ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to move beyond the study of the Bible as an object, instead identifying it as a catalyst of imagination. It shows how the English thought of the Bible in a foreign language: a thinking process different indeed from the one they applied to their own familiar Bibles, used for their devotion. The parabola of the Italian printed translations of the Bible starts in 1471 and closes in the 1590s, after a century filled with editions, either authorised or heterodox. The Bible is central to the saga of the Protestant Risorgimento, extensively studied since Giorgio Spini’s pioneering book. Of course, there is no historical link between sixteenth-century Italian dissent and nineteenth-century Italian Protestantism: the story is broken. At the heart of the nineteenth-century Bible initiative was Count Piero Guicciardini, a patrician Florentine who became the patron of Italian evangelicalism.
