MOBILITY AND SOCIETY IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD

The course aims to analyze the mobility of people, ideas and objects in the early modern age through the study of the diaspora of Italian heretics of the sixteenth century. This is a traditional theme of Italian historiography, which in the course will be addressed with new questions, precisely those prompted by recent developments in historiography in the field of studies on collective diasporas and mobility.

The course is divided into three parts.

A first part (about 21 hours, 3 CFU), entitled "Itineraries of the Diaspora" will be introductory and will study the reaction of the Italian Churches and states vis-à-vis the spread of ideas related to the Protestant Reformation. It will then analyze the ways in which these ideas were presented as dangerous because they came from outside, not only from the Protestant north but also from the "Spain of the three cultures", which in the same years was trying to eradicate all its debt to Judaism and Islam. In particular, it will be seen to what extent the foundation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in 1542 should be considered at the origin of the first wave of migration of the Italian supporters of the Reformation. Particular attention will be paid to the social composition and mobility of this diaspora, the geography of the movements, the difficulties, both ideal and material, that its members encountered in establishing themselves in a new context.

A second part (21 hours, 3 CFU), entitled "Diasporas in comparison", will analyze - through sources and case studies - the diaspora of Italian heretics within the framework of other contemporary diasporas, such as that of the French Huguenots, or of marranos and moriscos, the descendants of Spanish Jews and Muslims forced to convert or flee in 1492. In addition, an attempt will be made to analyse the interaction between religious and mercantile networks, in an attempt to see to what extent religious diversity influenced the possibilities of trade and whether commercial contacts were also established between individuals or groups of different religious orientations.

A third part (21 hours, 3 CFU), entitled "Physical Mobility, Religious Mobility, Cultural Mobility", through a research on primary sources, will focus on the ways in which the experience of physical dislocation activated processes of religious change and, conversely, on other cases in which it reactivated internal bonds within the diaspora that would never be stimulated under normal conditions. On the other hand, we will see how the exponents of the Italian heretical diaspora have acted as cultural brokers, promoting the diffusion of Humanism and Renaissance culture in a very wide geographical context.

These are the main arguments:

- History of heresy and free thinking
- Religious comparison
- Inquisition and censorship
- Migration and mobility
- Forms of resistance
- Gender
- Religion, politics and society in Europe