Sulle tracce dell’eresia: Ambrogio Catarino Politi (1484–1553) (review)

Giorgio Caravale has completely reconsidered the life and work of Ambrogio Catarino, hitherto known as an unstoppable hunter of sixteenth-century Protestant heretics. The revisionist portrait Caravale has drawn should be read carefully by all students of the era. Some of his reasoning may be challenged, but all will agree that Caravale has admirably breathed genuine life—with its necessary contradictions—into a person too often left as a cardboard caricature usually propped up in standard assessments of early-modern Italy.

Caravale reviews Catarino’s life, his career as a theologian and as a member of the Dominican order, and his numerous polemical treatises, all to challenge the typical portrayal of Catarino as the anti-hero in stories of the spirituali. The Sienese Dominican may have written vicious anti-Lutheran tracts and believed that obedience to ecclesiastical hierarchy was the principal remedy to the spread of heresy, but as Caravale shows us, his polemics were mixed with pastoral as well as theological concerns, and he engaged in discussions with noted spirituali like Vittoria Colonna and Gasparo Contarini. He was apparently mystified by the attraction of Lutheran thought, as he considered it completely empty, but in some places Catarino expressed views identical with Protestant fellow-travelers like Bernardino Ochino. Catarino held that contemporary clerical corruption and societal moral degeneration were sharp weapons placed in the hands of enemies of Rome by the Church itself. He was also a key contributor to debates at Trent on justification, and Caravale writes here glowingly of the Dominican’s innovative two-stage notion, simultaneously rejecting the Lutheran position—at least as he understood it—that believers needed to do nothing after first justification in baptism. For Caravale, Catarino thus demonstrated independent judgment and freedom of thought.

Catarino’s independence was not complete, however, according to Caravale, who saw Marcello Cervini—a figure who retains cardboard depth in this study—inspiring several of Catarino’s nastier polemics. Caravale used the fact that Ludovico Beccadelli worked for Cervini and informed him regarding certain matters, like Ochino’s activity in Switzerland and the reception of the text Il beneficio di Cristo in Reggio Emilia, to make some huge logical leaps. He used these to surmise that Cervini probably commissioned and/or inspired the content of Catarino’s Trattato della giustificazione attacking Ochino’s preaching in Geneva. Caravale also places Cervini behind Catarino’s Compendio attacking the theology in Il beneficio. These amplify suggestions made by Dario Marcatto in 1996, but are no more convincing now than they were twelve years ago. Given the friendship between Cervini and Catarino, the suggestions are certainly plausible, but characterizing them as “probable” simply is not warranted. Should some evidence emerge confirming the plausible to be true, historians will then have a deeper contradiction to explain: why Reginald Pole was elated at the papal election of Cervini in 1555.

In the end, what Caravale concludes about Catarino and the inadequacy of thinking of him as an antihero is properly consistent with the revision of sixteenth-century Italian church history begun by Giuseppe Alberigo, Paul Grendler, Adriano Prosperi, and Eric Cochrane, now carried on by Thomas Mayer, Paul Murphy, and others. But Caravale ends with a cute paradox that just does not work. He indicates that this “different memory” of a Catholic controversialist was “destined to be retained and cultivated only outside the confines of Roman orthodoxy” (p. 305).This assertion must have Cochrane—a former president of the American Catholic Historical Association—spinning in the good Tuscan soil in which he is buried. For the “different memory” is not just of Catarino, and it is profoundly tied to historical analysis pursued by historians both inside and outside that Roman orthodoxy. In fact, if a quarrel over the memory did not begin between individuals explicitly and implicitly standing on one and the other side of those confines, historical...