ABSTRACT
The field of Reformation studies has long been established as an important area of academic endeavour, with an impeccable pedigree of seminal and path-breaking texts and analyses beginning in the nineteenth century.1 Attention to the period of the European Reformation underpins our understanding of much of our own religious and political climate, equally riven by religious dissent and doctrinal disagreement, by casting light on the pivotal period of religious unrest, suppression and violence in the sixteenth century that still helps shape societies and cultures to this day. In this context, however, Italy’s own experience of reform and Reformation has remained relatively unexplored, generally because it is deemed in traditional historiographies to have lasted only for a brief moment in the 1530s and early 1540s, with any religious renewal effectively stamped out after the re-establishment of the Roman Inquisition in 1542, and the subsequent zeal in prosecuting heresy on the peninsula.2
