Profezie di riforma e idee di concordia religiosa: Visioni e speranze dell’esule piemontese Giovanni Leonardo Sartori (review)

Specialists in Sabaudian institutional history know of Giovanni Leonardo Sartori, a ducal secretary from Chieri and treasurer of the county of Asti during the early-sixteenth century, last mentioned in bureaucratic records from 1541. Historians of heterodox sixteenth-century Italian religious figures are familiar with Johannis Leonis Nardi (sometimes also referred to as Sertorius or Sartorius), a visionary who, in the early 1550s, opposed coercive, institutionalized religion and sought to inaugurate a new age of a universal, invisible church. Lucia Felici, a historian of the Italian Reformation, argues (against Delio Cantimori) that these two individuals were the same person. Strangely, although this discovery appears to be the central contribution of this book, Felici buries the evidence for it in a footnote on page 252, which cites a chronicle entry by the Bernese theologian Johannes Haller: in 1554 “Joannes Leo Nardus, der sich auch Mosen secundum nampt, was vorzejten ein secretarius dess fürsten von Saphoij,” visited the city. Eight pages later, a second piece of evidence from Strasbourg city council records makes a similar identification. This evidence appears to seal Felici’s argument, but it is frustrating for the reader not to learn about it earlier and to have to take for granted the identification of Sartori and Nardi until the final twenty pages of the text. This finding also could have been more forcefully exploited for its relevance to Sartori’s thought (beyond the notion that Sartori opposed social disorder), or to the intellectual development of heterodox thinkers generally. How many radical Reformers were there who had begun their careers as state officials, and how did this affect their religious positions? Exploring these questions could have enlivened debates in Italian religious history of the early sixteenth-century.

Despite these missed opportunities, Felici offers an interesting study of Sartori’s life and ideas. After retiring from ducal service, Sartori returned to Chieri, where he likely encountered Reformed preaching, and then crossed the Alps to Geneva in late 1550 or early 1551. Thence he traveled to England, Flanders, back to Geneva, Lausanne, Basel, Berne, Zürich, Strasbourg, and Stuttgart, claiming to have been appointed by God to spread a message of universal religious concord. This message was articulated in a series of texts: the Tabularum duarum legis evangelicae, gratiae, spiritus et vitae libri quinque (Basel, 1553), the Revelationes factae Iohanni Leonis Nardi (1554, a set of manuscripts in the Zürich state archives), and others that were lost. Along with a portion of the Tabularum, part of the Revelationes was published for the first time as an appendix to this book (the only citation to the text’s archival location is in a footnote on p. 217). For Sartori, being filled with the Holy Spirit was crucial for Christians, who together composed the true church, independent of any organized ecclesial structure (which was a mark of the antichrist). In contrast to many radical Reformers, Sartori affirmed Trinitarian doctrine and believed that a correct reading of the Koran and the Old Testament pointed to Christ’s position in the Godhead. For all believers, outward (although nonformulaic) behavior was the crucial sign of one’s spiritual position: Sartori did not believe that everyone would be saved. He was eventually captured on Sabaudian territory and, while his heresy trial was being prepared, died in prison in 1556.

Felici wants to counterbalance a historiographic emphasis on social disciplining and confessionalization, seeing Sartori as a resister of discipline whose nonconformity could be related to Enlightenment Deism. However, Sartori’s radical individualizing of spirituality might be viewed as a necessary complement to the well-documented process of bodily disciplining in early-modern Europe.