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Introduction
Although in recent decades Italian preaching has attracted more scholarly attention than ever before, printed Italian sermons of the post-Tridentine and Baroque ages remain largely unexplored. Archives and libraries offer rich collections of printed sermons and of manuscript material concerning homilies that have not yet been subject to historiographical and critical analysis.1 This lack of interest seems surprising, considering the role played by sermon-based literature in seventeenth-century Italy. In fact, after the Council of Trent (1545–1563), the Catholic church invested all its energies into establishing an orthodox form of faith and reinforcing disciplined cohesion in its congregations. All forms of communication—liturgical, oratorial, artistic, and literary—were directed towards this huge effort to create religious uniformity and encourage the spiritual growth of the Catholic world.2 Preaching became such a vehicle for displaying social, cultural and literary expertise that the most important poet of the time, Giovan Battista Marino, a layman, wrote and published three very popular sermons, becoming a model for later preachers. As Maravall has stated, Baroque culture was a mass culture, where preaching acted as an important means of forging religious emotions, thoughts, and actions, a function well recognized and used by the leading spiritual institutions.3 The arts of rhetoric prized in Baroque culture also met the need of capturing the attention of listeners. Corrie Norman suggests tentatively that "the passionate, abstract, melodious and vivid preaching gave the people what they wanted and what the churchmen thought they needed. Not entertainment or teaching but the miracle of divine transforming presence" (155).4 Norman presents this as a hypothesis, but I would argue that it is beyond doubt.
The best evidence of the importance of Italian preachers as emotional leaders and religious teachers is the fact that they were invited to preach abroad, and that their sermons were a primary means for spreading—even manipulating—ideas. It is well known that Renaissance collections of Italian sermons were translated into other European languages or into Latin and circulated widely in Catholic and Reformed communities in the early modern period. Not only are there the well known cases of Girolamo Savonarola's sermons, which were repeatedly translated and reprinted in several European countries, and of the preaching of Bernardino Ochino, which was also translated into French, English,...