Dissensi espliciti e dissimulazioni mancate. Miscredenza e forme del discorso eterodosso in età moderna

• Main Author: Federico Barbierato
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Groupe de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur l'Histoire du Littéraire 2010-11-01
• Series: Les Dossiers du GRIHL
• Subjects: baroque age; dissimulation; early modern period; inquisition; libertinism; public opinion
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/dossiersgrihl/3691

The essay examines the features of religious dissent – particularly in the form of unbelief – in Venice between the mid-seventeenth century and the 1740s. The period witnessed continuous overlapping between fragments of theories, ideas, convictions, which had lost most of their connections with the Protestant faith, and acquired a life of their own. Rather than identifying principles as genetically belonging to one or another tradition of nonconformity, thus, it becomes important to verify how different forms of cultural unrest met and entwine one another in a grey area: their traits blurred according to a dynamic logic of communication; individual elaboration stood out as the outcome of interpersonal interaction. Interaction and public communication is precisely what characterized a form of dissent that appears to have been loud rather than measured; dissimulation predominantly took the form of a selection of places and moments in which “rebel” discourses could go public: the ostentation of diversity was instrumental to the creation of a social identity. Debates worked therefore as stages somehow depriving of responsibility, free spaces of expression, in which theological-political contest marked a free zone where the discussion and presentation of beliefs and issues, even daring ones and for pleasure’s sake, was possible.