In a confessional age in which Catholics and Protestants accused each other (and for a long time) of misinterpreting the Holy Scriptures and deceiving the faithful, some churchmen made religious controversy their life’s mission. One of the most famous among them was Ambrogio Catarino Politi, a Dominican polemist from Siena who lived in the first half of the sixteenth century. His entire existence revolved around the concept of error: errors of which he accused Luther and his Italian followers in some of the most effective pamphlets of the time; errors of which he himself was repeatedly accused by his Dominican adversaries before and during the Council of Trent; but also errors of which Politi accused himself in some revealing and at time merciless autobiographical reconstructions. Through the figure of the Sienese controversialist, this essay highlights all the semantic nuances assumed by the idea of error in sixteenth-century confessional controversy: from presumption to credulity, from delusion to deception.
Roma Tre University, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0002-6016-7545
Chapter Title
Error of the Heretic, Error of the Controversialist. Error and Deception in Sixteenth-Century Religious Polemics
Authors
Giorgio Caravale
Language
Italian
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0266-4.03
Peer Reviewed
Publication Year
2023
Copyright Information
© 2023 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Book Title
Errors, False Opinions and Defective Knowledge in Early Modern Europe
Authors
Marco Faini, Marco Sgarbi
Peer Reviewed
Number of Pages
145
Publication Year
2023
Copyright Information
© 2023 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Publisher Name
Firenze University Press
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0266-4
ISBN Print
979-12-215-0265-7
eISBN (pdf)
979-12-215-0266-4
eISBN (epub)
979-12-215-0267-1
Series Title
Knowledge and its Histories