Seventeenth-Century Italy and English Radical Movements

Villani’s essay examines some of the many seventeenth-century Italian accounts on the political activity and ideas of the contemporary English radical political movements to understand how these ideas and activity were perceived in such a different cultural, religious, and political context. The concept of “radical,” both in the theological and political sphere, has a very different meaning for Italian culture in the late 1600s than it did in England. For an Italian culture, where there was already uneasiness in defining the Church of England, the sectarian world of seventeenth-century English radicalism was substantially incomprehensible. Italy was astonished by the proliferation of the sects that emerged in England in the second half of 1640s. Notwithstanding, it is significant that this topic was very rarely treated in the many seventeenth-century historical narrations of the Civil War and Interregnum that were published in those years. It is significant to note that more or less reliable accounts on the religious debates of those years are found almost exclusively in travel reports and in monographs on England in which the historical aspects have only a secondary importance. Likewise it is interesting to note that these works deliberately emphasize the more outlandish aspects of the English sectarian world. The opinions of the English religious groups of the Seventeenth Century are taken as so manifestly bizarre in order to provoke astonishment rather than genuine interest and very often only described in order to provide an “exotic” accent to the travel narrations. From the theological point of view the sects represented more or less only the perverse effect of the separation from Rome and of freedom of conscience for the Italians who wrote about the religious debates in England.