What did it mean, in early modern Italy, to belong to a religion in a physical sense? How was affiliation instilled and developed in a body? We can approach such questions by examining occasions when religious identity was publicly contested and affirmed. Abjurations, adult baptisms, and conversion sermons all emphasized the confessionally ambiguous bodies and movements of the participants. In an age of growing religious pluralism and its obverse, confessional anxiety, such ceremonies took on extra weight and invited curious or hostile attention across religious divides. The itineraries, streets, and spaces around these ceremonies played a role too, as both literal and literary framing devices — the central metaphor of a Christian journey meeting early modern Italy’s increasing urban growth, travel and migration. Using lessons from the study of spiritual journeys, mobility, and religious conversion, can we begin to write the history of the confessionalized body? How might doing so shed light on early modern religious diversity?
Emily Michelson is Professor of History at the University of St. Andrews. She is primarily interested in the religious, interreligious, and cultural history of Italy, and is currently Co-Investigator (with Mary Laven, Cambridge) of the AHRC-funded project Italian Renaissance Objects and Spaces of Encounter (ItalianROSE). Major publications include Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance (Princeton University Press, 2022) and The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation Italy (Harvard University Press, 2013). More recently, she also co-edited with Matthew Coneys Wainwright, A Companion to Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome (Brill: 2020) and with Jan Machielsen and Katrina Olds, The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Saints and Sanctity (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press: 2025).
