Throughout history, prophetic voices have bolstered the struggle for social and political emancipation. Such voices have given meaning to suffering, spoken with pathos and anger to touch passions, and set into motion the moral imagination guiding efforts toward redemption. This book provides the visions of social emancipation we need.

During the Counter-Reformation, inquisition manual authors working in Italian lands adapted the Catholic Church's traditional tactics of inquisitorial procedure, which had been formulated in the medieval period, to the prosecution of philo-Protestants. Through a comparison of the texts of four such authors to contemporary inquisition processes, Jane K. Wickersham situates the Roman inquisition's prosecution of philo-Protestants within the larger framework of the complex religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. Identifying the critical role played by ritual practice in discovering and prosecuting heretical subjects, Wickersham uncovers two core reasons for its use: first, as a practical means of prosecuting a variety of philo-Protestant beliefs, and second, as an approach firmly grounded within the Catholic Church's history of prosecuting heresy. Finally, Rituals of Prosecution provides an in-depth examination of the inquisitorial processes of urban residents from humble socio-economic backgrounds, providing new insight into how the prosecution of ordinary people was conducted in the early modern era.

Saint Birgitta of Sweden (d. 1373), one of the most famous visionary women of the late Middle Ages, lived in Rome for the last 23 years of her life. Much of her extensive literary work was penned there. Her Celestial Revelations circulated widely from the late 14th century to the 17th century, copied in Italian scriptoria, translated into vernacular, and printed in several Latin and Italian editions. In the same centuries, an extraordinary number of women writers across the peninsula were publishing their work. What echoes might we find of the foreign widow’s prophetic voice in their texts? This volume offers innovative investigations, written by an interdisciplinary group of experts, of the profound impact of Birgitta of Sweden in Renaissance Italy. Contributors include: Brian Richardson, Jane Tylus, Isabella Gagliardi, Clara Stella, Marco Faini, Jessica Goethals, Anna Wainwright, Eleonora Cappuccilli, Eleonora Carinci, Virginia Cox, Unn Falkeid, and Silvia Nocentini.

Leading scholars from Italy and the United States offer a fresh and nuanced image of the religious reform movements on the Italian peninsula in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. United in their conviction that religious ideas can only be fully understood in relation to the particular social, cultural, and political contexts in which they develop, these scholars explore a wide range of protagonists from popes, bishops, and inquisitors to humanists and merchants, to artists, jewelers, and nuns. What emerges is a story of negotiations, mediations, compromises, and of shifting boundaries between heresy and orthodoxy. This book is essential reading for all students of the history of Christianity in early modern Europe.

The idea that the Renaissance witnessed the emergence of the modern individual remains a powerful myth. In this important new book Martin examines the Renaissance self with attention to both social history and literary theory and offers a new typology of Renaissance selfhood which was at once collective, performative and porous. At the same time, he stresses the layered qualities of the Renaissance self and the salient role of interiority and notions of inwardness in the shaping of identity. Myths of Renaissance Individualism , in short, will interest students not only of history but also of art history, literature, music, philosophy, psychology and religion.

Vittoria Colonna (1490-1547) was the genre-defining secular woman writer of Renaissance Italy, whose literary model helped to establish a decorous and wholly assimilated voice for women within the field of Italian literature. The Companion to Vittoria Colonna brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of leading scholars to assess Colonna’s contribution, both as a writer, a role model, and a contributor to important religious debates of the era. This book, while amply fulfilling the remit of providing a useful and comprehensive handbook to meet the needs of students and scholars at earlier and advanced levels, aims in addition to do more than this, by drawing into a single volume for the first time scholarship from across disciplines in which Vittoria Colonna’s influence has been felt, including literary criticism, religious history, history of art and music. Contributors are: Abigail Brundin, Stephen Bowd, Emidio Campi, Eleonora Carinci, Adriana Chemello, Virginia Cox, Tatiana Crivelli, Maria Forcellino, Gaudenz Freuler, Anne Piéjus, Diana Robin, Helena Sanson, and Maria Serena Sapegno.