Protest, Dissent and Activism: Experiences and Interpretations of Non-Conformity in Early Modern Italy

Just published: Daniele Santarelli, Protest, Dissent and Activism: Experiences and Interpretations of Non-Conformity in Early Modern Italy (Scienze e Lettere, 2026).
For further information: http://www.scienzeelettere.it/book/50497.html

In early modern Italy, protest, dissent and activism almost inevitably took the form of religious deviation. Heresy, rebellion, prophecy, and reform were not separate phenomena, but different expressions of the same underlying tension: the struggle between authority and conscience. This book traces this long and fragmented history through a series of individual lives, episodes, contexts, and experiences. From itinerant friars to persecuted humanists, from dissident noblewomen to prophetic women and accused witches, from physicians and scientists whose activities exposed them to suspicion to jurists who transformed law from an instrument of discipline into a language of freedom, and from rebellious communities to radical heresies: this volume explores how religion functioned both as a tool of repression and as the most powerful medium of resistance. Accusations of heresy served to neutralize social conflict, delegitimize political opposition, and enforce obedience; yet the same label also opened spaces in which men and women could articulate demands for justice, autonomy, and dignity. Rather than offering a systematic theory, this volume presents a narrative reflection grounded in documentary traces, trials, banned books, sermons, and silenced voices. Its protagonists are not idealized heroes but often contradictory and fragile figures, whose gestures of non-conformity reveal the deep roots of freedom of conscience in Italian and European history. Moving from the age of the Counter-Reformation and the Inquisition to the threshold of political modernity, the book shows how dissent survives defeat by changing form—circulating underground, re-emerging in new languages, and reminding us that freedom is never granted, but continuously negotiated.

Table of Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 - The Religion of Dissent

Fleeing Friars and Preachers
Persecuted Humanists and Intellectuals
Science and Faith under Attack
Giordano Bruno: Infinite Dissent
Isolated Communities and Persecuted Women
Radical Heresy: from Servetus to the Anabaptists and Socinians
The Many Faces of Dissent

CHAPTER 2 - The Shifting Boundary between Heresy and Rebellion

The Power of Faith and Faith in Power
Popular Uprisings and Tax Resistance
Cities and Territories of Dissent
Heretical Jurists between Law and Religion
Tommaso Campanella: Utopia, Religion, and Subversion
Pietro Giannone: a New Path of Dissent
Heresy, Rebellion, Politics: a Karstic Thread in Early Modern Italy

CHAPTER 3 - Women and Dissent: the Neapolitan Case

Naples: a Laboratory of Dissent
Female Mediation and Spiritual Networks in the Valdesian Circle
Prophetesses and Mystics
Popular Religion and Institutional Control
Naples as a Mirror of Europe
A Lasting Laboratory
Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel

CHAPTER 4 - Dissent, Conscience, and Freedom

A Broken but Persistent Thread
Past and Present

Bibliography