Preaching and Inquisition in Renaissance Italy. Words on Trial by Giorgio Caravale (review)

This is the story of Ippolito Chizzola of Brescia (early 1520s–1565). He became a Lateran Canon Regular at the age of twelve, then became a well-known preacher by his late twenties. But he preached heresy by means of carefully chosen words, hints, implications, and omissions. Summoned to Rome, he began to testify before the Congregation of the Holy Office in July 1549. Under questioning Chizzola equivocated on confession, the Eucharist, and other Catholic doctrines. On July 1, 1550, the Holy Office ordered him to make the abjuration of someone under strong suspicion of heresy. It sentenced him to return to Venice to read the text of abjuration publicly, then to preach sermons admitting his guilt in the same churches in which he had preached heresy in early 1549. After that, he returned to Rome where he lived in a Lateran Canons Regular convent. Then in the early 1560s he became "a zealous Catholic controversalist," who wrote works answering and refuting one of the chief Italian Protestant exile polemicists, Pier Paolo Vergerio. Chizzola also became a Roman informer for Duke Cosimo I de' Medici of Florence, and Chizzola relayed news of papal diplomatic maneuvering and other political and religious matters. Chizzola also tried to influence popes and key cardinals, with little success. Then he suddenly died in 1565. It is an interesting story well told by Caravale. An appendix prints the Italian and Latin transcription of Chizzola's inquisition trial plus an English translation. The English edition surprisingly does not give the provenance of the trial document, a manuscript that Caravale found in the Biblioteca Queriniana in Brescia.

The book was originally published in Italian in 2012; spot checking indicates that the translation is very accurate. However, one wishes that the translator had divided paragraphs as much as four pages long into multiple paragraphs. The Italian edition also included fifty-four letters by and to Chizzola; they are omitted here. While interesting, they are less important than the trial document. Caravale deserves full credit for always giving the original Italian in the notes for translations in the text and for quite thorough documentation. There are two historical slips. Girolamo Savonarola was not burnt at the stake (p. 2); he was hanged and his body burnt. And relying on an old secondary source, Caravale states that Pietro Pomponazzi taught Greek to Celso Martinengo, who influenced Chizzola and later fled to Protestant Europe, at Ferrara (p. 56). However, Pomponazzi (1462–1525) was not known as a Greek scholar; he taught natural philosophy at the University of Ferrara between 1509 and 1512, and Martinengo was not born until 1515.

Overall this is a good book that tells an interesting story that advances our knowledge of the complex religious situation in the middle of the sixteenth century.