The People Who Believe in Nothing: Intolerable Thoughts in Late Renaissance Italy

During the seventeenth century the Republic of Venice and its satellite university town of Padua remained a relatively free-thinking island in the Catholic world. Due to the intermingling of ideas from Catholic skeptics, Jewish philosophers, and various heterodox foreigners, who constituted what was perhaps the most diverse population in Western Europe, Venice was unusually cosmopolitan. Padua was the only university in Italy where Protestants and Jews could actually study alongside Catholics despite the Council of Trent’s prohibition of non-Catholics taking degrees. Venice had the largest publishing industry in Italy and one of the largest in Europe. Especially after the epic confrontation between Venice and Rome when Pope Paul V placed the Republic under Interdict (1606-1607), the Republic tolerated and sometimes even encouraged unconventional religious speculation and rabid anti-papal polemics.

Presented by Edward Muir, Clarence l. Ver Steeg Professor in the Arts and Sciences and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence Northwestern UniversityThe event is free and open to the public. Reception to follow.Co-Sponsored by Department of History; Supported by Group for Early Modern Studies (GEMS); Institute for the Study of Religion and Culture (ISRC), Religious Studies Program; UA Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation Committee (UAMARRC)