Religion and Ideas in Southern Italy

Religion and Ideas in Southern Italy offers the first comprehensive English-language study of the relationship between Church, State, and intellectual life in the early modern Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily and their nineteenth-century legacies. Long understood as a frontier of the Counter-Reformation and of Roman power, southern Italy was a space where jurisdictional tensions, cultural control, and religious innovation intersected. This volume reconsiders the region not as a peripheral outpost, but as a coherent and dynamic political, social, and Mediterranean crossroads, deeply embedded in European networks of ideas and reform.

Despite a rich Italian historiography, the circulation of ideas in southern Italy has rarely been examined as a unified theme linking institutions, intellectual networks, religious orders, lay devotion, and artistic production. This collection proposes a new interpretative framework for understanding southern Italy as a laboratory of jurisdictional negotiation and cultural production in early modern Europe. Rather than treating censorship, missionary activity, popular religion, and artistic representation as separate phenomena, the volume demonstrates how they formed interconnected arenas in which Church and State competed to define orthodoxy, authority, and cultural legitimacy. By integrating institutional, social, legal, and cultural history, the book offers the first synthetic account of how mechanisms of control and channels of circulation shaped southern Italy’s intellectual and religious landscape over the longue durée.

This book will be essential reading for scholars and students of early modern Italy, Mediterranean history, Church history and Counter-Reformation. It will also appeal to readers interested in censorship, religious movements, and the political uses of culture.