Phd in POLITICAL STUDIES

Research: A political interpretation of the Counter-Reformation. The impact of the reaction of the Catholic Church to the Protestant Reformation on the formation of the Italian national identity in the European context

Giulia Iacovelli got her bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Relations at Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, where she was also a student at Collegio Marianum, and her master’s degree in Science of Politics at Sapienza University of Roma. She is a student of the PhD course of the Sapienza School of Advanced Studies. She is a member of the Commission for Foreign Affairs of the Italian Youth Council and she is a University Fellow at the Aspen Institute of Italy.


Abstract
At the beginning of the ‘80s Paolo Prodi wished for a new season of historiography to be opened, in order to examine in depth the pair Counter-Reformation – Catholic Reformation, theorized by Hubert Jedin, with the ambition to reinterpret from this perspective the history of institutions. A fascinating challenge, especially concerning the matters of the Italian politics of the XVI century.

How much of the ideology of missing that so strongly affects the narration of the history of the peninsula depends on the impact that the Counter-Reformation had in the construction of an Italian national culture? How did the commitment towards the fight against the Protestant Reformation change, within a few decades, the approach of the Papal States to the project of unification of the Italian States? These are the main questions this research is focused on. The project assumes as its first frame of reference the studies by Carlo Ginzburg and Alberto Mario Banti and completely adopts the perspectives emerged in the historiographical debate, that found a first but fundamental landing place in the book “L’Italia come storia” edited by Francesco Benigno and Igor Mineo.

The study aims to analyse the consequences that the most relevant elements, both reformist and repressive, of the reaction of the Catholic Church to the phenomenon of the Protestant Reformation had on the process of unification of the Italian States and on the formation of the national identity of the peninsula, contextualizing them in a European dimension, with a global history approach. The project is going to pay specific attention to the religious, territorial, social, linguistic, and cultural cleavages that characterize Italy and that were exacerbated and made structural by the Counter-Reformation itself.

Key words: Counter-Reformation, national identity, cleavages