Juan de Valdés has recently received two English-language monographs. In his 2008 study Twilight of the Renaissance: The Life of Juan de Valdés, Daniel A. Crews presents Valdés as a courtier at the service of the imperial policy of Charles V for whom “most importantly, religion was fun” (167). His attempts at religious reform are interpreted as being primarily politically motivated: Valdés aimed to achieve a concordia between the Catholic Church and Protestants to strengthen the position of the emperor against the French threat. The Juan de Valdés described by Massimo Firpo differs largely from this interpretation. His Valdés is a serious spiritual teacher whose religious writings were not instruments for imperial policy but guidance for devoted followers within the Neapolitan elites. What Crews labeled a “lack of theological clarity and consistency” or “religious opportunism” (163) for Massimo Firpo is the result of Valdés’s radical spiritualism, which refused any dogma, rule, or system, and went even beyond sacred texts. The emphasis on the strong subjectivity of religious experience led to a spiritual openness that made it possible for Valdés to integrate Catholic as well as Lutheran or Erasmian opinions, even if these were contradictory. With this, Valdés not only left behind Catholicism, but also any orthodoxy and maybe found a syncretistic view like his Alumbrado masters in Spain. Such a syncretistic and antidogmatic view couldn’t be upheld publicly either in Spanish Naples or elsewhere in Italy. Valdés and his disciples thus adopted Nicodemism in order to prevent any anger, as they publicly accepted Church authorities, rules, and rituals, while living their religious freedom secretly.

The Spanish Alumbrado movement of the 1520s was the main basis of Valdés’s religious thinking. Until his flight to Naples he was in close contact with theses radical mystics. In the first chapter of the book, Firpo gives a very complete picture of the spiritual and religious reform movement in Spain at the beginning of sixteenth century, when the Alumbrados arose and Valdés was socialized. Valdés then serves him to link pre-Tridentine Spanish reform to religious reform movements in the 1530s and 1540s in Italy, whose detailed description follows in chapter 2. Chapter 3 deals with the influence of Valdés and his followers on Italian heretics and even within the Church apparatus on important figures like Cardenal Reginald Pole. It is this “heresy at the top of the Church” that brings Firpo to point out that a simple distinction of Catholicism and Protestantism, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, is not useful to describe the Italian Reformation (121). Moreover, the Italian Reformation of the 1530s and 1540s is characterized by a “climate of experimentation, theological flexibility, syncretism, free discussion” (115), against the dogmatism of post-Tridentine Church and of Protestant orthodoxies. Dogmatic post-Tridentine Catholicism was only one of the most extreme positions within the Church, even if it finally triumphed, mainly because it deployed the Inquisition as a repressive force to impose orthodoxy. The last chapter deals with the radical heritage of Valdés within Valdensianism, Anabaptism, and anti-Trinitarianism, in Italy as well as in Europe.

All in all, Massimo Firpo offers not only a monograph on Valdés and his influence, but also a very detailed and well-documented study (on Valdés’s spirituality, a reference to Wolfgang Otto, Juan de Valdés und die Reformation in Spanien im 16. Jahrhundert [1989], is missing) of the Italian Reformation during the first half of the sixteenth century, including its heritage and its relation to Spanish reform around 1500. Firpo gives very detailed information about Reformers and groups in the whole of Italy, but always manages to trace back their activity to the major question of the “Italian Reformation.” This term is preferred by him to “Reformation in Italy” because of the complexity and originality of the Italian Reformation, which not only was an answer to Northern influences but had its own traditions and — here Valdés serves as principal witness — received its impulses from Spain.