Mystical Theology, Ecumenism and Church-State Relations: Francesco Bellisomi (1663

Mystical theology, ecumenism and church-state relations: Francesco Bellisomi (1663-

1741) at the limits of confessionalism in early eighteenth-century Europe

Abstract: This article reconstructs the biography of a little-known Italian priest, Francesco Bellisomi (1663-1741), in order to trace the intellectual and political dimensions of religious reformism in early eighteenth-century Europe. Its primary objective is to demonstrate the causal relationships between three trends: firstly, pietistic spiritual reform influenced by mystical theology; secondly, ecumenical dialogue among Protestants and between Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox Christians; and thirdly, the political articulation of the non- confessional state. By following a persecuted Bellisomi from Pavia to Rome, and then on to Venice, Vienna, Halle, Berlin and London, it depicts the strands connecting the political, intellectual and religious environment on the Italian Peninsula, within the Holy Roman Empire and in the British Isles. From the latter seventeenth century, the equation of confessionalism – the alliance of a confessionalising church and a centralising state - was being undermined across Europe. One factor in this process was enthusiasm for a supra- confessional ecclesia universalis, the nature of which was highly contested. Bellisomi’s life offers a unique window onto this networked and inter-confessional intellectual culture.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, the ‘golden age’ of confessionalisation – the alliance of a confessionalising Church and a centralizing state which had emerged from the religious reformations of the sixteenth century – was coming to an end.1 The schisms within

European Christendom had become, in large part, territorially established, and the stage was

1 On the Confessionalisation thesis, see Heinz Schilling, ‘Das Konfessionelle Europa. Die Konfessionalisierung der europaischen lander seit Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts und ihre Folgen für Kirche, Staat, Gesellschaft und Kultur‘, in Ausgewahlte Abhandlungen zur europaischen Reformations-und Konfessionsgeschichte, ed. Heinz Schilling (Duncker & Humblot, 2002), pp. 646-700; Heinz Schilling, Early Modern European Civilization and its Political and Cultural Dynamism – the Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures (Brandeis University Press, 2008). Reviewing the thesis, see Timothy A Brady Jr., ‘“We have lost the Reformation” – Heinz Schilling and the rise of the confessionalisation thesis’, and other essays in Wege der Neuzeit. Festschrift für Heinz Schilling zum 65 Geburtstag, ed. Stefan Ehrenpreis, Ute Lotz-Heumann, Olaf Mörke, Luise Schorne-Schutte, eds. (Duncker & Homblot, 2007), pp. 33-56; Hartmut Lehman, ‘Grenzen der Erklarungskraft der Konfessionalisierungsthese‘, in Interkonfessionalitat – transkonfessionalitat – binnenkonfessionelle Pluralität, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz, Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen, Thomas Kaufmann and Hartmut Lehmann (Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2003), pp 242-49.

1 set for the emergence of the modern secular state. In this reading, from the eighteenth century religion was increasingly ejected from a secularising political realm. In the face of its expulsion from ‘the political’, where the making of modern history took place, ‘the religious’ was turned back upon itself to become a private, spiritual or natural affair.

This narrative of the conceptual decoupling of ‘the political’ and ‘the religious’ is integral to well-established academic understandings of the modern world. Since the latter part of the twentieth century, however, it has increasingly come under assault. A key factor here has been the practical recognition of the inadequacy of a narrowly secular frame to understand contemporary political realities: the bulk of modern Western political thought was constructed upon a teleological premise – that of secularisation – which has proven demonstrably false.2 This ‘return of religion’ to the academic consciousness has also prompted a wealth of scholarship reassessing the long historical arc of secularisation as process.3 One emergent perspective has proposed a sustained ‘dialectical relationship’ between political and religious realms into the eighteenth century and beyond.4 From this point of view, learning to forget the inevitable divergence of ‘the religious’ and ‘the political’ offers alternative frameworks through which to understand the emergence of the modern world.

2 The key recognition of this is Peter Berger’s revision of his own classic ‘Secularisation thesis’, first articulated in his 1967, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1967), revised most bluntly in his 1999 The Desecularisation of the World: The Resurgence of Religion in World Politics (William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1999). Jeffrey Cox, ‘Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularisation: A Progress Report’, in Secularisation in the Christian World, ed. Callum Brown and Michael Snape (London: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 13-26. 3 Perhaps most significantly, this scholarship has nuanced readings of confessional toleration, indifference and co-habitation between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries: Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Diversity and Dissent: Negotiating Religious Difference in Central Europe, 1500-1800, ed. Howard Louthan, Gary Cohen and Franz Szabo (Bergahn Books, 2011). 4 Hartmut Lehmann, ‘Competing concepts for the study of religious reform movements, including Pietism, in early modern and in North-America’, in Confessionalism and Pietism: Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe, ed. Fred Van Lieburg (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), pp. 313-322, p. 320; see also, for instance, the work of Paolo Prodi, summarised in ‘Europe in the Age of Reformations: the Modern State and Confessionalization’, The Catholic Historical Review, vol. 103, 2017, no. 1, pp. 1-19.

This article makes a modest contribution to this project. Concretely, it aims to demonstrate a causal relationship between three historical developments at play in Europe in the years around 1700: firstly, the proliferation of spiritual, non-conformist, pietistic strands of

Christian renewal, buoyed by the circulation of mystical theology; secondly, the strengthening of trans-confessional religious networks predicated upon an overcoming of religious conflict and division within Christianity; and thirdly, the political articulation of the state as a non-confessional but fundamentally Christian entity. These historical developments are all well-established within their respective fields, and the relationship between a turn to mysticism and pietism and the undermining of confessional and ecclesiastical hierarchy in particular is increasingly recognised.5 The political context to these religious dynamics, however, is less well understood, and this blunts their potential to revise historical narratives at large.6 A key objective here is to demonstrate the significance of spiritual-religious reformism for political reformism in Europe – and especially Catholic Europe – in the first decades of the eighteenth century.

At a slightly deeper level, this article aims to demonstrate how within this nexus the forces which had fuelled confessional division in Europe from the sixteenth century – political theology, spiritual renewal and doctrinal primitivism – were, by 1700, increasingly being redeployed by scholars, theologians and jurists for an anti-confessional agenda, to heal the fissures within Christendom. Given that different individuals and groups tended to envisage

5 An important point of reference remains Leszek Kolakowski, Chrétiens sans église: la conscience religieuse et le lien confessionnelle au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1967). More recently, see Hartmut Lehmann, Hans-Jürgen Schrader and Heinz Schilling, eds., Jansenismus, Quietismus, Pietismus (Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Pietismus, 2002); Ted Campbell, The Religion of the Heart (University of South Carolina Press, 1991); Geoffrey Rowell, ‘Scotland and the ‘mystical matrix’ of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: an exploration of religious cross-currents’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 2, 128- 144. Recent work by Lionel Laborie has been significant here: ‘Spreading the Seed: Toward a French Millenarian Network in pietist Germany’, in Kriminelle – Freidenker – Alchemister. Raume des Untergrunds in der Fruehen Neuzeit, ed. Martin Mulsow (Koln/Weimer/Wien: Böhlau-Verlag, 2014), pp. 99-117. 6 A recent article which does explicit tie together the political and religious currents of anti-confessionalism is Henri Adrien Krop, ‘Fides et Ration: An Early Enlightenment Defence of Non-Confessional Religion by Poiret and his Circle’, Church History and Religious Culture, vol. 90, no. 1, 2010, pp. 47-67.

3 an ecclesia universalis in their own (often confessionalised) image, attempts at unity within the Church tended to fail. Nonetheless, it was religious reform, renewal and an ecumenical enthusiasm, rather than advocacy for the secular state or the proliferation of anti-religious sentiment, which featured most prominently in attempts to unravel the confessional agenda circa 1700.

The vessel for these arguments is a biographical case study: the little-known life of the itinerant priest Francesco Bellisomi (1663-1741).7 Born in Pavia, Bellisomi spent his early years on the Italian peninsula before travelling, under duress, extensively through Protestant

Europe in the first three decades of the eighteenth century. Piecing together Bellisomi’s biography through scattered letters and isolated manuscripts allows his life to become a pivot around which to tell a larger story about Europe’s religious, intellectual and political history at a crucial juncture in the early eighteenth century.

In the summer of 1701 the Rome-based scholar and polemicist Giusto Fontanini wrote to the

Neapolitan antiquarian Matteo Egizio, thanking him for sending a copy of the Viaggio

D’Europa. Egizio had edited and prepared for publication the travel writings of the Viaggio’s author, the Neapolitan ‘globetrotter’ Francesco Gemelli Careri, and was distributing copies around his friends and contacts. Fontanini had been unable, however, to receive the copy from Egizio’s ‘go-between’, a ‘Monsig. Bellisomi’, who now found himself ‘in the prisons of

7 The only serious research on Bellisomi has been carried out by Adelisa Malena, published in her 2015 article ‘Ecclesia Universa: “imparzialita” confessionale e transfer culturali tra Sei e Settecento. Note su una ricerca in corso’, in Ripensare la riforma protestante: nuove prospettive degli studi italiani, ed. Lucia Felici (Turin: Claudiana, 2015), pp 283-310, on Bellisomi see pp. 303-7.

4 the Holy Inquisition’.8 In November of that year, Fontanini wrote again informing Egizio that he had no new information regarding Bellisomi, though that he feared for his well-being.9

Who was Bellisomi, and what was the Inquisition’s rationale for imprisoning him? Egizo had met Francesco Bellisomi in Naples in late 1699, and after Bellisomi’s return to Rome they exchanged nine letters between March 1700 and June 1701. These letters identify Bellisomi, firstly, as participant in discussions about ecclesiastical reform and the limits of papal authority, and, secondly, as well-connected with a range of Protestant scholars in central and northern Europe. In both contexts, Bellisomi had found good company in the Naples of

Giuseppe Valletta, the city’s chief scholar and intellectual patron, and a friend of both

Bellisomi and Egizio.10 In the years around 1700 Valletta was at the forefront of political turmoil in Naples, defending the Neapolitan civil jurisdiction against papal intervention, and defending modern philosophy against the persecution of the Inquisition. A predicate to both positions was Valletta’s religious conviction in the primacy of scripture, posited upon a strong distinction between human certainties and divine truths, between experimental philosophy and dogmatic theology.11 This intellectual nexus had the capacity to undermine papal primacy in temporal affairs and, without being properly heretical, Valletta’s thought sustained serious engagement with the philosophical, political and theological arguments emerging from Protestant scholars in Northern Europe.

8 ‘del regalo che mi destina de’ Viaggi d’Europa; i quali benchè non possa ricevere da Monsig Bellisomo per esser egli nelle carceri della Sagra Inquisizione’, Giusto Fontanini, Rome to Matteo Egizio, Naples, 2nd July 1701 – Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, MS XIII.C.90 199. 9 ‘Di March. Bellisomi non si ragiona nulla com’è, Giusto Fontanini, Rome to Matteo Egizio, Naples, 5th November 1701 – Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, MS XIII.C.90 200. 10 On Valletta’s Naples see Vittor Ivo Comparato, Giuseppe Valletta. Un intellettuale napoletano della fine del seicento (Naples: Istituto italiano per gli studi Storici: 1970). 11 ‘perche approvare, per cosi dire, la libertà di teologare e poi oppugnare la libertà filosofare? (perche) introduire il probabile nelle cose spirituale, l’improbabile nelle scienze umane... scienza nelle coscienze, coscienza nelle scienze; ed in un motto, Accademici nella Teologi, Dogmatici nelle filosofare; filosofi nella Teologia, e nella Filosofia Teologi’, Difesa, in Opere filosofiche di Giuseppe Valletta, ed. Michele Rak (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1975), p. 96.

Bellisomi’s letters to Egizio demonstrate both correspondents’ intimacy with this stance; political condemnation of papal aggression is combined with ecclesiological condemnation of an over-reaching and superficial Church. Cognizant of the controversial nature of such claims, Bellisomi proposed that Egizio pursue publication of his ecclesiastical-historical manuscript in Protestant Europe, suggesting a host of publishers from his own contacts in

England, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland:

I can propose them in London to Mr. Jackson of the Royal Society, who I

recommended to Sig. Valletta in Naples, and from whom I received a letter this

morning… In order to publish the work it will be necessary to know some scholars in

Utrecht, or Amsterdam experienced in publishing Italian books in Holland, since there

they are printed with every freedom and at good value… for example in Utrecht there

is ‘Dottore Vurigo’, Sig. de Vries and Sig. Giovanni Grenio, in Leipzig, Sig.

Menchenio,12 in Frankfurt in Brandenburg Sig. Christofaro Becmano, in Geneva with

Sig. Turretino,13 and when the most esteemed gentleman would like to communicate

with several of the above named gentlemen, please let me know, and I will endeavour

to help.14

Egizio’s tract on the history of the church remained in manuscript form; for his part, he stepped back from the sharp edge of political-theological scholarship.

12 The Leipzig based editor of the Acta Eruditorum Otto Mencke 13 The Swiss theologian Jean-Alphonse Turrettini 14 ‘potrò proporle in Londra il Sig. Jackson della Societa Regia, che da me fù raccomondato al Sig. Valletta in Napoli et a cui questa mattina ho letta la stimatissima di Lei lettera... in ordine però alla stampa sarà necesario conoscere qualche letterato in Utrecht opure Amsterdam perche accudisca alla stampa delli libri Italiani in Olanda, over puo stamparsi con ogni libertà e risparmio e talvolta utile dell’istesso Autore, per essempio in Utrecht il Dottore Verrico, il Sig. de Vries et il Sig. Giovanni Grenio in Lipsia il Sig. Menchenio in Francfort di Brandenburgo il Sig. Christofano Bechmano, in Ginevra il Sig. Turretino, e quando V.S. volesse per lettere communicare con alcuno delli sudetti Sig.i si compiaccia avisarmi perche procurerò di servirla’, Bellisomi, Rome, to Egizio, Naples, 03.27.1700, BNN MS XIII C. 90. 104

As for Bellisomi, we can only speculate about the intimacy of his relationship with the notable Protestant scholars, theologians and go-betweens he references; elsewhere in his letters to Egizio he cites his correspondence and familiarity with German and Scandinavian contacts.15 Bellisomi also played host to protestant and Northern European visitors passing through Rome, evidenced in his letters to the Modena-based scholar Lodovico Antonio

Muratori of the same years.16 The visits of ‘oltralpini’ only emphasised, to Bellisomi, the impoverished intellectual culture spreading across the Italian peninsula, with Naples a rare oasis of intellectual rigour and debate.17 In this climate, Bellisomi began integrating himself into the group of critics who would spearhead the reform of Italian intellectual culture over the first third of the eighteenth century. Muratori was a central figure here, alongside the

‘giornalisti’ Benedetto Bacchini, Apostolo Zeno and Scipione Maffei in Northern Italy,

Fontanini in the Roman ‘Circolo Tamburo’, and Valletta in Naples.18 Driving critical philology towards ecclesiastical history undermined papal arbitrariness and posed a moderate pathway towards intellectual liberalization, though broadly within a Catholic key.

15 Offering ‘un catalogo degli huomini universali più dotti del Nord, cioè Svezia, Danimarca’ - Bellisomi, Rome to Egizio, Naples, July 3rd 1700, BNN MS XIII. C. 90. 107. 16 Bellisomi, Rome to Muratori, Milan, February 13, 1700 – Biblioteca Estense-Universiatorio di Modena, Archivio Muratoriano, 53.15, letter 1, 2 (28.4.1701, to Milan), 6 (8.5.1701, to Modena), 7 (28.5.1701, to Modena). 17 ‘Li curiali poi che segnavo in questo parte vedono vane tali fatiche, e screditano altri che vi s’applicavo, e questo provisse dalla loro ignoranza’. On the contrary, ‘in Napoli con aria edification alcuni nobili oltre molti fuori cittadini e par numero d’avvocati bene istruitti di simili facolta, e ben chiaro cio si dimostra p la costante conservatione della moderna filosofia’, Bellisomi, Rome to Egizio, Naples, June 11th, 1701, BNN MS XIII C. 90. 111. 18 Bellisomi, Rome to Muratori, Modena, BEUMo AM 53.15, letters 2, 3 and 7; In his letter of 11.6.1701 Bellisomi cites appreciatively the new work of the Scipione Maffei, ‘un trattato… delle Investiture Ponteficie di Napoli e Sicilia e loro historia’, BNN MS XIII C90 110. Useful introductions to this culture of intellectual reform, through the lens of the literary journal edited by Zeno and Maffei, are Brendan Dooley, Science, Politics, and Society in Eighteenth-Century Italy: The Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia and Its World (New York: Garland, 1991) and Il “Giornale de’’ Letterati d’Italia" Trecento Anni Dopo: Scienza, Storia, Arte, Identità (1710-2010) : Atti Del Convegno, Padova, Venezia, Verona, 17-19 Novembre 2010, ed. Enza del Tedesco (Pisa, 2012). The Roman context is best described in Alberto Caracciolo, Domenico Passionei tra Roma e la repubblica delle lettere (Rome: ed. di storia e letteratura, 1968).

III

Support for intellectual reform, criticism of papal excess and extensive connections with

Protestants all provide context for Bellisomi’s passage to the prisons of the Holy Office in the summer of 1701. A glance at his earlier life, however, presents a complex picture. Born into

Pavian aristocracy on the 19th January 1663, Bellisomi’s father was the Marchese Annibale

Bellisomi, and his mother a member of the prominent Beccaria family.19 Francesco graduated from University of Pavia on the 27th October 1683 in ‘Iuris Pontificus et Caesaris’20, before pursuing five more years of theological study. This manifested itself in two ways. Firstly,

Bellisomi was, on the 4th November 1688, made Abbot of the Pavian church Santa Maria della Pertica, ensured by a papal bull dated 3rd November 1688, and granted with the authority of Pope Innocent XI.21 Secondly, Bellisomi published, in 1689, three theological essays, titled collectively Tria Theologiae Opusculae.22 The first essay was on the Trinity in the thought of Boetius the second on whether angels were corporeal beings, and the third a commentary on Scotus. The arguments presented are largely derivative, and the work was deemed unproblematic by the Index in Rome.23

Through the 1690s Bellisomi continued his progress through the ranks of regional civil and ecclesiastical hierarchy. Another papal record in the family archive, dated 13th August 1695, made Bellisomi Governor of the city of Forlì in the Papal States, with Cardinal Albani, the future pope Clement XI, acting as Bellisomi’s patron in Rome.24 This appointment, and his

19 The certificate of baptism in the Bellisomi family archive, Archivio Storico Comunale, Biblioteca Civica Carlo Bonnetta, Pavia, Fondo Bellisomi, (ASCP FB), busta 7., 301, f.1; on the Bellisomi family, see Marica Forni, Cultura e Residenza Aristocratica a Pavia, (Milan: F. Angeli, 1989), pp. 83-150. 20 Bellisomi’s ‘patente di Laurea’, with the sigil attached, ASCP FB, 7-316. 21 ASCP FB, 7-318, 319. 22 The work is quite rare – the copy consulted was in the Biblioteca Civica Carlo Bonetta, Pavia, VAR A IV 111. 23 Bellisomi’s Tria Theologiae Opusculae was sent to the Holy Office by Bellisomi’s father Annibale in July 1688, and was judged inoffensive: ‘nihil mali in eo seperitur... meius impressionis permittat’ – Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede (ACDF), De Titulus Librorum ab anno 1688-1691, Tit. Libr. 1688- 1691, no. 13. 24 ASCP FB, 8-326.

8 illustrious patron, consolidated Bellisomi’s presence in Rome in the 1690s. In 1695 Bellisomi was one of the founders, along with Bonaventura di S. Elia and Vincenzo degli Atti, of the so-called ‘Accademia dei Dogmi’ in Rome, an ecclesiastical academy founded initially in the church of San Paolo alla Regola under the aegis of Cardinal Albani and Cardinal Lorenzo

Altieri. Over the following five years the academy moved, first to the Chiesa Trinita dei

Pellegrini, and then finally within the university La Sapienza.25 By 1700, Bellisomi was being considered for election as bishop of his home-town, evidenced by two letters of recommendation sent from senior Pavese figures to the pope, dated 8 December 1700 and 22

January 1701, just a few months after the accession of Bellisomi’s patron Albani to papacy.26

Over the course of 1701, then, following his return to Rome from Naples, Bellisomi’s fortunes changed dramatically and his patrons abandoned him. The notes from Bellisomi’s trial by the Inquisition are explicit but non-specific in the rationale behind his incarceration:

‘conversations and familiarity with heretics and heretical proposals’ a charge restated with conviction in August 1701, with the elaboration of Bellisomi’s ‘possessing heretical literature’.27 Bellisomi was accused of receiving heretical literature from Germany, via a

Livornese merchant, and at the conclusion of his trial, on the 15th December 1701, ‘sentenced to ten years imprisonment, and more at the arbitration of the Holy Office’.28 Two accounts shed further light upon the circumstances of Bellisomi’s imprisonment. The first is included in the ‘Diario di Roma dell’anno MDCCI’ by Francesco Valerio. Here Bellisomi is described as being arrested along with a group, including one ‘Inglese Eretico’, at his house. Bellisomi and the English heretic were then transferred under guard in a carriage to the Inquisition’s

25 See Maria Pia Donato, Accademie Romane. Una storia Sociale, 1671-1824 (Napoli, 2000), pp. 53-54. 26 The letters, from Hercules Malaspina and Joannes Antonius Sannazarius, sent for papal consideration by Alessandro Guidi, are held in ASCP FB 8-328. 27 ‘conversationes et familiaritate cum hereticis, et propones hereticales’, from the Feria of the 18th May 1701, which concluded that Bellisomi should ‘abstinendo in future ab asserta conversationes cum hereticus’, ACDF. Decreto S.O. 1701, f. 171v. ‘retentiones librorus hereticones’, ibid., f. 284r. 28 Ibid., f. 435v, underlining in original.

9 prisons, followed by ‘a cart with two chests of writings and other books’. Valerio was unaware of the underlying cause behind the raid and imprisonment of the group of scholars, concluding ‘I have not discovered the reason for his imprisonment’.29 The second account is an English pamphlet published in 1712, titled The Short Account of the Many extraordinary

Mercies GOD in his infinite goodness has conferred upon Franciscus Bellisomus.30 The work, with no author or place of publication, elaborates in a general way upon the circumstances of Bellisomi’s encounters with Protestants in Rome, and lists the ten charges of heresy directed towards Bellisomi by the Inquisition.31 This eclectic cocktail of heresies doesn’t clarify Bellisomi’s theological stance; the provenance of the Short Account, presumably printed in England, does, however, give a clue as to the key encounter which would draw Bellisomi into the trans-confessional networks animating Europe’s religious landscape at the dawn of the eighteenth century: his meeting with Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf in Rome in the Winter of 1698.

29 The manuscript, from the Archivio Capitolores, Rome, Armadio XIV, n. 11, f. 105, is cited by Gustavo Costa, ‘Documenti per una storia dei rapporti anglo-romani nel settecento’, Saggi e ricerche sul Settecento (Naples, 1968), pp. 371-452, p. 413. Costa concludes that the case of Bellisomi was not an isolated incident, and that ‘evidentemente il protestantismo, che doveva alimentare il pensiero di Giannone, suscitava grande interesse nella stessa capitale del Cattolicesimo’, p. 414 30 Several copies exist in English collections; I have consulted the edition at the University Library, Cambridge, Bb.12.5 item 4. 31 1) De Reliquiis & Sanctis non adorandis 2) Non dari Purgatorium 3) Quod liberum arbitrium, post Lapsum hominis & post peccatum Originale, sit servus peccati 4) Quod Doctirna Iansenii inter Catholicos sit optima 5) Theologia Mystica Michaelis Molinis dignissima est 6) Ritus antiquae Ecclesiae adhuc inter Lutheranos observantur, non vero inter Cathlicos tantum 7) Nullus ex tribus Religionibus in Imperio Romano toleratis, nominandus est haereticus, neque illi statim Haeretici haberi debent, qui in errore esse inveniuntur 8) Dissentientes tantummodo sunt Haeretici, habito respectu ad Romam non respectu ad Evanglium, 9) Miracula Sanctorum sunt fallacia & incerta 10) Indulgentiae non liberant animas ex purgatorio – cited from the German translation of the English, Species Facti des Herrn Marchesen Francisci Bellisomo (1728?).

Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf (1655-1712) was one of the chief architects of a lively ecumenical inter-confessional culture in Europe in the years around 1700.32 The nephew of the renowned

Erfurt-based Ethiopian scholar Hiob Ludolf, Heinrich Wilhelm trained as a scholar and theologian, becoming learned in numerous middle-eastern languages, and coming in contact with Philipp Jakob Spener who was establishing what became the pietist movement in

Lutheran theology. From the 1680s Ludolf worked as secretary to Prince George of

Denmark, the husband of Princess Anne, the daughter of James II of England, who would become Queen of England from 1702, and then Great Britain from 1707, until her death in

1714. This position gave Ludolf a stable income and permanent base in London, whilst also affording him the opportunity to travel extensively, both on diplomatic missions and to pursue his zeal for a pietistic ecumenical Christian faith. From London, Ludolf established himself as a central node in an inter-confessional network stretching to St Petersburg,

Istanbul and Cairo, and structured around centres in London, Halle and Amsterdam-the

Hague. Ludolf was driven by a millenarian conviction that the world was entering a new phase, that the conflict between the regnum lucis and the regnum tenebris was intensifying, and that he was providentially selected to set in alignment the traces of a reformed, pietistic and ‘inner’ Christianity which were emerging across Europe, either side of the confessional divide.33

32 For many years Ludolf was best known as a linguist and orientalist, and for his Grammatica Russica, 1696: John Simon Gabriel Simmons, ‘H.W. Ludolf and the printing of his Grammatica Russica at Oxford in 1696’, Slavonic Papers I, 1950, 104-129. Only relatively recently has he been seriously interrogated as a religious thinker: Renate Wilson, ‘Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf, August Hermann Francke und der Eingang nach Russland‘, in Halle und Osteuropa, zur europaischen Ausstrahlung des hallischen Pietismus, ed. Udo Strater and Johannes Wallmann, Halle Forschungen 1, 1998, pp. 83-108; Renate Wilson, ‘Continental Protestant refugees and their protectors in Germany and London’, in Pietismus und Neuzeit, 20 (1994), pp. 107-24, pp. 111-115; Alexander Schunka, ‘„An England ist uns viel gelegen“. Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf (1655-1712) als Wanderer zwischen den Welten‘, in London und das Halleschen Waisenhaus: Eine Kommunikationsgeschichte im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Holger Zaunstock, Andreas Gestrich and Thomas Muller-Baulke (Halle Forschungen 39, 2014), pp. 65-86. 33 Writing from Amsterdam to a ‘gentlewoman in spiritual doubts’, probably his friend Betty Hastings, in 1701, Ludolf wrote: ‘those that fancy I am to spend the next winter in England, have too narrow a notion of Gods design with me; I am fully persuaded that so wonderful a providence about me, in temporal affairs as well as spiritual ones, can have no mind to bury me amongst my London acquaintances. In my conversations here with people of different nations and churches, I find that powerful influence from the foundations of life, that I am

It was en route to Jerusalem and the Levant in 1698 that Ludolf stopped over in Rome and made the acquaintance of Francesco Bellisomi.34 That Bellisomi made an impression on

Ludolf is indicated by the long letter the latter sent the former upon arriving back in London in late 1700. Here Ludolf provides a description of ‘ecclesiastical developments among

Protestants’ – essentially a ‘brief history of pietism’ from its origins in the thought of

Johannes Arndt, to its theorization by Spener and Johannes Peterson, and its institutionalization by August Hermann Francke at Halle.35 The relationship between pietism and Lutheran orthodoxy, and the distinction between ‘crass’ and ‘subtle’ chiliasm, the former being typical of Millenarian enthusiasts, the latter more refined, being ‘known in the primitive church, but only recently among Protestants has it been revived’, is discussed at length.36 German pietism’s difficult relationship with political authority in Brandenburg and

Saxony is also set out. Crucially, however, Ludolf’s story is not fixated on the pietism of middle Germany; he describes German developments alongside the emergence of the

Quakers, the Philadelphians, and the Religious Societies in England, the religious ferment in

Holland, and the persecution of Protestants in Catholic France. All across Europe, theologians and scholars were announcing the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God on

Earth. From Ludolf’s perspective, however, many of these new movements neglected to cultivate God’s kingdom within their own souls.37

amazed at the Great God’s mercyfull condescensions in working through such a wretch as myself’, Archiv Franckesche Stiftungen (AFSt) /H D23, 25r-37v. 34 Ludolf refers to his encounter with Bellisomi in a letter from Amsterdam to August Hermann Francke on the 2.9.1700 as he was travelling back to London: AFSt /H D71 ff. 45-48: ‘Das wichtigste von meiner romischen Reise habe ich weder aus Italien noch aus Franckreich der Post anvertauen wollen, nehmlich dass ich mit einem gewissen Prelaten, Monsignor Bellisomi genandt, bekandt worden, der das wesentliche Christenthumb wohl einsiehet und vermuthlich mit gottlicher Hulffe ein Werckzeug vieles Guten einstens werden dorffte’; cited in Joachim Tetzner, H.W. Ludolf und Russland (Berlin: Akad. Verlag, 1955), pp. 115-121. 35 ‘motus Ecclesiasticos inter Protestantes’, Ludolf, London to Bellisomi, Rome, no date (but 1700), AFSt/H D23, ff. 1r-3v. 36 ‘Quae opinion Spenero Chiliasmus subtilis vocatur, in primordio Ecclesiae non ignota, sed inter Protestantes ultimis hisce annis resuscitata’, ibid. 37 ‘multos autores circa manifestationem regni Dei in Terra solicite evolverant, sed se ipsos examinare neglexerant num regnum Dei /: quod sanctimonia Iustitia, Pax et gaudium, in Spiritu Sancto est:/ ipsorum animos ingressum sit’, ibid.

This European panorama, and Ludolf’s vision of an ecclesia universalis driven by an inner piety, may well have captured Bellisomi’s own enthusiasm for religious reform. In his letter to Bellisomi, Ludolf describes the transformation of religion within protestant Europe, but

Ludolf’s vision of religious awakening was universal, and he engaged with both Catholic and

Orthodox communities, both to track the signs of a new emerging age across Christendom, and to promote his vision of a pietistic inner spirituality which eschewed scholastic reasoning, doctrinal polemics and ecclesiastical superficiality. It was the conjunction of pietism’s relations with Greek Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, and the interplay between mystical theology and mission, which deepened Bellisomi’s engagement with German strands of pietism in 1700 and 1701.

After returning from the Levant in 1700, Ludolf was keen to strengthen relations between

Protestants and the Orthodox communities he had met in Constantinople, Smyrna and elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean. Ludolf’s interest in the Orthodox Church emerged, in part, through his relations with Anglican High Churchmen researching the liturgy in the primitive church. Keen to align this scholarly project with missionary activity, he decided to commission a translation of the New Testament into vulgar Greek and disseminate copies throughout the Levant. This project was also part of an attempt to develop Greek colleges, along with communities of Orthodox students, in Oxford and Halle.38 Ludolf lobbied the

Anglican Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), of which he was a founding member, receiving support and financial contributions from its members.39 He also

38 Ulrich Moennig, ‘Die griechischen Studenten am Hallenser Collegium orientale theologicum‘, in Halle und Osteuropa, pp. 299-329. 39 Ludolf’s ‘Proposals relating to the instructions of the Greek Christians’ are recorded in the notes from the meetings of the SPCK, now held in the University of Cambridge’s University Library: ‘If we make it our

13 collaborated with Francke in Halle, through whom he established a group of Protestants travelling to Constantinople to serve as chaplains who could act as agents for the Greek bible project: Anhard Adelung, Christoph Salchow and Isaac Rombouts.

Adelung, Salchow and Rombouts arrived in Venice in late 1700, travelling on to Rome and

Livorno, from where they took a ship, via Toulon, to Constantinople, arriving before the 30th

July 1701.40 On Ludolf’s recommendation the trio met Bellisomi in Rome; Ludolf had entrusted Rombouts with a book for Bellisomi, Balthasar Kopke’s De tribus sanctorum gradibus.41 After this encounter, Bellisomi wrote to August Hermann Francke, the founder and director of the Lutheran Orphanage in Halle. In his first letter to Francke, after referencing his encounters, first with Ludolf and then Rombouts, Adelung and Salchow,

Bellisomi lamented the corruption of Catholic theologians (‘here Theologians don’t promote it (the great Christian republic), favouring doctrine over piety’), citing Paul’s letters to

Timothy (Timothy I, Chapter 6) and complaining that the examples of Cardinal Petrucci and

Miguel de Molinos are not followed more widely. Primarily Bellisomi was keen to better understand the religious developments in Northern Europe, asking for information about

‘recent controversies among Evangelical and Reformed religion’ and ‘catalogues of books printed in Germany, Holland and England’. In particular Bellisomi wanted to be sent ‘books for and against Socinianism, such as the books of Mr Beverland and Mr Benedict Spinoza’.42

byseiness ye our light might even dart some rays into ye darkness of the Oriental church… I have therefore thought fit to lay before the above mentioned honble society the following proposals… As the main business will be to obtain the esteem and love of the oriental church so great care ought to be taken of sending such patrons of christian virtue amongst them’, SPCK MS E1/1. 40 Rombouts to Francke, from Venezia, 4.12.1700, AFSt/H D81 888g; Salchow to Ludolf, Rome, 28.12.1700, AFSt/H D42, ff. 294r-295r; Rombouts to Francke, Toulon, 1.2.1701, AFSt/H D81 888e; Rombouts to Francke, Constantinople, 30.7.1701, AFSt/H D ff. 324rv. 41 …seu de incipitenibus, adoloscentibus & adultis in christo eorumque communibus & distinctis officiis…, 1689, with a preface by Jakob Spener, as described by Ludolf in his letter to Bellisomi; Bellisomi confirms receiving the work in his first letter to Francke: AFSt/H F14 ff. 318-9, no date. 42 Bellisomi to Francke, AFSt/H F14, 318r-9v – ‘Oh felicem Christianorus Respubblica. Sed qui Theologus non promovet est, qui secundum pietate est doctrinam… libentissime intelligam doctrina huiusmodi statum in germania et alibi, necnon controversias recentes ad religiones Evangelicas, Hollandia et Anglia et alibi cuduntur.

The dense letters Bellisomi sent to Francke in Februrary, March and April 1701 illustrate the cohabitation of mysticism and anticurialism in Bellisomi’s intellectual profile. This was of great interest to Francke, and in particular the censorship and trial of exponents of Catholic quietism, mainly Molinos, but also the case of the Burgundian priest Philibert Robert.43

Francke, along with Spener and Gottfried Arnold, had worked on translation of Molinos’

Guida Spirituale in the 1680s and 90s, and Bellisomi offered to send Francke documents relating to the trial of Molinos and the censorship of quietist texts by the Index.44 In exchange

Bellisomi asked for works by Heinrich von Cocceijch and Johann Conrad Riselmann on ‘the history of the papacy and its usurpation of princes and bishops’.45 As indicated in his letters from the same months with Egizio and Muratori, the politics of papal critique was embedded in a sober historical criticism, and Bellisomi cites approvingly the method of the French scholar Jean de Launoy and the ‘critical examination of visions, apparitions and miracles of the lives of Saints’ by Dominican and Jesuit historians.46

Cross-referencing Bellisomi’s letters to and from Egizio and Muratori, Ludolf and Francke articulates the combination of anti-curial politics, scholarly criticism fuelled by intellectual reformism and an appetite for trans-confessional spiritual revivalism which made him so suspect to the Vatican. Most significantly, folding these distinct dynamics into his biography

Libri pro Socinianismo et contra erunt mihi grati, quaemadmodum libris Domini Beverland et Benedictis Espinoze’. 43 Hubert Mauparty, Histoire du Quillotism, (Paris, 1703); see also Charly Coleman, The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2014), pp. 91-98. 44 Bellisomi to Francke, Rome, 25.2.1701, AFSt/H F14, ff. 295r-298v; 30.4.1701, ff. 299r-300v, ‘catalogorum Molinis Processum et catalogorum aliorum processum’: On the pietists and Molinos see Malena, ‘Ecclesia Universa’, pp. 293-99; Klaus vom Orde, ‘Der Quietismus Miguel de Molinos bei Philipp Jacob Spener‘, in Lehmann, Schrader and Schilling, eds., Jansenismus, Quietismus, Pietismus, pp. 106-118. 45 ‘de historia Papatus, eius pertensis usurpationibus adversus Principis ed Episciopos ad me prima occassione dirigere’, AFSt/H F14, ff. 295r-298v. 46 ‘Nescio an aliquis historicus sive ex Anglia et Hollandia sive ex Germania aut Gallia Evangelicus, aut Reformatus, legendas Pontificias SS. Martyrus et Confessorum quam plurire a Domenicanis et Jesuiti sunt refectes ubique visionibus apparitionibus et miraculis, vite examineverit et repugnaverit, quaemadmodum Gallis Pontificis Joannis Launoy’, ibid.; on de Launoy’s critical scholarship, see Jacques Grès-Gayer, ‘“L’Aristarque de son siècle”, le Dr Jean de Launoy (1601-1678)’ in Papes, princes et savants dans l’Europe moderne. Mélange à la mémoire de Bruno Neveu, ed. Jean-Louis Quantin and Jean-Claude Wacquet (Geneva, 2006), pp. 269-85.

15 demonstrates how they were causally connected, rather than merely coincidental. Tracking

Bellisomi’s flight from Italian peninsula and his wandering through Protestant Europe through the 1710s and 1720s serves to transpose this intellectual equation onto a European stage.

Establishing Bellisomi’s relationship with pietistic currents in protestant Europe clarifies the rationale behind his imprisonment: his challenge at once to the temporal and spiritual authority of the papacy in Rome. An unsigned and undated record in Francke’s personal documents describes Bellisomi’s arrest, stressing his relations with the English in Rome, establishing ‘a new sect, worse than Molinos’.47 After his sentence, delivered in December

1701, Bellisomi was held in the Castello Sant’Angelo, before being moved several times to different churches in Rome, with strict restrictions upon his right to read, write and correspond. This continued through to November 1710, at which point Bellisomi, concerned by the arbitrary nature of his sentence, manufactured an escape from his then prison in the

Convent of St. Augustine, assisted by Imperial agents acting under direction of the Marquis de Prié.48 Bellisomi fled to Vienna, via Venice where he stayed with Francke’s brother,

Heinrich Friedrich Francke, writing to August Hermann Francke from the Imperial capital.

Bellisomi was prepared to remain in Vienna, being effectively exiled and poor, and having established a network of patrons and supporters – Christian Friedrich von Bartholdi, Eberhard von Danckelman, Barthold Holztfus and Johann-Baptist Habermann – through whom he

47 ‘li detti Togati siano Inglesi, che lo instruissero in quella Religione e far forse una nuova secta, di cose peggiore del Molinos’, AFSt/H D 94. 48 As described in the 1712 account of Bellisomi’s imprisonment, anon., A short account…, p. 7. In the account of his escape Bellisomi sent to Francke on the 5th December, he makes no mention of Imperial diplomats aiding his escape, but rather stresses the assistance he received from a ‘Domino David Wilkins, peregriano egregio Theolog.’, with whom he appears to have travelled to Vienna. Bellisomi, Vienna to Francke, Halle, December 5th 1710, AFSt/H F14, ff. 303-4.

16 hoped to secure a position in the Imperial court. Bellisomi was seized once again, however, by agents of the Inquisition on the 7th January 1711 and held for five months in Vienna, before being ordered to return to prison in Rome and pay a fine. Instead, Bellisomi left in the opposite direction travelling under the pseudonym of Domenico de Sassi via Regensburg,

Nuremburg, and Coburg to Halle and Francke.49 From Halle, Bellisomi wrote to Francke’s brother in Venice, declaring to ‘have found charity among these Protestants, which I had not found in Vienna’.50

So began Bellisomi’s own ‘christliche Wanderung’, supported initially by King Heinrich

XXIV of Reuss-Kostritz, a ‘pious prince’ who Bellisomi had met in Rome in 1699.51

Bellisomi only spent the summer of 1711 in Halle, before leaving for Berlin, where he entered the company of Carl Hildebrand von Canstein and Johann Porst, both close affiliates of Francke’s pietist milieu.52 Porst was the court preacher to the pious Prussian queen Sophie

Luise, and through him Bellisomi met Sophie Luise, with whom he was keen to discuss

Catholic mystical literature: Petrucci, Molinos, but also writings on Catherine of Siena, and others.53 Bellisomi’s family had urged him to return to Venice or to Chiavenna, a Protestant

49 Bellisomi describes the journey and his acquaintances in a letter to Francke from Nuremburg, late June 1711, AFSt/H 166 68a. A series of letters signed Domenico de Sassi, and addressed to Francke, are held in the archive of the Franckesche Stiftungen, AFSt/H C565 from Leipzig, Caselwitz and Berlin, from Autumn 1711 and Winter 1712. Another letter (AFSt/H A 113, ff. 119r) is addressed to Domenico Sassi, sent from Ludolf in London in October 1711. That Bellisomi and de Sassi are the same person is explained in the letter from Francke to King Heinrich XXIV of Reuss-Kostritz on the 23.07.1711, printed in Otto Meusel and Berthold Schmidt, eds., A.H. Franckes Briefen an den Grafen Heinrich XXIV, L. Reuss zu Kostritz (Leipzig, 1905), pp. 28-30: ‘habe ich gestern vor acht tagen berichtet, dass ich, unter dem angenommen Namen Dominico de Saxis, den Hrn. Bellisomo bey mir habe’; on King Heinrich, see note 60. 50 ‘ho trovato prego li S. Protestanti quella carita, che non ho trovato in Vienna’, Bellisomi, Halle to H.F. Francke, Venice, 12.7.1711, AFSt/H F14 ff. 305-6. 51 As Bellisomi describes him, AFSt/H 166 68a; letters between Francke and King Heinrich about Bellisomi, consulted on microfilm at AFSt: BFSt: FS.5.620 10 (Francke to Heinrich, 15.1.1711), 11 (Francke to Heinrich, 15.7.1711) 12 (Francke to Heinrich 23.7.1711) and 15 (Francke to Heinrich, 14.11.1712); on Heinrich see Anke Brunner, Aristokratische lebensform und reich gottes. Ein lebensbild des pietistischen Grafen Heinrich XXIV. Reuß-Köstritz (1681-1748) (Herrnhuter Verlag, 2005). On Heinrich’s journeys to Italy, see pp. 35-6. 52 ‘ho preparato la di lei lettera al Sig. Porstio, quale unitamente con il sig barone di Canstein procurare la miei vantaggi in questa Citta’, Bellisomi, Berlin to H.F. Francke, Venice, 30.10.1711. 53 Asking Francke to send him several works and catalogues; Bellisomi, Berlin to Francke, Halle, 18.5.1712, AFSt/H 166 68b.

17 territory on the border between Lombardy and Switzerland,54 but he was either reluctant or uninterested in doing so, and left instead for England in the summer of 1712.

VII

Bellisomi’s primary rationale for heading to England would have been to reunite with Ludolf, but this was prevented by the latter’s death in spring 1712.55 Beyond this, Bellisomi may have wanted to explore the lively religious environment described to him by Ludolf before his imprisonment. The publication in 1712 of a short English text recounting Bellisomi’s imprisonment and escape indicates that he had other contacts in England;56 for instance,

Bellisomi stated to Francke his plan to meet Anton Wilhelm Bohme, the German theologian based in London, an important point of reference of the Halle community in England.57

Bellisomi had met several Englishmen in Halle, notably the young student Henry Hastings, and the pair kept in touch after Hastings’ return to Oxford, where he received Bellisomi in

1713.58 In Oxford Bellisomi also made acquaintance with the High-Church community of non-juring bishops, most directly Hilkiah Bedford, Samuel Parker and Thomas Hearne.

Writing to Hearne in January of 1713, Bedford asked the Oxford antiquarian to assist

Bellisomi’s stay in Oxford and his research in the university’s libraries; Bedford himself had

54 ‘ho ricevuto risposta dal mio Fratello, Zeio et altre cugino, qali vogliono che mi porti in Chiavena terra posseduta da Signori Riformi... io pero voglio qui dimorare almeno fino alla Primavera’, Bellisomi to H.F. Francke, 30.10.1711, AFSt/H F14 f. 308; ‘mei consanguinei me urgent ut redeam Vinetias’, Bellisomi, Berlin to A.H. Francke, Halle, 8.5.1712, AFSt/H 166 68b. 55 ‘ex litteris Londini mortem amici nostri in Chiesa carissimi P. Ludolf’, Bellisomi, Berlin to A.H. Francke, Halle, 2.5.1712, AFSt/H F14, f. 310-11. 56 Several copies of the Short Account of the Many Mercies of GOD Conferred upon Franicscus Bellisomus…, anon. 1712, exist in English libraries. I consulted the edition at the University Library, Cambridge, Bb.12.5 item 4. 57 Bellisomi also planned to meet several friends in Holland though he names no names: Bellisomi, Berlin to Francke, Halle, 18.3.1712, AFSt/H 166 68b; in the same letter, Bellisomi asks Francke for assistance in attaining a young assistant capable of speaking English and French. On Bohme see Daniel Brunner, Halle Pietists in England: Anthony William Bohme and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2003). 58 ‘Monsieur Bellisono est parti nouvellement pour l’Italie afin de guerrir plus d’argent pour vivre y plus cavalierement’, Henry Hastings, London to A.H. Francke, Halle, 22.05.1715, AFSt/H C714 38.

18 been supported by Bellisomi in Rome, presumably in 1699-1700. Bedford’s letter to Hearne also gives some insight into Bellisomi’s activity in in England: firstly, ‘examining ye controversy between us and ye church of Rome wich he could not do safely there’;59 and secondly, attempting to secure long-term patronage from Queen Ann, the wife of Ludolf’s boss Prince George of Denmark, Bellisomi’s previous stipend form the Duke of Savoy having been revoked since he entered a Protestant state.

Locating Bellisomi between the English affiliates of Halle Pietism, the Society for Promoting

Christian Knowledge, and the renegade community of nonjuring Bishops – a stance also held by Ludolf prior to his death – is interesting because it draws attention to the touchpoints and slippages between ecclesiastical factions which are sometimes presented as distinct from or in conflict with one another. The nonjurors, so named for their refusal to recognise the legitimacy of the post-1688 English monarchy, advocated an independent and assertive

Anglican Church, the model for which was drawn from an ancient constitution, which they sought to excavate and revive through scholarship. Accordingly, they objected to what they saw as the subsuming of the Anglican Church into the State, as well as the dilution of liturgical and ecclesiological norms by Whigs, non-conformists and the ‘low-church’. Even as they condemned toleration of Catholics and non-orthodox Anglican strands within

Protestantism, establishing positive theology as the scaffolding for religious reform drew nonjuring scholars into dialogue with other confessions. From the early eighteenth century, nonjuring bishops explored extensively, if ultimately unsuccessfully, attempts to unify

Anglicanism with Eastern Orthodoxy, on the basis of a historic alignment of English

Christianity with Jerusalem and Constantinople, rather than Rome.60

59 Bedford, London to Hearne, Oxford. July 8 1713, Bodleian, Rawl. 13.84 – the letters are reproduced in Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, ed. David Watson Rannie, vol. IV (1898), p. 209. 60 Reviewing the nonjurors’ engagement with the Orthodox Church, see Ionut-Alexandru Tudorie, ‘They were they in great fear, where no fear was. The Theological Dialogue between the Nonjuror Anglicans and the Eastern Church (1716-1725), in Orientalia Christiana Periodica, vol. 79, no. 1, 2013, pp. 429-512. On the

High-Church admiration for Eastern Orthodoxy was only one aspect of a richer patchwork of ecumenical sentiment in England in the early eighteenth century. Most notably, the

Archbishop of Canterbury, William Wake, covertly engaged in a lengthy ecumenical dialogue with the Gallican scholar Louis Ellies Dupin, interrogating the prospect of unity between Anglicanism and factions within a splintering Catholicism.61 Wake was also in touch with doyens of ecumenical cooperation between the confessions in Europe, such as Daniel

Jablonski, who sought a reunification between Calvinists and Lutherans, the ‘Socinian’ biblical scholar Jean Le Clerc and the Geneva-based Calvinist Jean-Alphonse Turretini, a contact of both Bedford and Bellisomi. Wake was a key patron of David Wilkins, who

Bellisomi had met in Rome, and who was a contact of Francke in Halle. Bellisomi’s ambiguous confessional identity - Bedford, describing Bellisomi to Hearne, notes that ‘in ye mean while he has not yet renounc’d his Religion, nor declar’d himself a Protestant’62 – located him comfortably in this milieu where pursuing an ideal of religious truth fashioned as an ecclesia universalis could transgress prefabricated confessional boundaries. Ecumenical threads connecting Central Europe, the Low Countries and the British Isles created a highly heterogeneous meshwork of reform-oriented groups of Lutherans, Calvinists and Anglicans among whom Bellisomi, as a semi-lapsed Catholic, was not only tolerated by actively embraced.

VIII

nonjurors in general, see Mark Goldie, ‘The nonjurors, episcopacy and the origins of the Convocation controversy’ in Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689-1759, ed. Eveline Cruickshanks (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 15-35. 61 William Wake’s Gallican Correspondence and Related Documents, ed. Leonard Adams, in seven volumes, (Peter Lang, 1988-1993). 62 Bedford, London to Hearne, Oxford. July 8 1713, Bodleian, Rawl. 13.84.

The death of Queen Anne in 1715 changed the political-ecclesiastical landscape in England, and probably ended Bellisomi’s hopes of acquiring long-term patronage. In spring of that year Bellisomi left England and travelled to Paris, from where he wrote to Francke in 1717, indicating his ambition to return to Italy to ‘sort out his domestic affairs’ before travelling once again to Germany to re-engage with ‘the work of piety and the understanding of the pure religion’.63 Bellisomi’s license to return to Italy was stimulated by his absolution by the

Vatican, conveyed to him officially on 25 October 1716 by the Papal nuncio to Paris

'Monsignor Bentivolio’.64 The rationale behind this pardon is unclear, though Bellisomi took the opportunity to return to Pavia and Milan where he stayed, in relative peace for several years. Bellisomi’s respite was only temporary, however, and by late 1721 he had become the subject, once more, of interrogation by agents of the Inquisition. At this point Bellisomi fled once again, following the route he had taken almost exactly a decade previously, to Venice and then on to Vienna.65

Bellisomi’s second, longer, stay in Vienna represents the height of his political aspirations to secure a position in the Imperial court, as well as the culmination of the previous thirty years of reflection about the relationship between Church and State. Bellisomi suggests he was received well in the court Emperor Charles VI,66 and began mobilising networks of patronage to garner favour.67 A central figure here was Giuseppe Aguirre, the influential Regent of the

63 Bellisomi, Paris to Francke, Halle, 13.7.1717: ‘spero in breve tempo di stabilire li miei affare domestici rovinati, lì quali passerò un altra volta in Germania per revenire V.S... nell’opere della pietà e nella cognitione della pura Religione’. 64 The original letter is included in in the Species Facti, pp. 14-15, noting the Vatican to have ‘solennemente, assoluto, tanto el Foro intero quanto nel esterno il Sig.re Franc.co Bellisomo, hoggi 25. Ottobre 1716’. 65 Bellisomi’s views on Venice capture his predicament: ‘Urbs hec est praeclarisimam edificus, ceterisque aulibus. Sed nihil est comparabile cul pietate tua buonus amicorem et litterae hic neglicscuntur et omnino conoscientiae libertas est suppressa’, Bellisomi, Venice to Francke, Halle, 21.2.1722, AFSt/H F14 316-7. 66 ‘cher ami se vous puis assurerez, que mes affaires à cette heure sont dans un autre situation toute différent du tems du feu Empereur Joseph… Les affaires regardent ma justification, et les violentes procedures de l’inquisition, qui seront représentées à la M.te Imp.le, Laquelle ne permet pas aux Ecclesiastiques, même a la cour de Rome d’imposer des peines a ceux qui ne sont pas dans leurs sentiment’, Bellisomi, Vienna to Francke, Halle, 10.10.1722, from Vienna to Halle, AFSt/H 166 68f. 67 On the Italian political-intellectual environment in early eighteenth-century Vienna, see Pierpaolo Bonacini, ‘Giovan Battista Muneretti: Rapporti tra ducato estense e Impero nel Settecento attraverso la mediazione di un

Council of Spain, which governed the Empire’s Italian affairs, and who intervened to ensure

Bellisomi’s security in the Imperial capital. Bellisomi also reached out once more to his old correspondent in Modena Lodovico Antonio Muratori; a series of six letters sent between

February 1723 and February 1725 show Bellisomi’s attempts to enter the structures of political power between Vienna and the Imperial possessions in Northern Italy. This strategy followed several courses: requesting letters of recommendation from Italian princes to be sent to senior members of the Imperial court, notably the ‘Imperatrice Amalia’, Emperor Joseph

I’s widow and the ‘Sig. Co. Schonbonn’, Friedrich Karl Schonborn, the Vice-Chancellor, as well as to influential princes and scholars on the Italian peninsula, notably the Prince of

Parma, and Scipione Maffei.68

The culmination of Bellisomi’s strategy to curry favour in Vienna was the publication of two works, a polemic angled against the Inquisition, titled Breve Trattato degl’Inquisizione e suoi abusi and a longer legal treatise titled Dell’Autorita degl’Imperatori nel Governo Esteriore degl’Affari Ecclesiastici. It was this second work, the Dell’Autorita, which was best positioned to impress the emperor and pro-Imperial forces in Italy, arguing strongly for the curtailing of ecclesiastical authority, absolutely in temporal affairs and partly in spiritual concerns. Briefly reviewing Bellisomi’s argument serves firstly to situate the work in both

Italian anti-curial and German pro-Imperial jurisdictional contexts, and secondly, to identify the subtle anti-confessional dynamic at play in the work.

agente press oil Reichshofrat’, Quellen und Forschungen aus Italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, Bd. 92, 2012, pp. 430-497; see also various passages in Giuseppe Ricuperati L’esperienza civile e reigiosa di Pietro Giannone (Milan-Naples: R. Ricciardi, 1970). 68 Bellisomi, Vienna to Muratori, Modena, BEUMo AM 53.15, letters 9-14.

Dell’Autorita presents itself as a history of the origin and organization of ‘the two supreme powers, spiritual and political’, and was the basis of a larger projected, yet apparently unpublished and unwritten, work, titled Dell’Origine e Progresso del Papato. The work’s key inspirations and sources, Bellisomi lists, were Grotius’ De jure supremarum potestatum circa sacra, Melchior Goldast’s Compilazione di cento Autori Catolici, and among Catholic authors Edmond Richer’s De Ecclesiastica, & politica potestate, Pietro de Marca’s De

Concordia Sacerdotii & Imperii, Louis Ellies Du Pin’ Traite de la puissance ecclesiastique et temporelle, and the work of Paolo Sarpi, clearly situating the text in a multi-confessional scholarly tradition aiming to limit the independent authority of the Roman Church. The work argues that, according to Judaeo-Christian historical precedent, the monarch should play a dual role, as arbiter of political and spiritual authority.69 This arrangement was necessary,

Bellisomi claimed, to prevent the corruption of religion, both from external forces, which would divide political and spiritual powers, and from internal forces, namely corrupt priests and religious leaders. This was the constitution which Constantine revived in the fourth century AD, inheriting authority over ecclesiastical affairs not from the episcopacy, led by the bishop of Rome, but from the clergy and the lay members of the Church, who arbitrated during the Primitive Church.70 Bellisomi describes how this ecclesiological covenant was transgressed at historical moments, in particular when the temporal power of the emperor was weakened in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. During these periods, the Papacy and Roman

Church exercised a series of power-grabs, reneging on the ancient constitution in order to extend its own authority.71 As such, princes and emperors in general are justified in

69 ‘doppo questo tempo non si puo piu distinguere, quale fosse l’officio de Re, e quello de Preti nella condotta della Chiesa… trasportando nel medesimio tempo l’autorita delle cose civili e sacre in una persona’, Dell’Autorita, p. 10. 70 ‘e indubitabile che nelli primi 3 secoli non essendovi imperatori Christiani, l’elezzion delli Vescovi, o pure la loro deposizione apparteneva universalmente al Clero, & alla Plebe’, ibid., p. 71. 71 In its critique of the Papacy, there is a striking parallel with the themes in the Istoria Civile of Pietro Giannone, published in the same year in Naples, with Giannone fleeing soon after to Vienna. There is no evidence that Giannone and Bellisomi met.

23 recovering and reclaiming their authority over spiritual affairs, and Bellisomi applauds examples of this practice in France, Spain, Germany and England.

If this reading presents Bellisomi’s Dell’Autorita as a straight-forward regalist tract, several passages indicate a more nuanced and inter-confessional agenda at play. The problem of confessionalism is confronted head-on, as Bellisomi describes the general crisis and ecclesiastical disruption signalled by ‘the great transformation of religion which took place in

Germany’.72 In this environment, Bellisomi is quick to assert that neither the papacy nor other ecclesiastical leaders are capable of pacifying a divided Church; the polemicizing leaders of different confessions, and explicitly the papacy as an institution, only serve to deepen existing divides. Only the emperor, as representative of temporal power, has the capacity to usher in a pax ecclesiasticae. Bellisomi uses an example of the imperial arbitration of peace between Catholics and Protestants in the Peace of Westphalia at Osnabruck – only the emperor was able to ‘hold the Republic above every private good, otherwise it would be in the hands of laypeople, or of churchmen’.73 On the one hand this advocates for a kind of political pragmatism; at the same time it is predicated upon Bellisomi’s aversion to confessionalism, and coheres with an ecumenical agenda of underplaying doctrinal controversies in the light of an inclusive Christian piety. This is reinforced by Bellisomi’s identification of the emperor as the protector not of the singular Roman Catholic Church but rather of all churches and sects, including minor confessions.74

The arguments of Dell’Autorita are not in and of themselves particularly innovative; the text is primarily interesting when placed in the context of Bellisomi’s biography. The work

72 ‘doppo il gran cambiamento di religione seguitò in Germania’, Dell’Autorita., p. 41. 73 ‘è notabile la pace fattasi nella Germania fra li Cattolici e li Protestati, quale in Osnabruch fu conclusa con la concessione non solo di molte terre, & altri beni laicali, e concessi a Prencipi protestanti; ma ancora con la concessione d’Archivescovati, Vescovati, Monasterii, Prepsotirure, commende, Canonicati & altri Beni Ecclesiastici, per liberar la Germania dalla guerra di Religion’, ibid., p. 125-126 74 ‘gl’Imperatori si sono degnati d’essere Avocati e Protettori di chiese minori, sopra la qual protezzione hanno giurati nella loro solenne coronazione’, ibid., p. 129 – original italics.

24 represents the fusing of political theological discourses in the Italian peninsula, the Holy

Roman Empire and the British Isles, regarding the renegotiation of Church and State in the first decades of the eighteenth century. As such, it provides a full exposition of the political arguments which complemented Bellisomi’s theological convictions. The constitution gestured towards in the Dell’Autorita is designed to protect religious toleration (in a Christian key), an objective incubated within Bellisomi’s exploration of a supra-confessional spirituality. Or put another way, Bellisomi grasped how Ludolf’s imagined ‘ecclesia universalis’ could only be safeguarded through a political realignment.

The reception of Bellisomi’s Dell’Autorita by Charles VI and his court is difficult to gauge;

Bellisomi failed to secure the formal appointment for which he hoped, perhaps precisely because its publication, and explicit anti-curial tone, acted as a stimulus to reinvigorate

Rome’s attempts to incarcerate him.75 These attempts came to fruition in the imprisonment of

Bellisomi in April 1726, while Bellisomi was in Leipzig negotiating the publication of his projected longer work on the history of the papacy. The arrest was overseen by the papal nuncio in Warsaw and regional representatives of the Society of Jesus, and upon imprisonment all his book and manuscripts were confiscated, and he was deprived of access to books and letters. After four months in prison a formal bill was released by the Vatican in

75 Vatican machinations against Bellisomi were initiated in March 1725 by his Dell’Autorita, as indicated by correspondence between the Vatican Secretary of State and the Papal nuncio in Vienna – Arch. Segr. Vaticano, Segreteria di Stato, Germania 499, fol. 181-182; 516v. I would like to thank Elizabeth Garms in Vienna for bringing this to my attention, as well as other insights regarding Bellisomi, which warrant further research.

August 1726, demanding that Bellisomi retract his heretical theology and revoking their pardon of 1716.76

Bellisomi’s retraction was delayed, and after twenty months of imprisonment, he was released, primarily owing to the intervention of his nephew Gaetano Annibale Bellisomi, who paid a significant sum to Rome for the release of his uncle. The agreement was that Bellisomi returned directly to his family home and remain there under house arrest, for an undefined period of time.77 Bellisomi agreed to these terms, and was released on the 24th November

1727, although his passage to Pavia was not necessarily ‘by the shortest road and not stopping anywhere on the way’, as cited in his letter of release, Bellisomi being still in Jena the following May, where his Dell’Autorita was reprinted in 1728. From this point Bellisomi, now in his 65th year, appears to have adhered to the conditions of his house arrest, with a few exceptions.78 He maintained some contacts in the Protestant world, exchanging letters and erudite news with Heinrich Callenberg in Berlin79 and Johann Georg Walch in Jena,80 but otherwise seems to have spent the remainder of his years in the Bellisomi family library.81

76 The details and chronology of this episode are narrated in the German Specie Facti, pp. 18-21; they are also detailed in a letter sent from Bellisomi to Muratori from Jena to Modena, dated the 4th May 1728,: ‘Io non so se siano note a V.S.Illm ale violenza da me sofferte in Lipsia nell’arresto di venti mesi fina li 24.9bre dell’anno scorso, la sottrazione di miei libri e manoscritti per investigare della nota corte’; BEUMo AM letter 15 77 Two documents are included in Italian, and translated into German, in the German Species Facti, one titled a ‘resoluzione presa in Roma in ordine alla persona del signore Abbate Bellisomo’ dated 5 Luglio 1727, pp. 21- 22; the second titled ‘Dell’Obligazione del Sig.re Marchese Abbate Fran.co Bellisomo verso la Camera Apostolica’, signed by Bellisomi, from the ‘Castello di Lipsia’, and dated ‘il mese d’Agosto 1727. 78 Francesco’s nephew, and de facto head of the Bellisomi family, Gaetano Annibale requested two ‘salva condotta personale’ from the Vatican in May and then July 1731 for his uncle – though there is no indication of the destination., ASCP FB, 8-343 and 8-344 79 Bellisomi, no provenance, to Heinrich Callenberg, Berlin, 3.5.1731, AFSt /H K6, f. 204. 80 Bellisomi, Milan to Walch, Jena, 3.1.1736, Thuringische Universitats- und LandesBibliothek, Jena, MS. Prov. F. 153. Mappe 1, ff. 81r-82r. 81 Records of the Bellisomi family library are given by a catalogue made in 1770 recording its sale to the University of Pavia. No books in the catalogue date before 1744, and some of them are perhaps indicative that it was Francesco’s collection, August Hermann Francke’s Christus S. Scipture Nucleus (Magdeburg, 1724), and an edition of Sermons by John Tillotson (1713) – see ‘nota de libri esistenti nella libraria di Casa Bellisomi’, 5 June 1770, Manoscritti Ticinesi 151, Archivio Biblioteca Universitario di Pavia.

Bellisomi died in 1741, at the age of 78.82 Outside of the context of Pavian local history, his life was, and is, little known, and his publications little read and rarely cited. It was probably in the context of Protestant anti-Catholic journals that his name became more widely known, evidenced in the relatively numerous publications of the English account of his life to 1711, and the 1728 German Species Facti. The German text was also translated, with slight amendments, into French in the 1732 24th edition of the Bibliotheque Germanique, ou

Histoire Litteraire de l’Allemagne de la Suisse et des Pays du Nord, the French-language

Amsterdam-printed protestant journal edited by the Berlin-based Isaac de Beausobre.83 Here the biography, titled ‘Relation des maux que les Inquisiteurs de Rome ont fait souffrir a M. le

Marquis Francois Bellisomo’, was accompanied by reviews of and extracts from historical, scholarly, and theological works of Protestant polemics.84 Journals such as the Huguenot

Bibliotheque Germanique peddled anti-Catholic propaganda, but they were also important vessels through which the idea of the reunified Church, and the ideal of a pure, primitive

Christianity underpinning an inter-confessional toleration, could be propagated. That this appears to have been the driving force of Bellisomi’s life, which he pursued through a pietistic religiosity which led him close to conversion to Protestantism, and which he sought to safe-guard through the pooling of religious authority in the hands of post-Confessional

Christian rulers, it is fitting that his biography was deployed to support this appeal.

82 Bellisomi wrote to his nephew Gaetano Annibale in autumn 1740 regarding financial matters, and to encourage his nephew to introduce himself to ‘C.R. Pio Imperadore’, clearly harbouring political ambitions for his family. The letter is signed ‘Suo zio, chi ti ama’, ASCP Archivio Marozzi, cassetta 36, 769.47. This is the last record of his activity I have located. 83 Bellisomi’s biography is pp. 164-180. The journal was also edited by Isaac’s brother Louis, Alphonese des Vignoles, and Paul-Emilie Mauclerc - http://dictionnaire-journaux.gazettes18e.fr/journal/0163-bibliotheque- germanique (accessed 09.09.2017) 84 Of note, the second item was a continued extract from the anonymous ‘Suite des Pensées Libres sur la voye de l’Autorité, & sur les moyens de conserver la paix dans l’église’ (pp. 19-41), in which fictitious protestant and catholic characters spar over articles of faith and discipline, the preference for either the ‘voye de l’autorie’ or the ‘voye de l’Examen’. Ultimately the protestant wins the argument, endorsing the prioritization of a simple, basic theology, neither wholly dogmatic nor wholly bound to a mystical theology, which could be shared by all confessions. This is followed by a briefer text, titled ‘Reflexions simples & nouvelles sur la Tolerance & la Reunion des Protestants’, which makes a similar argument, more concisely.

Bellisomi’s life is worth recounting as a historical artefact in and of itself; it attains true historical significance, however, as a vehicle with which to demonstrate the complex inter- penetration of political and religious dynamics in Europe in the first decades of the eighteenth century. His biography is particularly valuable for two reasons:

Firstly, it stresses the symmetries and synergies between political-religious-intellectual arenas in different parts of Europe: most obviously here, the Italian peninsula, the Holy Roman

Empire and the British Isles. In spite of the progress made in recent years by historians promoting a transnational approach to European history, much early modern history remains stubbornly within a national frame. Reconstituting pan-European biographies, such as that of

Bellisomi, provides a useful reminder that in the past, much as in the present, individual lives, social structures, intellectual currents and frameworks of belief could to flow across political and territorial boundaries.85

Demonstrating transnationalism should not become an end in and of itself, however, and the second, more significant, value of Bellisomi’s biography lies in its crystallization of a key intellectual-religious-political nexus which underpinned the unravelling of confessionalism from the late seventeenth century: the relationship between scholarship, spirituality and politics at the core of religious reform. Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these tools had strengthened the confessional equation and bolstered the divisions between

Catholics and Protestants, and between Calvinists, Lutherans and Anglicans. From the late seventeenth century, they began to be turned against the logic of confessionalism, and were

85 In its biographical approach to this task, this essay traces to some extent the methodological logic of John Paul Ghobrial, ‘The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Microhistory’, Past and Present, Feb. 2014, pp. 51-93.

28 deployed by individuals and networks who sought a more conciliatory attitude among the confessions, and a religious sensibility and political entity which could contain this.

In considering why this equation has been under-appreciated, it is worth turning in brief to the context in which intellectual history has emerged as a discipline over the course of the twentieth century. Since its formation, one key object of intellectual history, most explicitly in the Anglophone world where it has been bound tightly to the history of political thought, has been a systematic analysis of the emergence of the modern state. This tacit assumption underpins the logic of the confessionalisation narrative itself, the product of a peculiarly

German form of intellectual history embedded in a social and institutional history. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the state instrumentalised confessionalism for the purpose of its own consolidation. By the late seventeenth century, and more explicitly through the eighteenth century, confessionalism had lost its appeal to the state, which strengthened instead further through an acceleration of secularisation. The moving target to be tracked here is the State; the transformation of religion acts primarily as context.

By making the state centre-stage, the realm of the intellectual, as studied by most intellectual historians, has been monopolized by the political. Religion, on the other hand, when explored in and of itself by historians, and when not the domain of church historians and theologians, became a subcategory of ‘culture’, to be studied by cultural, social and institutional historians. Thus, the sharpened distinction between the religious and the political, a legacy of the secularisation narrative, has become manifest in the siloed sub-disciplinary architecture of the historical method. In the process, historically-informed understandings of politics and religion have been impoverished by their conceptual exclusion from one another, and in particular the exclusion of the latter from intellectual-historical practice. As this has been recognised in recent years, attempts have been made to reinsert the religious/cultural into the

29 political/intellectual, a posteriori.86 A wealth of valuable scholarship has ensued.87 A fully articulated reimagining of intellectual history in a post-secular key remains, however, very much a work in progress.88 Such a reimagining would further sharpen focus on figures such as Francesco Bellisomi. More importantly, it would allow them to take their place in an alternative intellectual architecture of early modern Europe.

Bibliography

Adams, Leonard, ed., William Wake’s Gallican Correspondence and Related Documents, in seven volumes, (Peter Lang, 1988-1993) Berger, Peter, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1967) ---, The Desecularisation of the World: The Resurgence of Religion in World Politics (William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1999) Bonacini, Pierpaolo, ‘Giovan Battista Muneretti: Rapporti tra ducato estense e Impero nel Settecento attraverso la mediazione di un agente press oil Reichshofrat’, Quellen und Forschungen aus Italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, Bd. 92, 2012, pp. 430-497 Brady Jr, Timothy., ‘“We have lost the Reformation” – Heinz Schilling and the rise of the confessionalisation thesis’, Wege der Neuzeit. Festschrift für Heinz Schilling zum 65 Geburtstag, eds. Ehrenpreis, Stefan, Lotz-Heumann, Ute, Mörke, Olaf and Schorne- Schutte, Luise (Duncker & Homblot, 2007), pp. 33-56 Brunner, Anke, Aristokratische lebensform und reich gottes. Ein lebensbild des pietistischen Grafen Heinrich XXIV. Reuß-Köstritz (1681-1748), (Herrnhuter Verlag, 2005) Brunner, Daniel, Halle Pietists in England: Anthony William Bohme and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2003) Campbell, Ted, The Religion of the Heart (University of South Carolina Press, 1991)

86 Reviewing this process see Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, ed. Alister Chapman, John Coffey and Brad S. Gregory (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). 87 One of the subfields of intellectual history most attuned to the centrality of religion to intellectual life has been the history of scholarship: for a panorama, see the essays collected in History of Scholarship: A Selection of Papers from the Seminar on the History of Scholarship Held Annually at the Warburg Institute, ed. Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin (Oxford University Press, 2006). 88 In his review of Dominick LaCapra’s History and its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence, Alan Megill offers some useful initial remarks on the theoretical dimensions of this question: Alan Megill, ‘History, Theoreticism and the Limits of the “Postsecular”’, History and Theory, 52, February 2013, pp. 110-129.

Caracciolo, Alberto, Domenico Passionei tra Roma e la repubblica delle lettere (Rome: ed. di storia e letteratura, 1968) Chapman, Alister, Coffey, John and Gregory, Brad S., eds., Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). Coleman, Charly, The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2014) Comparato, Vittor Ivo, Giuseppe Valletta. Un intellettuale napoletano della fine del seicento (Naples: Istituto italiano per gli studi Storici: 1970) Costa, Gustavo, ‘Documenti per una storia dei rapporti anglo-romani nel settecento’, Saggi e ricerche sul Settecento (Napoli, 1968), pp. 371-452 Cox, Jeffrey, ‘Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularisation: A Progress Report’, in ed. Brown, Callum and Snape, Michael, eds., Secularisation in the Christian World, (London: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 13-26 Del Tedesco, Enza, ed., Il “Giornale de’’ Letterati d’Italia" Trecento Anni Dopo: Scienza, Storia, Arte, Identità (1710-2010) : Atti Del Convegno, Padova, Venezia, Verona, 17-19 Novembre 2010, (Pisa, 2012) Donato, Maria Pia, Accademie Romane. Una storia Sociale, 1671-1824 (Napoli, 2000) Forni, Marica, Cultura e Residenza Aristocratica a Pavia, (Milan: F. Angeli, 1989), pp. 83- 150 Dooley, Brendan, Science, Politics, and Society in Eighteenth-Century Italy: The Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia and Its World (New York: Garland, 1991) Gabriel Simmons, John Simon, ‘H.W. Ludolf and the printing of his Grammatica Russica at Oxford in 1696’, Slavonic Papers I, 1950, 104-129 Ghobrial. John Paul, ‘The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Microhistory’, Past and Present, Feb. 2014, pp. 51-93 Goldie, Mark, ‘The nonjurors, episcopacy and the origins of the Convocation controversy’ in Cruickshanks, Eveline, ed., Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689-1759 (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 15-35 Grès-Gayer, Jacques, ‘“L’Aristarque de son siècle”, le Dr Jean de Launoy (1601-1678)’ in Quantin, Jean-Louis and Wacquet, Jean-Claude, eds., Papes, princes et savants dans l’Europe moderne. Mélange à la mémoire de Bruno Neveu (Geneva, 2006), pp. 269-85. Krop, Henri Adrien, ‘Fides et Ration: An Early Enlightenment Defence of Non-Confessional Religion by Poiret and his Circle’, Church History and Religious Culture, vol. 90, no. 1, 2010, pp. 47-67 Laborie, Lionel, ‘Spreading the Seed: Toward a French Millenarian Network in pietist Germany’, in Mulsow, Martin, ed., Kriminelle – Freidenker – Alchemister. Raume des Untergrunds in der Fruehen Neuzeit (Koln/Weimer/Wien: Böhlau-Verlag, 2014), pp. 99- 117

Lehmann, Hartmut, Schrader, Hans-Jürgen and Schilling, Heinz, eds., Jansenismus, Quietismus, Pietismus (Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Pietismus, 2002) ---, ‘Competing concepts for the study of religious reform movements, including Pietism, in early modern and in North-America’, in Fred Van Lieburg, ed., Confessionalism and Pietism: Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe, (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), pp. 313-322 ---. ‘Grenzen der Erklarungskraft der Konfessionalisierungsthese‘, in von Greyerz, Kaspar, Jakubowski-Tiessen, Manfred, Kaufmann, Thomas and Lehmann, Hartmut, eds., Interkonfessionalitat – transkonfessionalitat – binnenkonfessionelle Pluralität (Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2003), pp 242-49 Kaplan, Benjamin, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) Kolakowski, Leszek, Chrétiens sans église: la conscience religieuse et le lien confessionnelle au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1967) Ligota, Christopher and Quantin, Jean-Louis, eds., History of Scholarship: A Selection of Papers from the Seminar on the History of Scholarship Held Annually at the Warburg Institute (Oxford University Press, 2006) Louthan, Howard, Cohen, Gary and Szabo, Franz, eds., Diversity and Dissent: Negotiating Religious Difference in Central Europe, 1500-1800, (Bergahn Books, 2011) Malena, Adelisa, Ecclesia Universa: “imparzialita” confessionale e transfer culturali tra Sei e Settecento. Note su una ricerca in corso’, in Lucia Felici, ed., Ripensare la riforma protestante: nuove prospettive degli studi italiani, (Turin: Claudiana, 2015), pp 283-310 Megill, Alan, ‘History, Theoreticism and the Limits of the “Postsecular”’, History and Theory, 52, February 2013, pp. 110-129 Meusel, Otto and Schmidt., Berthold, eds., A.H. Franckes Briefen an den Grafen Heinrich XXIV, L. Reuss zu Kostritz (Leipzig, 1905), Moennig, Ulrich, ‘Die griechischen Studenten am Hallenser Collegium orientale theologicum‘, in Strater, Udo and Wallman, Johannes, eds., Halle und Osteuropa, zur europaischen Ausstrahlung des hallischen Pietismus, Halle Forschungen 1, 1998, pp. 299- 329 Prodi, Paolo, ‘Europe in the Age of Reformations: the Modern State and Confessionalization’, The Catholic Historical Review, vol. 103, 2017, no. 1, pp. 1-19 Rak, Michele, ed., Opere filosofiche di Giuseppe Valletta (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1975) Rannie, David Watson, ed., Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, vol. IV (1898) Ricuperati, Giuseppe L’esperienza civile e reigiosa di Pietro Giannone (Milan-Naples: R. Ricciardi, 1970)#

Rowell, Geoffrey, ‘Scotland and the ‘mystical matrix’ of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: an exploration of religious cross-currents’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 2, 128-144 Schilling, Heinz, ‘Das Konfessionelle Europa. Die Konfessionalisierung der europaischen lander seit Meitte des 16. Jahrhunderts und ihre Folgen für Kirche, Staat, Gesellschaft und Kultur‘, in Ausgewahlte Abhandlungen zur europaischen Reformations-und Konfessionsgeschichte, ed. Heinz Schilling (Duncker & Humblot, 2002), pp. 646-700 ---, Early Modern European Civilization and its Political and Cultural Dynamism – the Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures (Brandeis University Press, 2008) Schunka, Alexander, ‘„An England ist uns viel gelegen“. Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf (1655- 1712) als Wanderer zwischen den Welten‘, in Zaunstock, Holger, Gestrich, Andreas and Muller-Baulke, Thomas, eds., London und das Halleschen Waisenhaus: Eine Kommunikationsgeschichte im 18. Jahrhundert, (Halle Forschungen 39, 2014), pp. 65-86. Tetzner, Joachim, H.W. Ludolf und Russland (Berlin: Akad. Verlag, 1955) Tudorie, Ionut-Alexandru, ‘They were they in great fear, where no fear was. The Theological Dialogue between the Nonjuror Anglicans and the Eastern Church (1716-1725), in Orientalia Christiana Periodica, vol. 79, no. 1, 2013, pp. 429-512 vom Orde, Klaus, ‘Der Quietismus Miguel de Molinos bei Philipp Jacob Spener‘, in Lehmann, Hartmut, Schrader, Hans-Jürgen and Schilling, Heinz, eds., Jansenismus, Quietismus, Pietismus, (Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Pietismus, 2002) pp. 106-118 Wilson, Renate, ‘Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf, August Hermann Francke und der Eingang nach Russland‘, in Strater, Udo and Wallmann, Johannes, eds., Halle und Osteuropa, zur europaischen Ausstrahlung des hallischen Pietismus, Halle Forschungen 1, 1998, pp. 83- 108 ---,‘Continental Protestant refugees and their protectors in Germany and London’, in Pietismus und Neuzeit, 20 (1994), pp. 107-24, pp. 111-115