Riccarda Suitner The good citizen and the heterodox self: turning to and in 16th-century Venice

In the following pages, I wish to discuss conversions within the specific context of the so-called ‘Radical ’, tackling issues such as their similarities with and differences from other types of intra-Christian conversion, and the legal and psychological implications of this decision. The Venetian Republic lends itself best to a survey of this type, particularly during the period between the 1540s and 1560s. These years saw numerous conversions to Protestantism and at the same time the high point of the local Anabaptist movement. Furthermore, these decades saw the first trials of the , which as we know was established in 1542 but only came into full force very slowly; during the period of interest here it had not yet succeeded in radically undermining the organisation of Venetian heterodox groups as it did in the second half of the century. Finally, for numer- ous reasons the conversions of inhabitants of these regions were rather different from those that took place elsewhere. The analysis of the modalities with which factors such as conversion, Nicodemism, confessional eclecticism, and exile came to interact with each other in some milieus of this city provides an excellent example of the exercise of individual religious choice in early modern – which is here strictly related to other phenomena such as plurality of personae and of multiple religious ‘identities’, and thus with ways of ‘parting the self’.

1 Embracing the Reformation in early 16th-century Venice

The authorities of the Venetian Republic had numerous reasons to close one eye to suspected cases of heterodoxy and to allow non- individuals at least to reside on its territory. One of these was the web of commercial relations with the populations of central Europe and the Ottoman Empire, often mediated by Jews. The Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the Fondaco dei Turchi, the Jewish ghetto and

Note: I am very grateful to Shahzad Bashir, Antje Linkenbach, Aditya Malik, Martin Mulsow and Jutta Vinzent for discussions during the preparation of this article.

Open Access. © 2019 Riccarda Suitner, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580853-022 460 Riccarda Suitner their various synagogues (though some crypto-Jews lived outside the ghetto) were among the places intended to spatially delimit confessional divisions. The latter were on the one hand aimed at preventing contacts with the Italian population and simultaneously (at least in the eyes of the Venetian authorities) also served in some ways to ‘protect’ these religious minorities from potential attacks by the local population. Obviously, that adopted in Venice was a concept of ‘’ typical of the which has little in common with the current meaning of this expression (for a detailed analysis of this notion see Forst 2003; Salatowsky, Schröder 2016; Vollhardt, Bach, Multhammer 2015). This was a sort of paternalistic concession, made essentially for reasons of , of a minimal number of rights, on the part of a religiously homogeneous and cohesive community, to individuals seen as posing a potential danger to the social order; they could not expect to become fully integrated, but merely to be ‘tolerated’ and not to risk death or forced conversion. Not coincidentally, these groups were permitted only to perform specific jobs and were obliged in various ways to ‘signal’ their difference. For example, Jews had to wear a specific type of hat and, if they were students at the University of Padua, paid higher uni- versity fees (see Ravid 2003). Furthermore, spaces were divided in accordance with rigorous confessional criteria, we can think for example of the Fondaco dei Turchi or the Jewish ghetto; in the case of multi-confessional spaces, these were conceived to allow the authorities simultaneously to isolate and to control non-Catholic individuals. A well-known example of such spaces is the casa dei catecumeni, established in imitation of similar institutions disseminated around the Ottoman Empire, where, when necessary, conversion processes were regu- lated (as an introduction to the link between space and conversion in the early modern period see Marcocci et al. 2015; specifically on the casa dei catecumeni see Matheus 2013). All of this, obviously, had only a minimal impact on the Catholic, Italian-speaking population, towards which – and particularly towards those who turned to Protes- tantism – there was no need to demonstrate any sort of ‘tolerance’. Nonetheless, the penetration of the Reformed ideas into Venetian territory was easier than else- where in Italy, given the larger volume of international contacts and the existence – mentioned above – of foreigners in the city, alongside other factors: the flourishing and relatively free book industry; and Venetian political independence, pervaded from the earliest centuries of its history by a strong anti-Roman – and therefore anti-Papal – sentiment that led it to demand and practise a strong autonomy in decision-making also expressed in matters of the repression of religious dissent (classic studies on Venetian history are Lane 1973; Zorzi 1979; Landwehr 2007; Bouwsma 1968; specifically on the Venetian Inquisition see Grendler 1977; Pullan The good citizen and the heterodox self 461

1997; Del Col 2012, 342–94). The dissemination of Lutheran and Calvinist doctrines on Venetian soil – though mainly ‘second hand’ – and above all of the works of and perhaps also those of Servetus (see for instance Seidel Menchi 1993; Felici 2010; Ongaro 1971), suddenly opened up a range of options: conversion to , or one of those more ‘radical’ versions of the Reformation that, harking back to preconciliar , rejected the and the of infants. In the two former cases, the two possibilities open to the convert were dissimulation or flight. The ‘dissimulative’ approach is so-called Nicodemism, a famous term thought to originate with Calvin, who introduced it in 1543 with specific reference to Italian crypto-Protestants (though the practice was widespread and theorised not just by Juan de Valdés and other Italian reformers, but also in some German reformed circles to the ‘left of the Reformation’, like that of Otto Brunfels), initially studied by Delio Cantimori, Antonio Rotondò, Carlo Simoncelli and Carlo Ginzburg, and later by numerous other scholars. The expression designated, in modern histori- ography, the doctrine of the permissibility of religious simulation, the deliberate concealment of Protestant beneath a of Catholic observance (Cantimori 1948; Rotondò 1967; Ginzburg 1970; Simoncelli 1979; Biondi 1974; Eire 1985). Often the Nicodemite attitude culminated, as we know thanks to the numerous tran- scripts of trials held in the Venice State Archive, with an abjuration that could be followed by a conviction or otherwise, often entailing the death penalty. One Nicodemite was Paolo d’Avanzo. This young man, aged about thirty, from Città di Castello, a small town in present-day Umbria, worked in the 1560s in the Rialto area for the Florentine leather merchant Michelangelo Baglione (see Archivio di Stato Veneto, hereafter cited as ASVE, Savi all’eresia, b. 29, file ‘Paolo d’Avanzo’, fol. 1r: ‘Paulo d’Avanzo […] prattica in Rialto et veste alla forestiera giovane di 30 anni in circa con poca barba’). The first charge laid against him was that of a conversion to Calvinism, the second that of owning forbidden books. The second charge was dropped after a search in the house of Donato Baglione, the son of the merchant under whom he served, where no subversive books were found. The accounts given by the various witnesses who testified during the trial against him from 1568 onwards and his own evidence provide us not only with insights into the life of a young emigrant to Venice, but above all with an idea of the concrete stages involved in a conversion in Venice at this time. The young man had relatives in Geneva and an uncle, Pompeo, in Lyon. The latter had fervently praised the sermons of the local Huguenot community, whilst his relatives in Geneva had convinced him of the superiority of the Calvinist doc- trine amongst those of the Reformed world. He himself had travelled to Geneva for work. D’Avanzo was just an errand boy, but he nonetheless had the opportu- nity to travel, and came into contact not just with other merchants but also with 462 Riccarda Suitner the different social classes in the city of Venice: the Buccella family, the doctor Ludovico Abbioso, Paolo Moscardo (ibid.). Among those who chose the second alternative – to emigrate abroad – some succeeded in attaining a status very close to full integration (Cantimori 1939). This is true of Guglielmo Gratarolo, a student of medicine first in Padua and then at the Collegio dei fisici in Venice. The bibliography on Gratarolo, rather than on religious issues, focuses mostly on his keen interest in alchemy and the natural sciences and on his activity as editor of Pietro Pomponazzi’s works. Indeed, if we examine his religious views as well, we see that he survived a first trial that ended with an abjuration (see ASVE, b. 10). After fleeing the Veneto in 1550, Gratarolo settled in Basle in 1552, where he edited the works of Pietro Pomponazzi for the printer Pietro Perna, and became a professor and dean of the local university. In Switzerland Gratarolo became one of ’ harshest antagonists and a defender of Reformed orthodoxy, going so far as to report the owners and sup- pliers of forbidden literature to the authorities (see , 194–201; Thorndike 1941, 600–16; Maclean 2005; Doni 1975; Pastore 2002; Gallizioli 1788). The very different cases of Gratarolo and d’Avanzo are a good illustra- tion of the two main routes to conversion in the Venetian Republic during the mid-: commercial relations with foreign countries, and the cos- mopolitanism of the élite at the University of Padua, constantly fed by rela- tions between Italian professors open to Reformed ideas and foreign students (see Suitner 2016b, with further bibliography). In both cases we are dealing with a dualism between a simulated Catholic and the Calvinist faith with which people intimately identified. The choices made by the two converts and their consequences, though, were entirely different: Gratarolo chose emigra- tion, which in the long term saved his life, whilst the young errand boy hid his genuine faith for as long as possible and was ultimately prosecuted by the Holy Office. Whilst in the former case this dualism was ‘overcome’ by emigra- tion – allowing for a new ‘reconciliation’ between faith and ‘area of residence’, previously separated, – in the latter we are dealing with a conflict between inner faith and outer faith that in the territory of the Venetian Republic could not be overcome. However, Gratarolo and Avanzo had one thing in common: they turned to one of the main confessions then in the process of institutionalisation in the Reformed world and led by clearly identifiable ‘figure-heads’. At that time, Lutheranism and Calvinism had gradually constructed their own theological orthodoxy and, aside from a few multi-confessional contexts, were firmly rooted in specific ter- ritories. By contrast, other stories of conversion from Roman Catholicism were completely different. For example, Anabaptism and Antitrinitarianism, excluded from the so-called process of ‘confessionalisation’, were beliefs stigmatised both The good citizen and the heterodox self 463 in Reformed and Catholic territories.1 In yet other cases, to be discussed in the fol- lowing pages, this conflict could not be overcome since in the mid-16th century – an era of cuius regio, eius religio (‘whose realm, his ’) whose implications are exemplified in different ways in the events considered above – embracing Anabaptism implied the absence of a physical ‘place’ to which converts could legitimately emigrate.

2 Turning to the ‘’

In mid-16th century Europe, the various confessions had not yet reached a defini- tive configuration, and this was even truer of Venice. During this phase, a general fascination with Protestantism presented Italian religious dissent, influenced by its highly composite doctrinal background – Machiavellianism, the philosophical mortalism widespread at the University of Padua, the ideology of the mendicant orders, the heritage of Savonarola’s preachings, Valdesian groups – a multiplic- ity of options in terms of religious criticism. The works of Luther, Calvin and Erasmus, furthermore, were often known only indirectly. The doctrinal nuances to be espoused by a reformed religion capable of taking root in the states of Italy were not clear even to those who had rejected Catholicism or those who were preparing to do so. If we leaf through the transcripts of the section ‘Savi all’eresia’ of the Vene- tian trials held between the 1540s and 1560s, we find that the sympathisers of the Reformation share a particular series of convictions: the non-belief in tran- substantiation, in the intercession of and the of their images; a positive predisposition towards salvation through grace and the non-existence of Purgatory; the condemnation of the sale of indulgences. On key doctrinal issues, however, there was complete disagreement. The Pope was seen by some as one among the many, by others as the ; some believed in the virgin- ity of Mary, others thought that she was simply a pious woman and yet others that she was a prostitute (since otherwise, we read in some confessions to the inquisi- tors, she would certainly not have given birth in a cave, under such unsuitable cir- cumstances); the is sometimes considered immortal, at others material and mortal. Apparently minor differences in the interpretation of issues such as the mortality or otherwise of the soul, the difference between the soul of the damned and that of the just, the rapport between the soul of animals and that of humans,

1 The geographical and chronological extension and the legitimacy itself of the notion of ‘con- fessionalisation’ have been widely debated; see Brady 2004. 464 Riccarda Suitner led to radically different conceptions of religion and the form to be taken by the concept of ‘Reformation’. Some people arranged to read texts by Reformers at clandestine meetings, some discussed them cautiously with their students or foreign clients, some came into contact with the Reformed world through travel abroad, and some attempted a sort of ‘practical application’ of their beliefs, such as the parish priest of the church of San Pantalon in Venice who, while celebrating Mass, deliberately ‘forgot’ to declare the transubstantiation of the host into the body of (ASVE, Savi all’eresia, b. 19). The way in which these beliefs were ‘assembled’ and personally (re)inter- preted differed less from group to group (since their boundaries were not always particularly clear), and more from person to person. Very frequently, individuals did not adhere to an ‘orthodox’ version of Lutheranism or Calvinism but created their own personal, eclectic interpretation, essentially a fairly ambiguous and hybrid religious identity. All this was true of many sympathisers of Calvinism and Lutheranism, whose dissemination in Italy never went beyond the initial stage and came to an almost complete halt in the second half of the century. This was even truer of Anabaptism, a credo in a yet more embryonic state, with few reference texts, difficult to find, without a developing orthodoxy and character- ised – if I may use a contemporary expression – by an evident lack of leadership. We are indeed still far from the phase of proper. In fact, if we wish to seek out a phase during which Antitrinitarianism developed a normative and ‘institutionalised’ structure, we should look to the specific context of eastern Europe from around the 1570s. These decades saw the work of various intellectu- als who took Antitrinitarianism to the heights of theological refinement: Giorgio Biandrata, Fausto Sozzini and Ferenc Dávid. This is a doctrinal level completely different from that which had characterised, for example, Venetian and Paduan non-conformism a few decades earlier, which we discuss in these pages. It is no coincidence that this phase marked the first time that we can associate Antitrin- itarianism with a specific territory. In , in 1568, the legitimacy of the Unitarian confession was sanctioned and legally recognised alongside Cal- vinism and Lutheranism. Conversions to increased progressively, especially from the 1570s onwards (see Caccamo 1970; Wien, Brandt, Balog 2013; Balázs 1996). With the exception of this short-lived phase in some regions of Eastern Europe where some sovereigns included these among those that could be legitimately practised within state borders, Anabaptism and Antitrini- tarianism never enjoyed political protection in . In contrast to those drawn to mainstream Reformation, very few Italian Anabaptists had direct contacts with relatively well organized foreign communi- ties during these decades. One exception was the professor of anatomy Niccolò The good citizen and the heterodox self 465

Buccella. Buccella had Anabaptist sympathies: he had undergone a second baptism and preached the free interpretation of Scripture and the inequality of the persons of the Trinity. He was influenced in his heterodox views, like various other Venetian physicians of his generation, by contacts with the students of the natio germanica at the University of Padua and by the debates on radical Aristo- telianism and mortalism that had been held for some time in the Facultas arti- starum. On the one hand, Buccella held a series of basic convictions common to Venetian Protestantism: the critique of worshipping images of saints, of tran- substantiation and of indulgences (but not of the cult of Mary, as was by con- trast typical of other Anabaptists of the time), the non-existence of Purgatory, the nature of the Pope as a usurper. However, he combined these theories with ideas drawn both from the philosophical discussions taking place at the University of Padua and from the convictions of Moravian Anabaptists (Stella 1961–1962; Stella 1967; see also Suitner 2016b, with further bibliography). Unlike many others, his knowledge of Anabaptism was not second hand; he had travelled to Moravia himself, where he had come into contact with local Anabaptist communities. For this reason, he was able to give accurate testimony to the inquisitors, together with his travelling companion Francesco della Sega, on the organisation of the Moravian community: on the practice of the second baptism of adults ‘with pure and simple water without any ceremony’, demanding a declaration of faith in the resurrection of Christ for the sins of humankind, on the attempts to practice the sharing of property, on radical (ASVE, Savi all’eresia, b. 19). The convictions most widespread among the Italian sympathisers of Anabap- tism were the sole validity of baptism received as an adult and the affirmation of the human nature of Christ. On the exact form to be taken by the critique of postconciliar Christianity there was complete disagreement, as demonstrated in exemplary fashion by the confession of Pietro Manelfi in 1551 (Ginzburg 1970). There was no unitary approach to issues such as the status of the soul before and after death, the essence and power of angels and demons, the Resurrection, the relationship between Old and , the characteristics of Hell and Purgatory nor a long series of other issues. This heterogeneity particularly characteristic of Venetian Anabaptist groups also implied an extreme ‘fluidity’, the potential for not remaining ‘rooted’ in a fixed religious vision, changing one’s position over time. It is as if for some individuals, once the process had been ‘triggered’, it could no longer be stopped: they continued until they found the religion most suited to their own selves, to their own inner life. ‘Multiple’ conversions are much more common – and well-documented – personal developments in the two following centuries, for example in Holland during the 17th and 18th century, with converts who reached deist positions if not those of the so-called ‘Radical Enlightenment’ (see Israel 2001). Obviously, many sympathisers 466 Riccarda Suitner of Antitrinitarianism or Anabaptism who eventually became atheists, or adopted an undefined form of scepticism or agnosticism (and who sometimes became Catho- lics again at the end of their lives), did so as a result of multiple migrations and a combination of various factors: opportunistic motives given the need to simply survive in a foreign country on the one hand, the condition of being perennially uprooted and contact with other cultures on the other. This is, for instance, true of two Italian physicians: Simone Simoni and Agostino Doni. Starting from Averroist positions in line with Venetian/Paduan medical circles, during the stages of his exile (Geneva, Paris, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Basel, Cracow), Simoni passed through Antitrinitarian and later clearly atheist positions before eventually reconverting to Catholicism (see Verdigi 1997; Suitner 2016b). Doni, also an exile in Swizerland and , highly probably integrated Michael Servetus’ theory of the single spir- itus into his work De natura hominis, strongly depending upon Bernardino Tele- sio’s natural philosophy (Suitner 2019). These cases of migration are of a different kind from that of Gratarolo treated above. Here we don’t see a conscious choice of a country which guaranteed the possibility of practising the ‘true’ faith; migra- tion instead triggers the acquisition of a new and more complex religious identity, showing us how strong the religious dimension of biographical experience is. Fur- thermore, in some cases – particularly those involving physicians – the sources for accusations of and/or Antitrinitarianism were not always reliable, as such charges were often mixed up with professional rivalries. In any case, this is a phase and a generation after that of the mid-16th century under discussion here, and one that saw the migration of the so-called ‘Italian here- tics’.2 The discussion of the implications of migration for the development of the self exceeds the purposes of this paper, which concentrates on groups of dissenters in the Venetian Republic and not specifically on the later exile of some of their members. Anyway, it is worth mentioning that the connection between the crossing of borders and the emergence in Europe of processes of individualisation has been stressed on several occasions, with particular reference to the mobility of Renaissance intellec- tuals (see for instance Elias 1987). There is undoubtedly a close relationship between religion and specific individual biographical models, and between biographical and . By contrast, biographical models may also have influenced the religious practices (or their absence) of individuals (see Nassehi 1996, 11). Further- more, migration studies stress more and more the ‘multiple belongings’ and the ‘internal plurality’ triggered by migration (see for instance Pfaff-Czarnecka 2013), concepts which seem to be useful in the debate on the in/dividual.

2 The expression eretici italiani del Cinquecento was famously introduced by the homonymous book of the Italian scholar Delio Cantimori. The good citizen and the heterodox self 467

Whilst some citizens of the Venetian Republic passed directly from Catholi- cism to the Radical Reformation,3 moving from Lutheranism to Anabaptism was in fact far more frequent. In 1551 or 1552, Nicola d’Alessandria visited some nuns in Treviso, to whom he explained the doctrine of the Anabaptists. The nuns turned out to already be very well informed on Lutheran doctrines, but after discussing them with their guest they agreed that those of the Anabaptists were even better, and declared their intention to leave the convent to undergo adult baptism:

‘In Utine del Frioli sono de molti Lutherani, sì come ho inteso da Nicola da Treviso et da maestro Iacometto suo compagno, etiam, de Treviso: et ho inteso dalli sudetti che questa estate, cioè questo iulio et iunio passato, essendo Nicola da Treviso nella sudetta cità, ribat- tezzò dui, li quali non cognosco né so il nome; de più me disse ch’era stato per mezzo di certi Lutherani in uno monasterio de monache, se ben me ricordo de san Francesco, dove parlò con loro della dottrina Lutherana et le ritrovò in detta dottrina essere molto bene istruite, et così cominciò a parlare la dottrina anabattista, cioè il battesmo, et loro accettorno tal dottrina et domandorno, secondo mi dissero li sudetti, il battesmo; ma perch’erano ancora nel monasterio et non potevano uscire non furno rebattizzate da Nicola, benché l’eshor- tasse ad uscire del monasterio per ribattezzarsi; et loro dissero che se possevano il fariano’ (Ginzburg 1970, 81f.).

A significant detail is that these nuns lived in seclusion. As such, we do not know how their story ended, and whether they decided to leave the convent or not. The conversions of the religious, generally described as sfratati, reappear constantly in the transcripts of trials. In general, these were former members of mendicant orders (Capuchins, Franciscans), receptive not only to critiques of the corruption of the Roman church but also attracted by the nature of Venetian Anabaptism: its pacifist leanings, the radical return to the text of the Scriptures and the Chris- tology of the Synoptic (on pacifism see for instance Ginzburg 1970, 48: ‘Maestro Giovan Maria spataro, ma non fa più ‘l maestro, perché gli anabattisti non vogliono alchuno he facci arme, né dipintori, anabattista’). There are also people who became atheists after turning to Lutheranism and Anabaptism: for example, those Neapolitan groups, studied by Luca Addante and Massimo Firpo, who later moved to Padua (Addante 2010; Firpo 1990). These are disciples of Juan de Valdés, who on the basis of a more esoteric and exclusively oral level of doctrine, probably already theorised by their leader, bent his teach- ings in a more radical direction to ‘espouse’ ideas that had very little to do with the Reformation, such as the denial of the redeeming power of the life of Christ,

3 George Hudston Williams’ monograph The Radical Reformation (1965), as is well known, gave its name to this set of doctrines. 468 Riccarda Suitner and not just of his divine nature, the condemnation of both the Old and the New Testament and, in some cases, of all forms of religion. A series of social, economic, cultural and confessional factors made it pos- sible for part – albeit a tiny part – of the population of the Venetian Republic of the mid-16th century to develop the feeling that they had been given the potential to choose the confession most suited to their own inner needs, be it Anabaptism, Lutheranism, Calvinism or even an atheism not devoid of evidently blasphemous undertones. This close connection between individual choice, conversion and an approach that we could describe as ‘confessional eclecticism’ is fairly unusual in Europe at this time. Actively seeking out a religion suited to oneself clashed stridently with the iron-clad territorial criterion then prevailing and with the very mindset of this period, which ‘could not conceive of religion as a sphere sepa- rate from other domains of being’ (Luebke 2012, 4). The best-known example of the application and crystallisation of this principle is the Augsburg confession of 1555 (the celebrated motto cuius regio, eius religio famously dates to a few years later), which, not coincidentally, offered Lutherans and Catholics the possibility of migration, but excluded Anabaptists and Antitrinitarians. The first generation of Venetian Anabaptists is representative of individual religious choice; their religious identity is pluralistic, fragmented and eclectic, lacking in dogmatic coherence and loyalty to a single confession. The same could be said for all those who adopted the teachings of the magisterial Reformation in an eclectic and personal, hybrid fashion, a highly ‘spurious’ reformed thought.4 In general terms this is certainly an expression of individualisation unconceiv- able without the major shift starting from the Reformation, but that should be considered a separate phenomenon, in opposition to the gradual establishment of reformed orthodoxies in other countries. It seems to me that the events under discussion here are a good demonstration that individualisation is not a single, almost supra-historical process, but a multiplicity of discontinuous processes resulting from specific networks, factors and contingent situations.5 The phenomenon of the radical fringes that emerged at the margins of the Reformation and long persecuted in Europe had, among other things, long-term theological consequences. Consider, for example, the Mennonite and com- munities in North America. Both, though they are now fragmented into numerous

4 In particular the works of Massimo Firpo offer a detailed picture of the multiplicity of influenc- es typical of 16th-century Italian heterodoxy. 5 For a summary of the state of research of the KFG – which has shown that individualisation is not linear and progressive, but is characterised by strong discontinuities and gaps – see Suitner 2016a. The Christian and ancient Rome had for instance their own concept of reli- gious individuality: see Rüpke 2013; Rüpke, Spickermann 2012; Mieth, Löser 2014. The good citizen and the heterodox self 469 subgroups with specific beliefs and slightly different practices, originated from the migration of non-conformist communities established in 16th-century Europe, especially the Anabaptist community, with which they share many fundamental principles, including opposition to the baptism of infants and radical pacifism. The diversity of American religious and congregations, in an apparently paradoxical way, can be considered simultaneously an expression of individ- ualism and conformity. These communities are an integral part of a context in which individualisation has become a rule, a specific feature of national religious culture. As Richard Madsen has pointed out,

‘religious individualization is the American religion […]. The geography of American reli- gion is coming to resemble an archipelago of little islands of strongly held faith. The popu- lation of these islands is somewhat transitory, because restlessness is built deeply into the core of American religious culture. The restlessness is not so much a result of the weakness in faith. It is a result of the very strength of the fundamental promises of the American reli- gious individualism’.6

In relation to our Venetian context – and without claiming to be making rigor- ous comparisons – we could mention the growing attention paid in recent years in anthropological studies to multiple identities and the fragmentation of the personal identity of the individual. This research has called into question part of the narrative proper to the so-called ‘modernisation theory’, which presumes an opposition between a pre-modern and/or non-European ‘dividuality’ and a Western ‘individuality’, a dichotomy between the dividualised/collectivistic/rela- tional and the individualistic personhood.7 In opposition to this viewpoint, which theorised a presumed internal uniform- ity of the non-Western and Western blocs, scholars have spoken of a ‘fluidity of the boundaries that define the contours of one’s persona’, as a consequence of which ‘personae (whether they be individualistic or collectivistic) have various modes of being; these modes of presence are inherently plural and diverse’, of ‘personhood

6 Madsen 2009. See also Fuchs, Rüpke 2015, 3: ‘it is of specific interest to determine and research constellations in which individualized relationships with the Supreme as well as with human others becomes a social trend, a defining feature for at least certain sections of society […]. The approach allows to capture paradoxical constellations, in which individualization is made into a norm or even becomes stereotyped’. 7 See exemplarily Strathern 1988 on gender relations on Malanesia, and Geertz 1974: ‘the West- ern conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe; a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organised into a distinctive whole and set contrastingly both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures’. 470 Riccarda Suitner as defined and shaped by a multiply authored, relational nexus between individual autonomy and the collective’ (Appuhamilage 2017; see also Sökefeld 1999). This is a fascinating debate arguing that pluralism and the fragmentation of the self should not be considered the exclusive prerogative of pre-modern and non-European con- texts, in opposition to individualisation, but rather an integral part of it. This posi- tion seems to me to be confirmed, with all the due distinctions, by the reflections made on the Venetian heterodox groups of the mid-16th century, with their more or less conscious struggle for the search of an individual form of religion, their rejec- tion of any form of dogmatism, and their ‘multiple’ religious choices which, instead of juxtaposing and replacing themselves on one another, gave result to ‘hybrid’ forms of religiosity. A different matter are the clear conversions to a Reformed confession, also discussed above. Regardless of whether this conversion is made explicit by a migration, or concealed by the practice of Nicodemism, the religious identity of the person is clearly defined. The outcome of forced retractions may be highly dramatic, such as suicide. A famous example is that of Francesco Spiera, a lawyer from Cittadella (near Padua), who turned to Lutheranism and was forced first to dissimulate and later – once discovered – to abjure. In despair at having betrayed his faith and certain that he was therefore destined for eternal damnation, Spiera let himself die of hunger and depression in 1548, leading to a heated debate in erudite Italian circles (Curione, Calvin, Gribaldi, Gelous, Scrymgeour 1550). Alternatively, there may be a ‘happy ending’ – as in the case of Guglielmo Gratarolo, who decided to emigrate to a region where he found an entire com- munity and pre-defined system of dogmas to support his choice. In this case, the Nicodemitic opposition is between a ‘genuine’ religious identity (that of the Calvinist) and a fictitious identity (that of the Catholic) that is not truly heartfelt. These two identities do not form a whole, and are not both intimately experi- enced. The premise here is the confessional state with its identification of reli- gious and political/civic identity; the ‘exception’ of migration forms a coherent part of this picture, aimed at reappropriating this lost genuine identity. We are not dealing here with a dividuality in the sense in which it is used in the most recent anthropological debate, ‘in the sense of permeability, porosity, and openness’ (Linkenbach, this publication; see also Smith 2012), nor with a duality resembling that of the libertines and the ‘free thinkers’ of the two following centu- ries. Underlying the latter was a deliberate doctrine of dissimulation and a distinc- tion between different personae, roles and levels of communication in a complex stratification of levels. This meaning of dividuality could, for example, take con- crete forms in the opposition between author and private individual, between the persona of an author of texts for a bourgeois audience and the persona of an author for an audience of ‘insiders’, or in a series of conscious dissimulation strategies The good citizen and the heterodox self 471 and literary practices such as a play with different pseudonyms by a single author, the use of fictitious letters or the composition of dialogues in co-authorship (see on this Mulsow 2012, 58–79 and in this publication). Furthermore, these practices, attested mostly in 17th-century Socinian and pre-Enlightenment, ‘rationalist’ Huguenot milieus, show how even the strategies of religious dissenters belong- ing to the ‘left wing of the Reformation’ – including confessional eclecticism and multiple conversion – had become more ‘aware’ in comparison with the undoubt- edly more naïve religious fluidity of Venetian Anabaptists treated in the previous pages. The ‘double truth’ that is the expression of their world has nothing to do with the opposition between and philosophy, or between two different theological truths; it does not form an integral part of the structure of confessional states (but rather a foreign presence), and presupposes a complete identity of the individual only in the simultaneous presence of all their different identities.

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