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Department of History

Popular religion and Catholic reform

Seminar Tutor

Luca Molà

Site Visit

There is no site visit this week. The seminar will be at the Querini Stampalia.

Seminar Questions

  • What were the most distinctive aspects of popular religion in Renaissance Venice?
  • Why was blasphemy considered so threatening in Renaissance Venice?
  • To what degree did reformist religious ideas penetrate the city in the sixteenth century?
  • Discuss the impact of the Inquisition in sixteenth-century Venice.
  • How did Catholic reform change Venetian culture?

Key Texts

Further Reading

  • Bizzocchi, Roberto, ‘Church, Religion, and State in the Early Modern Period’, The Journal of Modern History 67, Supplement: The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300-1600 (1995), S152-65. JSTOR
  • Black, C.F., Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989). War.
  • Bowd, Stephen D., Reform Before the Reformation: Vincenzo Querini and the Religious Renaissance in Italy (Leiden, 2002)
  • Cairns, Christopher, Domenico Bollani, Bishop of Brescia: Devotion to Church and State in the Republic of Venice in the Sixteenth Century (Nieuwkoop, 1976) War.
  • Chavasse, Ruth, ‘Latin Lay Piety and Vernacular Lay Piety in Word and Image: Venice, 1471-Early-1500s’, Renaissance Studies 10.3 (1996), 319–42.
  • Cocke, Richard, Paolo Veronese: Piety and Display in an Age of Religious Reform (Aldershot, 2001)
  • D'Andrea, David, 'Charity and Confraternities', in Dursteler (ed.), A Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797 (Leiden, 2013), pp.421-48.
  • Davidson, Nicholas, ‘The Clergy of Venice in the Sixteenth Century’, Bulletin of the Society of Renaissance Studies 2 (1984), 19-31.
  • Delph, Ronald K., ‘From Venetian Visitor to Curial Humanist: The Development of Agostino Steuco's “Counter”-Reformation Thought’, Renaissance Quarterly 47.1 (1994), 102-39. JSTOR
  • Donnelly, J.P. and Michael Maher (eds), Confraternities & Catholic reform in Italy, France, & Spain (Kirksville, MO, 1999)
  • Fragnito, Gigliola, Gasparo Contarini: un magistrato veneziano al servizio della Christianità (Florence, 1988)
  • Gilbert, F., ‘Religion and Politics in the Thought of Gasparo Contarini’, in Action and Conviction In Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of E.H. Harbison (Princeton, 1969). War. (xerox)
  • Gleason, E., ‘On the nature of sixteenth-century Italian evangelism: scholarship 1953-78’, Sixteenth Century Journal 9.3 (1978), 3-26. JSTOR
  • Gleason, Elisabeth G., Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and Reform (Berkeley 1993)
  • Goffen, Rona, Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice: Bellini, Titian, and the Franciscans (New Haven, 1986)
  • Grubb, James S., Provincial Families of the Renaissance: Private and Public Life in the Veneto (Baltimore, 1996)
  • Gullino, Giuseppe, (ed.), La Chiesa di Venezia tra Riforma protestante e Riforma cattolica (Venice, 1990) War.
  • Hudon, William V., ‘Religion and Society in Early Modern Italy - Old Questions, New Insights’, American Historical Review 101 (1996), 783-804. JSTOR
  • Humfrey, Peter, ‘Competitive Devotions: The Venetian Scuole Piccole as Donors of Altarpieces in the Years around 1500’, The Art Bulletin 70.3 (1988), 401-23. JSTOR
  • Humfrey, Peter, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, 1993)
  • Logan, O., ‘The idea of the bishop and the Venetian patriciate, 1430-1630’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (1978). War. (xerox)
  • Lowe, K.J.P, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture: Women and History Writing in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (Cambridge, 2003).
  • Mackenney, R., ‘Devotional confraternities in Renaissance Venice’, in W.J. Sheils and D. Wood (eds.), Voluntary Religion (Oxford, 1986). (Studies in Church History, 23). War.
  • MacKenney, Richard, ’The Scuole Piccole of Venice: Formations and Transformations’, in The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 172-189.
  • MacKenney, Richard, Venice as the polity of mercy: guilds, confraternities, and the social order, c. 1250-c. 1650 (Toronto, 2019), especially Chapters 5 and 6. E-book.
  • Martin, John Jeffries, ‘Out of the Shadow: Heretical and Catholic Women in Renaissance Venice’, Journal of Family History 10 (1985), 21-33.
  • Martin, John Jeffries, ‘Spiritual Journeys and the Fashioning of Religious Identity in Renaissance Venice’, Renaissance Studies 10.3 (1996), 358–70.
  • Martin, John Jeffries, Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berkeley, 1993)
  • Martin, John Jeffries, 'Religion, renewal, and reform in the sixteenth century', in J. A. Marino (ed.), Early Modern Italy (Oxford, 2002), pp. 30-50.
  • Morse, Margaret A., ‘Creating sacred space: the religious visual culture of the Renaissance Venetian casa’, Renaissance Studies 21.2 (2007), 151–84. Blackwell
  • Peterson, David S., ‘Out of the Margins: Religion and the Church in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000), 835-79. JSTOR
  • Piasentini, Stefano, 'Indagine sulla bestemmia nel Venezia del Cinquecento', Studi storici 40 (1999), 471-549.
  • Pullan, Brian S., Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: the Social Institutions of a Catholic State to 1620 . War.
  • Romano, Dennis, ‘Charity and Community in Early Renaissance Venice’, Journal of Urban History 11 (1984), 63-81.
  • Schutte, A., Pier Paolo Vergerio: The Making of an Italian Reformer (Geneva, 1977).
  • Schutte, A., 'Religion, spirituality and the post-Tridentine Church', in J. A. Marino (ed.), Early Modern Italy (Oxford, 2002), pp. 125-42.
  • Simoncelli, P., ‘Pietro Bembo e l’evangelismo italiano’, Critica Storica 15 (1978).
  • Trolese, F.G., (ed.) Riforma della Chiesa, cultura e spiritualità nel Quattrocento veneto (Cesena, 1984)
  • Viani, Giovanni, (ed.), La chiesa di Venezia tra medioevo ed età moderna (Venice, 1989) War.
  • Waddington, Raymond B., ‘Pietro Aretino, religious writer’, Renaissance Studies 20.3 (2006), 277–92. Blackwell

E-Resources