Introduction

Abstract

The land of Italy, as the seat of the Roman Church, and, formerly, of the Papal State, has been for centuries the home of Catholicism.¹ The prominent role played by the Catholic Church in the life, politics, and society of the peninsula, before and after Italian Unification, has shaped many aspects of Italian culture and thought, albeit in ways that reflect the precise nature and weight of religious belief and its links with politics in each given historical moment. What is less known, however, are the challenges to, or appropriations of, the doctrine of Catholicism for ideological, political, spiritual, aesthetic, or cultural reasons. While some studies have begun to explore these processes, particularly those associated with the early modern context of the reform movements,² or with the more modern context of anticlericalism,³ the aim of this collection is to investigate, for the first time, Italian cultural engagement, from the Middle Ages to the present, with notions of heresy, mysticism, and apocalypse and the ways in which, in their various forms, they work against Catholicism. The need for such an evaluation stems in part from the desire to continue to assess the more controversial aspects of the Italian cultural engagement with Catholicism, as well as from a renewed interest in the relationship between religion and secularism, one which is revealing of how secularism reelaborates and expands religious metaphors, especially those of dissent, in new contexts.