In this book, Federico Barbierato pursues a particularly elusive and nebulous historical prey: unbelief among early modern non-elites. Barbierato’s choice of the city of Venice as his hunting ground makes sense. After all, Venetians were long believed to have an imperfect relationship with orthodoxy. Barbierato finds the reputation well deserved, describing the city’s elites as shot through with libertinism and the general populace as emitting a constant hum of heterodoxy. But his depiction rests on a particularly expansive definition of unbelief and on effectively quantitative claims that rest solely on qualitative evidence.
Barbierato is at his best when using his wide-ranging research in Venetian and Vatican archives to re-create the varied contexts in which one could encounter heterodox ideas in early modern Venice. The eponymous hat shop, for example, hosted one of the many informal religious and philosophical discussion groups that met in homes, workshops, religious institutions, and elsewhere across the city. These groups could include lay people and clerics, university graduates and autodidacts, patricians and commoners — especially those who would offer clever, provocative ideas. As Barbierato describes them, the beliefs expressed in these discussions were distinctly idiosyncratic. Reformation-era doctrinal battles, Barbierato argues, “had left a battlefield strewn with fragments of theories, ideas, and convictions” (xxii) that circulated unattached to any particular confession. Barbierato also highlights the circulation of philosophical speculations from the professors at Padua, ideas imported by foreigners, and pieces of the myriad texts churned out by the city’s publishers. These sources provided a strikingly diverse set of tesserae from which Venetians composed their individual intellectual mosaics.
Another useful contribution is Barbierato’s illustration of Venetians’ readiness to talk about religious doctrines as devised by elites for political ends. Barbierato ties this belief both to local factors (the Venetians’ relatively high levels of political engagement) and to more general trends (particularly the emerging systems for disseminating news — especially less-than-flattering news about the civil and ecclesiastical leadership).
Barbierato’s collection of trees is remarkable; the weakness of the work comes in trying to turn that somewhat sprawling mass of colorful trees into an orderly forest. Barbierato never offers a clear definition of unbelief. He argues for the “broadest possible meaning” (xxiv) of such key terms as unbelief, libertinism, irreligiousness, and atheism, given their ambiguous use in the past. But in practice that leaves the terms so broad as to be indistinguishable from each other. Barbierato’s recognition of the variation and even incoherence of early modern views and his effort to avoid forcing past individuals into modern categories are commendable, but a more sustained and nuanced discussion of the categories used by various historical actors would have strengthened Barbierato’s arguments. Early modern Inquisitors, for instance, developed a complex, subtle taxonomy of heterodoxy over time and would not have applied the term atheism as freely as Barbierato does.
A related difficulty in Barbierato’s account is the question of how widespread unbelief was in Venice. His loose definitions encompass a wide array of ideas, and he uses his many examples of unbelievers to imply that heterodoxy was ubiquitous. But his evidence is ambivalent: there were dissenters but also self-consciously orthodox individuals, such as the bookseller who refused to carry “volumes which stink of hell” in his shop (274). Barbierato finds “heterodox unrest … widely present among the patriciate” (165) but also a “deep-rooted piety” (117). Barbierato admits that quantifying the distribution of (un)beliefs is difficult, but nonetheless uses vague but quasi-quantitative terms — widespread is a favorite. Such overreaching distracts unnecessarily from what he can conclusively prove.
Overall, the book is reasonably well written, though in need of stronger editorial intervention to smooth some of the prose’s rough edges and to trim extraneous passages. Some anecdotes, albeit engaging, are only loosely relevant. The book includes a short appendix listing the contents of the library of the eponymous hat shop’s owner, a substantial bibliography, and an index mostly limited to names. In bringing to light the diversity of participants in and places and forms of everyday religious and philosophical debates, Barbierato has made a useful contribution to scholarship on Venice and on belief and unbelief more generally. It is a helpful step on the path toward a more synthetic account of unbelief across early modern European society.
