religious life 413
religious culture, whose 16th-century origins lay precisely in the spread
and repression of Protestant ideas. After a phase characterized at the
beginning of the 17th century by the multiplication of magical practices
and phenomena of witchcraft, the new century witnessed the spread—
particularly among those involved in printing and bookselling—of a cau-
tious skepticism, and it heard the uttering of professions of impiety which
provided a counterweight to the intense, traditional religious practices
and the new forms of devotion promoted after the Council of Trent. These
phenomena were superficial, however, occasional, and of short duration:
fleeting infractions of ecclesiastical discipline which none of the protago-
nists of such episodes truly intended to challenge.85 A significant clue to
the superficial character of this nonconformity was that, at no time in the
entire 17th century did the Venetian Holy office hand over to the secular
arm (equivalent to a death sentence) a single one of those it prosecuted.
But not all veins of religiously corrosive discourse were limited to con-
versations with the barber, the hatter, or the bookseller who sold pro-
hibited books under and, sometimes, over the table. in the 17th and 18th
centuries, Venice experienced forms of libertinism that were more pugna-
cious and systematic and which had ramifications in the broader euro-
pean culture. These thinkers, whom historians like edward Muir consider
precursors to the enlightenment,86 had three main centers of aggregation:
the challenge to spanish-Papal hegemony linked to the figure of ferrante
Pallavicino, the theory of the political imposture of religions, and the new
localization of sexuality in individual and social life.
in the case of ferrante Pallavicino (1615–44), who was born in Piacenza
and took his monastic vows in Milan (he was a lateran Canon), a long
residence in the Venetian Republic helped breed a disorderly and impul-
sive talent. His visceral and volcanic pen was born out of the stimulus
of contemporary politics and responded to the author’s need to find a
place in the spotlight of current events, in other words, he wrote from
an instinct of self-promotion rather than from a real intent to influence
the course of those events. After a first work which won him favor, at
age 19, with the Venetian senate (a piece which exalted the state which
was hosting him)87 and a series of novellas and novels of frequently erotic
85 spini, Ricerca dei libertini; Barbierato, Politici e ateisti.
86 Muir, Culture Wars, p. 3. giorgio spini expresses the same judgment in Ricerca dei
libertini.
87 ferrante Pallavicino, Il Sole ne’ pianeti, cioè le grandezze della Serenissima Republica
di Venetia (Padua, 1635).