The history of the Roman Inquisition, and the cultural and social history of early modern preaching, have in recent decades been two fertile but separate areas of investigation. Via a study of the case of Ippolito Chizzola – a Lateran regular canon preacher in his early life influenced by dissenting ideas, but later a staunch supporter of the Counter-Reformation – this volume aims to bridge the gap between these two different fields. In this work, Caravale investigates the Inquisition's increasing control over preaching in sixteenth-century Italy, and therefore the invention of new models of social and religious conformity for preachers. The volume has a special focus on the 1540s, arguably the pivotal decade in early modern Italian religious history.

Building on the scholarship of Adriano Prosperi and Massimo Firpo, respectively on the Holy Office and on Inquisitorial trials, and indeed on that large body of work resulting from the opening to the public of the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctine of the Faith in 1998, Caravale also engages with the historiography of preaching that has more recently begun to influence early modern Italian studies. In particular, the book's introduction, specifically written for this English edition (the volume originally appeared in Italian in 2013), expands its historiographical dimension, mainly entering into a dialogue with Emily Michelson's The pulpit and the press in Reformation Italy (Cambridge, Ma 2013). Michelson's was the first work that systematically addressed the connection between preachers – in particular, those belonging to mendicant orders – and the spread of heresy in the peninsula. Caravale looks at the other side of the coin, at the role played by the Roman Inquisition in an attempt to control and punish them. The author challenges the tendency to underline the continuity between late medieval and sixeenth-century preaching, as for example argued by Corrie Norman, but instead stresses the periodising effect of the diffusion of Protestant ideas and the birth of the Inquisition. ‘Recalling the role of the Inquisition’ – according to Caravale – ‘helps us to discern that the spread of Protestant doctrines was a period of fracture in the sixteenth-century history of the Italian peninsula that also involved preachers’ (p. 20). Caravale applies to Renaissance Italy considerations on the intersection between orality and print in preaching that have been successfully tested in England, for example by Arnold Hunt in his innovative The art of hearing (Cambridge 2010). The printed word in Italy was also used to recreate ex post factum an orthodox religious past: the publication of sermons in Chizzola's case was a clear way to repaint the image of his orthodoxy, after years of accusations, a trial and an abjuration. In examining this case, Caravale sheds light on the many ‘grey areas’ of Italian dissent, an environment in chiaroscuro highly resistant to doctrinal categorisations, often encompassing figures ready to move from fashionable dissenting circles to the new forms of conformity of Tridentine Italy. This book is therefore a way to show that fluidity of religious identities in Counter-Reformation Italy, and to underline the importance of turning points and periodisation in sixteenth-century Italian religious history, against the tendency to prefer narratives of long-term continuity. This argument is probably one of the most significant legacies of the Italian historiographical tradition of studies on sixteenth-century religious life, of which Caravale is distinguished part.

The volume includes an appendix of over sixty pages, where the trial of Domenico Chizzola is transcribed and made available to the reader.