Inquisition, Conversion, and Foreigners in Baroque Rome by Irene Fosi (review)

Reviewed by: Inquisition, Conversion, and Foreigners in Baroque Rome by Irene Fosi Stefano Villani Inquisition, Conversion, and Foreigners in Baroque Rome. Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700. By Irene Fosi, translated by Giuseppe Bruno-Chomin. ( Leiden: Brill, 2020. Pp. vi, 260. €125. ISBN 978-9-004-42265-0.) This volume is the translation, with bibliographic updates, of Convertire lo straniero: Forestieri e Inquisizione a Roma in età moderna (Rome: Viella Editrice, 2011). In this research, Fosi considers the conversion strategies toward "heretical" foreigners adopted by Roman authorities between 1580 and 1750, highlighting the diversity of subjects involved in this work of persuasion and the changes that intervened over time. From the end of the 1500s, many Protestant foreigners were able to travel to or live in the Italian peninsula, thanks to privileges granted by the sovereigns of the Italian states. In the first chapter, Fosi presents the activity of hospitality and control End Page 411 by numerous confraternities, hospitals, and colleges in Rome (13-42). The second chapter (43-70) focuses on the symbolic importance of holy years as a conversion tool and outlines the significance of the Trinità dei Pellegrini as a place of reception for foreigners since its foundation in 1576 by Saint Philip Neri. Fosi discusses both the conversion narratives of the renegados and of the numerous Ultramontanes—English, Germans, Flemish—who went to Rome to "convert." Starting from 1600, to encourage the conversion of heretics, the Oratorian Giovanni Giovenale Ancina established in Rome a congregation programmatically aimed at favoring the return to their countries of origin of the converts, transforming them into agents of propaganda. This congregation—whose importance Fosi has here highlighted for the first time—continued a more or less struggling existence until 1658 when it was reformed (if not re-founded) by Alexander VII (68). Fosi then presents three fascinating case studies to show the liminal and ambiguous condition of the converts. The first one reconstructs the uncertain religious identity of the German goldsmith Christophorus Gasparus Fischer, who died in Rome in 1626 (71–84). The second outlines the biography of Johannes Faber, a Lincean physician and papal herbalist who was born into a Lutheran family but educated as a Catholic, went to Rome in 1598, where he lived until his death in 1629, becoming a point of reference for the German community there while also spying for the Inquisition (71–106). The third one discusses the events that led to the death sentence of the Huguenot pamphleteer Guillaume Reboul in 1611 (107–24). The further discussion of the control mechanisms over Protestant foreigners who traveled through Italy—students, merchants, soldiers—allows Fosi to expand her research to other parts of Italy such as Mantua, Savoy, Modena, Ferrara, Tuscany, and Naples. In one of the most innovative parts of the book, the author convincingly explains how the pontificate of Alexander VII represented a real turning point in the Roman conversion strategy. Probably influenced by his previous experience as nuncio in Germany, this pope initiated a policy of "caresses and courtesies" toward the Protestant foreigners who went to Rome, thus favoring persuasion over repression. This new conversionist project was based on the idea that the magnificence of Rome could not fail to strike the religious imagination of the Protestants who visited it. At the same time, a cultural offensive was promoted that ranged from allowing access to Roman libraries to the development of bold editorial strategies. The last chapter describes the zenith of this strategy with the foundation by the Oratorian Mariano Sozzini of the Ospizio dei Convertendi in 1673 (179-222). Besides the Hospice, in this chapter, Fosi also discusses the problem of the burials of heretics, noting the significant semantic shift in some eighteenth-century Italian documents from heretics to non-Catholic Christians. In her conclusions, the author rightly warns against considering early modern Rome as a hospitable land for "religious minorities," highlighting how attributing to it a cosmopolitan character indeed runs the serious risk of anachronistically distorting End Page 412 the cultural, religious, and political context in which the encounter with foreigners took place at the time (225). In sum, this is a very important work that, in its Italian edition, has already...