In discussing the authorship of the anonymous Treatise of the Three Impostors, the French Huguenot scholar Prosper Marchand reminded his readers that the text had been attributed to the Italian heretic Bernardino Ochino, “the founder and patriarch of the Capuchin order” who “became a heretic, and then a Jew, and finally a Turk. After all that, he turned out to be quite vindictive and wrote against all three, whom he called the greatest impostors of the world, among whom he counted Christ our savior, Moses, and also Mahomet” (Dictionnaire historique [Pierre de Hondt, 1758], 1:316, no. J). Marchand's reference to Ochino was not an isolated example. In the Republic of Letters, the Italian heretic enjoyed remarkable posthumous fame, almost becoming a celebrity in the circles of the libertinage érudit and the Radical Enlightenment. While Gabriel Naudé in his Avis pour dresser une bibliothèque suggested that Ochino be included in any respectable library, Bayle dedicated an article to him in the Dictionnaire historique et critique. In the twentieth century, Ochino scholarship flourished thanks to historians such as Delio Cantimori, Roland Bainton, Benedetto Nicolini, Philip Mc Nair, and, more recently, Gigliola Fragnito, Massimo Firpo, Emidio Campi, Anne Overell, and Miguel Gotor.

While situating himself in this rich historiographical tradition, Michele Camaioni's recent book, Il Vangelo e l'Anticristo: Bernardino Ochino tra francescanesimo ed eresia (1487–1547), breaks new ground and offers what is so far the most detailed study of Ochino's life. Camaioni traces Ochino's education and activity up to 1547, the year of the Battle of Mühlberg and a turning point in the history of the Reformation. To be sure, Camaioni's goal is to reconsider not just the biography of one prominent religious reformer but, more generally, the religious crisis of sixteenth-century Italy, paying special attention to the fluid period before the opening of the Council of Trent when confessional boundaries were not yet rigidly defined and a reunification of the church still seemed possible. Moving away from Cantimori's and Bainton's image of Ochino as a heretic “with respect to all churches,” Camaioni's first chapter (1–144) meticulously studies Ochino's Franciscan religious background, shaped on the one hand by the radicalism of figures such as Angelo Clareno and Ubertino da Casale and on the other by Bernardino of Siena. The second and the third chapters (145–463) follow Ochino's movements during the 1530s and the early 1540s, when he joined the Capuchin order, becoming its vicar general in 1538. Camaioni retraces in detail Ochino's relationship with several patrons and interlocutors, from Vittoria Colonna to Caterina Cibo to Juan de Valdés, as well as his strategy as a preacher, convinced that it was possible to reform the church from within and to reconcile the doctrine of the justification by faith alone with the obedience to Rome. It was in this period, during which he earned the admiration of humanists and artists such as Bembo, Aretino, and Tiziano that Ochino preached “Christo mascherato” in order to reach different audiences while avoiding exposing himself to the guardians of orthodoxy (290–291). Intertwining religious and political history, Camaioni also recovers Ochino's strong ties with the Colonna family and with “l'Italia dell'imperatore” (cf. Elena Bonora, Aspettando l'imperatore [Turin, 2014]), whose anticlericalism and opposition to Rome often led them to sympathize with the Reformation. Finally, the fourth chapter (465–574) considers the first years of Ochino's exile, when the failure of the Colloquy of Regensburg convinced him to leave Italy. Examining the period that he spent in Geneva and Augsburg, Camaioni brings the book to its conclusion, highlighting how, in rebutting the attacks of Catholic polemicists such as Girolamo Muzio and Ambrogio Catarino Politi, Ochino broke away once and for all from Rome and from his Franciscan past.

Il Vangelo e l'Anticristo belongs to a new phase of scholarship that, in the wake of the “post-Cantimori pardigim shift,” has succeeded in contextualizing the ideas of the Italian heretics in the religious crisis of Renaissance Italy, moving beyond old disciplinary boundaries and intertwining religious and political history. Camaioni's investigation into Ochino's Franciscan background deserves special praise. The effort to study the social and political impact of Ochino's preaching is also highly interesting and especially relevant in an age in which oral communication continued to play a crucial role, despite the traditional historiographical insistence on the “printing revolution.” In this respect, Camaioni fruitfully dialogues with the recent scholarship on early modern orality, developed by scholars such as Giorgio Caravale, Stefano Dall'Aglio, Brian Richardson, Massimo Rospocher, and others. One might regret that the book ends with 1547, leaving aside the years in which Ochino interacted with Sebastian Castellio and Elizabeth I and argued against Calvin on the Servetus affair. Indeed, when Ochino left for England in 1547, he did not abandon his Italian contacts. Tudor England offered refuge to many Italian exiles, who often reciprocated keeping communication open with Counter-Reformation Italy, acting as intelligencers and cross-confessional brokers in the midst of the religious strife. More attention could have been dedicated also to the wide circulation of Ochino's writings, translated into many different languages, which were appropriated and misread by Catholic censors, European reformers, and later by libertines and philosophes. But these are only minor shortcomings of Camaioni's rich and stimulating book, which will be of interest for anyone working on the religious crisis of sixteenth-century Italy and on its relationship with the European Reformation.