Venice and the Radical Reformation

The Republic of Venice was the only Catholic territory in which an Anabaptist community formed in the 16th century. The history of Venetian Anabaptism, hitherto little known in Reformation Studies, is the focus of this book. Using a large quantity of archival material and rare printed sources Riccarda Suitner reconstructs the lives of the Republic's Anabaptists and the inquisitorial repression they suffered, and analyses the doctrinal specificities of the Radical Reformation in this area. This story represents a fundamental stage in the relations between German, central-European and Italian culture in the early modern period. Events in Venice are presented within a broader comparative framework, paying particular attention to the German states, Switzerland, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Transylvania, Moravia, Tyrol, and the Kingdom of Naples. It will emerge that its Venetian history cannot be ignored if we are to gain a true understanding of the European Reformation.



Riccarda Suitner is a Lecturer at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. Her research focuses on the period between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. She is the author, among other publications, of the monograph The Dialogues of the Dead of the Early German Enlightenment, previously also published in German and Italian. The first edition of the book won the German Humanities Translation Prize in 2019.