On the books by Girolamo Imbruglia, Utopia. Una storia politica da Savonarola a Babeuf, Carocci, Roma 2021, 204 pp., Lucia Felici, Girolamo Imbruglia, La tolleranza in età moderna. Idee, conflitti, protagonisti (secoli XVI-XVIII), Carocci, Roma 2024, 336 pp., Lucia Felici, Girolamo Imbruglia, A Cultural History of Tolerance. Ideas, Conflicts, and Protagonists, Routledge, Abington-New York 2026, 262 pp.
Within the space of just three years, Girolamo Imbruglia has published two books with Carocci which, despite their different titles, cover largely overlapping ground. Utopia reconstructs the changing conceptions of the ideal society from Savonarolan prophetism to the French Revolution; La tolleranza in età moderna, co-authored with Lucia Felici, examines the history of religious toleration and its relationship to the emergence of sovereignty and political liberty. The second book has since appeared in an English edition, recently published by Routledge, which reorganises and further develops its treatment of the subject. The sequence is revealing: the subjects multiply, while the paradigm intended to explain them displays remarkable stability. In other words, with Imbruglia the titles change and the range of topics expands, but the same questions, the same interpretative categories and often the same protagonists invariably return. The question is whether this proliferation of publications corresponds to any substantive advance in historiographical thinking or, more simply, to the continual restatement of interpretations formulated earlier; above all, it is how far the overall findings can genuinely be considered original.
At the centre of these latest publications, issued by Carocci and Routledge, lies the relationship between religion and politics in early modern Europe. Montaigne, Bodin, Spinoza, Locke and Montesquieu recur; so do community, civil religion, sovereignty and secularisation. Utopia and toleration become two vantage points from which to reconstruct the transformation of the ways in which power was legitimised and the emergence of political modernity. The undertaking has a discernible ambition. Less discernible, in the material examined here, is the interpretative gain achieved by moving from one subject to the other.
At the centre of these latest publications, issued by Carocci and Routledge, lies the relationship between religion and politics in early modern Europe. Montaigne, Bodin, Spinoza, Locke and Montesquieu recur; so do community, civil religion, sovereignty and secularisation. Utopia and toleration become two vantage points from which to reconstruct the transformation of the ways in which power was legitimised and the emergence of political modernity. The undertaking has a discernible ambition. Less discernible, in the material examined here, is the interpretative gain achieved by moving from one subject to the other.
A scholar may devote an entire lifetime to the same questions. Continuity of interest is no indictment, and synthesis is not an inferior form of historical scholarship. But each new account must be able to show what it changes: a hypothesis, a hierarchy of causes, the meaning of a category, or the understanding of a conflict. Familiarity with a subject does not certify the originality of every subsequent book devoted to it. Nor does chronological breadth, in itself, bridge the distance between identifying a problem and explaining it.
It is precisely this distance that calls for examination. Identifying important historiographical questions is the starting point of an investigation; it becomes too easy a conclusion when those questions are linked within a framework sufficiently elastic to accommodate almost everything without itself having to change. An interpretative construction gains strength when it encounters genuine difficulties and manages to account for them. If it chiefly recognises what it was already predisposed to recognise, its coherence may become a respectable name for its immobility.
In this respect, Girolamo Imbruglia’s intellectual universe has a reassuring order. New publications find their place within relationships that are already familiar; what their arrival forces us to reconsider is less apparent. The paradigm’s capacity to accommodate them thus seems to provide, above all, another opportunity for self-confirmation.
In Utopia, Imbruglia proposes to remove the subject from an overwhelmingly literary history and to acknowledge its essential role in the formulation of projects for political and social transformation. His decision to begin with Savonarola rather than Thomas More follows from this approach. The failure of Savonarola’s government becomes the pivotal event around which the different responses of Machiavelli and More to the crisis in relations between religion and politics are situated. The account then traverses the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reaching the transformations of the Enlightenment and the revolutionary attempt to bring a radically different order into being.
The programme is clear. Its explanatory power is considerably less so. The category of utopia ought to make it possible to distinguish between imagining an alternative society, criticising the existing order, designing institutions, religious expectation and political action. These forms may intersect, but their intersection is precisely what needs to be reconstructed. Subsumming them under a common aspiration to transform society risks erasing the problem at the very moment one claims to have solved it.
Bringing together Savonarola, Machiavelli, More, Campanella, Spinoza and Montesquieu does not, in itself, demonstrate the existence of a single historical trajectory. For such a trajectory to have historical meaning, one must specify what was transmitted, what was transformed, what was contested and what is identified only through the interpreter’s retrospective gaze. Otherwise, the succession of great names substitutes for demonstration: the order of presentation suggests a connection which the analysis should instead render verifiable. From this standpoint, the links among the various protagonists remain largely external. The reader sees the names succeed one another but is given no equally precise criteria for distinguishing actual transmission from resemblance constructed by the interpreter.
The danger is that the category becomes progressively inflated. If everything that imagines a different organisation of collective life counts as utopian, much of political thought can be absorbed into the history of utopia. Yet a category that encompasses almost everything becomes increasingly unable to discriminate. Its expository success then coincides with its analytical weakening: it makes it possible to traverse numerous texts at the cost of obscuring why those texts should belong to the same history.
A general synthesis must also explain its own boundaries. The criterion by which More is brought into relation with a proposal for reform, a religious community or a theory of sovereignty must also apply to cases that complicate the comparison. Selecting favourable examples and arranging them along a coherent trajectory may produce an elegant narrative. The value of an explanation, however, is also measured where the evidence resists it: where a project for an ideal society reinforces coercion, where religion sustains a claim to freedom, or where reform proceeds without any utopian horizon.
The proposed periodisation compounds these difficulties. The sixteenth century of utopia in imaginary space, the seventeenth century of ideal society in the present and of theocracy, and the eighteenth century of secularisation and projection into the future form an orderly sequence, easy to follow. But history does not acquire the same neatness simply because it is divided into three centuries. Projects for the practical realisation of communities already existed in the sixteenth century; fiction, prophecy, institutional experimentation and expectations of the future continued to overlap in subsequent centuries.
The Anabaptists and other experiments in religious and social transformation prevent the sixteenth century from being identified solely with imaginary space; likewise, the persistence of literary construction and prophetic languages prevents the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from being assigned strictly distinct functions. The book does consider experiences that complicate the scheme: the question is how far those experiences affect its explanatory value. A periodisation can accommodate many exceptions. But if exceptions remain exceptions regardless of their weight, the model is being protected rather than tested. The division by centuries thus retains its expository convenience even as it loses historical precision. It is a way of organising material, whose usefulness does not yet establish the fruitfulness of the interpretation.
The same issue arises in the relationship between prophecy and utopia. Assigning the failure of Savonarola in 1498 a decisive role in the response formulated by More is a hypothesis that requires the nature of the connection to be specified. Documentable reception, a conscious response, an analogy between experiences and retrospective reconstruction do not possess the same evidentiary value. Distinguishing them becomes all the more necessary when a particular case is made to sustain a general interpretation of the transition from prophecy to utopia.
Prophetism, millenarianism and expectations of renewal continued, in fact, to interact with political culture long after Savonarola was burned at the stake. Campanella, who also figures in Imbruglia’s reconstruction, shows how prophecy and plans for the organisation of society could still nourish one another. This does not automatically refute a thesis about More. It does, however, prevent that thesis from being transferred, without further argument, into a general sequence in which one mode of anticipating the future gives way to another. The historical problem lies in the combinations, appropriations and transformations of languages, not in the neatness of their arrangement.
Matteo Marcheschi has called for reconsideration of the conclusions on pp. 9–10 of Utopia, drawing attention to the different temporal assumptions underlying prophecy and utopia (Matteo Marcheschi, Primum in orbe deos fecit tempus? Una nota sulla storiografia e i regimi di storicità nella filosofia dei Lumi, in «Lo Sguardo. Rivista di filosofia», 37, 2023, pp. 249–271, especially p. 260, n. 41). His observation is limited in scope but touches on an essential issue: the relationship between the interpreter’s categories and the historical actors’ experience of time.
An evocative rupture may guide interpretation; it does not thereby explain the transformations it purports to organise. To demonstrate the predominance of one political form over another, it is necessary to clarify where, for whom and through which mediations that predominance emerged. The failure of one experiment and the appearance of a later work are insufficient to turn their juxtaposition into a convincing genealogy. Intellectual history remains history only so long as it takes these intermediate steps seriously.
The heading Machiavelli e la politica senza cristianesimo also deserves scrutiny, but without inventing a spurious objection. The phrase does not imply the absence of religion, and it would be improper to attribute such a meaning to it. The question concerns the specific contribution it makes in relation to a scholarly tradition that has long examined the autonomy of politics, Machiavelli’s judgement of Christianity and the civic function of beliefs. In the Discorsi, religion remains an essential factor in the constitution and preservation of political order. The relationship between these dimensions demands a more precise analysis than any broad opposition can promise.
The autonomy of politics is a central finding of Machiavellian scholarship, not a result that becomes new by being incorporated into a history of utopia. To derive an advance from it, one must show what problem the new setting resolves, what relationship it brings to light and what interpretation it forces us to revise. Simply relocating an established thesis within a broader framework may increase its visibility; it does not automatically increase its substance. Here the critical findings appear slight: the autonomy of politics and the civic function of religion are brought within the framework of utopia, while it remains unclear what problem in the interpretation of Machiavelli this framing helps to resolve. The repositioning of the thesis thus stands in for an advance in analysis.
The limitations of the selection are more directly documented in the reception of Utopia. Carlo Capra notes the underestimation of Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque, the French-centred character of the treatment of the eighteenth century, which sidelines British and German traditions, and the mere dozen pages devoted to the French Revolution (Carlo Capra, review of Utopia. Una storia politica da Savonarola a Babeuf, in «Società e storia», 174, 2021, pp. 846–849). These criticisms concern the construction of the explanation, not the impossible demand to mention every author.
The compression of the revolutionary period is particularly telling. The book moves towards a juncture at which projects ought to be tested against action, conflict and the organisation of power. Yet it is precisely this juncture that receives very limited attention. This weakens the test of the original promise: a political history of utopia ought to linger where it becomes most difficult to distinguish theory, programme, mobilisation and governmental practice. The narrative destination cannot dispense with an analysis of the path by which it was reached. The synthesis thus risks becoming no more than a textbook account at its decisive point: it arrives at the revolutionary outcome but devotes too little space to determining how the utopian promise was translated, transformed or contradicted in the exercise of power.
The French-centred perspective raises a similar problem. A scholar’s research interests are a legitimate criterion for selecting the subject matter of their work; they do not establish the historical centrality of what that scholar knows best. A European history must justify its hierarchies through comparison between different traditions, even when such comparisons undermine the unity of the narrative. Otherwise, Europe tends to coincide with the territory most thoroughly explored by the author. Bibliographical familiarity is elevated into a measure of historical representativeness.
In a generally favourable review, Maria Matilde Benzoni observes that the extensive chronological scope sometimes encourages description at the expense of historiographical analysis and the interweaving of events and ideas. She also points to the need for more organic integration of Atlantic, global and intercultural perspectives, not least to overcome residual exoticisation of otherness. Among her examples are the reception of More’s Utopia in Spanish America and the experience of Vasco de Quiroga (Maria Matilde Benzoni, Utopia. Una storia politica da Savonarola a Babeuf, in «Cromohs», 25, 2022, pp. 219–222, published online in 2023).
This observation touches on an issue that another list of authors would not resolve. A political history must also explain what happened to texts when they entered different contexts: who read them, who used them, how they were adapted, what practices they helped to legitimise and what resistance they encountered. The New World cannot function merely as the space onto which Europeans projected their images. Contact between societies changes meanings, generates appropriations and reveals relations of power which a reconstruction focused on European imagination risks subordinating to its own requirements.
Paolo Luca Bernardini, likewise favourably disposed towards the book, notes its return to themes from the 2017 volume on Paraguay and stresses the continuing importance of the philosophical and literary dimension. He also discusses the meaning of civil religion and, from a libertarian perspective, the coercive implications of utopian models (Paolo Luca Bernardini, «In un mondo nuovo, diverso da questo»: il porto dell’Utopia, in La nostra storia, blog of «Corriere della Sera», 28 March 2021). His assessment should not be misrepresented as an outright denunciation. It does, however, provide grounds for testing the relationship between the stated project and the categories employed.
The persistence of the literary dimension, in particular, is not a flaw to be eliminated. It requires the political function of fiction to be reconstructed without automatically treating it as a programme intended for implementation. An author may imagine a society in order to criticise the present, explore a problem or stage a contradiction. Narrative form is part of the work’s meaning. To treat it merely as the vehicle for an already fully developed political theory is to simplify the very text from which the explanation is supposed to be drawn.
Civil religion raises a further problem. The sacral legitimation of authority, the public function of beliefs, the organisation of worship and the religion of the body politic may be closely related without being the same phenomenon. A category spanning three centuries must make visible the transformations of what it designates. Otherwise, continuity of terminology produces a historical continuity that still needs to be demonstrated. A common designation makes comparison orderly but may conceal what is irreducibly distinctive about each case.
The reservations expressed in reviews do not, therefore, amount to a negative consensus on the book. To portray them as such would be misleading. Their critical usefulness consists in identifying points at which the ambitions of the synthesis encounter limits: the distribution of examples, the movement between representation and practice, the definition of categories, and the relationship between the European setting and extra-European contexts. The severe judgement offered here concerns the overall significance of these problems; it is not delegated to the authority of reviewers.
It is above all comparison with Imbruglia’s earlier work that makes the assessment of originality more demanding. In 1980 he published L’utopia «philosophique» di Helvétius in «Rivista storica italiana» (XCII, no. 2, pp. 309–359). A section entitled L’utopia philosophique reappears in the 2021 book. The recurrence does not establish an identity of content, but it makes the longevity of the interest immediately apparent. The subject presented by the synthesis as part of a broad trajectory has belonged to the scholar’s work for more than forty years.
The relationship between utopia, political community and missionary experience had already been addressed in L’invenzione del Paraguay. Studio sull’idea di comunità tra Seicento e Settecento (Bibliopolis, Naples 1987, copyright 1983), and subsequently revisited and reworked in English in The Jesuit Missions of Paraguay and a Cultural History of Utopia (1568-1789) (Brill, Leiden–Boston 2017). Here too the issue goes beyond merely returning to a subject: it concerns the relationship between a specific study, its subsequent reworking and the further generalisation undertaken in 2021.
Significantly, this line of inquiry goes back to Imbruglia’s first monograph, developed in the early 1980s: the idea of community is not a discovery of the recent volumes but belongs to their oldest intellectual foundations. The same period also saw his work in introducing, presenting and annotating Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s Relation des missions du Paraguay (translation by F.-E. de Lourmel, La Découverte-Maspero, Paris 1983; reissued by La Découverte, Paris 2002). The sequence thus involves more than the recurrence of a country or an author: it connects the initial work on community, the return to the Jesuit missions and the subsequent synthesis on utopia. The change in scale is evident; the distance between the original question and the more recent answers deserves equally precise scrutiny.
Niccolò Guasti has compared the Italian book on Paraguay with the English one, noting the persistence of the essential features of Imbruglia’s interpretation of the French Enlightenment, alongside advances in scholarship on the Society of Jesus. His assessment acknowledges the value of Imbruglia’s research and does not present this persistence as a defect (Niccolò Guasti, L’invenzione del Paraguay trent’anni dopo. Alcune riflessioni sul libro di Girolamo Imbruglia The Jesuit Missions of Paraguay and a Cultural History of Utopia (1568-1789), in Utopie e comunità religiose tra età moderna e contemporanea, edited by Guido Mongini, Edizioni dell’Orso, Alessandria 2021, pp. 75–86).
The point nevertheless remains important for the issue at hand. Updating the bibliography and revising the paradigm are different undertakings. A study may incorporate new findings while retaining its underlying explanation; a subsequent synthesis may extend the application of that explanation without redefining it. There is nothing illegitimate about this, but originality must then be measured by what actually changes. The multiplication of publishing opportunities is no measure of interpretative movement.
Bernardini likewise observes that Utopia revisits numerous themes from the 2017 volume, which itself belonged to the long history of research on Paraguay. The sequence therefore raises the question of how much new knowledge is produced: of the distance between a new framework and a different arrangement of problems already examined. That gain ought to emerge from the relationships the synthesis uncovers, the hypotheses it abandons and the conclusions it modifies. The recurrence of themes can be documented; their textual reproduction would require a systematic comparison. To confuse these two matters would weaken the very objection that the continuity makes legitimate.
In the material examined, continuity is more immediately visible than any such increase in knowledge. The relationship between community and religion, Enlightenment culture, political imagination and the meaning of sovereignty form a recognisable cluster, recurring within different scales of exposition. The coherence of the trajectory is beyond doubt. But coherence can signify the preservation of an interpretation just as much as the deepening of a problem. It is precisely the need to distinguish between these possibilities that prevents every new synthesis from being mistaken for a new finding.
This continuity extends over decades and, for that very reason, calls for a less indulgent comparison between the accumulated body of research and its subsequent intellectual yield. In the trajectory reconstructed here, the expansion of the material is easier to document than any change in the answers. The new book inherits the recognisability of earlier studies; the claim to originality, by contrast, ought to rest on what it can demonstrate beyond them. In Girolamo Imbruglia’s intellectual universe, the move from Helvétius and Paraguay to the synthesis on utopia enlarges an already familiar constellation. The reader has little difficulty recognising the accumulated legacy; identifying a genuinely new result is a more demanding task.
The question becomes still more significant with La tolleranza in età moderna. The 2024 volume is divided into two parts, corresponding to two distinct historiographical approaches. Lucia Felici reconstructs religious and social experiences, confessional conflicts, the circulation of ideas, exile and coexistence; Imbruglia gives priority to political thought and the relationship between toleration, sovereignty, civil religion and liberty. The division makes it possible to recognise two areas of expertise and two trajectories. But the promised integration requires more than their appearance between the same covers.
The problem emerges from the organisation of the material. After the reconstruction of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century experiences, the second part begins again in the sixteenth century, following a new succession of authors and problems. This chronological return can be fruitful if the second reconstruction reinterprets what the first has established and takes its difficulties into account. It becomes mere juxtaposition, however, when social experiences provide the context for an intellectual itinerary that retains its own explanatory autonomy. Integration is measured by its effects: by the points at which the history of practices compels a revision of the history of ideas.
In his favourable review, Francesco Quatrini particularly appreciates the attempt to move beyond a purely intellectual history of toleration and acknowledges the authors’ attention to conflict and to the discontinuities of historical processes. His judgement should be recorded without distortion: the reviewer attributes originality to the book and welcomes its rejection of a linear narrative of progress. It would therefore be improper to use his review as evidence of a failing that he regards as having been overcome (Francesco Quatrini, review of La tolleranza in età moderna. Idee, conflitti, protagonisti (secoli XVI-XVIII), «Società e storia», no. 188, 2025, pp. 496–498).
A further problem remains, however, which the absence of naïve faith in progress does not resolve. Dalla tolleranza religiosa alla libertà politica, the title of Imbruglia’s part, establishes both a direction and a destination. One may recognise setbacks and defeats while continuing to organise the reconstruction around that direction. Even a winding road can be traced backwards from its destination. Testing for teleology must therefore concern the selection of protagonists, the weight accorded to alternatives, and the capacity to explain outcomes that do not lead to political liberty.
Confessional coexistence may endure without becoming a recognition of rights; a concession may be revoked; freedom claimed for one’s own community may coexist with intolerance towards others. These outcomes are not merely unfinished steps. They possess a historical substance of their own, arise from interests, convictions and institutional arrangements, and may remain stable for long periods. If they are assessed chiefly in terms of what they still lack in relation to a later outcome, their autonomy is lost precisely when the reconstruction professes to respect their complexity.
It is in Imbruglia’s part that comparison with Utopia becomes most compelling. Bodin, Spinoza, Locke and Montesquieu reappear; so do community, sovereignty, civil religion and secularisation. In the first book this constellation serves to reconstruct transformations in political imagination; in the second it supports the transition from toleration to liberty. The proximity makes it possible to examine important phenomena together. Yet it also carries the risk that different subjects become occasions for confirming one and the same explanation.
The relationship between the two subjects ought to be demonstrated through the difficulties each introduces into the other. The history of toleration may challenge the utopian aspiration to a perfect order; the history of utopias may reveal how liberation from ecclesiastical domination could coexist with intrusive control over collective life. If this comparison consists merely in the return of the same authors within a common framework, the juxtaposition remains external. The affinity between the themes is displayed, while its interpretative value remains unproven.
The earlier bibliography makes the long gestation of this framework even more apparent. As early as 2001, Imbruglia addressed the relationship between toleration and the Enlightenment in Dopo Rousseau. Il problema della tolleranza nella Histoire des deux Indes di Raynal e Diderot, in Formazione storica della alterità. Studi di storia della tolleranza nell’età moderna offerti a Antonio Rotondò, Olschki, Florence 2001, pp. 1009–1046. To this may be added Religioni, religione naturale e religione civile nel giovane Montesquieu, in Magia, superstizione, religione. Una questione di confini, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome 2015, pp. 143–164, and Civilisation and Colonisation: Enlightenment Theories in the Debate between Diderot and Raynal, «History of European Ideas», 41, 2015, pp. 858–882.
This intellectual background, moreover, predates even the 2001 contribution. Dalle storie dei santi alla storia naturale della religione. L’idea moderna di superstizione, «Rivista storica italiana», CI, no. 1, 1989, and Tra Anquetil-Duperron e l’Histoire des deux Indes. Libertà, dispotismo e feudalesimo, in the same journal, CVI, no. 1, 1994, document an early engagement with religion, Enlightenment criticism and despotism. A further link is provided by Indignation et droits de l’homme chez le dernier Diderot. De l’Encyclopédie à l’Histoire des deux Indes, in L’édition du dernier Diderot, edited by Didier Kahn and Gianluigi Goggi, Hermann, Paris 2007, pp. 125–176. The constellation within which toleration is now situated therefore has a bibliographical history considerably longer than this latest sequence of publications. Its familiarity is verifiable; any interpretative departure must be measured in the conclusions, not in new opportunities to present them.
These are not incidental precedents. Toleration, civil religion, civilisation and Enlightenment criticism are questions that reappear in the discussion of France and in the engagement with Rousseau, Diderot and Raynal. The new volume thus draws on a substantial body of research. For that very reason, its assessment cannot stop at the competence with which this material is brought together. One must identify what new relationship emerges from its recombination and which earlier findings are subjected to revision.
The same observation applies to Socinianism. Religione senza sacrificio. Grozio e Sozzini alle origini di un tema illuminista, «Rivista storica italiana», CXXVIII, no. 2, 2016, pp. 383–421; Fausto Sozzini, la teoria del sacrificio e il socinianesimo, «Bruniana & Campanelliana», XXVII, 2021, pp. 195–210; La religione sociniana. Culto e comunità, «Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken», 102, 2022, pp. 69–85: these contributions document a line of inquiry already developed before the 2024 book. The comparison between Sozzini, Grotius and Johann Crell thus belongs to a recognisable trajectory, one that returns in the chapter on the separation of state and churches.
This sequence also includes The Idea of Religion and Sacrifice from Grotius to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, «History of European Ideas», 47, no. 5, 2021, pp. 680–697, and Johann Crell e il nuovo socinianesimo, «Rivista di storia della filosofia», no. 1, 2021, pp. 150–155. The connection between religion, sacrifice and the Enlightenment therefore precedes the synthesis and runs across different scholarly venues. Imbruglia also appears, alongside Cristiana Facchini, Vincenzo Lavenia and Sabina Pavone, among the editors of Sacrifice and Sacred Violence. History, Comparisons, and the Early Modern World (Brepols, Turnhout 2025). His involvement in this edited collection confirms the persistence of an interest that makes the return of these questions scarcely surprising. What needs to be demonstrated in the books under review is what further result their recombination produces.
Having worked on these questions for many years provides a basis for scholarly authority; it does not guarantee the originality of every subsequent synthesis. Continuity may sharpen hypotheses or make them less susceptible to revision. The decisive issue is how accumulated knowledge is used: whether it serves to confront the most difficult objections or to restate an explanation within a broader expository setting. In both volumes the return of the paradigm is immediately recognisable. Its transformation, by contrast, requires a demonstration that the mere succession of publications does not provide.
The English edition of 2026 does introduce a genuine reorganisation. Imbruglia’s part expands from five chapters to seven: the Netherlands and the German-speaking world are treated separately, the British and French discussions are arranged differently, and the American Revolution and Diderot are given new places in the structure. It would be inaccurate to reduce these changes to a mechanical translation. Yet the redistribution of content does not necessarily entail a revision of the interpretation.
More chapters may mean greater room for differences; they may equally allow the same scheme to be applied in finer detail. The expansion must be judged by what it makes necessary to correct. If the new contexts merely provide further instances of a trajectory already defined, the increase in material leaves the explanation untouched. Editorial novelty can be established from the table of contents. Historiographical novelty must emerge from the argument. Language, publisher and the work’s new circulation do not dispense with this test. A more elaborate arrangement may remain devoid of original results wherever it merely restates what is already known. Novelty can thus reach the reader with the advantage of already being familiar.
The English publisher’s presentation groups Erasmus, Castellio and the Socinians together as defenders of conscience and religious dissent. This is promotional wording: it cannot be attributed to the authors’ own text without verification. Nevertheless, it presents readers with a genealogy that demands more rigorous distinctions. Erasmus’s irenicism, Castellio’s intervention against the persecution of heretics and Socinian formulations responded to different circumstances and problems. Placing them within a shared history of toleration is not enough to establish an identity of positions.
Concord, irenicism, toleration, freedom of conscience and religious liberty designate different objectives. Seeking agreement among Christians may imply the hope of restoring unity; permitting a minority to worship may leave the legal superiority of the dominant confession intact; affirming freedom of conscience may leave unresolved the question of the public expression of beliefs. Precision of terminology here determines precision of interpretation. If these differences are subsumed under an overly broad retrospective category, history acquires continuity at the expense of accuracy.
The Hobbes–Spinoza–Locke sequence demands similar scrutiny. The secularisation of sovereignty may expand the power to decide on religious matters rather than limit it. The removal of powers from ecclesiastical authorities does not guarantee the freedom of subjects. A state may become less dependent on churches while becoming more capable of imposing uniformity. The relationship between transformations of sovereignty and the extension of rights is therefore a problem to be explained under specific conditions, not a connection made self-evident by the sequence of philosophers.
The transition from toleration as a concession to liberty as a right must likewise be reconstructed in terms of its actual content. The English Toleration Act of 1689 granted limited protections to certain groups of Protestant dissenters while maintaining confessional exclusions and civil inequalities. Its historical significance is not enhanced by turning it into a general proclamation of religious liberty. It becomes greater when we understand why those protections were granted, to whom, within what limits and with what effects. A succession of theoretical formulations cannot, in itself, explain the enactment of a law, its implementation or the unequal distribution of its benefits.
Here the history of dissent as it was lived takes on decisive significance. Exiles, preachers, physicians, artisans, and women and men who changed their religious practices were not merely recipients of ideas formulated elsewhere. Reading, discussion, migration, refusal of a ritual, circulation of books and the search for a community gave concrete form to problems that philosophical systems would later address in different terms. Freedom could be pursued within the language of faith, as a duty to obey one’s own conscience before God, without awaiting a secular foundation.
These experiences prevent dissent from being reduced to the prehistory of a concept destined to find fulfilment in great thinkers. Those who risked persecution were not necessarily anticipating Locke; those who sought protection for a community were not already formulating a universal right; those who rejected one form of coercion might accept another. It is precisely this distance that makes historical reconstruction meaningful. A history that immediately translates the actors’ choices into its own vocabulary loses sight of their reasons for acting and lays claim to an understanding it has not yet demonstrated.
The material conditions of dissent mattered as much as doctrinal formulations. Networks of protection, professional settings, mobility, access to books, family position and the possibility of leaving a territory could open or close spaces of autonomy. The same argument acquired different meanings and consequences according to who voiced it and who possessed the power to hear it. We must therefore explain how a conviction became public, how it came to be recognised as a threat and what resources made it possible to sustain it.
Dissimulation introduces a further difficulty. Outward conformity could conceal dissent; silence might arise from fear, prudence or indifference; coexistence might rest on a decision not to investigate the beliefs of others. Recognising these possibilities requires attention to circumstances and to the language of the sources. It does not justify treating every instance of conformity as hidden resistance or every absence of persecution as toleration. The interpretation of liberty, too, must resist the temptation to find everywhere what it seeks.
The records of repression demand the same discipline. Voices reach us through questions, written depositions, translations, omissions and defensive strategies. The categories of heresy and deviance are also products of the institutions that employ them. A judicial confession does not provide immediate access to inward belief; an abjuration does not, in itself, allow us to measure a conversion; the frequency of denunciations may indicate the intensity of surveillance as much as the prevalence of dissent. Archives pose problems that a genealogy of concepts cannot resolve by proxy.
Documentary scrutiny nonetheless requires us to distinguish between the limited visibility of new findings in the books under review and the absence of source-based research across Imbruglia’s entire output. His work on the history of historiography also provides a point of comparison: Illuminismo e storicismo nella storiografia italiana. In appendice il carteggio Venturi-Cantimori dal 1945 al 1955 (Bibliopolis, Naples 2003) brings together essays, most of them already published, alongside a substantial edition of letters, largely previously unpublished. In that instance, the recombination of earlier studies is accompanied by an identifiable documentary contribution. It is precisely the possibility of specifying that additional contribution which makes the assessment of the recent syntheses more demanding.
A directly archival example is supplied by the essay Illuminismo e religione. Il Dei delitti e delle pene e la difesa dei Verri dinanzi alla censura inquisitoriale, «Studi settecenteschi», 25–26, 2005–2006, pp. 119–161. Its scholarly apparatus refers, among other things, to the Holy Office’s Censura librorum series for 1753–1754, the Protocolli for 1763–1767 and manuscripts in the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu. These references attest to the use of archival materials, without in themselves proving that each constituted a previously unknown discovery. More recently, the volume Cinque secoli di Litterae indipetae. Il desiderio delle missioni nella Compagnia di Gesù, edited with Pierre-Antoine Fabre and Guido Mongini (Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, Rome 2022), placed at the centre of a collective research project the letters written by Jesuits seeking assignment to missions, more than twenty-two thousand examples of which are preserved in the Society’s Roman archive. An original question may be asked of a source already known; equally, a new source may serve merely to confirm a familiar answer. What remains to be established in the recent books is which documentary findings, or which new readings of the sources, have compelled a revision of the interpretation.
For the same reason, different institutional arrangements must be distinguished. The Roman Inquisition, the Iberian inquisitions, civil magistracies, Protestant ecclesiastical authorities and communal bodies operated within different jurisdictions and relations of power. Religious control could consolidate a political authority or become the site of conflict between authorities. Protection and persecution might depend on political interests, personal relations and economic necessities without amounting to adherence to a general principle. Institutional realities alter the meaning of abstract formulations.
The decision not to prosecute must likewise be interpreted rather than immediately elevated into evidence of freedom. It might reflect compromise, calculation, the effect of a jurisdictional limit or a temporary inability to intervene. Conversely, the intensity of repression does not prove that a society was homogeneous: it may reveal how much effort was required to portray and preserve it as such. These are questions that demand the reconstruction of processes, not merely the assignment of a degree of toleration to each period.
Felici’s attention to religious and social experiences is therefore a substantial feature of the volume. It would be unfair to attribute a general absence of these concerns to the work as a whole. The reservation concerns the relationship between its parts: how far this complexity modifies the explanation advanced by Imbruglia, how much friction it introduces, and how far it remains confined to a parallel reconstruction. Practices and institutions must be allowed to contradict the theoretical framework. If their sole function is to give it concrete substance, integration stops precisely where it ought to begin.
Comparison between utopia and toleration makes this requirement sharper still. The two categories do not necessarily describe converging stages of a single emancipatory process. An ideal society may seek to eliminate the conditions of conflict through uniformity of behaviour and belief. Toleration, by contrast, may make possible a form of coexistence in which disagreement persists. The issue concerns the place accorded to difference and the power authorised to define its limits.
Not all utopias impose the same discipline, and toleration may preserve very rigid hierarchies. It is precisely these differences that make a juxtaposition based on a shared concern with modernity inadequate. The perfection of community may conflict with the autonomy of conscience; recognition of a minority may depend on its public discretion; the emancipation of political power may enlarge its claims upon individuals. Such relationships demand specific comparisons between texts, laws and practices.
Bernardini’s observations on the authoritarian consequences of utopian constructions thus identify a tension that deserves to be pursued to its historiographical implications. The promise of a just order says nothing, in itself, about the space left to those who contest it. A community may declare itself free because it has escaped domination while denying its own members the possibility of dissent. If utopia and toleration are too readily subsumed under the transformation of sovereignty, this contradiction risks being softened by the very category that ought to explain it.
The colonial dimension subjects the paradigm to further pressure. Universalism and domination, criticism of intolerance and justification of conquest, imagining better societies and organising dependency may coexist within the same traditions. Invoking the New World does not guarantee that the standpoint has ceased to be European. What matters is which interlocutors are acknowledged, which experiences acquire the capacity to modify the interpretation and which remain mere material at the disposal of European thought.
The publisher’s description of the English volume as the first global history of toleration raises the burden of proof. A history becomes global when extending its field also changes its questions, relationships and explanatory criteria. Geographical scale is not yet interpretative scale. Even a narrative spanning several continents may retain a single centre and summon other worlds as witnesses to its importance. Benzoni’s observations on utopia and its colonial reception acquire a significance here that extends beyond an individual book: they require us to test how far the enlargement of the framework actually shifts the centre of interpretation. The expansion of the repertoire thus risks remaining external to the structure of the explanation: other contexts increase the number of examples without acquiring comparable weight in redefining the questions. Here too, the systematic character of the framework precedes any demonstration of its novelty.
Imbruglia’s experience of Paraguay and Enlightenment thought legitimately warrants high expectations. His familiarity with these subjects could have provided especially fertile ground for reconsidering the relationship between community, religion and liberty. Instead, it is precisely the recognisability of the framework, as it moves between different works and subjects, that makes scrutiny urgent. Such an extensive body of research ought to make the paradigm more vulnerable to well-founded objections, not simply more available for new applications.
Assessment of these publications must therefore distinguish between the ability to organise material and the ability to deepen our understanding of it. The first is readily apparent: the selection of topics, familiarity with authors, long-term connections and recognisability of the argument. The second is the contested point. Correctly identifying important historiographical questions marks the beginning of research; novelty depends on what one manages to explain beyond relationships already known.
Otherwise, the conclusion that religion and politics were closely intertwined in the early modern period, or that utopia, sovereignty and toleration were involved in transformations of political thought, risks amounting to a truism. The problem begins afterwards: which relationships, through which mediations, amid which conflicts, and with what capacity to account for divergent outcomes? An analysis remains external to its subject when it moves from one of these themes to another without demonstrating the connection that makes them mutually illuminating.
A synthesis is not expected to replace every specialised study or exhaust three centuries of history. It is expected to make its conclusions proportionate to the evidence and to explain the criteria governing its choices. Broad ambition imposes more exacting scrutiny of cases that resist the reconstruction. A model that works chiefly with material selected to illustrate it confirms the selection before it confirms itself.
In comparing Utopia, Imbruglia’s contribution to La tolleranza in età moderna and the earlier bibliography of an extensive career, the most evident feature remains the persistence of an interpretative constellation. The scope of the material, its arrangement and the publishing occasion change. Less clear is the process by which an explanation is corrected when its subject matter presents it with difficulties. The most serious limitation therefore concerns the manner in which these problems are organised: their tendency to yield above all familiar answers, to reconfirm the framework within which they have been posed. The title changes more visibly than the explanation.
The longevity of a paradigm may testify to its strength; it may also make its immobility harder to perceive. What distinguishes the two is revision, consideration of alternatives and findings not already contained in the premises. The materials considered reveal a remarkable continuity of approach; they do not make the claim to interpretative renewal equally persuasive. The severity of the judgement arises from this disproportion, not from any rejection of intellectual history or of syntheses spanning long periods.
The achievement of an effective synthesis remains, but its standing must be precisely defined. The ability to present an established tradition anew should not be credited with a novelty and originality that have yet to be demonstrated. The breadth of Imbruglia’s undertaking confers both an expository advantage and a measure of protection: it allows many problems to be connected without subjecting each connection to scrutiny commensurate with its significance. It is on this point that the reconstruction proves least convincing.
The overall assessment is not favourable. Reservations concerning periodisation, geographical selection and the colonial dimension, together with the persistence of the same categories in Imbruglia’s earlier work, cast doubt on the distance between reorganising material and advancing an interpretation, and above all on the actual originality of the overall findings. The concrete history of societies, conflicts and institutions remains the decisive test. Yet Imbruglia offers an arrangement of his own paradigm in which its familiarity is more evident than its renewal. The strength of the undertaking lies in its organisation; novelty is precisely what remains weakest, along with an interpretative originality that appears scarcely demonstrated. This disproportion is made more conspicuous by the length of the scholarly trajectory: decades of work have rendered the paradigm familiar, while these new books still leave it difficult to identify what it has learned to explain differently. In Girolamo Imbruglia’s intellectual universe, new publications readily find their place; less evident is how far they contribute to changing the order into which they are inserted. They are the ‘same old novelties’: new publishing ventures that offer old reconstructions another opportunity to confirm themselves. Accumulated experience heightens the expectation of original findings and makes their continued deferral less persuasive. Nor is it clear, in the volumes discussed here, which new documents have made it possible to refine, correct or expand earlier interpretations: the reorganisation of existing scholarship is more evident than any substantial increase in documentary evidence or critical insight. Well-organised repetition retains the characteristics of a textbook synthesis; it does not thereby acquire those of original research or genuine historiographical innovation.
It is precisely this distance that calls for examination. Identifying important historiographical questions is the starting point of an investigation; it becomes too easy a conclusion when those questions are linked within a framework sufficiently elastic to accommodate almost everything without itself having to change. An interpretative construction gains strength when it encounters genuine difficulties and manages to account for them. If it chiefly recognises what it was already predisposed to recognise, its coherence may become a respectable name for its immobility.
In this respect, Girolamo Imbruglia’s intellectual universe has a reassuring order. New publications find their place within relationships that are already familiar; what their arrival forces us to reconsider is less apparent. The paradigm’s capacity to accommodate them thus seems to provide, above all, another opportunity for self-confirmation.
In Utopia, Imbruglia proposes to remove the subject from an overwhelmingly literary history and to acknowledge its essential role in the formulation of projects for political and social transformation. His decision to begin with Savonarola rather than Thomas More follows from this approach. The failure of Savonarola’s government becomes the pivotal event around which the different responses of Machiavelli and More to the crisis in relations between religion and politics are situated. The account then traverses the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reaching the transformations of the Enlightenment and the revolutionary attempt to bring a radically different order into being.
The programme is clear. Its explanatory power is considerably less so. The category of utopia ought to make it possible to distinguish between imagining an alternative society, criticising the existing order, designing institutions, religious expectation and political action. These forms may intersect, but their intersection is precisely what needs to be reconstructed. Subsumming them under a common aspiration to transform society risks erasing the problem at the very moment one claims to have solved it.
Bringing together Savonarola, Machiavelli, More, Campanella, Spinoza and Montesquieu does not, in itself, demonstrate the existence of a single historical trajectory. For such a trajectory to have historical meaning, one must specify what was transmitted, what was transformed, what was contested and what is identified only through the interpreter’s retrospective gaze. Otherwise, the succession of great names substitutes for demonstration: the order of presentation suggests a connection which the analysis should instead render verifiable. From this standpoint, the links among the various protagonists remain largely external. The reader sees the names succeed one another but is given no equally precise criteria for distinguishing actual transmission from resemblance constructed by the interpreter.
The danger is that the category becomes progressively inflated. If everything that imagines a different organisation of collective life counts as utopian, much of political thought can be absorbed into the history of utopia. Yet a category that encompasses almost everything becomes increasingly unable to discriminate. Its expository success then coincides with its analytical weakening: it makes it possible to traverse numerous texts at the cost of obscuring why those texts should belong to the same history.
A general synthesis must also explain its own boundaries. The criterion by which More is brought into relation with a proposal for reform, a religious community or a theory of sovereignty must also apply to cases that complicate the comparison. Selecting favourable examples and arranging them along a coherent trajectory may produce an elegant narrative. The value of an explanation, however, is also measured where the evidence resists it: where a project for an ideal society reinforces coercion, where religion sustains a claim to freedom, or where reform proceeds without any utopian horizon.
The proposed periodisation compounds these difficulties. The sixteenth century of utopia in imaginary space, the seventeenth century of ideal society in the present and of theocracy, and the eighteenth century of secularisation and projection into the future form an orderly sequence, easy to follow. But history does not acquire the same neatness simply because it is divided into three centuries. Projects for the practical realisation of communities already existed in the sixteenth century; fiction, prophecy, institutional experimentation and expectations of the future continued to overlap in subsequent centuries.
The Anabaptists and other experiments in religious and social transformation prevent the sixteenth century from being identified solely with imaginary space; likewise, the persistence of literary construction and prophetic languages prevents the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from being assigned strictly distinct functions. The book does consider experiences that complicate the scheme: the question is how far those experiences affect its explanatory value. A periodisation can accommodate many exceptions. But if exceptions remain exceptions regardless of their weight, the model is being protected rather than tested. The division by centuries thus retains its expository convenience even as it loses historical precision. It is a way of organising material, whose usefulness does not yet establish the fruitfulness of the interpretation.
The same issue arises in the relationship between prophecy and utopia. Assigning the failure of Savonarola in 1498 a decisive role in the response formulated by More is a hypothesis that requires the nature of the connection to be specified. Documentable reception, a conscious response, an analogy between experiences and retrospective reconstruction do not possess the same evidentiary value. Distinguishing them becomes all the more necessary when a particular case is made to sustain a general interpretation of the transition from prophecy to utopia.
Prophetism, millenarianism and expectations of renewal continued, in fact, to interact with political culture long after Savonarola was burned at the stake. Campanella, who also figures in Imbruglia’s reconstruction, shows how prophecy and plans for the organisation of society could still nourish one another. This does not automatically refute a thesis about More. It does, however, prevent that thesis from being transferred, without further argument, into a general sequence in which one mode of anticipating the future gives way to another. The historical problem lies in the combinations, appropriations and transformations of languages, not in the neatness of their arrangement.
Matteo Marcheschi has called for reconsideration of the conclusions on pp. 9–10 of Utopia, drawing attention to the different temporal assumptions underlying prophecy and utopia (Matteo Marcheschi, Primum in orbe deos fecit tempus? Una nota sulla storiografia e i regimi di storicità nella filosofia dei Lumi, in «Lo Sguardo. Rivista di filosofia», 37, 2023, pp. 249–271, especially p. 260, n. 41). His observation is limited in scope but touches on an essential issue: the relationship between the interpreter’s categories and the historical actors’ experience of time.
An evocative rupture may guide interpretation; it does not thereby explain the transformations it purports to organise. To demonstrate the predominance of one political form over another, it is necessary to clarify where, for whom and through which mediations that predominance emerged. The failure of one experiment and the appearance of a later work are insufficient to turn their juxtaposition into a convincing genealogy. Intellectual history remains history only so long as it takes these intermediate steps seriously.
The heading Machiavelli e la politica senza cristianesimo also deserves scrutiny, but without inventing a spurious objection. The phrase does not imply the absence of religion, and it would be improper to attribute such a meaning to it. The question concerns the specific contribution it makes in relation to a scholarly tradition that has long examined the autonomy of politics, Machiavelli’s judgement of Christianity and the civic function of beliefs. In the Discorsi, religion remains an essential factor in the constitution and preservation of political order. The relationship between these dimensions demands a more precise analysis than any broad opposition can promise.
The autonomy of politics is a central finding of Machiavellian scholarship, not a result that becomes new by being incorporated into a history of utopia. To derive an advance from it, one must show what problem the new setting resolves, what relationship it brings to light and what interpretation it forces us to revise. Simply relocating an established thesis within a broader framework may increase its visibility; it does not automatically increase its substance. Here the critical findings appear slight: the autonomy of politics and the civic function of religion are brought within the framework of utopia, while it remains unclear what problem in the interpretation of Machiavelli this framing helps to resolve. The repositioning of the thesis thus stands in for an advance in analysis.
The limitations of the selection are more directly documented in the reception of Utopia. Carlo Capra notes the underestimation of Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque, the French-centred character of the treatment of the eighteenth century, which sidelines British and German traditions, and the mere dozen pages devoted to the French Revolution (Carlo Capra, review of Utopia. Una storia politica da Savonarola a Babeuf, in «Società e storia», 174, 2021, pp. 846–849). These criticisms concern the construction of the explanation, not the impossible demand to mention every author.
The compression of the revolutionary period is particularly telling. The book moves towards a juncture at which projects ought to be tested against action, conflict and the organisation of power. Yet it is precisely this juncture that receives very limited attention. This weakens the test of the original promise: a political history of utopia ought to linger where it becomes most difficult to distinguish theory, programme, mobilisation and governmental practice. The narrative destination cannot dispense with an analysis of the path by which it was reached. The synthesis thus risks becoming no more than a textbook account at its decisive point: it arrives at the revolutionary outcome but devotes too little space to determining how the utopian promise was translated, transformed or contradicted in the exercise of power.
The French-centred perspective raises a similar problem. A scholar’s research interests are a legitimate criterion for selecting the subject matter of their work; they do not establish the historical centrality of what that scholar knows best. A European history must justify its hierarchies through comparison between different traditions, even when such comparisons undermine the unity of the narrative. Otherwise, Europe tends to coincide with the territory most thoroughly explored by the author. Bibliographical familiarity is elevated into a measure of historical representativeness.
In a generally favourable review, Maria Matilde Benzoni observes that the extensive chronological scope sometimes encourages description at the expense of historiographical analysis and the interweaving of events and ideas. She also points to the need for more organic integration of Atlantic, global and intercultural perspectives, not least to overcome residual exoticisation of otherness. Among her examples are the reception of More’s Utopia in Spanish America and the experience of Vasco de Quiroga (Maria Matilde Benzoni, Utopia. Una storia politica da Savonarola a Babeuf, in «Cromohs», 25, 2022, pp. 219–222, published online in 2023).
This observation touches on an issue that another list of authors would not resolve. A political history must also explain what happened to texts when they entered different contexts: who read them, who used them, how they were adapted, what practices they helped to legitimise and what resistance they encountered. The New World cannot function merely as the space onto which Europeans projected their images. Contact between societies changes meanings, generates appropriations and reveals relations of power which a reconstruction focused on European imagination risks subordinating to its own requirements.
Paolo Luca Bernardini, likewise favourably disposed towards the book, notes its return to themes from the 2017 volume on Paraguay and stresses the continuing importance of the philosophical and literary dimension. He also discusses the meaning of civil religion and, from a libertarian perspective, the coercive implications of utopian models (Paolo Luca Bernardini, «In un mondo nuovo, diverso da questo»: il porto dell’Utopia, in La nostra storia, blog of «Corriere della Sera», 28 March 2021). His assessment should not be misrepresented as an outright denunciation. It does, however, provide grounds for testing the relationship between the stated project and the categories employed.
The persistence of the literary dimension, in particular, is not a flaw to be eliminated. It requires the political function of fiction to be reconstructed without automatically treating it as a programme intended for implementation. An author may imagine a society in order to criticise the present, explore a problem or stage a contradiction. Narrative form is part of the work’s meaning. To treat it merely as the vehicle for an already fully developed political theory is to simplify the very text from which the explanation is supposed to be drawn.
Civil religion raises a further problem. The sacral legitimation of authority, the public function of beliefs, the organisation of worship and the religion of the body politic may be closely related without being the same phenomenon. A category spanning three centuries must make visible the transformations of what it designates. Otherwise, continuity of terminology produces a historical continuity that still needs to be demonstrated. A common designation makes comparison orderly but may conceal what is irreducibly distinctive about each case.
The reservations expressed in reviews do not, therefore, amount to a negative consensus on the book. To portray them as such would be misleading. Their critical usefulness consists in identifying points at which the ambitions of the synthesis encounter limits: the distribution of examples, the movement between representation and practice, the definition of categories, and the relationship between the European setting and extra-European contexts. The severe judgement offered here concerns the overall significance of these problems; it is not delegated to the authority of reviewers.
It is above all comparison with Imbruglia’s earlier work that makes the assessment of originality more demanding. In 1980 he published L’utopia «philosophique» di Helvétius in «Rivista storica italiana» (XCII, no. 2, pp. 309–359). A section entitled L’utopia philosophique reappears in the 2021 book. The recurrence does not establish an identity of content, but it makes the longevity of the interest immediately apparent. The subject presented by the synthesis as part of a broad trajectory has belonged to the scholar’s work for more than forty years.
The relationship between utopia, political community and missionary experience had already been addressed in L’invenzione del Paraguay. Studio sull’idea di comunità tra Seicento e Settecento (Bibliopolis, Naples 1987, copyright 1983), and subsequently revisited and reworked in English in The Jesuit Missions of Paraguay and a Cultural History of Utopia (1568-1789) (Brill, Leiden–Boston 2017). Here too the issue goes beyond merely returning to a subject: it concerns the relationship between a specific study, its subsequent reworking and the further generalisation undertaken in 2021.
Significantly, this line of inquiry goes back to Imbruglia’s first monograph, developed in the early 1980s: the idea of community is not a discovery of the recent volumes but belongs to their oldest intellectual foundations. The same period also saw his work in introducing, presenting and annotating Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s Relation des missions du Paraguay (translation by F.-E. de Lourmel, La Découverte-Maspero, Paris 1983; reissued by La Découverte, Paris 2002). The sequence thus involves more than the recurrence of a country or an author: it connects the initial work on community, the return to the Jesuit missions and the subsequent synthesis on utopia. The change in scale is evident; the distance between the original question and the more recent answers deserves equally precise scrutiny.
Niccolò Guasti has compared the Italian book on Paraguay with the English one, noting the persistence of the essential features of Imbruglia’s interpretation of the French Enlightenment, alongside advances in scholarship on the Society of Jesus. His assessment acknowledges the value of Imbruglia’s research and does not present this persistence as a defect (Niccolò Guasti, L’invenzione del Paraguay trent’anni dopo. Alcune riflessioni sul libro di Girolamo Imbruglia The Jesuit Missions of Paraguay and a Cultural History of Utopia (1568-1789), in Utopie e comunità religiose tra età moderna e contemporanea, edited by Guido Mongini, Edizioni dell’Orso, Alessandria 2021, pp. 75–86).
The point nevertheless remains important for the issue at hand. Updating the bibliography and revising the paradigm are different undertakings. A study may incorporate new findings while retaining its underlying explanation; a subsequent synthesis may extend the application of that explanation without redefining it. There is nothing illegitimate about this, but originality must then be measured by what actually changes. The multiplication of publishing opportunities is no measure of interpretative movement.
Bernardini likewise observes that Utopia revisits numerous themes from the 2017 volume, which itself belonged to the long history of research on Paraguay. The sequence therefore raises the question of how much new knowledge is produced: of the distance between a new framework and a different arrangement of problems already examined. That gain ought to emerge from the relationships the synthesis uncovers, the hypotheses it abandons and the conclusions it modifies. The recurrence of themes can be documented; their textual reproduction would require a systematic comparison. To confuse these two matters would weaken the very objection that the continuity makes legitimate.
In the material examined, continuity is more immediately visible than any such increase in knowledge. The relationship between community and religion, Enlightenment culture, political imagination and the meaning of sovereignty form a recognisable cluster, recurring within different scales of exposition. The coherence of the trajectory is beyond doubt. But coherence can signify the preservation of an interpretation just as much as the deepening of a problem. It is precisely the need to distinguish between these possibilities that prevents every new synthesis from being mistaken for a new finding.
This continuity extends over decades and, for that very reason, calls for a less indulgent comparison between the accumulated body of research and its subsequent intellectual yield. In the trajectory reconstructed here, the expansion of the material is easier to document than any change in the answers. The new book inherits the recognisability of earlier studies; the claim to originality, by contrast, ought to rest on what it can demonstrate beyond them. In Girolamo Imbruglia’s intellectual universe, the move from Helvétius and Paraguay to the synthesis on utopia enlarges an already familiar constellation. The reader has little difficulty recognising the accumulated legacy; identifying a genuinely new result is a more demanding task.
The question becomes still more significant with La tolleranza in età moderna. The 2024 volume is divided into two parts, corresponding to two distinct historiographical approaches. Lucia Felici reconstructs religious and social experiences, confessional conflicts, the circulation of ideas, exile and coexistence; Imbruglia gives priority to political thought and the relationship between toleration, sovereignty, civil religion and liberty. The division makes it possible to recognise two areas of expertise and two trajectories. But the promised integration requires more than their appearance between the same covers.
The problem emerges from the organisation of the material. After the reconstruction of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century experiences, the second part begins again in the sixteenth century, following a new succession of authors and problems. This chronological return can be fruitful if the second reconstruction reinterprets what the first has established and takes its difficulties into account. It becomes mere juxtaposition, however, when social experiences provide the context for an intellectual itinerary that retains its own explanatory autonomy. Integration is measured by its effects: by the points at which the history of practices compels a revision of the history of ideas.
In his favourable review, Francesco Quatrini particularly appreciates the attempt to move beyond a purely intellectual history of toleration and acknowledges the authors’ attention to conflict and to the discontinuities of historical processes. His judgement should be recorded without distortion: the reviewer attributes originality to the book and welcomes its rejection of a linear narrative of progress. It would therefore be improper to use his review as evidence of a failing that he regards as having been overcome (Francesco Quatrini, review of La tolleranza in età moderna. Idee, conflitti, protagonisti (secoli XVI-XVIII), «Società e storia», no. 188, 2025, pp. 496–498).
A further problem remains, however, which the absence of naïve faith in progress does not resolve. Dalla tolleranza religiosa alla libertà politica, the title of Imbruglia’s part, establishes both a direction and a destination. One may recognise setbacks and defeats while continuing to organise the reconstruction around that direction. Even a winding road can be traced backwards from its destination. Testing for teleology must therefore concern the selection of protagonists, the weight accorded to alternatives, and the capacity to explain outcomes that do not lead to political liberty.
Confessional coexistence may endure without becoming a recognition of rights; a concession may be revoked; freedom claimed for one’s own community may coexist with intolerance towards others. These outcomes are not merely unfinished steps. They possess a historical substance of their own, arise from interests, convictions and institutional arrangements, and may remain stable for long periods. If they are assessed chiefly in terms of what they still lack in relation to a later outcome, their autonomy is lost precisely when the reconstruction professes to respect their complexity.
It is in Imbruglia’s part that comparison with Utopia becomes most compelling. Bodin, Spinoza, Locke and Montesquieu reappear; so do community, sovereignty, civil religion and secularisation. In the first book this constellation serves to reconstruct transformations in political imagination; in the second it supports the transition from toleration to liberty. The proximity makes it possible to examine important phenomena together. Yet it also carries the risk that different subjects become occasions for confirming one and the same explanation.
The relationship between the two subjects ought to be demonstrated through the difficulties each introduces into the other. The history of toleration may challenge the utopian aspiration to a perfect order; the history of utopias may reveal how liberation from ecclesiastical domination could coexist with intrusive control over collective life. If this comparison consists merely in the return of the same authors within a common framework, the juxtaposition remains external. The affinity between the themes is displayed, while its interpretative value remains unproven.
The earlier bibliography makes the long gestation of this framework even more apparent. As early as 2001, Imbruglia addressed the relationship between toleration and the Enlightenment in Dopo Rousseau. Il problema della tolleranza nella Histoire des deux Indes di Raynal e Diderot, in Formazione storica della alterità. Studi di storia della tolleranza nell’età moderna offerti a Antonio Rotondò, Olschki, Florence 2001, pp. 1009–1046. To this may be added Religioni, religione naturale e religione civile nel giovane Montesquieu, in Magia, superstizione, religione. Una questione di confini, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome 2015, pp. 143–164, and Civilisation and Colonisation: Enlightenment Theories in the Debate between Diderot and Raynal, «History of European Ideas», 41, 2015, pp. 858–882.
This intellectual background, moreover, predates even the 2001 contribution. Dalle storie dei santi alla storia naturale della religione. L’idea moderna di superstizione, «Rivista storica italiana», CI, no. 1, 1989, and Tra Anquetil-Duperron e l’Histoire des deux Indes. Libertà, dispotismo e feudalesimo, in the same journal, CVI, no. 1, 1994, document an early engagement with religion, Enlightenment criticism and despotism. A further link is provided by Indignation et droits de l’homme chez le dernier Diderot. De l’Encyclopédie à l’Histoire des deux Indes, in L’édition du dernier Diderot, edited by Didier Kahn and Gianluigi Goggi, Hermann, Paris 2007, pp. 125–176. The constellation within which toleration is now situated therefore has a bibliographical history considerably longer than this latest sequence of publications. Its familiarity is verifiable; any interpretative departure must be measured in the conclusions, not in new opportunities to present them.
These are not incidental precedents. Toleration, civil religion, civilisation and Enlightenment criticism are questions that reappear in the discussion of France and in the engagement with Rousseau, Diderot and Raynal. The new volume thus draws on a substantial body of research. For that very reason, its assessment cannot stop at the competence with which this material is brought together. One must identify what new relationship emerges from its recombination and which earlier findings are subjected to revision.
The same observation applies to Socinianism. Religione senza sacrificio. Grozio e Sozzini alle origini di un tema illuminista, «Rivista storica italiana», CXXVIII, no. 2, 2016, pp. 383–421; Fausto Sozzini, la teoria del sacrificio e il socinianesimo, «Bruniana & Campanelliana», XXVII, 2021, pp. 195–210; La religione sociniana. Culto e comunità, «Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken», 102, 2022, pp. 69–85: these contributions document a line of inquiry already developed before the 2024 book. The comparison between Sozzini, Grotius and Johann Crell thus belongs to a recognisable trajectory, one that returns in the chapter on the separation of state and churches.
This sequence also includes The Idea of Religion and Sacrifice from Grotius to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, «History of European Ideas», 47, no. 5, 2021, pp. 680–697, and Johann Crell e il nuovo socinianesimo, «Rivista di storia della filosofia», no. 1, 2021, pp. 150–155. The connection between religion, sacrifice and the Enlightenment therefore precedes the synthesis and runs across different scholarly venues. Imbruglia also appears, alongside Cristiana Facchini, Vincenzo Lavenia and Sabina Pavone, among the editors of Sacrifice and Sacred Violence. History, Comparisons, and the Early Modern World (Brepols, Turnhout 2025). His involvement in this edited collection confirms the persistence of an interest that makes the return of these questions scarcely surprising. What needs to be demonstrated in the books under review is what further result their recombination produces.
Having worked on these questions for many years provides a basis for scholarly authority; it does not guarantee the originality of every subsequent synthesis. Continuity may sharpen hypotheses or make them less susceptible to revision. The decisive issue is how accumulated knowledge is used: whether it serves to confront the most difficult objections or to restate an explanation within a broader expository setting. In both volumes the return of the paradigm is immediately recognisable. Its transformation, by contrast, requires a demonstration that the mere succession of publications does not provide.
The English edition of 2026 does introduce a genuine reorganisation. Imbruglia’s part expands from five chapters to seven: the Netherlands and the German-speaking world are treated separately, the British and French discussions are arranged differently, and the American Revolution and Diderot are given new places in the structure. It would be inaccurate to reduce these changes to a mechanical translation. Yet the redistribution of content does not necessarily entail a revision of the interpretation.
More chapters may mean greater room for differences; they may equally allow the same scheme to be applied in finer detail. The expansion must be judged by what it makes necessary to correct. If the new contexts merely provide further instances of a trajectory already defined, the increase in material leaves the explanation untouched. Editorial novelty can be established from the table of contents. Historiographical novelty must emerge from the argument. Language, publisher and the work’s new circulation do not dispense with this test. A more elaborate arrangement may remain devoid of original results wherever it merely restates what is already known. Novelty can thus reach the reader with the advantage of already being familiar.
The English publisher’s presentation groups Erasmus, Castellio and the Socinians together as defenders of conscience and religious dissent. This is promotional wording: it cannot be attributed to the authors’ own text without verification. Nevertheless, it presents readers with a genealogy that demands more rigorous distinctions. Erasmus’s irenicism, Castellio’s intervention against the persecution of heretics and Socinian formulations responded to different circumstances and problems. Placing them within a shared history of toleration is not enough to establish an identity of positions.
Concord, irenicism, toleration, freedom of conscience and religious liberty designate different objectives. Seeking agreement among Christians may imply the hope of restoring unity; permitting a minority to worship may leave the legal superiority of the dominant confession intact; affirming freedom of conscience may leave unresolved the question of the public expression of beliefs. Precision of terminology here determines precision of interpretation. If these differences are subsumed under an overly broad retrospective category, history acquires continuity at the expense of accuracy.
The Hobbes–Spinoza–Locke sequence demands similar scrutiny. The secularisation of sovereignty may expand the power to decide on religious matters rather than limit it. The removal of powers from ecclesiastical authorities does not guarantee the freedom of subjects. A state may become less dependent on churches while becoming more capable of imposing uniformity. The relationship between transformations of sovereignty and the extension of rights is therefore a problem to be explained under specific conditions, not a connection made self-evident by the sequence of philosophers.
The transition from toleration as a concession to liberty as a right must likewise be reconstructed in terms of its actual content. The English Toleration Act of 1689 granted limited protections to certain groups of Protestant dissenters while maintaining confessional exclusions and civil inequalities. Its historical significance is not enhanced by turning it into a general proclamation of religious liberty. It becomes greater when we understand why those protections were granted, to whom, within what limits and with what effects. A succession of theoretical formulations cannot, in itself, explain the enactment of a law, its implementation or the unequal distribution of its benefits.
Here the history of dissent as it was lived takes on decisive significance. Exiles, preachers, physicians, artisans, and women and men who changed their religious practices were not merely recipients of ideas formulated elsewhere. Reading, discussion, migration, refusal of a ritual, circulation of books and the search for a community gave concrete form to problems that philosophical systems would later address in different terms. Freedom could be pursued within the language of faith, as a duty to obey one’s own conscience before God, without awaiting a secular foundation.
These experiences prevent dissent from being reduced to the prehistory of a concept destined to find fulfilment in great thinkers. Those who risked persecution were not necessarily anticipating Locke; those who sought protection for a community were not already formulating a universal right; those who rejected one form of coercion might accept another. It is precisely this distance that makes historical reconstruction meaningful. A history that immediately translates the actors’ choices into its own vocabulary loses sight of their reasons for acting and lays claim to an understanding it has not yet demonstrated.
The material conditions of dissent mattered as much as doctrinal formulations. Networks of protection, professional settings, mobility, access to books, family position and the possibility of leaving a territory could open or close spaces of autonomy. The same argument acquired different meanings and consequences according to who voiced it and who possessed the power to hear it. We must therefore explain how a conviction became public, how it came to be recognised as a threat and what resources made it possible to sustain it.
Dissimulation introduces a further difficulty. Outward conformity could conceal dissent; silence might arise from fear, prudence or indifference; coexistence might rest on a decision not to investigate the beliefs of others. Recognising these possibilities requires attention to circumstances and to the language of the sources. It does not justify treating every instance of conformity as hidden resistance or every absence of persecution as toleration. The interpretation of liberty, too, must resist the temptation to find everywhere what it seeks.
The records of repression demand the same discipline. Voices reach us through questions, written depositions, translations, omissions and defensive strategies. The categories of heresy and deviance are also products of the institutions that employ them. A judicial confession does not provide immediate access to inward belief; an abjuration does not, in itself, allow us to measure a conversion; the frequency of denunciations may indicate the intensity of surveillance as much as the prevalence of dissent. Archives pose problems that a genealogy of concepts cannot resolve by proxy.
Documentary scrutiny nonetheless requires us to distinguish between the limited visibility of new findings in the books under review and the absence of source-based research across Imbruglia’s entire output. His work on the history of historiography also provides a point of comparison: Illuminismo e storicismo nella storiografia italiana. In appendice il carteggio Venturi-Cantimori dal 1945 al 1955 (Bibliopolis, Naples 2003) brings together essays, most of them already published, alongside a substantial edition of letters, largely previously unpublished. In that instance, the recombination of earlier studies is accompanied by an identifiable documentary contribution. It is precisely the possibility of specifying that additional contribution which makes the assessment of the recent syntheses more demanding.
A directly archival example is supplied by the essay Illuminismo e religione. Il Dei delitti e delle pene e la difesa dei Verri dinanzi alla censura inquisitoriale, «Studi settecenteschi», 25–26, 2005–2006, pp. 119–161. Its scholarly apparatus refers, among other things, to the Holy Office’s Censura librorum series for 1753–1754, the Protocolli for 1763–1767 and manuscripts in the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu. These references attest to the use of archival materials, without in themselves proving that each constituted a previously unknown discovery. More recently, the volume Cinque secoli di Litterae indipetae. Il desiderio delle missioni nella Compagnia di Gesù, edited with Pierre-Antoine Fabre and Guido Mongini (Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, Rome 2022), placed at the centre of a collective research project the letters written by Jesuits seeking assignment to missions, more than twenty-two thousand examples of which are preserved in the Society’s Roman archive. An original question may be asked of a source already known; equally, a new source may serve merely to confirm a familiar answer. What remains to be established in the recent books is which documentary findings, or which new readings of the sources, have compelled a revision of the interpretation.
For the same reason, different institutional arrangements must be distinguished. The Roman Inquisition, the Iberian inquisitions, civil magistracies, Protestant ecclesiastical authorities and communal bodies operated within different jurisdictions and relations of power. Religious control could consolidate a political authority or become the site of conflict between authorities. Protection and persecution might depend on political interests, personal relations and economic necessities without amounting to adherence to a general principle. Institutional realities alter the meaning of abstract formulations.
The decision not to prosecute must likewise be interpreted rather than immediately elevated into evidence of freedom. It might reflect compromise, calculation, the effect of a jurisdictional limit or a temporary inability to intervene. Conversely, the intensity of repression does not prove that a society was homogeneous: it may reveal how much effort was required to portray and preserve it as such. These are questions that demand the reconstruction of processes, not merely the assignment of a degree of toleration to each period.
Felici’s attention to religious and social experiences is therefore a substantial feature of the volume. It would be unfair to attribute a general absence of these concerns to the work as a whole. The reservation concerns the relationship between its parts: how far this complexity modifies the explanation advanced by Imbruglia, how much friction it introduces, and how far it remains confined to a parallel reconstruction. Practices and institutions must be allowed to contradict the theoretical framework. If their sole function is to give it concrete substance, integration stops precisely where it ought to begin.
Comparison between utopia and toleration makes this requirement sharper still. The two categories do not necessarily describe converging stages of a single emancipatory process. An ideal society may seek to eliminate the conditions of conflict through uniformity of behaviour and belief. Toleration, by contrast, may make possible a form of coexistence in which disagreement persists. The issue concerns the place accorded to difference and the power authorised to define its limits.
Not all utopias impose the same discipline, and toleration may preserve very rigid hierarchies. It is precisely these differences that make a juxtaposition based on a shared concern with modernity inadequate. The perfection of community may conflict with the autonomy of conscience; recognition of a minority may depend on its public discretion; the emancipation of political power may enlarge its claims upon individuals. Such relationships demand specific comparisons between texts, laws and practices.
Bernardini’s observations on the authoritarian consequences of utopian constructions thus identify a tension that deserves to be pursued to its historiographical implications. The promise of a just order says nothing, in itself, about the space left to those who contest it. A community may declare itself free because it has escaped domination while denying its own members the possibility of dissent. If utopia and toleration are too readily subsumed under the transformation of sovereignty, this contradiction risks being softened by the very category that ought to explain it.
The colonial dimension subjects the paradigm to further pressure. Universalism and domination, criticism of intolerance and justification of conquest, imagining better societies and organising dependency may coexist within the same traditions. Invoking the New World does not guarantee that the standpoint has ceased to be European. What matters is which interlocutors are acknowledged, which experiences acquire the capacity to modify the interpretation and which remain mere material at the disposal of European thought.
The publisher’s description of the English volume as the first global history of toleration raises the burden of proof. A history becomes global when extending its field also changes its questions, relationships and explanatory criteria. Geographical scale is not yet interpretative scale. Even a narrative spanning several continents may retain a single centre and summon other worlds as witnesses to its importance. Benzoni’s observations on utopia and its colonial reception acquire a significance here that extends beyond an individual book: they require us to test how far the enlargement of the framework actually shifts the centre of interpretation. The expansion of the repertoire thus risks remaining external to the structure of the explanation: other contexts increase the number of examples without acquiring comparable weight in redefining the questions. Here too, the systematic character of the framework precedes any demonstration of its novelty.
Imbruglia’s experience of Paraguay and Enlightenment thought legitimately warrants high expectations. His familiarity with these subjects could have provided especially fertile ground for reconsidering the relationship between community, religion and liberty. Instead, it is precisely the recognisability of the framework, as it moves between different works and subjects, that makes scrutiny urgent. Such an extensive body of research ought to make the paradigm more vulnerable to well-founded objections, not simply more available for new applications.
Assessment of these publications must therefore distinguish between the ability to organise material and the ability to deepen our understanding of it. The first is readily apparent: the selection of topics, familiarity with authors, long-term connections and recognisability of the argument. The second is the contested point. Correctly identifying important historiographical questions marks the beginning of research; novelty depends on what one manages to explain beyond relationships already known.
Otherwise, the conclusion that religion and politics were closely intertwined in the early modern period, or that utopia, sovereignty and toleration were involved in transformations of political thought, risks amounting to a truism. The problem begins afterwards: which relationships, through which mediations, amid which conflicts, and with what capacity to account for divergent outcomes? An analysis remains external to its subject when it moves from one of these themes to another without demonstrating the connection that makes them mutually illuminating.
A synthesis is not expected to replace every specialised study or exhaust three centuries of history. It is expected to make its conclusions proportionate to the evidence and to explain the criteria governing its choices. Broad ambition imposes more exacting scrutiny of cases that resist the reconstruction. A model that works chiefly with material selected to illustrate it confirms the selection before it confirms itself.
In comparing Utopia, Imbruglia’s contribution to La tolleranza in età moderna and the earlier bibliography of an extensive career, the most evident feature remains the persistence of an interpretative constellation. The scope of the material, its arrangement and the publishing occasion change. Less clear is the process by which an explanation is corrected when its subject matter presents it with difficulties. The most serious limitation therefore concerns the manner in which these problems are organised: their tendency to yield above all familiar answers, to reconfirm the framework within which they have been posed. The title changes more visibly than the explanation.
The longevity of a paradigm may testify to its strength; it may also make its immobility harder to perceive. What distinguishes the two is revision, consideration of alternatives and findings not already contained in the premises. The materials considered reveal a remarkable continuity of approach; they do not make the claim to interpretative renewal equally persuasive. The severity of the judgement arises from this disproportion, not from any rejection of intellectual history or of syntheses spanning long periods.
The achievement of an effective synthesis remains, but its standing must be precisely defined. The ability to present an established tradition anew should not be credited with a novelty and originality that have yet to be demonstrated. The breadth of Imbruglia’s undertaking confers both an expository advantage and a measure of protection: it allows many problems to be connected without subjecting each connection to scrutiny commensurate with its significance. It is on this point that the reconstruction proves least convincing.
The overall assessment is not favourable. Reservations concerning periodisation, geographical selection and the colonial dimension, together with the persistence of the same categories in Imbruglia’s earlier work, cast doubt on the distance between reorganising material and advancing an interpretation, and above all on the actual originality of the overall findings. The concrete history of societies, conflicts and institutions remains the decisive test. Yet Imbruglia offers an arrangement of his own paradigm in which its familiarity is more evident than its renewal. The strength of the undertaking lies in its organisation; novelty is precisely what remains weakest, along with an interpretative originality that appears scarcely demonstrated. This disproportion is made more conspicuous by the length of the scholarly trajectory: decades of work have rendered the paradigm familiar, while these new books still leave it difficult to identify what it has learned to explain differently. In Girolamo Imbruglia’s intellectual universe, new publications readily find their place; less evident is how far they contribute to changing the order into which they are inserted. They are the ‘same old novelties’: new publishing ventures that offer old reconstructions another opportunity to confirm themselves. Accumulated experience heightens the expectation of original findings and makes their continued deferral less persuasive. Nor is it clear, in the volumes discussed here, which new documents have made it possible to refine, correct or expand earlier interpretations: the reorganisation of existing scholarship is more evident than any substantial increase in documentary evidence or critical insight. Well-organised repetition retains the characteristics of a textbook synthesis; it does not thereby acquire those of original research or genuine historiographical innovation.
(Daniele Santarelli)
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