THE ITALIAN PENINSULA AND THE EUROPEAN WARS OF RELIGION
Historians tend to see the French Wars of Religion (1559-1598) and the Revolt in the Low Countries (1566-1648) as similar but separate conflicts. Among other similarities, these civil wars had a strong international dimension in common. From the start a variety of European actors were involved, and the warring parties continuously targeted different European audiences for support. By focussing on the Italian peninsula, Lana Martysheva and Nina Lamal explore how early modern Italian audiences followed and interpreted the religious and political aspects of these two contemporary conflicts. The discussant will be Professor Olivier Poncet (ENC/EHESS and visiting fellow at New College.) This joint session is organised thanks to a generous partnership with the Ecole française de Rome
Lana Martysheva, Engaging with the French Wars of Religion from the Italian Peninsula
This presentation outlines how close was the monitoring of the French Wars of Religion in the Italian peninsula and how Italian elites contributed to the formulation and dissemination of contemporary discourses on these conflicts. I will in particular navigate between an internationally successful text, Lo stratagema di Carlo IX, re di Francia contro gli Ugonotti by Camillo Capilupi, and the family archives of this secret papal chamberlain. The objective is to contribute to the understanding of the Wars of Religion as a transnational early modern phenomenon, not only from the point of view of direct interventions in the conflict (military, diplomatic and financial), but also because of the influence of contemporary foreign readings of the ‘French’ events. To understand how these readings fashioned a new way of thinking contemporaneity and acting on it, it is crucial to consider both the Italian written cultures and the intensification of news circulation in the sixteenth century.
Nina Lamal, Beyond the Battlefield: the influence of Italian condottieri and soldiers on news networks during the Wars of Religion
This presentation builds on my 2016 article, in which I noted that news reports about the French Wars of Religion, printed in Italian cities, were often Italian translations of French accounts originally printed in Paris or Lyon. As a result, Italian audiences received similar news reports to that of the French. However, for news about the Low Countries, this was rarely the case. To explain this discrepancy, I initially speculated that printers in Italy had closer connections with their French counterparts, facilitating the exchange of material. In this paper, I explore a different possibility. During the Wars of Religion, the number of Italian soldiers fighting in France declined rapidly, with many instead choosing to serve in the Spanish-Habsburg army in the Low Countries. Could the presence of thousands of Italian soldiers on the battlefield there have influenced the flow of information to Italy and shaped how Italian audiences perceived the conflict?
BIOGRAPHIES
Lana Martysheva holds a PhD in Early Modern History from the University of Sorbonne. She published her thesis on the pacification process at the end of the French Wars of Religion as a book entitled Henri IV roi. Le pari de l’hérétique (Champ Vallon, 2023). With Mark Greengrass, she co-edited a collective volume on the Cardinal Jacques du Perron (PUR, 2023). She has held research fellowships at the European University Institute (Max Weber fellow) and at the Ecole française de Rome (scientific member). She specializes in the sixteenth-century political cultures and transnational information practices, with a focus on Italian and French archives. Currently, she is co-editing a special issue at the crossroads of history and art history: “Immobilizing the Gaze: the Visual Fabrication of Events in the Early Modern Period”.
Nina Lamal is researcher at the Huygens Institute in Amsterdam. Her research focusses on diplomacy and politics, the transnational history of media, communication and publishing in early modern Low Countries, Italy and the Holy Roman Empire. She is the author of Italian Communication on the Revolt in the Low Countries (Brill, 2023) and editor of the digital edition of the letters of Christofforo Suriano, the first Venetian envoy to the Dutch Republic from 1616 to 1623. Other recent publications include a journal article on the foreign powers and the first Italian newspapers, a co-edited journal issue with Jan Machielsen on Jesuits and Print (2023), and a co-written article with Helmer Helmers on Dutch diplomacy in the seventeenth century.
