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This special issue is devoted to the influence of Italian culture on the Antitrinitarian movements that spread through Europe during the early modern period. One of the objectives is to go back to the period preceding the activities of Lelio and Fausto Sozzini, and to consider the influences of various trends in the Italian thought of the 15th and 16th centuries that made a crucial contribution to shaping Antitrinitarian ideas about Biblical exegesis, spirituality, baptism and the Trinity. Some papers also cover the phase following the international establishment of Socinianism. While for the first half of the sixteenth century there is a tendency to underestimate the Italian contribution to European Antitrinitarianism, the exact opposite is true for the period between the end of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The perception of Antitrinitarianism changes completely and, following the international affirmation of the Sozzini, is often mistakenly identified with Socinianism, taking the part for the whole (as is still often the case today on a historiographical level).

The article draws a new profile of one of the main representatives of the first phase of the Italian Radical Reformation, Camillo Renato. It argues that humanist philological criticism, the ‚border‘ culture of the Valtellina, and even Venetian urban life contributed to the highly original character of his constantly evolving theology.

Zusammenfassung Insbesondere im Licht von drei jüngst erschienenen Werken (eine Monographie und ein Sammelband) skizziert vorliegender Beitrag den Stand der Forschung über die Verbreitung der Reformation in Italien in der frühen Neuzeit und, allgemeiner, über den Status der mit der Reformation verbundenen religiösen Minderheiten. Die Besprechung der Bände ermöglicht ferner die Beurteilung von drei spezifischen Forschungsansätzen, die sich 1. auf den Nikodemismus, 2. auf das Exil religionis causa und 3. auf die materielle Kultur beziehen.

This paper, which presents first results of a wider book project, will reconstruct the influence of the so-called ‘radical wing’ of the Reformation, above all Anabaptism, Socinianism, and Antitrinitarism, on the tradition of natural philosophy that had established itself in particular in Veneto through the works of Pietro Pomponazzi, Agostino Nifo, and Giacomo Zabarella. Italian physicians and foreign students at the University of Padua developed theories that anticipated many scientific innovations of the 17th century (especially with regard to blood circulation). Often they were forced into exile, persecuted by the Inquisition and by political authorities of Protestant territories. In my article, I would like to give an overview of the education and European peregrinations of some of these heterodox physicians, in whose work medical, theological, and philosophical theory, religious dissent, conversion, and exile were remarkably entangled. I will focus on their international correspondence networks and on their relationship with political and religious authorities, with diplomats and with physicians from other confessions.

En 1731 un autor alemán anónimo publicó un diálogo del muerto continuando la tradición comenzada en la Grecia antigua por Luciano de Samosata. Hoy sobrevive una única copia del texto, publicada sin referencia del lugar de publicación o impresor y se encuentra ahora en el Evangelisches Predigerseminar Bibliothek en Wittenberg. Los protagonistas son el filósofo y físico Andreas Rüdiger (1673-1731) y René Descartes, quien representa en el diálogo a un tipo muy diverso de filósofo de la figura “histórica" que trascendió hasta nosotros en sus obras. Este artículo se propone reconstruir la composición de este texto raro y enigmático y contextualizar la perspectiva ideológica del autor en las controversias que animaban el trasfondo filosófico de las universidades alemanas de los comienzos del siglo XVIII. In 1731 an anonymous German author published a dialogue of the dead, continuing the tradition started in ancient Greece by Lucian of Samosata. Today a single complete copy of the text survives, published without indication of the place of publication or the printer and now in the Evangelisches Predigerseminar Bibliothek in Wittenberg. The protagonists are the philosopher and physician Andreas Rüdiger (1673-1731) and René Descartes, who in the dialogue represents a very different type of philosopher from the “historical" figure passed down to us in his works. This article aims to reconstruct the composition of this rare and enigmatic text and to contextualize the author’s ideological perspective in the controversies animating the philosophical underground of early 18th-century German universities. Fil: Suitner, Riccarda. Universidad de Erfurt