditional cultural expectations and codes. Paradoxically other postmodernists, at the same time, viewed the individual purely as an ideological representation of a fictive self that was incapable, in the end, of engaging in collective resistance against repressive institutions and economic arrangements. But it is also possible to offer a different perspective on the relation of postmodernism to historical change, one that stresses not the immediate contexts of its development but rather the relation of postmodernism to the history of western Europe over the longue durée, from the Renaissance down to the mid-twentieth century. Such a perspective makes it clear that many of the defining features of the modern world which arguably first took form in the Renaissance are now themselves fading into history. We see this pattern – the arc of the modern – on many levels. If the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century and the development of widespread literacy that ensued played a crucial role in the making of the modern world, the development of television, the internet, hypertext, and new forms of electronic data-storage have dislodged the printed book from its central role in the production and reproduction of culture. If we can interpret the rise of the nation state a basic framework for our collective lives in the


modern world, then the emergence of new transnational trading blocks such as the EEC and NAFTA inevitably make us wonder if the nation, like the book, is an endangered species. If a Copernican Revolution laid the foundations for modern cosmologies, Einstein’s theories have left the modern, Newtonian cosmology in shambles. If the development of artistic perspective – the ability to portray the world in three dimensions on a two dimensional surface – provided men and women with a certain confidence in the modern world about the ability to represent reality objectively, the turn to more abstract forms of art in the twentieth century has called such notions of objectivity into question. Even the way we fight our wars has radically changed. The emergence of the modern world depended to a large degree on the ability of emerging Renaissance monarchies to recruit enormous armies of infantry and ground-based artillery to protect or expand their territories in forms of warfare organized on a scale unimaginable in the medieval world. Today, advanced states are moving towards high-tech forms of warfare that, while undoubtedly still horrific and deadly, resemble nothing so much as video-games. We live in an era, it seems, in which most of what we once most fervently believed about the basic structures of the world have suddenly begun to appear not as fixed features of reality but rather as historically-contingent constructions. I have no idea if my children’s children will own or read books, vote in national elections, or even understand why anyone ever believed that the paintings of Massaccio or Michelangelo could have been understood as realistic portrayals of the human form. It is hardly surprising, given the enormity of these changes, that many have begun to wonder if the individual is not also a construction or an artifact of the modern world. It is certainly possible to provide an account of the origins of the individualist self and to view such a self as an engaged protagonist in the development of capitalist and democratic states in western Europe and the United States over the period running at least from the English Civil War on. But we are now no longer certain what the future of the self is, for we live in an era when earlier robust forms of individualism have been replaced by increasingly fragile and unstable representations of the self, with psychotropic medications, cyborgs, and now the prospect that human beings will be cloned in the relatively near future all making Burckhardt’s ‘individual’ look more and more like a strange, even quaint artifact from a forgotten era. Foucault’s prophesy that the concept of man ‘would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea’ captures many of the current anxieties in western culture.12


It is within these contexts – both immediate and long-term – that claims about the death of the subject resonate and, to some degree, make sense. Perhaps, reading about the postmodern subject, we see reflections of ourselves – ourselves as secular consumers, as purveyors of prestige, or as mesmerized spectators before our computer screens, our tomagochi, and our plasma TVs as they receive broadcasts of live coverage of wars fought half-way around the world. How, in such a world, can we ourselves be centered or believe that our individuality is in any way autonomous? Just as we used to believe that the book was the most natural thing in the world and that we would always have books, whether as means of presenting many aspects of the human imagination or as a way of preserving the gradual accumulation of all forms of knowledge and wisdom, so we used to imagine that the ‘individual’ was a fixed, a natural, and an enduring feature of our history. But now we are no longer sure of either of these things. Our libraries are no longer repositories of books but information centers; and our identities seem less and less based on a core self within but rather seem to have been transformed into plastic and easily manipulated constructions. And, it is as a result of this loss of certainty, along with our growing awareness that the self is itself subject to enormous historical pressures, that scholars of the Renaissance have begun to project the postmodern self back into the pivotal era they study. Postmodern critical practice, that is, has embraced the notion that the self is always a construction. Given the extraordinarily rich materials in Renaissance art and literature, it is hardly surprising that postmodernists have found this period enormously congenial. Yet what strikes me in looking back over the basic framework of identities in the Renaissance that I have explored in this book, is the degree to which issues of identity either as individualistic (in Burckhardt’s sense) or as constructed (in Greenblatt’s sense) were so rarely posed. Both Burckhardt’s individualist self and Greenblatt’s postmodern self are forms of anachronism. And both fail to capture the history of the Renaissance self, as I have tried to do in this book, on its own terms. Renaissance identities were only rarely about individuality in Burckhardt’s humanist sense of an autonomous and willful individual shaping the world in which he (or she) lived. But neither was the Renaissance self purely a cultural artifact, devoid of interiority, as many of the postmodern theorists envision it. Rather, as I have tried to demonstrate, what we find is a continual return to what I believe was the defining problem of identity in the Renaissance, namely the question of


how the experience of the inner world of each person was related to the larger social environment in which he or she lived. No matter which particular formation of Renaissance selfhood was salient – whether that, say, of a particular shipwright in the Venetian Arsenal, comfortably ensconced in his community or that of a Venetian printer or jeweler fearful that his heresies might be detected – the self was experienced as something in which one’s internal perceptions and beliefs either were or were not at home in the larger world. Indeed, even the representations of the self that most often resemble more modern notions of the individual, the prudential and the performative self – poses in which self-fashioning, theatricality, and decorum played an overwhelmingly important role – were nonetheless based not on the absence of a sense of interiority but rather on its presence. Courtiers experienced tensions, often profound and irresolvable, between their feelings and their façades, between what they believed and what they said, between their thoughts and their actions – tensions that many would evidently try to overcome through the cultivation of sincerity as an ethical ideal. But even these questions were inevitably colored by a world, at the level of both learned and popular culture, that was never sure of the boundaries of the self – that is, a world in which demons and spirits could move into and out of the human body. On this view, notions of individuality or individualism were not, as so many have long believed, part of the basic vocabulary of the Renaissance. Nor can the Renaissance self be equated with the postmodern; issues of interiority were simply too pronounced. The Renaissance self was never pure surface. It was always something in which interior experience and experience in the world were in dialogue with one another. Identity may have been played out on the surface of the body, but no one in the Renaissance equated the body (in particular the selfenveloping covering of skin and the clothing a particular person wore) with the self. Rather the self was always in this period a kind of psychomachy between the exterior and the interior worlds of experience. Only at the very end of the sixteenth century with the emergence of the ideal of sincerity do we begin to have a sense of the self as that which is enclosed within the body and that can be revealed or concealed at will. And even then, the relation between the external world and one’s thoughts, convictions, and feelings remains very much at the foreground of the understanding of identity. Yet, in the end, Renaissance views of the self remained profoundly embodied. Even Calvin, who tended to shift western spirituality away from its


traditions of viewing the body ‘as an index of the soul’ nonetheless recognized that the self was never simply something internal. ‘I retain the principle’, Calvin writes in his Institutes, ‘that the likeness of God extends to the whole excellence by which man’s nature towers over all the kinds of living creatures … And although the primary seat of the divine image was in the mind and heart, or in the soul and its powers, yet there was no part of man, not even the body itself, in which some sparks did not glow.’13 Nonetheless more individualist notions of identity did emerge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and they became foundational to many of the Enlightenment’s more optimistic views of the individual – views that stressed the ideals of political freedoms and open societies based precisely on the idea of the dignity and the rights of the individual. But about these particular ideals Renaissance men and women could have had no idea. Nor could they have imagined the horror that many political and religious conservatives in nineteenthcentury France expressed in the face of the emergence of individualisme. In fact, Renaissance men and women lived in societies markedly different from our own, societies in which it had not yet become possible to imagine the self either as a detached or self-contained entity whose rights were secured by the political order or as the postmodern representation of the self as decentered, fragmented, even illusory. Two hundred and some years now after the Enlightenment – after The Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man – it is difficult not to believe that our own assumptions about the self would be equally unrecognizable to such architects of the modern political order as Locke, Montesquieu, and Jefferson. In this sense, we do best to think of the history of the self not as something that moves in a linear fashion towards an ever more perfectly defined sense of the individual. Indeed, there is much about our current condition in postindustrial democracies to lead many to believe that what we used to think of as the individual is profoundly threatened on many fronts – from shifts in political practices, medical technologies, and economic structures the outlines of which we can only barely make out. From my perspective this is the fundamental reason why the history of the self matters.14 For the way we represent it – and the ways we are limited in representing it – are intrinsically related to our most basic discussions of human and political rights; and these issues are especially important in the context of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries when a variety of forces – technical as well as cultural – have undermined the modern notion of the individual. It is no wonder then that


scholars have begun to reconsider the very notion of the self and to ask new questions about what it is.15 This is true not only in Renaissance studies and other academic disciplines, but in the popular media as well, with books announcing that the self is ‘protean’ or ‘saturated’ or ‘endangered.’16 We are told – again and again – that our identities are not fixed but easily manipulated and changed. We might fashion ourselves and refashion ourselves. We attend to surfaces with greater intensity than any previous generation. And yet we still manage to wonder if we are more likely to be made whole by attending to our souls – to whatever it is that we have within that makes us who we are. Will introspection be of more lasting benefit to us than constant worry over our appearances, our reputations, our honor? History is playing an old trick on us; perhaps we are once again seeing ourselves in the Renaissance. Myths of Renaissance individualism persist, even as we struggle to interpret the past wie es eigentlich vielleict einmal gewesen – as perhaps it really once was.


Notes 1 ‘“Individualism” – a Word Unknown to our Ancestors’ 1 Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent: Original Text with English Translation, ed. H. J. Schroeder (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co., 1941), pp. 214–17 and pp. 483–5. 2 Veronese’s trial is published in Philipp Fehl, ‘Veronese and the Inquisition: A Study of the Subject Matter of the So-Called Feast in the House of Levi’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. VI, 58 (1961): 348–54; English translation in Venice: A Documentary History, ed. David Chambers and Brian Pullan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 232–6. 3 David Rosand, Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, rev. edn 1997), p. 120 is correct to ask that we now call this work The Last Supper – a request that, thus far, has gone unheeded. 4 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore, 2 vols (New York: Harper & Row, 1958); for the original German, I have used Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, ed. Horst Günther (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989). 5 Jacob Burckhardt, Der Cicerone: eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens (Leipzig: Alfren Kröner, 1927), pp. 932–5. 6 Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, vol. 1, p. 143 for both citations. 7 Among the more influential works inviting a rethinking of the history of the self – from antiquity to the twentieth century – see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). 8 Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 218. 9 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 256–7. 10 William J. Connell, ‘Introduction’ to his (ed.), Society & Individual in Renaissance Florence (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2002), p. 6. 11 Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘The Poetics and Politics of Culture’ in New Historicism, ed. Abraham Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 21. 12 For an overview of this literature, see my Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993; 2nd edn: Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). On witchcraft and magic, see Ruth Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice, 1550–1650 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) and Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and, on prophecy, Marion Leathers Kuntz, The Anointment of Dionisio: Prophecy and Politics in Renaissance Italy (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). 135

136 Notes 13 Joseph de Maistre, ‘Extraits d’une conversation’ in Oeuvres complètes, 14 vols (Lyons: E. Vitte, 1884–1893), vol. 14, p. 286. The conversation from 1820 was reported by Charles de Levau shortly after de Maistre’s death in 1821. 14 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Meyer; trans. George Lawrence (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1969), p. 70 and elsewhere. 15 Steven Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), p. 17. 16 In his book Individualism, cited in the note above, Lukes offers a short chapter on Burckhardt in which he notes that Burckhardt developed ‘a striking and influential synthesis of French and German meanings of “individualism.”’ (p. 23). 17 See, for example, Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 143: ‘The question is whether an individualism in which the self has become the main form of reality can ever really be sustained.’ 18 J. B. Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). 19 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday, 1955), p. 96. 20 Peter Burke, ‘Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes’ in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routlege, 1997), pp. 17–28. 21 For a trenchant critique of the Burckhardt’s Renaissance as myth, see Peter Burke, The Renaissance (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1987), pp. 1–5, a topic I also grapple with in ‘The Renaissance Between Myth and History’ in The Renaissance: Italy and Abroad (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–23. 22 William James Bouwsma, Jr, ‘The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History’, American Historical Review 84 (1979): 1–15. 23 Lee Patterson, ‘On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies’, Speculum 65 (1990), p. 99. 24 Richard Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), p. 221. 25 Two contrary assumptions are at work in current scholarship. Roy F. Baumeister, Identity, Culture, Change and the Struggle for the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) sees inwardness as a new feature of the Renaissance (p. 36), a view reiterated by Robin Kirkpatrick, The European Renaissance, 1400–1600 (London: Longman, 2002), p. 126: ‘So, on the one hand, the early Renaissance – again largely through Petrarch’s example and the resuscitation of Augustinian considerations, invents the notion of the inner self.’ This view is largely Burckhardtian. On the other hand, many scholars have denied the existence of interiority altogether; see, for example, Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (New York: Methuen, 1984), pp. 31 and 58 and Catharine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (New York: Methuen, 1995), p. 48. 26 On the Renaissance fascination with St. Augustine of Hippo, see Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); on the interest in Anselm and later ‘scholastic’ philosophers, with special attention to Aquinas, see John D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome:

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34

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38

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Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 160–7. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 174–5. On the social function of myth, see the celebrated essay by Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Myth in Primitive Psychology’ in his Magic, Science and Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954), pp. 93–148 – this essay originally appeared in 1926. I am also indebted in my thinking on the relation of historical narratives to myth to Roland Barthes; see his Mythologies (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957) and his Michelet par lui-même (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1994). Ironically, Ian Watt’s Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) embraces the view that the Renaissance was a period of flourishing individualism. For a similar approach to Renaissance identities – one that is equally insistent in its claim that many postmodern readings of the Renaissance self are anachronistic – see Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 26–9 especially. On ‘experience’ see Bernard Lepetit, Les formes de l’expérience: une autre histoire sociale (Paris: A. Michel, 1995). Montaigne, Les essais, ed. Pierre Villey 3 vols (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1924), vol. 2, p. 337; The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), p. 244. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in The Marx–Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 66–125 and ‘On the Jewish Question’ in the same volume, pp. 26–52. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Rivière and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960) is the locus classicus for Freud’s theory of the self. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), p. 404. The concept of a relational self is well-developed in object relations theory; see James W. Jones. ‘The Relational Self: Contemporary Psychoanalysis Reconsiders Religion’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59 (1001): 119–35. Jones exaggerates Freud’s view of the individual as a self-contained system. In addition to the works by Francis Barker and Catharine Belsey cited in n. 25 above, see the writings of Jonathan Goldberg, Jean Howard, Ramie Targoff, and Peter Stallybrass. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner et al., 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), vol. I, p. 393; Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, XII, 14.8. On the image of madness in Ariosto, see Albert Russell Ascoli, Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. I, p. 402. A widely read account of neurology and identity is Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (New York: Summit Books, 1985). Neuro-psychologists have a wide variety of views about the

138 Notes relationship of the brain to the development of the self, but all stress the absence of a single unified physiological center of the self-concept and maintain instead that such a function results from complex interactions among different parts of the brain. 41 Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), p. 188.

2 The Inquisitors’ Questions 1 Massimo Firpo, Artisti, gioiellieri, eretici: il mondo di Lorenzo Lotto tra Riforma e Controriforma (Rome: Laterza, 2001) offers a detailed analysis of Carpan’s role in the evangelical movement in Venice. 2 Józef Grabski, ‘Sul rapporto fra ritratto e simbolo nella ritrattistica del Lotto’ in Lorenzo Lotto: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi per il V Centenario della Nascita, Asolo, 1980, ed. Pietro Zampetti and Vittorio Sgarbi (Venice: Comitato per le celebrazioni lottesche, 1981), pp. 383–92. 3 Directorium inqvisitorum F. Nicolai Eymerici … cvm commentariis Francesci Pegñae (Venice: Apud Marcum Antonium Zalterium, 1595), p. 421. 4 Masini, Sacro arsenale, overo prattica dell’officio della S. Inquisitione ampliata (Genoa: Giuseppe Pavoni, 1625), p. 63. 5 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 29, dossier ‘Bartolomeo Carpan’, testimony of 8 January 1568. 6 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 20, dossier ‘Paolo Gaian’, 29 October 1569. 7 Directorium inqvisitorum, pp. 368–9 and 382–3. 8 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 20, dossier ‘Paolo Gaiano’, testimony of 20 February 1570. 9 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 20, dossier ‘Paolo Gaiano.’ 10 Gianpietro Carafa, ‘De Lutheranorum haeresi reprimenda et eccelesia reformanda est ad Clementem VII’ in Concilium Tridentinum. Diariorum Actorum Epistularum Tractatuum nova collectio, ed. Societas Goerresiana, 13 vols (Freiburg im Breisgaus: Herder, 1929), vol. 12, pp. 67–77. 11 ‘Girolamo Aleandro a Paolo III’ in Nunziature di Venezia, ed. Franco Gaeta (Rome: Istituto Storico per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1958), vol. 1, p. 289. 12 Cited in Paul Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 37. 13 Cited in Nicholas Davidson, ‘Il Sant’Uffizio e la tutela del culto a Venezia nel ‘500’, Studi veneziani n.s. 6 (1982): 89. 14 Carafa, ‘De Lutheranorum haeresi reprimanda’, p. 58. 15 Silvana Seidel Menchi, Erasmo in Italia (Turin: Boringhieri, 1987), p. 122. 16 Andrea Del Col, ‘Due Sonetti inediti di Pier Paolo Vergerio il Giovane’, Ce Fastu: Revista della Società Filologica Friulana 54 (1978): 77. 17 On the repression of the book trade in Venice, see Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press. 18 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 39, dossier ‘D’Ochino, Pietro’, especially the testimony of 1 September 1575. 19 On fra Marino da Venezia, see the classic article by Silvana Seidel Menchi, ‘Inquisizione come repressione o inquisizione come mediazione? Una

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26

27 28

proposta di periodizzazione’, Annuario dell’Isituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea 35–36 (1983–84): 54–77. Simonetta Adorni-Braccesi, ‘La Repubblica di Lucca e l’“aborrita” Inquisizione: istituzioni e società’ in L’Inquisizione romana in Italia nell’età moderna: archivi, problemi di metodo e nuove ricerche, ed. Andrea del Col et al. (Rome: Saggi del Ministerio per i beni culturali e ambientali, 1991), pp. 233–62 and her ‘Una Città Infetta:’ La Repubblica di Lucca nella crisi religiosa del Cinquecento (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1994). See Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Strikes and Salvation at Lyon’ in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 71–94 and Philip Benedict, Rouen During the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). On the social location of heresy in Venice, see my Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; 2nd edn Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), Chap. VI especially; on Caravia, see Brian Pullan: Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 117–21. The literature on the prestige ranking of occupations in European and American history is extensive, but see especially Michael Katz, ‘Occupational Classification in History’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (1972): 63–88; and Donald J. Treiman, ‘A Standard Occupational Prestige Scale for Use with Historical Data’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7 (1976): 283–304. Alberto Bolognetti, ‘Dello stato et forma delle cose ecclesiastiche nel dominio dei signori venetiani’ in Chiesa e Stato nelle relazioni dei nunci pontifici a Venezia (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1964), p. 278. Ronald F. E. Weissman, ‘Reconstructing Renaissance Sociology: The “Chicago School” and the Study of Renaissance Society’ in Persons in Groups: Social Behavior as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. Richard C. Trexler (Binghamton: CRTS, 1985), p. 45 and ‘“The Importance of Being Ambiguous”: Social Relations, Individualism, and Identity in Renaissance Florence’ in Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F. E. Weissman, eds, Urban Life in the Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), pp. 269–80. ‘Haeretici sunt qui quod prave sapiunt contumaciter defendunt. Item Augustinus contra Manicheos. Qui in ecclesia Christi morbidum aliquid pravumque sapiunt, si correpti, ut sanum rectumque sapiant, resistunt contumaciter, suaque pestifera et mortifera dogmata emendare nolunt sed defensare persistunt, haeretici sunt.’ Gratian, Decretum, Pars Secunda, Causa XXIV, Quaestio III, C. XXXI. in Patrologia Latina, ed. J.P. Migne (Paris: Apud Garnieri Fratres, 1891), vol. 187, col. 1307. Iacobo Simancas, De Catholicis instutionibus (Rome: In aedibus Populi Romani, 1575), p. 228. Directorium inqvisitorum, p. 319. On the influence of Thomas in Eymeric’s Directorium, see Louis Sala-Molins, ‘Utilisation d’Aristote en droit inquisitorial’ in Platon et Aristote à la Renaissance: XVIe Colloque international de Tours (Paris: J. Vrin, 1976), pp. 191–9.

140 Notes 29 Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and the Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 30 Directorium inqvisitorum, p. 231. 31 Directorium inqvisitorum, pp. 438–9. 32 Directorium inqvisitorum, pp. 438ff. 33 Masini, Arsenale, p. 46. 34 Masini, Arsenale, p. 63. 35 Lina Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory: Literacy and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Renaissance, trans. Jeremy Parzen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 155. 36 Cited in Firpo, Artisti, gioiellieri, eretici: il mondo di Lorenzo Lotto tra Riforma e controriforma, p.152. 37 Robert C. Davis, Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal: Workers and Workplace in the Preindustrial City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 83–105 especially. 38 Roberto Zago, I Nicolotti: storia di una communità di pescatori a Venezia nell’età modena (Padua: Aldo Francesci Editore, 1982). The reference to the ‘lingua nicolotta’ is from Firpo, Artisti, gioiellieri, eretici, p. 182 39 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 19, dossier ‘Zanco Giuseppe’, testimony of 8 July 1561. 40 With hindsight we know that Parto’s dissimulation was justified. In the mid-1570s when he momentarily let down his guard, the Inquisition had him arrested, tried, and executed; see ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 37, dossier ‘Parto Girolamo.’ 41 Pier Paolo Vergerio, La historia di M. Francesco Spiera in Biblioteca della Riforma italiana: raccolta di scritti evangelici del seculo XVI (Rome and Florence: Claudiana, 1883), vol. II, pp. 112–22. 42 Leon Battista Alberti, I libri della famiglia, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Alberto Tenenti (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), p. 350; The Family in Renaissance Florence (translation of I libri della famiglia), trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), p. 266. 43 Stanley Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 178–89; Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies, pp. 170–171; and Dennis Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 207–22. 44 Baltasar Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano (Turin: UTET, 1964), pp. 236 and 253. 45 Peter Burke, Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). 46 On Nicodemismo, see Carlo Ginzburg, Il nicodemismo: simulazione e dissimulazione religiosa nell’Europa del ‘500 (Turin: Einaudi, 1970). 47 Brian S. Pullan, ‘“A Ship with Two Rudders:” “Righetto Marrano” and the Inquisition in Venice.’ The Historical Journal 20 (1977): 37. 48 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); on the importance of this case for the history of the self, see Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture’ in Literary Theory/Literary Texts, eds Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 210–24, though see

Notes 141

49 50 51

52 53

54

55 56 57 58

59

60 61

62

63

Davis’s response to Greenblatt’s reading in her ‘On the Lame’, American Historical Review 93 (1988): 602 especially. Directorium inqvisitorum, pp. 430–1. Paolo Toschi, Le origini del teatro italiano (Turin: Einaudi, 1955). Tomaso Garzoni, Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, ed. Paolo Cherchi and Beatrice Collana, 2 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), vol. 2, pp. 1192–7. Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier was first published in Italian by the Aldus Press in Venice in 1528; by 1600, it had appeared in some 116 editions, including translations into Spanish, French, English, Latin, German; the English translation by Sir Thomas Hoby appeared in 1561 – on the enormous influence of Castiglione’s book, see Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier. On the Galateo, which was first published in 1558, see Giovanni della Casa, Galateo: A Renaissance Book on Manners, ed. and trans. Konrad Eisenbichler and Kenneth R. Bartlett (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1994), the introduction; and, on Civil Conversation, see the introduction to the most recent Italian edition by Amedeo Quondam: La civil conversazione (Modena: Panini, 1993). Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Marsilio Ficino, Three Books of Life, ed. and trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghamton, N.Y.: MRTS, 1989). D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Divine Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958). Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 168, cf. 178. Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Boundaries and the Sense of Self in SixteenthCentury France’ in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 53–63. Anne Jacobson Schutte, Autobiografia di una santa mancata, ed. Anne Jacobson Schutte (Bergamo: Pierluigi Lubrina Editore, 1990), pp. 95–7; Cecilia Ferrazzi: The Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint, ed. Anne Jacobson Shutte (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Heinrich Kramer and James (sic) Sprenger, The Malleus Malificarum (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1971), p. 125. Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner’s, 1971). Moshe Sluhovsky, ‘A Divine Apparition or Demonic Possession? Female Agency and Church Authority in Demonic Possession in Sixteenth-Century France’, Sixteenth Century Journal 27 (1996): 1039–55. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972) and Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)

142 Notes 64 Clifford Geertz, ‘ “From the Native’s Point of View:” On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding’ in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, ed. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 126.

3 Spiritual Journeys 1 Domenico Berti, ‘Di Giovanni Valdes e di taluni suoi discepoli secondo nuovi documenti tolti dall’Archivio Veneto’, Atti della R. Accademia dei Lincei 275 (1877–78), 3rd series, Memorie della classa di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, vol. 2, p. 68. I published an earlier version of this chapter as ‘Spiritual Journeys and the Fashioning of Religious Identity in Renaissance Venice’ in Renaissance Studies, 10 (1996): 358–70. 2 Berti, ‘Di Giovanni Valdes’, p. 69. 3 I costituti di don Pietro Manelfi, ed. Carlo Ginzburg (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1970). 4 Berti, ‘Di Giovanni Valdes’, p. 68. 5 On the evangelical, Anabaptist or antitrinitarian, and millenarian movements in Venice, see my Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; 2nd edn Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 6 Bernardino Ochino, ‘Del modo di liberarsi dalla confusione di tante fedi, sette e modi di vivere’ in Opuscoli e lettere di riformatori italiani del Cinquecento (Bari: Laterza, 1913), vol. 1, p. 263; on Alteri, see Martin Luther, Werke: Briefwechsel (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus, 1947), vol. 10, pp. 204–5; Alessandro Trissino, ‘Ragionamento della necessità di ritirarsi a vivere nella Chiesa visible di Gesù Cristo, lasciando il papesimo’, in ‘Alessandro Trissino e il movimento calvinista del Cinquecento’, ed. Achille Olivieri. Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia 21 (1967): 100–1. 7 See especially Delio Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento (Florence: Sansoni, 1939). 8 Lucien Febvre, ‘The Origins of the French Reformation: A Badly Put Question’, in A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Lucien Febvre, ed. Peter Burke and trans. K. Folca (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 86. 9 Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies, pp. 173–4. 10 Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation, ed. and trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards, Jr. (Durham, N.C.: The Labyrinth Press, 1982), p. 83. For a similar critique of the limits of social histories of the Italian heresies (including my own efforts in this field), see Silvana Seidel Menchi, ‘Italy’ in The Reformation in Social Context, ed. Bob Scribner, Roy Porter, and Mikuläs Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 181–201. 11 See now Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 12 Francesco Petrarca, Secretum, edited with notes and an introduction by Ugo Dotti (Rome: Archivio Guido Izzi, 1993). 13 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, John T. McNeill, ed., Ford Lewis Battles, trans. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), Bk. 3, Chap. 2, section 10.

Notes 143 14 Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 823 [Les essais, Pierre Villey, ed. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1924), p. 1075]. 15 Stephan Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 119, though Greenblatt hastens to add that ‘the inwardness of [his] poems can in no way be conceived as Wyatt’s private affair … [it] is intertwined with the great public crisis of the period, with religious doctrine and the nature of power.’ (119). 16 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. Josiah Pratt, 8 vols (London: G. Seeley, 1870). 17 The literature on Spiera is extensive; for an orientation, see M. A. Overell, ‘The Exploitation of Francesco Spiera’, Sixteenth Century Journal 26 (Fall 1995): 619–37. 18 John 3: 1–2. Calvin’s anti-Nicodemite writings include his De fugiendis impiorum illicitis sacris of 1536, vol. 5 of Corpus Reformatorum, Ioannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt omnia, Guilielmus Baum et al., eds, 59 vols (Brunswick, 1863–1900), cols 239–78 [hereafter I will cite this edition of Calvin’s works as CO]; his De christiani hominis officio in sacerdotiis papalis ecclesiae vel administrandis vel abiiciendis, also of 1536, vol. 5 of CO, cols 279–312; his Petit traicté monstrant que c’est que doit faire un homme fidele of 1543, vol. 6 of CO, cols 537–88; his Excuse de Iehan Calvin à Messieurs les Nicodemites sur la complaincte qu’ilz font de sa trop grand rigeur of 1544, vol. 6 of CO, cols 589–614; his Quatre sermons of 1552, vol. 8 of CO, cols 369–452 and in 1562 his Response à un certain Holandois, vol. 9 of CO, cols 581–628. On this theme in Calvin’s thought, see Carlos Eire, The War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and for a textual history of these works, see Eugenie Droz, Chemins de l’hérésie: Textes et documents, 4 vols (Geneva: Slatkine, 1970–1976), vol. 1, pp. 131–71. 19 Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). 20 Francesco Guicciardini, Ricordi, with an English translation by Ninian Hill Thomson (New York: S. F. Vanni, 1949), series 2, no. 28. 21 On Bernard of Clairvaux’s psychology, see Etienne Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard, trans. A. H. C. Downes (London: Sheed and Ward, 1955); for Peter Abelard, see especially his Ethica: Peter Abelard’s Ethics, ed. with an introduction, English translation and notes by D. E. Luscombe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); for Aelred of Rievaulx, see his De spirituali amicitia: L’amitié spirituelle, ed. with an introduction, French translation, and notes by J. Dubois (Bruges: Editions Charles Beyaent, 1948); and on changing twelfth-century ideals of penitence, Thomas Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 18–19. 22 The tension between these ideals is not exclusively western; see, for example, the suggestive essay by Raymond Jamous, ‘Politesse et sincérité dans le monde arabe’ in Politesse et sincérité, ed. Jean-Michel Besnier (Paris: Editions Esprit, 1994), pp. 25–31. 23 Alan of Lille, De virtutibus et de vitiis et de donis spiritus sancti in Odon Lottin, Psychologie et morale au XIIe et XIIIe siècles, 6 vols (Louvain: Abbaye du Mont César, 1942–1950), vol. 6, p. 51.

144 Notes 24 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, trans. English Dominican Province, 3 vols (New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1947), pt. I–II, Qu. 57, Art. 5. 25 Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). See also Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) and Nancy S. Struever, Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 26 Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. and trans. Mark Musa (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), pp. 144–7. 27 Baldesar Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, ed. Bruno Maier (Turin: UTET, 1964 [1528]), pp. 236, 253, 200. 28 Erwin Panofsky’s identification of the three figures, reading from left to right, as Titian, his son Orazio Vecellio, and his ‘adopted’ grandson Marco Vecellio is accepted by most scholars. See Panofosky, ‘Titian’s Allegory of Love: A Postscript’ in Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), pp. 166–7. 29 Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, ‘A Late Antique Religious Symbol in Works by Holbein and Titian’ Burlington Magazine 49 (1926): 177–81 and Panofosky, ‘Titian’s Allegory of Love’, pp. 146–68. 30 For a recent and important discussion of the problem of identity in Titian, see Daniela Bohde, ‘Skin and the Search for the Interior: The Representation of Flaying in the Art and Anatomy of the Cinquecento’ in Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Florike Egmond and Robert Zwinjnenberg (London: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 10–47. 31 Mario Santoro, Fortuna, ragione e prudenza nella civiltà letteraria del Cinquecento (2nd edn: Naples: Ligouri, 1978). 32 Cited in Paolo Simoncelli, Evangelismo italiano del Cinquecento: Questione religiosa e nicodemismo politico (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1979), pp. 379–80. 33 Cited in Antonio Rotondò, ‘Atteggiamenti della vita morale italiana del Cinquecento: la pratica nicodemitica’, Rivista storica italiana 79 (1967): 1029. 34 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 22, dossier ‘Varotta Marcantonio’, memorial of January 21, 1567. 35 Cited in Weissman, ‘The Importance of Being Ambiguous’, p. 275. 36 Gene Brucker, ‘Introduction: Florentine Diaries and Diarists’, in Brucker, ed., Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence: The Diaries of Buonaccorso Pitti and Gregorio Dati, (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 9–18. 37 Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 38 The analogy between Contarini and Luther – with certain psychological resonances – is emphasized by Hubert Jedin in a series of articles: ‘Ein Turmerlebnis des jungen Contarinis’, Historisches Jahrbuch 70 (1951): 115–30; ‘Vicenzo Quirini und Pietro Bembo’, Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1946), vol. IV, pp. 407–24; and ‘Contarini und Camaldoli’, Archivio Italiano per la storia della pietà 2 (1952): 53–117. See also the important biography by Elisabeth Gleason, Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

Notes 145 39 The pope’s decree establishing the Roman Congregation of the Holy Office is the bull Licet ab initio; the text is in Documents Illustrative of the Continental Reformation, ed. B. J. Kidd (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), pp. 346–50. 40 ‘Contarini an Giustiniani’ in Contarini und Camaldoli, ed. Hubert Jedin (Rome: Edizioni di storia e Letteratura, 1953), p. 13; English translation in ‘Gasparo Contarini to Paolo Giustiniani’ in Reform Thought in Sixteenth-Century Italy, ed. Elisabeth Gleason (Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1981), p. 24. 41 ‘Contarini an Giustiniani’, p. 14; English translation in ‘Gasparo Contarini to Paolo Giustiniani’, pp. 25–6. 42 Rita Belladonna, ‘Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Religious Dissimulation: Bartolomeo Carli Piccolomini’s Trattati nove della prudenza’ in Peter Martyr Vermigli and the Italian Reform, ed. Joseph C. McLelland (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1980), pp. 31–2. 43 Berti, ‘Di Giovanni Valdes’, p. 71. 44 Berti, ‘Di Giovanni Valdes’, pp. 74–5. 45 M. E. Pommier, ‘L’itinéraire religieux d’un moine vagabond italien au XVI siècle’, Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’Ecole française de Rome 66 (1954), p. 316. 46 Aldo Stella, Anabattismo e antitrinitarismo in Italia nel XVI secolo (Padua: Liviana, 1969), pp. 258–9. 47 Stella, Anabattismo, p. 259. 48 Stella, Anabattismo, p. 260. 49 Stella, Anabattismo, p. 260. 50 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 22, dossier ‘Contra Odoricum Grisonum et complices’, testimony of 16 May 1567. 51 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 7, dossier ‘Contra denuntiatos pro hereticis de contracta Sancti Moysis.’

4 A Journeymen’s Feast of Fools 1 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 49, dossier ‘Dall’Aquila, Bortolommeo’, testimonies of 4, 15, 18 September 1582. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17 (1987): 149–74. 2 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 49, dossier ‘Dall’Aquila, Bortolommeo’, the testimonies of 4 and 15 September 1582. 3 Euan Cameron, ‘“Civilized Religion:” From Renaissance to Reformation and Counter Reformation’ in Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas, eds Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 49–66. 4 The Council of Trent distinguished between superstitious worship and true religion in its decree ‘Concerning the Things to be Observed and Avoided in the Celebration of the Mass’, in The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, ed. and trans. J. J. Schroeder (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co., 1941), pp. 150–2. On the Tractatus de superstitionihus, see Mary Rose O’Neil, Discerning Superstition: Popular Errors and Orthodox Response in Late Sixteenth Century Italy (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1982), pp. 19–20. On the Apostolic Visit in Venice, see Silvio Tramontin, ‘La visita apostolica del 1581 a Venezia’, Studi Veneziani 9 (1967): 453–533.

146 Notes 5 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 49, dossier ‘Dall’Aquila, Bortolommeo’, testimony of 4 September 1582. 6 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 49, dossier ‘Dall’Aquila, Bortolommeo’, testimony of 15 September 1582. 7 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 49, dossier ‘Dall’Aquila, Bortolomeo’, testimonies of 20 September, and 2 and 16 October 1582. 8 The full text of the memorial reads: Seculares n.o. tres congregati in quodam cubiculo diebus festivis tempore vesperorum induti camisijs loco coltarum cum birettis de pagina rubei coloris ut vulgo dicitur a croce more cardinalium. Et alter ipsorum cum mitra papali pariter de pagina et in illius summitate cum cruce de pagina. Et cum curtina rubei vindisque coloris loco pluvialis ante altere ad hoc preparato in quo tenebant ciatum loco calicis cum opperculo rotundo loco patente et supra sedem Pontificis alterius ipsorum insignia supra que posuerant claves, accenis candillis 4.or vesperas et complectorium pluries cantarunt, chorum representarunt cum folle supra schabellum, Inibe tenentes tres libros v officiis Beate Marie. Quorum duo alterius vicibus se gessere pro Pontificem passique sunt se ut pontificem revereri ab aliis duobus, bis Altare cum turribulo et navicella existente incenso turrificarunt bis altare cum pura aqua existente in vase aereo ad hoc proportionato cum spargulo aspersere. Et unus de eis sedens in loco eminentiori semel predicavit Evangelium que exposuit, de quibus admoniti ab uno quod male faciebant responderunt se credere non male agere. Nihilominus Mitram bireta lacevarunt et absque predictis habitis sacerdotalibus semel postea accensio candellio in Altari complectarium dixere re detesta Sanctum Tribunal [ordinavit perquiri ipsos] et perquisitio ipsis latitarunt per pluros dies Et cum decreta esset inquisitio et citatio sponte comparuerunt duo ipsorum post capturam alterius interrogatur de plano fatentur et dicunt se credidisse non male egisse nec peccasse sed nec cognoscere se male egise et peccasse et veniam petunt. Queritur an p.ti ut formales heretici debeant abiurare aut de vehementi vel de levi. ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 49 ‘Dall’Aquila, Bortolommeo.’ On the distinction between those suspected de levi and de vehementi for heresy, see Nicolau Eymerich, Directorium inqvisitorum … cum commentariis Francisci Pegñae (Venice: Apud Marcum Antonium Zalterium, 1595), pp. 376–84; for a modern, scholarly discussion of this distinction, see John Tedeschi, The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy (Binghamton, N.Y.: MRTS, 1991), p. 152. 9 ‘Cum haec quae referuntur acta, non modo ab impietate, sed a levitate etiam animi, ac ignoranda proficisci possint, nisi me personarum circumstantia ad vehementem suspicionem adducerent, levem tantum praesumptionem, ac suspicionem esse duxerim, qua illi de haeresi leviter suspecti haberi debeant’, ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 49, dossier ‘Dall’Aquila, Bortolommeo’, legal brief provided by Martinus Fornarius; ‘Ego … existimo supra iscriptos reos ut vehementer suspectos abiurare debere’, ibid., opinion of Pietro Vendramin; ‘Casus iste mio iuditio tres habet partes’, ibid., opinion of Pietro Rodulfo; and ‘Omne quod agimus, agimus propter finem’, ibid., opinion of Desiderius Guido. Vendramin edited and annotated an alphabetized manual for inquisitors entitled Repertorium Inqvisitorium Praevitatis Haereticae (Venice: Apud Damianum Zenarum, 1575).

Notes 147 10 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 49, dossier ‘Dall’Aquila, Bortolommeo’, interrogations of 18 October 1582. While the tie to Lutheranism was implicit in the questioning of the heretics on this day, Desiderius Guido made the connection explicit: ‘Si quidem ista [the underlying motivation for the ceremony] fuit eorum credulitas, proculdubio ad execrandum damnatam heresim Lutheranorum inciderent, putantium omnes Christianos esse sacerdotes, omnesque habere equalem potestatem’, ibid., brief of Desiderius Guido. The final sentence, however, makes it clear that the inquisitors did not reduce the ritual to ‘Lutheranism’ alone, since their sentence specified that Evangelista, Fabio, and Bortholo were strongly suspected of heresy not only because their ceremony implied that they held the belief that all men are priests but also for performing a diabolical deed – ‘una cosa malfatta et diabolica.’ A similar distortion of popular beliefs and practices took place in the Friuli at about this time; see Carlo Ginzburg, The Nightbattles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), though now see Franco Nardon, Benandanti e inquisitori nel Friuli del Cinquecento (Trieste: Edizioni Università di Trieste, 1999). 11 Several of Ginzburg’s works have been suggestive for the method I follow here, but see especially his article ‘Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method’, History Workshop 9 (1980): 5–36, now reprinted in Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1986), pp. 96–125 under the title ‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm.’ For Darnton, see his The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984) – the quotation is from Darnton, p. 5. 12 See Dennis Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Robert C. Davis, Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal: Workers and Workplace in the Preindustrial City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); and Monica Chojnacka, Working Women of Early Modern Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 13 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968). 14 Richard Mackenney has provided a superb portrait of this trade in his ‘“In Place of Strife”: The Guilds and the Law in Renaissance Venice’, History Today 34 (1984): 20–1. The statistics concerning the distribution of wealth in the guild are taken from Mackenney. ‘Arti e Stato a Venezia tra tardo medio evo e ‘600’, Studi veneziani, n.s. 5 (1981): 134–5 – see also Mackenney, Tradesmen and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250–c. 1650 (London: Croom-Helm, 1987). On the mercers as retailers of vestments, see Giovanni Monticolo, ed., I capitolari delle arti veneziane (Rome, 1896–1914), vol. 2, p. 308 (Merciai, 11, 1271) and Luca Molà, The Silk Industry in Renaissance Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 174–6 and 296–7. 15 Paolo Preto, Peste a società a Venezia, 1576 (Vicenza: N. Pozza, 1978), pp. 118–19. 16 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 49, dossier ‘Dall’Aquila, Bortolommeo’, testimony of 16 October 1582.

148 Notes 17 On the shearers’ strike, see Frederic Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 314. I have dated the incident through consultation of the Mariegola of the Laneri, Correr, MS, ser. IV, Mariegole, no. 129. 18 On compagnnonage, see the excellent study by Cynthia M. Truant, The Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods of compagnonnage in Old and New Regime France (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994). 19 ASV, Sant‘Uffizio, busta 20, dossier ‘Paolo Gaiano’, testimony of 29 October 1569. 20 Pierre Lebrun, Histoire critique des pratiques superstitieuses, 4 vols (Paris: Widow of Delaulne, 1732–37), vol. IV: Recueil des pièces pour servir de supplement à l’histoire des pratiques superstitieuses, pp. 54–5. Compare the description of these rites of initiation with the documents published by Roger Lecotte, ‘Les plus anciens imprimés sur le compagnonnage (XVII siècle)’, Bulletin folklorique de l’île-de-France, 4th ser, 4 (1968): 67–72. 21 ASV, Sant‘Uffizio, busta 49, dossier ‘Dall’Aquila, Bortolommeo’, testimony of 22 September 1587. 22 On itinerancy, see Maureen Fennell Mazzaoui, The Italian Cotton Industry in the Later Middle Ages, 1000–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 67. 23 On Carnival in Venice, see Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, pp. 156–81; Peter Burke, ‘Le Carnaval de Venise: Esquisse pour une histoire de longue durée’, in Les jeux de la Renaissance, eds. Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin (Paris: J. Vrin, 1982), pp. 55–63; Linda L. Carroll, ‘Carnival Rites as Vehicles of Protest in Renaissance Venice’, Sixteenth Century Journal 16 (1985): 487–502; and on the figure of Carnival as a fat man, Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), p. 185. 24 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 30, dossier ‘Contra Jacobum Georgium et Zachariam Lombardini’, passim. On this trial, see Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions, pp. 3–23. 25 The earliest documentation for the Feast of Fools comes from France in the twelfth century – see E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1903), vol. 1, p. 275, though it is probable that the feast existed as early as the tenth century: see Vincenzo de Bartholomaeis, Origini della poesia drammatica italiana (Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1952), p. 179. 26 My description follows the text of a service book used in thirteenth-century Padua; Karl Young has published the relevant passages in his The Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933), vol. 1, pp. 106–9. 27 On the survival of the feast in sixteenth-century France, see Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, vol. 1: pp. 297–305 especially, and on its survival in Sicily, see Giuseppe Pitrè, ed., Biblioteca delle tradizioni popolari siciliane (Palermo: L. P. Lauriel, 1870–88), 12:137. On the feast in Lucca and its suppression, see Cesare Sardi, ‘La ceremonia del Vescovino negli antichi costumi lucchesi’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 5th ser., 30 (1902): 393–400. Trevisan’s decree is in his Constitutiones et privilegia patriarchatus et cleri Venetiarum (Venice: Aldine Press, 1587), 4v.

Notes 149 28 Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, vol. 1, p. 374 especially, and Paolo Toschi, Le origini del teatro italiano (Turin: Einaudi, 1955), pp. 79–103. Both scholars emphasize the clerical origins of much lay festive life. Natalie Davis takes strong issue with this view: ‘The Reasons of Misrule’, in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 102. 29 ‘Seculares homines faciendo tales ludos, qui sunt duntaxat ad risum vel ad ludibrium, non debent uti habitibus vel vestimentis monachorum, vel monialium aut aliorum ecclesiasticorum, cum illud sit etiam a civili jure prohibitum’, in the Epistola et 14 conclusiones facultatis theologiae Paris, ad ecclesiarum praelatos contra festum fatuorum in Octavis Nativitatis Domini vel primam Januarii in quibusdam ecclesiis celebratunt, in Chartularium Universitatis parisiensis, ed. Heinrich Denifle (Paris: Delalain, 1897), vol. 4, p. 655. 30 Although I have found no direct evidence for the Feast of Fools in the Abruzzi, it is likely that it existed there, for the region enjoyed a strong liturgico-dramatical tradition throughout the late Middle Ages. See Vincenzo de Bartholomaeis, ed., Il teatro abruzzese del medio evo (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1924). On folklore in the Abruzzi in general, see Giovanni Pansa, Miti, leggende e superstizioni dell’Abruzzo (Sulmona: U. Caroselli, 1924–27). On the mocking of the pope in the Feast of Fools, see again the Epistola et 14 conclusiones, p. 655. Chambers also describes such a feast in sixteenthcentury Amiens, a city not directly under papal authority (The Mediaeval Stage, vol. 1, p. 302). 31 Giovanni Dominici’s recommendation that parents encourage their children to play with toy altars is in his Regola del governo di cura familiare, ed., Donato Salvi (Florence: A. Garinei, 1860), p. 146; and for Savonarola’s boyhood and his play with toy altars, see pseudo-Burlamacchi, Vita del beato leronimo Savonarola (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1937), p. 6. On Evangelista’s childhood, see ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 49, dossier ‘Dall’Aquila, Bortolommeo’, testimonies of 16 and 18 October 1582. 32 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 44, dossier ‘Felini Giuseppe’, testimony of 10 October 1577. The Felini trial presents a number of complexities and should be read in light of ASV, Sant’Uffizio. busta 47, dossier ‘Capuano Alvise’, Felini’s recalcitrant son-in-law. 33 Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 34 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, p. 202. The citation from Victor Turner is from The Ritual Process (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 176. For an important critique of Turner, see Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Women’s Stories, Women’s Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner’s Theory of Liminality’ in Anthropology and the Study of Religion, ed. Frank Reynolds and Robert Moore (Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1984), pp. 105–25. André Vauchez emphasizes the vicarious quality of medieval spirituality in his La Spiritualité au moyen âge occidental, Vllle–Xlle siècles (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1975). 35 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 9, and Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, pp. 213–78 and 399–418. 36 Muir, Civic Ritual, p. 168.

150 Notes 37 Muir, Civic Ritual, pp. 156–81; and for Florence, in addition to Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, see Ronald F. E. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1985). A similar transition in festive life and the meaning of Carnival occurred in Nuremberg in these years: see Samuel Kinser, ‘Presentation and Representation: Carnival at Nuremberg’, Representations 13 (1986): 1–41 – see also Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 38 Muir, Civic Ritual, p. 164; and Matteo Casini, I gesti del principe: la festa politica a Firenze e Venezia in età rinascimentale (Venice: Marsilio, 1996). 39 On Borromeo and Bellarmine’s attacks on Carnival and the suppression of comedies in Venice, see Burke, ‘Le Carnaval de Venise’, p. 59. On Venetian views of the theater and morality in this period, see also Gaetano Cozzi, ‘Appunti sul teatro e i teatri a Venezia agli inizi del Seicento’, Bollettino dell’Istituto di Storia della Società e dello Stato Veneziano I (1959): 187–9. 40 On Venetian expansion onto the terraferma, see John Jeffries Martin and Dennis Romano, ‘Reconsidering Venice’ in our Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City State, 1297–1797 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 8–13 especially; on the growing detachment of the nobility from civic affairs, see Nicolai Rubinstein, ‘Italian Reactions to Terraferma Expansion in the Fifteenth Century’, in J. R. Hale, Renaissance Venice (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), pp. 197–217, and Brian Pullan, ‘The Occupations and Investments of the Venetian Nobility in the Middle and Late Sixteenth Century’, in the same volume, pp. 379–408. On the growth of manufactures, see Frederic Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic, pp. 308–21. Richard Mackenney points to many of the significant changes which took place in the structure and function of Venetian guilds between the late Middle Ages and the early seventeenth century in his ‘Arti e Stato a Venezia tra tardo medio evo e ‘600.’ 41 Turner, The Ritual Process, p. 194. 42 Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley: University of Caliornia Press, 1977), p. 51; the concept of bricolage as a means of understanding alternative systems of meaning derives from Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 16–33 especially.

5 Possessions 1 Elena was tried by the Venetian Inquisition on two occasions: ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 30, ‘Contra Helena ditta la Draga demoniata, 1571’ and busta 49, ‘Crusichi, Elena’, 1582. This trial has received considerable attention. See Ruth Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice, 1550–1650 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 140–6 especially and Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 149–64 especially. 2 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 30, ‘Contra Helena ditta la Draga’, testimony of 11 August 1571. 3 Cited in Ruggiero, Binding Passions, p. 162.

Notes 151 4 Carlo Ginzburg, The Nightbattles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 8. This influential work, which first appeared in Italian in 1966, should now be read in conjunction with Franco Nardon, Benandanti e inquisitori nel Friuli del Seicento (Trieste: Edizioni Università di Trieste, 1999). 5 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Boundaries and the Sense of Self in SixteenthCentury France’ in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, eds Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 53–63; on the permeable character of the skin in pre-Enlightenment Europe, see also Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 6 On historicizing the Renaissance body, see David Gentilcore, ‘The Ethnography of Everyday Life’ in Early Modern Italy, ed. John A. Marino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 202–5. 7 Jeffrey B. Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972). 8 Peter Brown, The Cult of Saints: Its Rise and Function in Late Antiquity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 107. 9 Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium maleficarum, ed. M. Summers, trans. E. A. Ashwin (New York: Dover Publications, 1988), p. 106. 10 Peter Winch, ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’ in his Ethics in Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 8–50 remains an essential starting point for the importance of understanding the kinds of questions that beliefs in witchcraft sought to answer. Winch demonstrates clearly that witchcraft beliefs are not a substitute for science but are rather closely related to the fundamental question of why misfortunes afflict particular persons. 11 Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London: Longman, 1987), p. 57. 12 Ruggiero, Binding Passions, p. 149; cf. Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 13 Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 14 Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt, p. 21. 15 Heinrich Kramer and James [sic] Sprenger, The Malleus malificarum, trans. Montague Summers (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1971), p 99. 16 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 433–8 stresses the complexity of the relation between the rise of printing and the development of the witch craze. 17 Bernardo [Rategno] da Como, De strigiis in Lucerna inquisitorum haereticae praevitatis (Milan: Apud Valerium et Hieronymum Fratres Metios, 1566); Italian translation in La stregoneria: diavoli, streghe, inquisitori dal Trecento al Settecento, eds Sergio Abbiati, Attilio Agnoletto, and Maria Rosario Lazzati

152 Notes

18 19

20 21 22

23 24

25 26 27 28

29

30 31

(Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editori, 1984), pp. 200–17 and Bartolomeo Spina, Questio de strigibus, selections published in La stregonaria, pp. 256–63. On Modena, see Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Stregoneria e pietà popolare: note a proposito di un processo modenese del 1519’ Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Lettere, storia e filosofia. S. II 30 (1961): 269–87. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 11–30. Ruth Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice, p. 208 and passim; Mary Rose O’Neil, Discerning Superstition: Popular Errors and Orthodox Response in Late Sixteenth-Century Italy, Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1981; E. William Monter and John Tedeschi, ‘Toward a Statistical Profile of the Italian Inquisitions, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries’ in The Inquisition in Early Modern Italy: Studies on Sources and Methods, eds Gustav Henningsen and John Tedeschi (Dekalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 135. Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions, p. 17. Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles, p. 137. Peter Burke, ‘Witchcraft and Magic in Renaissance Italy: Gianfrancesco Pico and his Strix’, in The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Sydney Anglo. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 32–50. Eymeric and Peña, Directorium inqvisitorum, pp. 335–48. Desiderio Scaglia, ‘Prattica per provedere nelle cause del Tribunale del Sant’Offitio’, Ph. 12868, Ranuzzi Collection, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin; on this work, see John Tedeschi, ‘The Question of Magic and Witchcraft in Two Inquisitorial Manuals’ in Tedeschi, The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy (Binghamton, New York, MRTS, 1991), p. 252, n. 48. Masini, Sacro Arsenale. John Tedeschi, ‘The Question of Magic and Witchcraft’, p. 252, n. 48. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), p. 493. The distinction between bewitchment and possession was not easily made; see Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium maleficarum, pp. 167–9. For a useful collection of essay on possession and exorcism, see Brian P. Levack, ed., Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, 12 vols (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1992), esp. vol. 9 Possession and Exorcism. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons; Anne Jacobson Schutte, Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618–1750 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). O’Neil, ‘Discerning Superstition’, p. 301. Menghi’s Latin texts on exorcism and possession include the Flagellum daemonum, exorcismos terribles, potentissimos, et efficaces (Venice: Apud I. V. Sauionum, 1644) and the Fustis daemonum adivrationes formidablies (Venice: Apud. I. V. Sauionum, 1644). Antonio Aliani, see preceding note, has counted 14 editions of the Flagellum daemonum; 7 of the Fustis daemonum; and 33 of the Flagellum and the Fustis in a combined edition. Ottavio Franceschini offers an overview of Menghi’s career in his reprint edition of the Compendio dell’arte essorcistica. Among Italian scholars who have studied Menghi, see Massimo Petrocchi, Esorcismi e magia nell’Italia del Cinquecento e

Notes 153

32 33

34

35 36

37 38 39

40 41 42 43

Seicento (Naples: Libreria scientifica editrice, 1957), pp. 13–27 especially and Giovanni Romeo, Inquisitori, esorcisti e streghe nell’Italia della Controriforma (Florence: Sansoni, 1990). Mary O’Neil has played a key role in calling attention to the significance of this figure in the contemporary historiography of the Renaissance. See especially her essay ‘Sacerdote ovvero strione: Ecclesiastical and Superstitious Remedies in 16th-Century Italy’ in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Steven L. Kaplan (Berlin: Mouton Publishers, 1984), pp. 54–83. O’Neil, Discerning Superstition. Alessio Porri, Antidotario contro li demoni, nel quale si tratta come entrano ne’ corpi humani (Venice: R. Megietti, 1601) and Giorgio Polacco, Pratiche per discerner lo spirito buono dal malvagio (Bologna: Giacomo Monti, 1638). Zaccaria Visconti, Complementum artis exorcisticae (Venice: Francisum Barilettum, 1600), Alessandro Albertino, Malleus daemonum (Venice: Typis Bartholomaei, 1620), and Candido Brognolo, Manuale exorcistarum ac parochorum (Lyons: Apud J. Radisson, 1658). Other important manuals of exorcism included Alberto da Castello, Liber sacerdotalis (Venice: Victor a Rabanis, 1537); Pietro Antonio Stampa, Fuga Satanae (Como: Ex Typografphia H. Frouae, 1597); the Tesaurus exorcismorum atque coniuratioum terribilium (Cologne: Lazarus Zetzner Heirs, 1626); Carolo Olivieri, Baculus daemonum (Perugia: Apud Marcum Naccarium, 1618); and Floriano Canale, Del modo di conoscer e sanare I malificiati trattati due (Brescia: Santo Zanetti, 1638; reprint edition: Sala Bolognese: Arnaldo Forni, 1987). O’Neil, ‘Discerning Superstition’. The 1572 edition has not survived, but see the Compendio dell’arte essorcistica e possibilità della mirabili e stupende operationi delli demoni e dei malefici con i rimedii opportuni all’infirmità maleficiali (Bologna: G. Rossi, 1576; reprinted with a postface by Ottavio Franceschini, Genoa: Nuova Stile Regina, 1987). In an appendix to Franceschini’s edition, Antonio Aliani provides a list of the various editions of Menghi’s works; there were 17 editions between 1576 and 1617. Girolamo Menghi, Compendio dell’arte essorcistica, Proemio, p. 2 (not numbered). Tomaso Garzoni, Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, ed. Paolo Cherchi and Beatrice Collina, 2 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), vol. 1, pp. 493–8. On the trials in Siena in 1569, when five women were burned, and at Rome in 1572, where there were four executions, see Romeo, Inquisitori, esorcisti, pp. 44–5, n. 50; on the trial at Lecco, carried out under Carlo Borromeo, archbishop of Milan, see ibid., pp. 48–53; and on the trial in Liguria of 1587–88, ibid., pp. 29–31; at Mantua in 1595 and 1600–01, ibid., p. 44; at Perugia in 1590, ibid., p. 44. See also Schutte, Aspiring Saints, p. 63. Menghi, Compendio, p. 75. Menghi, Compendio, p. 77. Menghi, Compendio, pp. 152 and 224. Menghi, Compendio, pp. 83–6, though, in the end, he proposes the solution that both opinions are true: ‘Concediamo adunque la loro esperienza vera, ma fa di bisogno che anchor essi concedano le nostre essere vere, perche una non ripugna all’altra, anci l’una, & l’altra alle volte ha potuto occorrer.’ (Compendio, 167, 177–8)

154 Notes 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63

Romeo, Inquisitori, esorcisti e streghe, p. 117. Romeo, Inquisitori, esorcisti e streghe, p. 107 or 167. Romeo, Inquisitori, esorcisti e streghe, pp. 119–22. Nardon, Benandanti e inquistori, pp. 179 ff. Garzoni, Piazza universale, p. 496. Menghi, Compendio, p. 44. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’ in Greenblatt, Shakespearian Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 94–128. Moshe Sluhovsky, ‘A Divine Apparition or Demonic Possession? Female Agency and Church Authority in Demonic Possession in Sixteenty-Century France’, Sixteenth Century Journal 27 (1996): 1039–56 and Greenblatt, ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists.’ Clark, Thinking with Demons, p. 409. Cecilia Ferrazzi, Autobiografia di una santa mancata, ed. Anne Jacobson Schutte (Bergamo: Pierluigi Lubrina Editore, 1990); Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint, ed. and trans. Anne Jacobson Schutte (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 71–2. Giancarlo Volpato, ‘Girolamo Menghi, o Dell’arte escorcista’, Lares 57 (1991): 381–97. Menghi, Flagellum daemonum, p. 20. Menghi, Fustis daemonum, p. 30. Menghi, Flagellum daemonum, p. 21. Menghi, Flagellum daemonum, p. 36. Menghi, Flagellum daemonum, pp. 74–5. Garry Wills, Venice, Lion City: The Religion of Empire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), pp. 69–71. Daniela Bohde, ‘Skin and the Search for the Interior: The Representation of Flaying in the Art and Anatomy of the Cinquecento’ in Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern Culture, eds Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 32. Katharine Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994): 1–33. Ovid, Metamorphosis, Bk. VI, line 385, also cited by Wills, Venice, Lion City, p. 70.

6 The Proffered Heart 1 Emile Mâle, Religious Art from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Pantheon, 1949). Portions of this chapter appeared earlier in my ‘Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe’, American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1309–42. 2 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, overo descrizzione di diverse imagini cavate dall’ antichità e di propria invenzione, trovate e dichiarate da Cesare Ripa perugino (Rome: Faci, 1603; reprinted New York: G. Olms, 1970). 3 Erna Mandowsky, Untersuchungen zur Iconologie der Cesare Ripa (Hamburg: H. Proctor, 1934); Gerlind Werner, Ripa’s Iconogia: Quellen-Methode-Ziele (Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker & Gumbert, 1977). See also the important

Notes 155

4

5

6 7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17

review essay on Werner by Elizabeth McGrath, ‘Personifying Ideals’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990): 363–8. At roughly the same time, the Dutch humanist Hadrianus Junius and the Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck developed prints portraying the story of Momus and the creation. In the inscription to his etching, borrowed from Junius, Heemskerck has Momus state, ‘I recommend man being fashioned with a latticed breast so that the space within conceals nothing from those who keep their eyes and ears open.’ (Ilja M. Veldman, Maarten van Heemskerck and Dutch Humanism in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Michael Hoyle [Maarsen: Gary Schwartz, 1977], p. 101.) John L. Lievsay, Stefano Guazzo and the English Renaissance 1575–1675 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961); cf Daniel Javitch, ‘Rival Arts of Conduct in Elizabethan England: Guazzo’s Civile Conversation and Castiglione’s Courtier’, Yearbook of Italian Studies 1 (1971): 178–98. Stefano Guazzo, La civil conversazione, ed. Amadeo Quondam (Modena: Panini, 1993). As the Italian scholar Amedeo Quondam has shown in his comprehensive study of La conversazione civile, there are numerous structural parallels between the way in which Guazzo described various virtues – justice, grace, courtesy, and so on – and Ripa’s portrayals of these same ideas. Quondam first established the influence of Guazzo on Ripa in his ‘La virtù dipinta: noterelle (e divagazioni) guazziane intorno a Classicismo e Istituto in Antico Regime’ in Stefano Guazzo e la Civil conversazione, ed. Giorgio Patrizi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1981). Guazzo, La civil conversazione, p. 170. Giralomo Vida, Dialogi de rei publicae dignitate (Cremona: Apud Vincentium Conetem, 1556), reprinted with an Italian translation in Giuseppe Toffanin, L’Umanesimo al Concilio di Trento (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1555), pp. 77–157. Quondam, ‘Note al primo libro’ in Guazzo, La civil conversazione, vol. 2, pp. 55–6. Carol Maddison, Marcantonio Flaminio: Poet, Humanist, & Reformer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), p. 158. Guazzo, La civil conversatione, vol. 1, p. 86. Guazzo, La civil conversatione, vol. 1, p. 107. Guazzo, La civil conversatione, vol. 1, p. 111. Guazzo, La civil conversatione, 86: ‘Chi desidera adunque usar felicemente della civil conversazione ha da considerare che la lingua è lo specchio e ‘l ritratto dell’ animo suo, e che sì come dal suono del danaio conosciamo la bontà e la falsità sua, così dal suone delle parole comprendiamo a dentra la qualità dell’ uomo e i suoi constumi.’ See also p. 92. Lievsay, Stefano Guazzo and the English Renaissance. Flaminio put great emphasis on sincerity. He translates Psalm 12: with a direct reference to Sincerity as a virtue. This is a new usage of the term in the Italian context. ‘Now kindly Truth has been driven away by lying/Falsehood, and has left the cities,/Together with Faith, and holy Modesty, and her sister/Lovely Sincerity.’ The original psalm does not use this word: ‘They speak vanity everyone with his neighbour, with flattering lips and with a double heart do they speak.’ (Maddison, Marcantonio Flaminio, p. 165).

156 Notes 18 Guazzo, La civil conversazione, vol. 1, p. 24. 19 Quondam, ‘Note al primo libro’ in Guazzo, La civil conversazione, vol. 2, p. 60. 20 Il Beneficio di Cristo, con le versioni del secolo XVI: documenti e testimonianze, ed. Salvatore Caponetto (Florence: Sansoni, 1972; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1972), p. 82 21 On the spread of Calvinist ideas in France in this period, see Robert J. Knect, The French Civil Wars, 1562–1598 (New York: Longman, 2000). 22 Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 11. 23 Lionell Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 2. 24 A notion of sincerity is implicit in Petrarch’s ‘The Ascent of Mont Ventoux’ (The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer et al. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948], 46). On Valla and sincerity, see Mario Fois, Il pensiero cristiano di Lorenzo Valla nel quadro storico-culturale del suo ambiente (Rome: Gregoriana, 1969). 25 Regula Benedicti, Rudolphus Hanslik, ed., vol. 75 of Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 2nd edn (Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Temsky, 1977), sect. 18: ‘de disciplina psallendi.’ On the influence of classical ideals of concordia on the Benedictine Rule, see Winfrid Cramer, ‘Mens concordet voci: zum Fortleben einer stoischen Gebetsmaxime in der Regula Benedicti’ in Pietas: Festschrift für Bernhard Kötting, eds Ernst Dassmann and K. Suso Frank (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1980), pp. 447–57, esp. 454; Viktor Warnach, ‘Mens concordet voci: zur Lehre der heiligen Benedikt über die geistige Haltung beim Chorgebet nach dem 19. Kapitel seiner Klosterregel’, Liturgisches Leben 5 [1938]: 179.) That concordia was not merely a religious but also a political ideal in the late Roman world is evident from H. P. L’Orange, Art Forms and Civic Life in the Late Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 46–51. On the medieval context, see Giles Constable, ‘The Concern for Sincerity and Understanding in Liturgical Prayer, Especially in the Twelfth Century’, in Classica et Mediaevalia: Studies in Honor of Joseph Szövérffy, eds Irene Vaslef and Helmut Buschhausen (Washington: Classical Folio Editions, 1986), pp. 17–30. 26 Cited in Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 98. See also John F. Benton, ‘Consciousness of Self and Perceptions of Individuality’ in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, eds Robert Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 263–95. 27 Hugh of St. Victor, Expositio in Regulam Beati Augustini, in Patrologiae cursus completus series latina [PL hereafter], ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: Apud Garnieri Fratres, 1844–91), vol. 176: col. 892. 28 Bernardus Sylvestris, Cosmographia, translation with introduction and notes by Winthrop Wetherbee (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), pp. 88 and 109. 29 Alan of Lille, ‘Expositio prosae de angelis’, in Alain de Lille: Textes inédits avec une introduction sur sa vie et ses oeuvres, ed. Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny (Paris: Vrin, 1965), p. 196.

Notes 157 30 Adam of Dryburgh, Liber de quadripertito exercitio cellae, sect. 35, in PL, vol. 153: col. 878C. 31 Francis’s reversal of Benedict’s formula ‘ut mens nostra concordet voci nostrae’ to ‘ut vox concordet menti’ has occasioned considerable discussion. See Bertilo De Boer, ‘La soi-disant opposition de Saint François d’Assise à Saint Benoit’, Etudes franciscaines 7 (1957): 181–94. 32 Marsilio Ficino, Letters, Members of the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, London, trans., with a preface by Paul Oskar Kristeller, 5 vols (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1975–94), vol. 1: no. 77; 5: no. 21. 33 Robert Javelet, Image et ressemblance au douzième siècle de saint Anselme à Alain de Lille, 2 vols (Paris: Editions Letouzey & Ané, 1967) and Giles Constable, ‘The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ’, in Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 145–248, esp. 179–217. 34 Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 90 and Timothy J. Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 87. Both Bynum and Reiss are responding critically to Morris, The Discovery of the Individual. 35 Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Late Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). 36 Steven Ozment, ‘Luther and the Later Middle Ages: The Formation of Reformation Thought’, in Transition and Revolution: Problems and Issues in European Renaissance and Reformation History, ed. Robert M. Kingdon (Minneapolis, Minn.: Burgess Publishing Company, 1974), p. 124. Despite Ozment’s point, it remained true that the human person continued to be understood, at least in part, in the language of similitude, a language in which concordia continued to play a role, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On this theme, see especially Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 17–77. Foucault ignores the evidence from early Protestant theology that challenges his dating of the shift from an emphasis on similitude to one of difference, identity, and analysis. As he notes, ‘[e]stablishing discontinuities is not an easy task even for history in general.’ (50) 37 Martin Luther, ‘Preface to the Psalms’, in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), 38–9 [‘Vorrhede auff den Psalter’ in Luther, Die Deutsche Bibel in D. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus, 1925), X, pt. I, 100 and 101.] 38 ‘Preface to the Psalms’, 39 [‘Vorrede’, pp. 100, 102, 103]. 39 Calvin, A Commentary on the Psalms, Arthur Golding, trans. [1571], revised and edited by T. H. L. Parker (London: James Clarke, 1965), 16 [Ioannis Calvini in librum Psalmorum commentarius [1557] in vol. 29 of CO, cols 16 and 17]. Here and below I have modified the Golding-Parker translation slightly. On the centrality of the Psalms to Calvin, see Barbara Pitkin, ‘Imitation of David: David as Paradigm for Faith in Calvin’s Exegesis of the Psalms’, Sixteenth Century Journal 24 (1993): 843–63, and for the central role of the Psalter in Reformed spirituality, see Henri Chaix, Le Psautier Huguenot: sa formation et son historie dans l’Eglise Réformée (Geneva: Romet, 1907). Calvin had compared the Psalms to an anatomy of the soul in his Preface to Louis Budé’s translation of the Psalms (1551) [‘Preface de Iehan Calvin aux lecteurs fideles,

158 Notes

40 41 42

43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64

touchant l’utilité des Pseaumes et de la translation presente’ in Rudolphe Peter, ‘Calvin and Louis Budé’s Translation of the Psalms’, in John Calvin, ed. G. E. Duffield (Appleford: The Sutton Courtenay Press, 1966), pp. 201–6, esp. p. 202, a work overlooked in CO, and further evidence of Calvin’s desire to popularize the Psalms among Reformed congregations]. Calvin, A Commentary on the Psalms, Ps. 12, v. 3 [in librum Psalmorum commentarius [1557], Ps. 12, v. 3]. Calvin, A Commentary on the Psalms, Ps. 15, v. 2 [in librum Psalmorum commentarius, Ps. 15, v. 2]. Melanchthon, Loci communes theologici, trans. by Lowell J. Satre with revisions by Wilhelm Pauck, in Melanchthon and Bucer, ed. Wilhelm Pauck (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969), pp. 29, 27, 30 [Loci communes in vol. 2, pt. 1 of Melanchthons Werke, Hans Engelland and Robert Stupperich, eds (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1978), pp. 29, 27, 31]. Bouwsma, ‘The Two Faces of Humanism’, 47. Melanchthon himself did not use the term ‘insincere’ but rather ‘per simulationem’ (Melanchthons Werke, 28). Calvin, Institutes, Bk. 3, Chap. 20, sect. 31. Bouwsma, John Calvin, p. 179. Melanchthon, Loci communes, 27 [Melanchthons Werke, 27]. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 610 [Essais, 804]. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 140 [Essais, 189–90]. Guicciardini, Ricordi, series 2, no. 104. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Liii.59. The best biographical study of Montaigne remains Donald M. Frame, Montaigne: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965). Scholars who have highlighted the split between public and private life in Montaigne’s self-exploration include Frederick Rider, The Dialectic of Selfhood in Montaigne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973) and Nannerl O. Keohane, ‘Montaigne’s Individualism’, Political Theory 5 (1977): 363–90. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, p. 177 [Essais, p. 241]. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 46. Prudence is most often used as a synonym for wisdom (sagesse) in the Essays. My analysis of sincerity in Montaigne is especially indebted to Jean Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Montaigne, The Compete Essays, pp. 600–1 [Essais, p. 792]. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, p. 642 [Essais, p. 846, where he adds, ‘[p]our estre bien secret, il le faut estre par nature, non par obligation’]. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, p. 505 [Essais, p. 666]. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, p. 491 [Essais, p. 647]. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, p. 492 [Essais, p. 649]. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, p. 610 [Essais, p. 804]. Jean Lecointe, L’ldéale et la différence: la perception de la personnalité littéraire à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1993), esp. Chap. 3: ‘Vers une rhétorique de la personne.’ Montaigne, The Complete Essays, p. 615 [Essais, p. 810–11]. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, pp. 773–4 [Essais, p. 1011].

Notes 159 65 Greenblatt, ‘Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture’, in Literary Theory/Literary Texts, eds Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 222. 66 Marc Fumaroli, ‘Michel de Montaigne ou l’éloquence du for intérieur’ in Jean Lafond, ed. Les formes brèves de la prose et le discours discontinu (XVIe–XVIIe siècles) (Paris, J. Vrin, 1984), pp. 27–50. 67 On Montaigne’s library, see Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne, trans. Dawn Eng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 41–2 as well as Montaigne’s own description in the Essays, pp. 628–9 [Essais, vol. 3, pp. 828–9; on Guazzo’s influence, see Marcel Tetel, Présences italiennes dans les Essais de Montaigne (Paris: Champion, 1992), pp. 11–27; Tetel misidentifies the Cavaliere in La civil conversazione as ‘l’auteur lui-même, le Cavaliere Guazzo.’ (14) First, the Cavaliere is not Stefano but Guglielmo, the author’s younger brother; moreover Annibale more closely represents the author; on this second point, see Giorgio Patrizi, ‘Una retorica del molteplice: forme di vita e forme del sapere nella ‘civil conversatione’, p. 48. 68 Montaigne, Essays, p. 244 [Essais, p. 337]

7 Myths of Identity – an Essay 1 The passage from ‘On Presumption’ is from Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), pp. 484–5; Les essais, ed. Pierre Villey, 3 vols (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1924), vol. 2, p. 639; on Montaigne’s views of the popular and elite beliefs concerning witchcraft, see especially his essay ‘Of Cripples’, Essays, pp. 784–92; [Essais, vol. 3, pp. 1025–35]. For a useful reading of this second essay, see Maryanne C. Horowitz, ‘Montaigne’s Doubts on the Miraculous and the Demonic in Cases of His Own Day’ in Regnum, Religio et Ratio: Essays Presented to Robert M. Kingdon, ed. Jerome Friedman (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, 1987), pp. 81–92. 2 Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and SelfIdentity in England, 1591–1791 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 3 My arguments here are informed in particular by the recent work of Lionel Gossman, See, in particular, his ‘Cultural History and Crisis: Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy’ in Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche, ed. Michael S. Roth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 404–27. On de Tocqueville’s reactions to 1848, see especially his Recollections, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970). 4 James Hankins, ‘“The Baron Thesis” after Forty Years and Some Recent Studies of Leonardo Bruni’, Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995): 309–38. 5 William James Bouwsma, ‘The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History’, The American Historical Review 84 (1979): 1–15. 6 On the appropriation of Burckhardt’s ideas, especially as he developed them in his Weltgeschichtliche Betractungen, see Lionel Gossman, ‘Jacob Burckhardt: Cold War Liberal?’ in Journal of Modern History 74 (2002): 551–3. 7 Gossman, ‘Jacob Burckhardt: Cold War Liberal?’ pp. 538–72.

160 Notes 8 James Grubb, ‘When Myths Lose Power: Four Decades of Venetian Historiography’, Journal of Modern History 58 (1986): 43–94. 9 Lee Patterson, ‘On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History and Medieval Studies’, Speculum 65 (1990): 87–108. 10 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke, 1991), an expansion of his earlier essay by the same title in New Left Review 146 (1984): 53–92 and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), but see also Barbara Epstein, ‘Postmodernism and the Left’, New Politics 6 (1997): 130–44, whose remarks have done much to shape my own thinking on this subject. For other important efforts to offer a historical account of the emergence of postmodern thought, see Martin E. Gloege, ‘The American Origins of the Postmodern Self’ in Constructions of the Self, ed. George Levine (Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 59–80 and Carolyn J. Dean, The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). 11 On French postmodernism, see the polemical work of Luc Ferry and Alain Renault, French Philosophy in the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, trans. Mary H. S. Cattani (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), which is useful primarily as an effort to place the development of postmodernism in its historical context. On the development of postmodernism in the United States, see the essays by Epstein and Gloege cited in the previous note. Daniel Gordon cautions against locating the origins of postmodernism exclusively in France; see his ‘On the Supposed Obsolence of the French Enlightenment’ in Postmodernism and the Enlightenment, ed. Gordon (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 206–11. 12 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 387. 13 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), vol 1, p. 188. 14 Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2002) and Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (New York: Times Books, 2003). 15 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 16 Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (Boston: Basic Books, 1991); and Richard K. Fenn and Donald Capps, eds The Endangered Self (Princeton: Center for Religion, Self, and Society, Princeton Theological Seminary, 1992), with special attention to the essay by Mary Ellen Ross.

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Acknowledgements No book belongs to an individual author alone; each has a collective as well as a personal identity; and this is especially true of a book such as this one, long in the making, that has benefited from the assistance of many colleagues and friends at every step of the way. I shall always be grateful to Kenneth Gouwens for re-igniting, in a memorable discussion in Toronto, my interest in intellectual history. To Nicholas Davidson, I owe the gratitude of years of friendship as well as an invitation to a conference in London. It was during that overseas flight to Heathrow that I first had a chance to focus in a serious way on the possibility of exploring the history of Renaissance identities. Above all, I thank Edward Muir not only for inviting me to contribute to this series but also for his example and unfailing collegiality. Several colleagues have read and commented on the manuscript as it took shape. Alida Metcalf helped me rethink the rather theoretical first chapter, while Douglas Biow, Nancy Diehl, Eunice Herrington, and Ed Muir read the entire manuscript and offered constructive criticisms throughout. My colleagues have, as always, been a source of intellectual camaraderie; this is especially true of my own department where each of my fellow historians has contributed to this project in various ways but primarily through their good humor and their graceful willingness to suggest new perspectives and the consideration of new problems. Willis Salomon, a colleague in English, has done much to help me make at least some sense of the connections between the concerns of literary scholars and more traditional historians such as myself. From other campuses I have benefited enormously from the thoughts, insights, and encouragement of my friends and colleagues Caroline Walker Bynum, Marion Leathers Kuntz, Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, and Dennis Romano. Finally, to Antonio Calabria, tante tante grazie – he has been a friend in difficult times, bolstering my spirits and keeping me grounded in cose italiane ed umane. I have been grappling with the issues and the ideas in this book for a long while. My earlier essay with the title ‘The Myth of Renaissance Individualism’ appeared in The Blackwell Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance (2002). While my arguments have evolved significantly since I wrote that piece, I am grateful to the volume’s editor, Guido Ruggiero for making it possible for me to explore this theme even as my thinking on the subject was evolving. Fragments of that essay have an afterlife in 177

178 Acknowledgements

this book, and I thank Blackwell Publishing as well as the editors of the American Historical Review, Renaissance Studies, and the Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies for permission to make use of previously published material, albeit in substantially different form. The Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Faculty Development Commission at Trinity University, and the Joullian Fund of my department all offered crucial financial support that enabled work on this project – and I am grateful to each. Several scholarly institutions and communities have also provided support. Librarians and archivists at the Archivio di Stato in Venice, at the Warburg Institute in London, and at the Houghton Library, Harvard University have been more than accommodating. I am also indebted to Maria McWilliams of the Coates Library at Trinity; she has been imaginative and resourceful in helping me locate works through Interlibrary Loan – not only primary sources but also the precious scholarship of my predecessors and peers whose work has done so much to pave the way for my own. My family has always made room for my idiosyncratic interests. I am grateful for every moment with Mary Ellen, for her love, her laughter, her strength, and above all her take on things. She has always invited me to see the world in novel, imaginative, rebellious, and beautiful ways. And she has done much, drawing on her own interest in psychoanalysis and the history of the self, to sharpen my thinking on these matters. I am equally appreciative to Margaret, my daughter, and my son, Junius, not only for sharing their own interesting ideas with me about what they think the ‘self’ might be but also for pushing me again and again not to write a book that nobody reads. How many scholars must have winced as I did and do when, in one of those virtually useless cavernous bookstores that now dot the American and British landscapes, a child asks for the umpteenth time, ‘Dad, how come we never see your books anywhere?’ Finally, it is a privilege to thank my brother, William Thomas Martin, for his love, friendship, and irrepressible intellectual curiosity. Because this is a book about identity, I dedicate it to the memory of my mother Dorothy Gemes Martin – who, along with her three lively sisters Mary Serena Gemes, Elizabeth Gemes Jackson, and Miriam Smith Irwin – had much to do with shaping my own sense of self. On the most important level, they offered me a sense of security and a sense of having a place in the world. They were, quite simply, my four points on the compass. Among other things, they told wonderful

Acknowledgements 179

stories about growing up in a small town in north Georgia during the Depression. To hear them talk, their childhoods were not about individual accomplishments so much as about larger connections. Families sat on their porches after dinner; everybody was related to everyone; church was central to their lives; and they just knew that Mr C. L. Collins had the magical power that enabled him, among other things, to ‘wish’ warts away. I recognize that, while much about their lives was difficult, they were, relatively speaking, among the privileged. But the fact is that their conversations about their shared past made me deeply conscious at a relatively young age that I had been born into a world different from theirs, and this recognition – I am certain – played a decisive role in inciting a sense of historical curiosity. Of course I can’t know which of their incredible stories about growing up during the Great Depression are true, but the truths I do know I owe to each of them, and especially to Dorothy. John Jeffries Martin San Antonio, Texas


Index Abelard, Peter 48 Adam of Dryburgh 111 Aelred of Rievaulx 48 Agrippa, Cornelius 37 Alan of Lille 49, 110, 111 Alberti, Leon Battista 30, 33–4, 52 Albertino, Alessandro 92 Aleandro, Girolamo 24 alienation 14, 38, 78, 106 Allegory of Prudence (Titian) 50–2 Altieri, Baldassare 43 Anabaptists 42, 43, 44–5, 57–8 angels, angelic spirits 37, 86 Anglican Church 97, 107 Anselm, St. 12 antitrinitarian heresies 42, 43, 57 Aquinas, St. Thomas 12, 28, 49, 53 Ariosto, Lodovico 17 Aristotle 48 Arles, Martino de 63 Arsenale 31, 32, 72, 131 arsenalotti 31 artisans and craftsmen 26, 44, 59–61, 70, 71, 74 see also arsenalotti; cobblers; printers; weavers artists 36, 50, 103–4 see also Carlo Dolci; Maarten van Heemskerck; Hans Holbein the younger; Lorenzo Lippi; Lorenzo Lotto; Salvatore Rosa; Raffaello Schiaminossi; Titian; Paolo Veronese Augustine, St. (of Hippo) 12, 44, 48–9 Bakhtin, Mikhail 68 Baron, Hans 126 Barthes, Roland 136n.28 Basle 124–5 Bellarmine, Roberto 78 benandanti 84, 89, 96 Benedictines 41 Rule of St. Benedict 110

Beneficio di Cristo 108–9 Bernard of Clairvaux 48 Bernard of Sylvester 110, 111 Bernardino of Siena 52 biography 10 Biow, Douglas 5–6 body appearance 22–3, 98, 131 embodied self 123–4, 131 porous nature 18, 83–4, 99–102, 102 and relational self 14–15 see also skin Bohde, Daniela 101, 143n.30 Bologna 57 Bolognetti, Alberto 62 Bolzoni, Lina 30 Book of the Courtier (Castiglione) 8, 34–5, 47, 49–50, 104, 140n.53 books on civility and etiquette 34–5, 49–50, 104–9 demonological 87–8, 92–6 on emblems 103 future of 130 heretical 25 martyrologies 47 Borromeo, Carlo 78 Bouwsma, William 115–16 Bragadin, Marcantonio 100 bricolage 80 Brognolo, Candido 92 Brown, Peter 85 Bruni, Leonardo 49 Burckhardt, Jacob Cicerone 4 Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy 4, 125 cultural and historical context 124–6 postmodern reassessment of 5–7, 127 on Renaissance individualism 4–5, 6, 7, 9–10, 15, 125–6

181

182 Index Burke, Peter 76 Burton, Robert 17 Busale, Abbot Bruno 42, 57 Bynum, Caroline Walker 19, 112 Caliari, Paolo see Veronese, Paolo Calvin, John on human nature 112, 132 on hypocrisy and sincerity 46–7, 47, 114–15, 116, 122 Calvinist ideas 108–9, 112 Campanella, Tommaso 37 Canale, Floriano 92 Capuano, Alvise 75 Carafa, Gianpetro (Pope Paul IV) 24, 25 Caravia, Alessandro 27 Cardano, Girolamo 38 Carnival 71–2, 76–8 Carpan, Bartolomeo 21–2, 22–3, 26–7, 30, 40 Casa, Giovanni della 25, 34, 36 Castelli, Giovanni Battista 73 Castiglione, Baldassare Book of the Courtier 8, 34–5, 47, 49–50, 104, 140n.53 Certaldo, Paolo da 52 Chambers, E. K. 74 Church, Roman Catholic and access to spiritual power 89, 91, 93 clergy and inversion rituals 72–4, 75–6 and exorcism 92–4 Holy Office of Inquisition (see also under Inquisition) 54 and religious art 1–4 Church of England 97, 107 civility 34–5; see also etiquette Clark, Stuart 98 clergy see under Church, Roman Catholic cobblers 60 Como, Bernardo da 88 concordia 110–12 Contarini, Gasparo 53–6, 59, 107 convents 38 conversation see speech Council of Trent 1, 63, 77–8, 93, 106–7

courtly life 34–5, 36, 47, 106, 108, 109 see also Book of the Courtier craftsmen and artisans 26, 44, 59–61, 70, 71, 74 see also arsenalotti; cobblers; printers; weavers Crusichi, Elena 83–4 da Certaldo, Paolo 52 da Como, Bernardo 88 da Venezia, fra Marino 26 Darnton, Robert 67 Davis, Natalie Zemon 21, 74, 84 de Arles, Martino 63 de Maistre, Joseph 9 de Priero, Silvestro 94 de Tocqueville, Alexis 9, 10, 124, 125 Dee, John 37 della Casa, Giovanni 25, 34, 36 della Sega, Francesco 58–9 demons and spirits 37–8, 94 exorcism of 91–100 possession by 83–6, 98–100 Derrida, Jacques 127–8 disease and healing 83, 85–6, 90, 96, 98–9, 102 dissimulation 28–30, 33–6, 47–8, 52–3, 119, 122 Dolci, Carlo 103–4 Dominicans 98 dramas see theater elites and patricians 34–5, 37, 44–5, 47, 53–5, 68 emblems 103, 104 Emilia-Romagna 92 England 90–1, 97 Enlightenment, ideological heritage of 132 Erasmus, Desiderius 34, 89, 124 etiquette 36, 55; see also civility evangelism 43, 44, 53–7, 60, 61, 107, 108–9 exorcism 91–100 Eymerich, Nicolau 29, 32, 35–6 Feast of Fools 72–4, 75–6, 81 Venetian journeymen 62–82

Index 183 Feast in the House of Levi, The (Veronese) 1–3 Febvre, Lucien 44 Felini, Iseppo 75 Ferrara 17 Ferrazzi, Cecilia 38, 98 Ficino, Marsilio 37, 111 fishermen 31–2 Flaminio, Marcantonio 107, 108 Flaying of Marsyas (Titian) 100–1 Florence 53, 57, 76, 77 Fornario, Martino 65 Foucault, Michel 127–8, 129 Foxe, John 47 France compagnonnages in 70 exorcism of Nicole Obry 38, 97 Feast of Fools in 73, 74, 76 French Revolution 10, 124 spread of Calvinist ideas 109 Wars of Religion in 109 Francis, St. 111 Franciscans 25, 26, 52 Freud, Sigmund 15 friars 25, 26, 52, 98 Friuli 84, 96 Gaiano, Paolo 23, 24, 32–3, 70 Garzoni, Tomaso Piazza universale di tutti professioni del mondo 36, 93, 96 Gay, Peter 15 Geertz, Clifford 39 Germany 91, 125–6 Gherlandi, Giulio 58 Ginzburg, Carlo 67, 89 Giustiniani, Tommaso 53–4 Gonzaga, Lodovico 109 Gonzaga family 104, 109 Grabski, Józef 22 Gratian, Baltasar 28 Greenblatt, Stephen Renaissance Self-Fashioning 6, 7, 11, 12, 16 Grillando, Paolo 88 Guazzo, Francesco Maria 85, 90 Guazzo, Stefano 104 Civil conversazione 8, 34, 36, 39, 104–9, 122

Guerre, Martin 35 Guicciardini, Francesco 47–8, 52, 117 Guido, Desiderius 65–7 guilds 69, 76, 77, 78, 79 Harvey, David 127 healing and disease 83, 85–6, 90, 96, 98–9, 102 heart as center of moral being 104, 113–14, 115–17 proffered heart emblem 40, 103, 104, 116 Heemskerck, Maarten van 154n.4 heresy as internal beliefs 28–30 as a plague 24–6 social location of 22–7, 44–5, 60–1 typology of 41–3 see also Anabaptists; antitrinitarian beliefs; evangelism; millenarian heresies Hermeticism 37 hierarchies (social) and rituals 75–82, 88 see also elites Holbein, Hans, the younger 124 Holy Office of the Inquisition see Inquisition, Holy Office of Huguenots 27, 38 humanism 49, 89, 106, 107, 124, 154n.4 identities in Renaissance 13–14, 39, 84, 117, 130–1 religious identity 46–8, 60–1 social identity 17–18, 31, 36 see also self immigrants 23, 63, 68–9, 70, 71 individual as agent 116–22 as dissimilar to God 112–13 see also self individualism, history of concept 8–12 Inquisition, Holy Office of 54 confessions to 41–3, 56–9

184 Index Inquisition, Holy Office of continued Directorium inqvisitorium 24, 28, 32, 35–6, 89–90 and heresy 24, 25, 71–2, 95–6 in Modena 52 and possession 83 questioning by 1, 22–30, 56, 63, 66 Sacro Arsenale 22, 29–30, 90 and superstitious practice 62–7, 90 Venetian archives 7–8 and witchcraft 84, 88–90, 91, 95–6 interiority/inwardness 17–19, 46–8, 97–8, 102 inversion, rituals of 72–4, 75–6, 79, 80–1, 88 Jameson, Frederic 127 Javelet, Robert 111 Jedin, Hubert 143n.38 jewelers 21–2, 26–7, 40, 60, 71 Jews 35, 57 journeymen mercers 62–82 Junius, Hadrianus 154n.4 Kramer, Heinrich

38, 87, 95

Lacan, Jacques 127 Laureto di Buongiorno, Giovanni 57, 58 lawyers and notaries 33, 47, 71 Levack, Brian 87 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 150n.42 bricolage 80 Liguria 93 Lippi, Lorenzo 104 literature see books Lombard, Peter 12 Lombardy 92 Lotto, Lorenzo 21–2, 40, 50 Lucca 26, 73 Luther, Martin 38, 54, 112 and sincerity 113–14 Machiavelli, Niccolò 36, 49 Macrobius, Ambrosius 50 magic, spiritual 37–8 see also witchcraft Maistre, Joseph de 9 Malinowski, Bronislaw 136n.28

Malleus Malificarum (Hammer of Witches) 38, 87–8, 95 Manelfi, don Pietro 42, 57, 58 Mantua 52, 104 Marx, Karl 15 Masini, Eliseo Sacro Arsenale 22, 29–30, 90 Medici family 77 medicine see healing medieval ideas of self see under Middle Ages Melanchthon, Philip 115–16 Menghi, Girolamo 8, 92–100 mercers 69–71 ‘Feast of Fools’ among 62–82 merchants 35, 44, 59–61, 69, 76 Michelet, Jules 10 Middle Ages notions of self in 11–12, 48, 110–12 millenarian heresies 42, 43 Mirabino, Angelo 67 misfortune 85 Modena 23, 24, 32–3, 52, 88 Moeller, Bernd 45–6 monasticism 54, 56, 57, 59, 110–11 convents 38 see also Benedictines; Dominicans; Franciscans Monferrato 104, 106 Montaigne, Michel de 118–22 Essays 11, 15, 121, 122 on inward nature 15, 47, 116–17, 123–4 on witchcraft 89 Moravia 58, 59 Muir, Edward 77 myths of Renaissance individualism 124–30 social function of 12–13 Naples 57 nature (temperament) 120–1, 123 neo-Platonists 37, 111 see also Macrobius Nicodemites 35, 47, 55 nominalism 112 Nuñes, Enriques 35

Index 185 Obry, Nicole 38, 97 Ochino, Bernardino 43, 57 Ockham, William of 112 Ovid 102 Padua 42, 72–3 University of 41, 53 painting see artists Panofsky, Erwin 50 Parto, Girolamo 33 Pater, Walter 10 patricians 26, 34, 53–5 Patterson, Lee 11 Paul III, Pope 54 Paul IV, Pope (Gianpetro Carafa) 24, 25 Peña, Franciso 28, 29, 32, 35–6 performance dissimulation 28–30, 33–6, 47–8, 52–3, 119 of ritual 63, 74–82 see also under self Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 11, 46, 110 Piacenza 57 Piccolomini, Bartolomeo Carli 52, 55 plague (1575–77) 69 Polacco, Giorgio 92 Pole, Cardinal Reginald 107 Pomponazzi, Pietro 89 Pontano, Giovanni 49 Porri, Alessio 92 Portrait of a Goldsmith in Three Views (Lotto) 21–2, 23 portraiture 10, 21–2, 40, 50 possession 38, 83–102 postmodernism 127–30 and Renaissance individualism 5–7, 11, 12, 13, 127 and the self as subject 15–16, 130 see also Greenblatt, Stephen Priero, Silvestro de 94 printers 25 Priuli, Alvise 107 proferred heart, emblem of 40, 103–4, 105, 116 Protestantism intellectual revolution 112–17

Protestants 27, 35, 47, 52, 90–1 see also Calvinist ideas; evangelism; Huguenots; Luther, Martin prudence 48–53, 55, 119 see also under self publishing see books; printers Quirini, Vincenzo 53–4 Quondam, Amedeo 155n.7 Reggio Emilia 88 Reiss, Timothy J. 112 religious identities 46–8, 60–1 Ripa, Cesare Iconoglia 103, 105, 106 rituals exorcism 97–100 Feast of Fools 72–4 of healing 83, 97 of inversion 72–4, 75–6, 79, 80–1, 88 of journeymen mercers 63–74, 78–82 social significance of 74–82 state orchestration of 68, 77–8 Rodolfo, Pietro 65–6 Rome 93 Romeo, Giovanni 93, 95, 96 Rosa, Salvator 104 Rosello, Lucio Paolo 52 Ruggiero, Guido 38, 89 Sacks, Oliver 136n.40 Sadoleto, Cardinal Jacopo 24 Salutati, Coluccio 49 Sanseverina, Lady Catherina 41 Scaglia, Cardinal Desiderio 90 Schiaminossi, Raffaelo 103 Sega, Francesco della 58–9 self boundaries of 13–14, 18, 39–40, 84, 86, 97, 131 conforming or social 31–2, 36 consciousness of 18–19 definition 14 history of 40, 130–3 performative, role-playing 35–6, 70, 81, 121, 131 porous (see also under body) 37–8

186 Index self continued and possession 84–5, 97–8 prudential 32–5, 50–3, 55–7, 117, 131 relational 7, 14–17, 39, 46, 84–5, 100 sincere 38–9, 40, 107–8, 112–13 see also identity; interiority servants and workers 34, 45, 69–71, 76 Shakespeare, William Hamlet 8, 11, 18, 117 shipbuilders 31–2 Sicily 73 Siena 93 Simancas, Iacobo 28 sincerity 38–9, 40, 103–22 Guazzo and 104, 106–9 history of the term 109–10 iconography of 103–4 Montaigne and 119–122 and the Reformation 113–17 and the Renaissance 110 see also under self skin 39–40, 84, 86, 100–2 smiths 60, 77 soul 84 Sozzini, Fausto 43 speech and possession 97–8 and prudence 34–5, 49–50, 52 and sincerity 106, 107–8, 110–11, 114 Spiera, Francesco 33, 43, 47 Spina, Bartolomeo 88 spirits and demons 37–8, 92, 94 exorcism of 91–100 possession by 83–6, 98–100 Sprenger, Jakob 38, 87, 95 symbols, religious 65, 79, 80, 90, 98 Symonds, John Addington 10 Tannio, Roberto 67 Taylor, Charles 134n.7 theater, Renaissance 16, 36 courtroom as 35–6 exorcism as 97 Thomas, Keith 90–1 Thomas Aquinas, St. 12, 28, 49, 53

Tihl, Arnaud du 35 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) 50–2, 100–2 Allegory of Prudence 51 Flaying of Marsyas 101 Tizzano, Lorenzo 41–4, 56–7, 59 Tocqueville, Alexis de 9, 10, 124, 125 Toschi, Paolo 74 Trevisan, Giovanni 62, 67, 73–4 Treviso 22 Trilling, Lionel 109–10 Trissino, Alessandro 43–4 Turner, Victor 76, 79 Valdés, Juan de 41, 42, 107 Valeriano, Pierio 50 Valla, Lorenzo 49, 110 van Heemskerck, Maarten 154n.4 Vendramin, Pietro 65 Venezia, fra Marino da 26 Venice apostolic visit 63 Carnival in 71–2, 76–8 case of possession 38, 83 conforming self in 31–2 elites and patricians in 53–5, 68, 71, 76–8 Feast of Fools in 62–7 guilds in 69, 76, 77, 78, 79 heresy in 25–7, 33, 44–5 immigrants in 23, 26, 27, 32, 63, 68–9 Inquisition archives 7–8, 59–60 plague (1575–77) 69 sexuality in 53 Venier, Nicolò 67 Vergerio, Pier Paolo 33 Veronese, Paolo Burckhardt’s view of 4 Feast in the House of Levi 2 and Inquisition 1–4, 6–7 Vida, Marc Antonio 106–7, 108 Villafranca, Juan de 42 virtues 106 Visconti, Zaccaria 92 War of Cyprus 100 weavers 23, 26, 32–3, 52, 70

Index 187 Weissman, Ronald F. E. Weyer, Johannn 86 Winch, Peter 150n.10 witchcraft 66, 86–96 and exorcism 93–6 and madness 86

27–8

and misfortune 85, 150n.10 and porous self 38, 84 sabbats 88, 94, 96 workers and servants 34, 45, 69–71, 76 Wyatt, Thomas 47

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