Cromohs Virtual Seminars

The English Civil Wars and the Interregnum in Italian Historiography in the 17^th century

Stefano Villani
Università di Pisa

S. Villani , "The English Civil Wars and the Interregnum in Italian Historiography in the 17^th century",
in M. Caricchio, G. Tarantino, eds., Cromohs Virtual Seminars. Recent historiographical trends of the British Studies (17th-18th Centuries), 2006-2007: 1-4
<http://www.fupress.net/public/journals/49/Seminar/villani_ecv.html>

1. The English civil wars and the Italian historiography in the 17^th century.

The revolutionary events in England aroused a remarkable amount of attention in contemporary Italian historiography. There are numerous works specifically dedicated to those events and a simple list of them bears witness to this interest. Perhaps the most detailed and complete narrative that appeared in print in Italy during the 17^th century was that contained in the fifteen volumes of the Mercurio by Vittorio Siri, the first volume of which was published in 1644. In the total economy of the work the space dedicated to the English Revolution was so large that one reader even criticized the author for having been "too precise" ("troppo minuto") in the narration of the English events (as a matter of fact, out of the approximately 16.900 pages that compose this monumental work, approximately 2.300 narrate the English vicissitudes).^[1] But beyond this merely quantitative aspect, the thing that a reader of these pages of the Mercurio notices most of all is that Siri here makes available for the first time in Italian translation many documents produced during the civil war from both sides of the conflict. To select just one example, he publishes the reports of Charles I's trial in their entirety. He also made use of first-hand information supplied by some of the protagonists of those events (not least those of cardinal Rossetti, who was in London as papal representative to Queen Henrietta Maria between June 1639 and July 1641). In the publishing history of Mercurio one can readily distinguish two great blocks: the first comprising the first five volumes of Mercurio, published between 1644 and 1655, in which Siri describes European history up to 1645 using documentary material collected for the most part when he lived in Venice; the second comprising the remaining ten volumes, published between 1667 and 1682, which are essentially based on the French diplomatic material that Siri used in order to describe European events up to 1655.

Maiolino Bisaccioni also broadly narrated the vicissitudes of England (with those of Catalonia, Portugal, Palermo, Naples, of the Poland of Bogdan Chmel' nickij, of the Fronde France, of Turkey and of the war of Fermo) in the Historia delle guerre civili de' nostri tempi of 1652.^[2] Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato examined the English events in the second, third and fourth part of his Historie, published respectively in 1641, 1648, and 1651.^[3] The second part of the Historie was written in August 1641 - thus approximately a year before the explosion of the civil war in England - and in it Gualdo Priorato narrates events in England up until the death-sentence of Strafford.^[4] The third part of 1648 continues the narration up to 1645. The fourth part of 1651 continues the narrative up to the decapitation of Charles I.^[5] In his famous Historia delle Rivolutioni di Francia, published in 1655, Gualdo Priorato again put forward his narrative of the trial, sentence and execution of the English monarch, already published four years earlier, and extensively narrated the events which followed.^[6] In 1669 Gualdo Priorato published a new biography of cardinal Mazzarino in which he spoke with some amplitude about the English revolution and the alliance between France and England.^[7] Gualdo Priorato then returned to these events in the Historia di Leopoldo Cesare^[8] and in a short biography of Cromwell, the latter being published in a 1671 volume that comprised the biographies of the most important 17^th century politicians.^[9] Girolamo Brusoni^[10] summarized the English revolutionary vicissitudes in the Istorie universali d'Europa of 1657, in which he narrates the European events of the thirty years from 1627 to 1656, as well as in the Osservationi sopra le relationi universali del Botero of 1659.^[11] In order to explain the reasons that induced him to publish a modernized version of Botero's work, the printer, in a letter to the readers, evoked the necessity of providing news of the revolutions that had taken place from Botero's time up to the present ("rivolutioni succedute" "da che scrisse il Botero sino al presente giorno")^[12] and Brusoni emphasized the exceptional interest generated by the English case: "since Botero's time the Reigns of Scotland and England have undergone such a great a mutation, that it would be necessary a long volume in order to give a complete account of it" ("hanno da' tempi del Botero in qua fatto così gran mutazione i Regni di Scozia, e d'Inghilterra, che ci converrebbe per darne intiera notizia tessere un lungo Volume").^[13] Antonio Santacroce mentions Charles' regicide in his Secreteria di Apollo and planned to write a history of the "civil wars of England".^[14] Between 1642 and 1656 the Historie memorabili de' nostri tempi appeared in five parts, edited by Alessandro Zilioli, Maiolino Bisaccioni, Giovan Battista Birago Avogadro and Girolamo Brusoni. This work dealt extensively with the English events in its fifth part, appearing in 1653, edited by Birago Avogadro, in which the Italian translation of the Elenchus Motuum Nuperorum in Anglia by the royalist physician George Bate is republished in its entirety, a work that Birago Avogadro had already published the previous year and that the translator considered "the most substantial, short and faithful account ever come to light" ("il più sostantioso, breve e fedele racconto che sia venuto in luce").^[15]

Between 1637 and 1641, Giovan Francisco Biondi (who, after his conversion to Protestantism, was employed by the king of England, the country in which he finally settled down and lived in 1612) published in Venice a history of the War of the Roses, the Istoria delle guerre civili d'Inghilterra tra le due case di Lancastro e Iorc, which was full of transparent references to the contemporary English events from a decidedly philo-monarchic point of view (the work was immediately translated into English).^[16] The cassinese monk Pajoli published in 1675 a biography of Cromwell,^[17] while Gregorio Leti at the end of December 1682 published in London for Roberto Scott the two volumes of the Teatro Britannico and ten years after (in 1692), published the two volumes of the Vita di Cromwell.^[18] Beside the historical works that dealt with English vicissitudes there was also a novel and a tragedy set against the background of the English civil wars: the Rosalinda by Bernardo Morando (1650) and the Cromuele by Girolamo Graziani (1671).

From a quick examination of this simple list of the works dedicated to the English events of the 1640s and 50s (a list that does not pretend to be complete but which includes the most important of such works), it clearly emerges that the greater part of these authors commonly belonged to the Venetian Academy of the Incogniti, founded by Giovan Francesco Loredano in 1630 and dissolved around 1660 - an academy that was, as is well known, one of the major centers of the dissemination of nonconformist and "libertine" tendencies in Italy in the 17^th Century.^[19] In order to understand the channels and the ways through which the English vicissitudes were spoken about in Italy in the 17^th Century, it will therefore be helpful to consider the relationships between the Incogniti and England.

2. The relationships between the Incogniti and England.

Around 1618 the Venetian patrician Marco Trevisan defended Nicolò Barbarigo from some slanderous remarks that had smeared his honor. He was subsequently received in the latter's house, where he ultimately resided for approximately ten years. A friendship was born that was to be be celebrated in dozens of writings, most of which were published in the 1620s. The reputation of this "heroica amicizia" (heroic friendship) also travelled to England, and in 1627 king Charles I formally requested a portrait of the two friends as a gift. When the parliamentarian soldiers during the English revolution broke into Hampton Court, destroying and plundering the rich collection of paintings accumulated by Charles Stuart, they left in its place the painting of the two friends. In 1662 the same Trevisan published for Francisco Valvasense an Italian translation of the Apotheosis, a text that the Incognito Francisco Pona had written in Latin in order to honor the two friends. In Trevisan's dedicatory letter to the brothers Marcantonio and Alexander Zeno, in which he narrates the aforementioned episode, the author commented that "where a wild hatred railed against the monarchy" furiously against a most benign monarch" ("dove correva pazzo l'odio contro la Monarchia, e furioso contro un benignissimo monarca") it had been "the same virtue of friendship" which had blinded "the senses of those robbers", despisers of the friendship.^[20]

This anecdote is extremely evocative, recalling at one and the same time both the great season of the Anglo-Venetian relationships of the age of Paolo Sarpi and the atmosphere of the Academy of the Incogniti. Trevisan was in fact a friend of Sarpi, and Fulgenzio Micanzio, Sarpi's friend and biographer, celebrated the friendship between the two patricians with warm words in his biography of father Paul.^[21] Pona, on the other hand, was an important exponent of the Academy of the Incogniti and Valvasense, the Italian publisher of the translation of his Apotheosis, which had previously been the official publisher of the academy.^[22]  But the episode is also significant for the decidedly hostile judgment about the parliamentarian side that emerges from the words of Marco Trevisan. It was not accidental that Trevisan recalled the loot of Hampton Court in dedicating his translation to Marcantonio and Alessandro Zeno, since the two brothers had in 1661 accompanied the extraordinary ambassadors of the Republic of Venice, Angel Correr and Michiel Morosini, on their visit to England, they having been sent there to congratulate Charles II for his happy Restoration.^[23] Apparently Trevisan was hurt by the fact that the Parliamentarians so openly despised his portrait, not even considering it worthy of being stolen. But his judgment on the English events of his times fully corresponds to that broadly negative judgement of a great part of the Venetian writers who dealt with the same events and who, in the majority, had shared the intellectual experience of the Academy of the Incogniti in the early 1600s.

As we have already pointed out, we can find in the Academy founded by Giovan Francisco Loredano the majority of those persons who in Italy collected and published news of the English civil wars around the 1650s. Indeed, it is possible to assume that it was this common belonging to the Academy that most decisively contributed to orienting the interests of these intellectuals towards the contemporary English vicissitudes.^[24] Maiolino Bisaccioni was secretary of the Academy; Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato, Girolamo Brusoni, Antonio Santacroce, Giovan Francisco Biondi, and Bernardo Morando were Incogniti. Also probably linked to the milieu of the Academy of the Incogniti was the already mentioned great editorial program of the Historie memorabili de' nostri tempi, published between 1642 and 1656.^[25] Membership of the Academy of the Incogniti had also included both Girolamo Graziani and Antonio Lupis, who in the Marchesa d'Hunsleij of 1677 told a fictionalized version of the history of the Scottish capuchin friar John Forbes and of his mother, Margaret Gordon, daughter of the Earl of Huntly.

To the list of those Italian intellectuals linked to the Academy of the Incogniti who had written about the English revolution, we can then perhaps even add the names of the Ferrarese Anselmo Pajoli and the Milanese Gregorio Leti (both of them born in 1630) who were not members of it. In fact, in 1675 the cassinese monk Pajoli published his biography of Cromwell with the aforementioned Francisco Valvasense, the Venetian printer of the Incogniti.^[26] Leti maintained close relationships with the associates of the Academy and, in 1665, after its dissolution, in his Dialoghi istorici, signed many letters as "Accademico Incognito".^[27]

Beyond ascertainment of the fact that practically all the main Italian historians who in the 17^th Century wrote about the English Revolution were in some measure linked to the Incogniti - but with the two relevant exceptions of Vittorio Siri and Birago Avogadro, whose works we have already mentioned - it is certain that the cultural relationships between the intellectuals who gathered around the Loredano and the English Protestants had been both intense and protracted. These relationships await further investigation in the future, but initial surveys already indicate their importance. Loredano wanted to learn English and took lessons from Sir Aston Cokayne - who then published in English Loredano's Dianea in 1654 - when he was in Italy in the 1630s.^[28] Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato, speaking about Loredano in the Scena di huomini illustri d'Italia, evidenced that "virtuosi" come to Venice to honor him personally "even from England, and from the remotest parts of the North" ("sino dall'Inghilterra, e dal più remoto settentrione").^[29] And in fact, we know that when Richard Lassels came to Venice in 1650, he met Loredano, of whom speaks in a very favorable way in his travel report.^[30]

Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato, who in his youth during the Thirty Years War served as a soldier on the Protestant side, in 1626 followed in London the earl Ernst of Mansfeld and stayed in England for some months.^[31] Gualdo Priorato always followed with attention the English political events - of which, as we have pointed out, he writes widely in his works. He had relationships with the bookseller James Allestry who around 1650 was in Italy in order to find manuscripts (of classical authors) to be published in England and in order to acquire books to be re-sold on the English market.^[32] In September 1650 he wrote to John Downes, an English student of the University of Padua, in order to request a report ("una informatione") regarding the circumstances of the death of king Charles ("come seguì la morte del re Carlo"), evidently in order to use it in the fourth volume of his Historie (which would have been published a little after that date). Gualdo Priorato specified clearly that his "desire" was "to know every particular of the death, like the words he said before, the leading persons of the council who judged and condemned him and every other particular, also concerning his own person" ("di saper ogni particolare così della morte, come delle parole dette prima, delli capi del consiglio che lo giudicarono e condannarono et ogn'altro particolare, come anche delle condizioni della sua persona").^[33] In 1652 he entertained epistolary relationships with the master of ceremonies of Cromwell, Oliver Fleming, on the nature of which it is impossible to venture a hypothesis.^[34]  The royalist Robert Bargrave at Venice in the 1650s met Gualdo Priorato near the bookseller and publisher Paul Baglioni and conversed with him about politics.^[35] The same Bargrave knew the works by Bisaccioni, which he often quoted, judging them negatively.^[36] The philosopher Fortunio Liceti - who had the tightest relationships with the Academy of the Incogniti - was in correspondence with Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who, when in Italy in 1615 went to Padua to meet Cesare Cremonini, the philosophical mentor of the Incogniti. And Cherbury still in 1640 sent as an homage one of his books to Liceti.^[37] Francisco Pona in 1629 published a translation in Italian of the Argenis that the catholic Franco-Scot John Barclay wrote in Latin in Rome and that was published in Paris a little after his death in 1621.^[38] Barclay's novel narrates the troubled vicissitudes of princess Argenis and of her admirers, and was an open allegory of European history between the end of the 16^th and the first decades of 17^th centuries, in whose characters readers could easily recognize the profiles of Henry IV of France, Elizabeth of England, and of Philip II.^[39]

3. The outlook of the Italian historians.

As for the way in which these historians judged the English events of the 1640s and 50s, the sources apparently betray a uniform "pro-royalist" attitude. The historical narratives of Bisaccioni and Gualdo Priorato - the two most notable historians among the Incogniti who wrote about these events - show, on the one hand, astonishment and admiration for the extraordinary military and political abilities of Oliver Cromwell, but on the other present him to the Italian readers as an ambitious and hypocritical tyrant. In none of the writings cited does one detect any sympathy for the regicide, nor any meaningful reflection upon the importance that the political and religious debates in England could have for the Italian contemporary situation. In my opinion, the possibility that the hostility towards the parliamentarians that is to be discerned in these writings ought to be attributed solely to a cautious and vigilant writing that is afraid of censorship, is wholly to be excluded. It is more feasible to think that their judgment on the English events of the 1640s and 50s was strongly conditioned by the sympathy that James I and his politics inspired in the Sarpianan milieu in the first decades of the century. Many of the intellectuals mentioned were already mature men in the years of the Interdetto, and had probably looked to the State Church of England as a possible model, far away from both Protestant extremism and Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Paolo Sarpi and Fulgenzio Micanzio had the closest relationships with England.^[40] The bishop of Split, Marc'Antonio De Dominis, left Italy in 1616, convinced that he had found in James the supporter of his irenical plan of resetting the divisions between Catholics and Protestants on the basis of the acknowledgment of a few fundamental articles common to the various Christian confessions. His English adventure concluded with his return in Italy in 1622, when the old prelate matured to the conviction that in England there were not margins for the advancement of his ecumenical plans.^[41] The vicissitudes of an Italian bishop who, in his sixties, took the decision to leave his diocese for England, gives us a sense of how strong was the fascination with England and with its theologian king, who had done intellectual battle with Bellarmino. The failure of that plan did not dim the memory of that season of hopes. Even if it is obviously difficult to discern a common political and ideological position among the members of the Academy of the Incogniti between 1630 and 1660, it nevertheless seems clear that the major exponents of the group that gathered around Loredano looked back with nostalgia upon those years in which the contrast between Venice and the curia of Rome had permitted them to dream of clamorous outcomes. The Dalmatian Biondi who in the 1610s preceded De Dominis in England, and wrote there the novels that made him famous all over Europe, can perhaps be regarded as a symbol of that season of illusions and hopes. The Republic of Venice, often taken as a model by the English "republicans", explicitly and without hesitation backed the monarchy during the civil war, escaping with firm and resolute hostility any parliamentarian approaches.

The Arminian politics of Charles and of archbishop Laud evidently appeared to the Continental European observers to be continuous with that of king James I. On the other hand, the demolition of the ecclesiastical system and its substitution with what was perceived to be a more rigid Calvinistic orthodoxy during the English revolution was regarded by the Incogniti as the construction of a new spiritual tyranny - much worse than Catholicism, which in those years represented a shelter for the restless spirit of Cristina of Sweden, a figure who earned the deepest admiration of those intellectuals. And it is no casual coincidence that the greater part of those English intellectuals who had relationships with Sarpi and Venice in the first decades of the century subsequently became royalists - as was the case, to choose but two examples, with Nathaniel Brent, former translator of the Historia del concilio tridentino (dead in 1652) and William Bedell (dead in 1642), former chaplain to the English ambassador in Venice.

It is possible that the same intellectual tendency was also operative in the Paduan Antonio Santacroce who, being been born in 1624, the year after the death of Sarpi, reached his maturity when the great season of the Anglo-Venetian relationships had long expired.^[42] The young Paduan, in the Preface to his Frammenti storici della guerra di Candia, asserted that he wanted to describe "the revolutions of Italy and of the civil wars of England with the intention of beginning from where the cavalier Biondi finished with his life" ("le rivoluzioni d'Italia e le guerre civili d'Inghilterra avendo intenzione di principiare dove con la sua vita terminò il cavalier Biondi").^[43]  His premature death (before 1653) ultimately prevented Santacroce from writing this history of the English civil war. But he could speak of the English political events in the Secretaria d'Apollo, a work of political-literary reflections published in 1653, which, on the model of Boccalini's Ragguagli del Parnaso, consisted of a series of imaginary letters sent by Apollo on the earth, commenting on the most recent European events.^[44] In this little work - which was to be condemned by the Index and subsequently translated into English in 1704 (with some modifications and omissions)^[45] - Santacroce imagined that the monarch of the Parnassus addressed the English people directly, "accusing it of impiety, because it did not oppose the sentence made by the Parliament, that condemned the king Charles Stuart to be beheaded" ("accusandolo d'empietà, per non essersi opposto alla sentenza fatta dal Parlamento, che condannò il re Carlo Stuardo ad essere decapitato"). Santacroce pointed out that, until then, while it had many times happened that the tyrants had been killed by "a sudden and disorderly fury" of the people ("un furore improviso, e disordinato"), this was the first time that a crowned head was "condemned by the subjects to the hands of the hangman" ("condannata da' sudditi sotto le mani del boia") and that the English people did not oppose to this "unprecedented" and "sacrilegious" decision of the Parliament.^[46] On the other hand, next to this determined condemnation of the regicide, Santacroce, in a letter to the Scottish people, clearly asserted the legitimacy of putting to death a tyrannical monarch. For him the task of princes is to "guard, protect, and to defend the subjects: being placed by God over people to this end, and that when with their cruelty they act to the contrary, they lose the merit, and do not deserve any more to be recognized as princes, because, not acting any more as princes, they are not such" ("di custodire, proteggere, e defendere i sudditi: essendo posti da Dio sopra le genti a questo fine, e che quando con la crudeltà fanno tutto il rovescio, perdendo il merito, si rendono indegni d'essere riconosciuti Prencipi, poiché non facendo più l'officio di Prencipe, non sono più tali").^[47] It is very difficult, therefore, to read these declarations of the Santacroce as an adhesion to the decisions taken by the English Parliament and as an approval of the regicide - as, for example, claims Pietro Messina in a dense and interesting article on the English revolution and the Italian historiography published in "Studi Storici" in 1984 (La rivoluzione inglese e la storiografia italiana del seicento).^[48] As a matter of fact Santacroce accused Charles not of being a tyrant but, on the contrary, of having not been sufficiently energetic and resolute in the face of uprising against him. And for sure he had in mind the recent English events when he reproached "Henry VI of Lancaster King of England" of having been too good.^[49]

But apparently other reasons - beyond the sympathy towards the erastian State Church of England and the memory of the hopes of the age of Sarpi - also influenced the substantial hostility towards the English parliamentarians of these Italian intellectuals. The English events had in fact an important influence on the politics of Europe more generally. Both during the English civil war and in the years of the Commonwealth, the royalists were perceived in Europe as pro-French; whereas, on the contrary, the parliamentarians and the republicans were perceived - not incorrectly - as pro-Spanish. As is well known, the frondeurs who used the English events as a warning to Mazzarino and the court were supported by Spain both politically and militarily. Ironically, therefore, it was the attitude of intolerance towards the political order of the Italy of the Spanish preponderance that pushed the more progressive Italian intellectuals to dissent with the Rebellion and to sympathize with the monarchic cause in England. The civil war and the decapitation of the English king therefore not only did not appear to their eyes as a "revolution" which could in some way represent a "model" for their political actions but, seen from the Italian point of view, against the widest European background, were perceived as events that, in the fight between the two Crowns, weakened France. When then, with the advent of the Protectorate, English foreign politics changed radically, we can perceive also a change in the attitude of the Italian pro-French intellectuals, and they did not hesitate to show admiration for the ambitious plans of Mazzarino and Cromwell. The European diplomacies greeted the advent of the Protectorate as a decisive and important step towards a normalization of the English political panorama. In the same way, when the alliance between Cromwell and Mazzarino began in 1655, this also marked a positive change in the attitude of the Italian pro-French intellectuals towards England, and this is clearly visible in the pages on the English vicissitudes that Bisaccioni added to his new edition of his history of the civil wars in 1655.

4. Gregorio Leti.

Even the most cursory examination of 17^th century Italian historiography on the events in England cannot avoid mentioning Gregorio Leti who, in his Teatro Britannico of 1682 - a work based on a series of anti-Cromwellian works published in England after the Restoration, and full of gossip and anecdotes - dealt with the history of the civil war, the decapitation of Charles, and the Interregnum. Returning to these events in his Life of Cromwell of 1692, the tireless writer republished these pages once more without substantial modifications, only adding a near-literal translation of entire chapters of a biography of Cromwell published some months before: the Histoire d'Olivier Cromwel by François Raguenet, published in Paris in July 1691 and then in Utrecht the year after. Indeed, it was probably the publication of this latter work that pushed Leti to hastily complete his own biography, which was published in the summer of 1692.^[50] This unscrupulous publishing operation had a certain success, because Leti's Vita di Cromuele was also translated into French, and was noted and discussed in the Republic of Letters.^[51] It is the same Leti that, in the first pages of his book, provides us with the key to reading this work. In the introduction to his biography, the author tells of how he let an English friend of his read the first drafts of his text in order to acquire the opinion of a person who knew the story contained therein better than himself. The friend responded by saying that while the biography contained many things "more invented as an ornament than dug up from the real history" ("più tosto inventate per ornamento, che scavate dalla verità dell'historia"), they were "so well applied, with so much wisdom interlaced, and described with such a savory ink" ("così bene applicate, con tanto giudicio intrecciate, e con uno inchiostro cosi saporoso descritte") that they bewitched "the spirit of the reader", and rendered the reading of the book absolutely fascinating.^[52]

From the methodological point of view, Leti worked in an opposite way to Siri and the other historians already mentioned. They thought that they had to adhere closely to the documentary evidence and considered the other sources of information to be merely accessory. Leti, on the other hand, privileged gossip, hearsay and other unreliable sources, emphasizing the more curious, odd and interesting aspects of a story. For Leti the documents serve, for the best hypotheses, to integrate the narrative, but they are not its fundamental and constituent components. The "saporoso" style in which Leti fused together and re-elaborated these peculiar anecdotes and pieces of gossip into a more or less coherent narrative, granted success to these "historical" narratives. From this point of view Leti's works are in many respects symptomatic of a violent reaction to the kind of sclerotic historiography which, in slavish fidelity to documents, mislaid the actual meaning of the events being narrated. Indeed, we might even say that Leti's works seem to foreshadow a new way of writing history, thus announcing a new intellectual climate.

References

^[1] Vittorio Siri, Del Mercurio overo Historia De’ correnti tempi… Tomo VI. All’Illustrissimo, & Eccellentissimo Signore Hugo di Lionne, Marchese di Fresnes, Signor di Berny, Commendatore de gli Ordini del Rè, e suo Consigliere, Segretario, e Ministro di Stato. In Casale, per Giorgio del Monte, 1667, t. vi, p. 646. For the total number of Mercurio’s pages cf. M. Laurain-Portmer, Aperçus sur l’historiographie du ‘Seicento’, in Ead., Études Mazarines, Paris , De Boccard, 1981 , pp. 493-511. Cf. Stefano Villani, La prima rivoluzione inglese nelle pagine del ’Mercurio’ di Vittorio Siri, in L’Informazione politica in Italia (secoli XVI-XVIII). Atti del seminario organizzato dalla Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa e dal Dipartimento di Storia moderna e contemporanea dell’Università di Pisa. Pisa, 23 e 24 giugno 1997, a cura di Elena Fasano Guarini e Mario Rosa, Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore, 2001, pp. 137-172. For the  reactions of Italian culture and society to the English Civil wars cf. also Id., Uomini, idee, notizie tra l’Inghilterra della Rivoluzione e l’Italia della Controriforma (Men, ideas, news between revolutionary England and Counter-Reformation Italy) , Ph.D. thesis, Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa (curriculum of History), 1999.

^[2] Maiolino Bisaccioni, Historia delle Guerre Civili di questi ultimi tempi…, Venetia 1652.

^[3] Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato, L’Historia universale… nella quale si tratta di tutte le guerre occorse in Europa in dieci anni parte prima e seconda, (s.l.), 1652; Dell’Historia… Parte terza nella quale si contengono tutte le cose universalmente occorse dall’anno 1640 sino all’anno 1646, in Venetia, presso i Bertani, 1648; Dell’Historie… Parte quarta nella quale si contengono tutte le cose universalmente occorse dall’anno 1645 sino all’anno 1649, in Venetia, per il Turrini 1651; Dell’Istorie… Parte quarta dove si tratta di tutte le guerre occorse cio [sic] Europa dal 1646 fin al 1650, (s. l.) anno 1652.

^[4] Id., Historie, parte II, pp. 68-72, 145-6, 211-215, 237-244, 307-8, 320-322.

^[5] Id., Historie, parte IV, pp. 1-10, 56-61, 81-84, 118-125, 154-170, 235-242, 306-322, 385-418, 472-495, 551-604.

^[6] Id., l’Historia delle rivolutioni di Francia sotto il Regno di Luigi XIV e regenza d’Anna d’Austria , Venezia 1655, pp. 129-180.

^[7] Id., Historia del ministerio del cardinale Giulio Mazarino, primo ministro della corona di Francia, In Colonia [vere Amsterdam] 1669, pp. 3-7, 162-185, 438-446. Discorso di un soggetto nell’Assemblea degli Stati Eletti per fare pace «Tutti i Re odiano nel lor interno la libertà delle Republiche, supponendo, non haver queste memoria de’ beneficii, né altra anima, che l’interesse della Publica libertà. Credetemi Signori, che né la Francia, né la Spagna amano, né la nostra Republica, né il moderno governo dell’Inghilterra, e che il contendere fra noi altri, non è, che farle il gioco, che desiderano, & invaghirle del trionfo della nostra oppressione» Gualdo Priorato, Mazarino, vol. iii, pp. 171-2 (sono di un qualche interesse anche le osservazioni di chi voleva proseguire pp. 176-8).

^[8] Id., Historia di Leopoldo Cesare, continente le cose piu memorabili successe in Europa, dal 1656 fino al 1670, In Vienna d’Austra , appresso Gio. Battista Hacque stampator academico, 1670-1674, pp. 310-322 and , vol. ii, p. 714. Cf. also ODNB s. v. “Myngs, Sir Christopher 1625-1666”.

^[9] Id., Vite et azzioni di Personaggi militari e politici, Vienna, Appresso Michele Thurnmayer, 1674.

^[10] On Girolamo Brusoni cf. DBI; F. P. Franchi, Bibliografia degli scritti di G. Brusoni, in “Studi Secenteschi”, XXIX, 1988, pp. 265-310.

^[11] This work came out in a second edition in 1671.

^[12] Girolamo Brusoni, Delle Varie Osservationi di Girolamo Brusoni Sopra le Relationi Universali di Giovanni Botero, Venezia, 1671, p. 3.

^[13] Ibid., p. 55.

^[14] Cf. infra n. 45.

^[15] Birago Avogaro, Delle Historie Memorabili che contiene le sollevationi di Stato de nostri tempi … A cui si è aggionti li Rumori Moderni di Francia. E questo volume viene ad essere la quinta parte delle Historie memorabili di Alessandro Zilioli, Venetia, Presso il Turrini, 1653. The first book dealt with the rebellion of Catalonia, pp. 1-103; the second with that of Portugal, pp. 104-128, the third with that of Sicily, pp. 128-159, the fourth with that of Brasil, pp. 160-171, the fifth with that of the kingdom of England, pp. 171-221, the sixth with that of Naples, pp. 222-336, the seventh dealt with the Rumori di Francia, pp. 337-408. The first three parts of this work by Alessandro Zilioli were published in Venice between 1642 and 1646. The fourth part, that dealt with the last phase of the Thirty Years War, was written by Bisaccioni (Delle Historie memorabili de’ nostri tempi, che contengono le Guerre di Germania, dalla mossa del Re di Svetia, doppo la pace di Lubecca sino all’altra di Munster l’anno 1650. Rappresentate dal co: Maiolino Bisaccioni Libro in ordine la Quarta parte delle Historie di Alessandro Zilioli). The title of the fifth part – on the English Revolution – is Delle Historie Memorabili che contiene le sollevationi di Stato de nostri tempi scritto dal dottor Gio: Battista Birago Avogadro A cui si è aggionti li Rumori Moderni di Francia. E questo volume viene ad essere la quinta parte delle Historie memorabili di Alessandro Zilioli (Venezia 1653). The sixth part was by Girolamo Brusoni (Delle Historie di Girolamo Brusoni racconti undeci. E questo volume viene ad essere in ordine la sesta parte delle historie di Alessandro Zilioli). Cf. infra n. 25.

^[16] Gio: Francesco Biondi, L’Historia delle Guerre Civili d’Inghilterra tra le due Case di Lancastro, e Iorc. Si desscrive in Ricardo II. L’origine di esse, il progresso nelle vite de i Re susseguenti, cioè. Di Arrigo IV. V. e VI. d’Odoardo IV. e V. di Ricardo III. e di Arrigo VII. nel quale finirono. Scritta in tre Volumi […]. Volume primo, In Venetia, Appresso Gio: Pietro Pinelli, 1637; Volume secondo, In Venetia, 1637 Appresso Gio: Pietro Pinelli; volume terzo, In Venetia, 1641 Appresso Gio: Pietro Pinelli. L’Historia delle guerre civili d’Inghilterra tra le due case di Lancastro, e Iorc was republished in Bologna, per Carlo Zenero nel 1647.

On Biondi  cf. Gino Benzoni, Giovanni Francesco Biondi: un avventuroso dalmata del ‘600, in “Archivio Veneto”, 5^a ser., 80 (1967), 19-37; Dianella Savoia, Sir Giovanni Francesco Biondi and the court of James I, in Gunnar Sorelius, Michael Srigley (eds.), Cultural exchange between European nations during the Renaissance, Uppsala 1994 (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia 86), 153–9; DBI s. v.;· ODNB, s. v.; D. Savoia, Sir Giovanni Francesco Biondi: an Italian historian of the War of the Roses, in “Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies”, 1 (1991), 51-53, cf. anche Paolo Getrevi, Dal picaro al gentiluomo. Scrittura e immaginario nel Seicento narrativo, Milano, Angeli, 1986. On his relationships with Sarpi cf. Paolo Sarpi, Opere, a cura di Gaetano e Luisa Cozzi, Milano-Napoli, Ricciardi, vol. I, pp. 232, 284-285, 637, 1216. On Biondi’s relationships with Vincenzo Armanni cf. Armani, Lettere, Roma, 1663, vol. I, p. 571 e John Leon Lievsay, A Racket of Old Letters: Vincenzo Armanni in England, in “Tennessee Studies in Literature”, vol. IV (1959), pp. 83-90.

^[17] Alfonso Pajoli, Vite del Cardinale Giulio Mazarini, e di Oliviero Cromvele, in Venetia et in Bologna, per Giovanni Recaldini, 1675.

^[18] Giorgio Spini, Ricerca dei libertini. La teoria dell’impostura nel Seicento italiano, Firenze La Nuova Italia, 1983 (new revised and expanded edition, the first edition was published at Rome, Universale, 1950), p. 175.

^[19] On Giovan Francesco Loredano cf. Spini, Ricerca dei libertini, p. 170.

^[20] Francesco Pona, La immortalità decretata nel Parlamento degli Dei a contemplatione dell’amicizia Degl’Illustrissimi Amici Eroi i Signori Nicolò Barbarigo, e Marco Trivisano. E con intiera fede descritta da Francesco Pona e dal medesimo Marco Trivisano dedicata A gl’Illustrissimi Signori Marcantonio e Alessandro Zeno Fu dell’Illustrissimo Signor Vincenzo, Venezia, Francesco Valvasense, 1662.

^[21] Sarpi asked to Micanzio to translate Montaigne’s essay on Etienne de la Boétie to give it as a present to the two friends. For the relationships between Sarpi and Trevisan, cf. Gaetano Cozzi, Venezia barocca: conflitti di uomini e idee nella crisi del Seicento veneziano, Venezia, Il cardo, 1995, pp. 325-409, in part. pp. 336-337, 372.

^[22] Monica Miato, L’Accademia degli Incogniti di Giovan Francesco Loredan. Venezia (1630-1631), Firenze, Olschki, 1998; Tiziana Menegatti, Ex ignoto notus: bibliografia delle opere a stampa del principe degli incogniti: Giovan Francesco Loredano, presentazione di Daria Perocco, Padova, Il poligrafo, 2000.

^[23] Cf. Luigi Firpo (a cura di), Relazioni di Ambasciatori Veneti al Senato. Tratte dalle migliori edizioni disponibili e ordinate cronologicamente, vol. I, Torino, Bottega d’Erasmo, 1965, pp. 891-906, CSPV 1659-1661, p. 308. Cf. also Gaetano Cozzi, Venezia barocca…, pp. 325-409, in part. pp. 405. Cf. also Ibid., pp. 374, 379, 400-401.

^[24] On Italian 17^th century historiography on the contemporary English events cf. Ilan Rachum, The Meaning of ‘Revolution’ in the English Revolution (1648-1660), in “Journal of the history of ideas”, vol. 56, 1995, n. 2, pp. 195-216, Id. Italian Historians and Emergence of the Term ‘Revolution’, 1644-1659, “History”, vol. 80, 1995, n. 259, pp. 191-206; Pietro Messina, La rivoluzione inglese e la storiografia italiana del seicento in “Studi storici”, vol. 25, 1984, n. 3, pp. 725-746; Nino Recupero, Storia provvidenza utopia. Forme ideologiche nel Seicento inglese, Catania, Giuseppe Maimone Editore, 1994; Marco Barducci, Oliver Cromwell negli scrittori italiani del Seicento, Firenze, Centro editoriale toscano, 2005.

^[25] On this important publishing enterprise cf. Sergio Bertelli, Ribelli, libertini e ortodossi nella storiografia barocca, Firenze, La Nuova Italia, 1973, pp. 208. Cf. also supra n. 15.

^[26] Valvasense published also Il trionfo d’Inghilterra, overo Racconto, et relatione delle solennità fatte, & osservate, nella gloriosa incoronatione della Maestà di Carlo secondo d’Inghiterra, Scotia, Francia, & Irlanda, re augustissimo; nel terzo giorno di maggio l’anno 1661.

^[27] Spini, Ricerca dei libertini…, p. 175.

^[28] Dianea an excellent new Romance written in Italian by Gio. Francesco Loredano A Noble Venetian in Foure Books. Translated into English by Sir Aston Cokaine, London, Printed for Humphrey Moseley at the sign of the Prince’s Arms in St. Pauls Church-yard, 1654. Sir Aston Cokayne wrote in the dedication: “my best of Friends, Colonell Edward Stamford, gave me the Author, and intreated me to teach him our Language”. On Sir Aston Cokayne (1608-1684) cf. ODNB s. v.

^[29] Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato, Scena d'huomini illustri d'Italia…, In Venezia : appresso Andrea Giuliani, 1659, p. 286.

^[30] Lassels wrote: “When I passed that way in the yeare 1650, I saw there the noble and ingenious Loredano whose witty compositions make him famous in all the Academyes of Italy and Europe”, Edward Chaney, The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion. Richard Lassels and ‘The Voyage of Italy’ in the Seventeenth Century, Geneva, Slatkine, 1985. [Centro interuniversitario di ricerca sul viaggio in Italia, Biblioteca del viaggio in Italia, testi, 19], p. 125.

^[31] On Gualdo Priorato cf. Carla Sodini, Scrivere e complire. Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato e le sue ‘Relationi’ di stati e città. In appendice ‘Relazione della Signoria di Lucca e suo dominio’, 1668, Lucca, Maria Pacini Fazzi editore, 2004. The general Peter Ernst II Earl of Mansfeld (1580-1626) played a leading role in the Thirty Years War, on him cf. ODNB, s. v.

^[32] On James Allestry (o Allestree), quoted in Milton’s letter to Carlo Dati of 20 April 1647, cf. Charles Rivington, Early printers to the Royal society, in “Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London”, vol. 39, 1984, pp. 1-27. We know many letters written by James Allestry to Carlo Dati (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Baldovinetti 258, I.4); Howard B. Adelmann, Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, London University Press, 1966, I 670; Nicholas Von Maltzahn, The Royal Society and the Provenance of Milton’s History of Britain (1670), in “Milton Quarterly”, vol. 32, n. 3, 1998, pp. 90-95;  L. G. Péllissier, Les amis d’Holstenius, in "Revue des Langues Romanes", Quatrième Série, Juillet-Août-Septembre 1891, pp. 321-378 e pp. 503-547 lettere 26 pp. 369-370, num. 27, pp. 370-372; num. 28, pp. 372-374; pp. 368-369, 367-368. For the relationships with Gualdo Priorato cf. British Library, London, Sloane 3299, cc. 180-181v

^[33] Ibid., cc. 180-181v, letter by Gualdo Priorato, Vicenza li 25 settembre 1650 to Giovanni Dowes “Padoa Santa Caterina in casa della signora Betta”.

^[34] “An historiographer of cardinal Mazarin passed here, last coming from France, called count Galeazzo Gualdo, and going to Padua or Bologna, to print there the history of the last civil wars of France”. Thurloe SP, vol. ii, p. 356. Cf. anche In una lettera del Pauluzzi del 23 agosto 1652 questi scriveva all’ambasciatore veneziano in Francia che il Fleming gli aveva chiesto di rispondere alcune lettere CSPV 1647-1652, p. 273.

^[35] “Il Conte Gualdo Priorato hath written in Italian ten books of the Revolutions of France, where all the intrigues of Mazzarino are mentioned. I made an acquaintance with that author at the shop in Venice where his book in folio, ‘Appresso Paolo Baglioni’, is sold MDCLV. He held great correspondance, first with the Parliament, then with Oliver Cromwell, then with his son Richard, against the King, as you may see in Milton’s Latin letters to him in their names. Then he caused King Charles the IId and the rest of the royal family to be banished France. And another Italian author [Il conte Bisaccioni], that writheth a history of our late civil wars of England, saith that King Charles the First suspected Mazzarino and the imbassador of France had a hand in his troubles, “for reasons that I could tell (saith that author), but it is not fit for me to speak them». So that we may almost more than probably conclude that our war was a religious war, fomented from Rome, Mazzarino in France, Rossetti the Pope’s nuntio in England, and Gio-Bat. Rinuccini the Archbishop of Firmo in Italy, but nuntio in Ireland, were the ecclesiastics, and the embassadors of France and Spain the Romanis seculars, that worked the war and confusion amongst us – so that the King and Archbishop Lawd died martyrs for their Protestant religion”; John Bargrave, Pope Alexander the Seventh and the College of Cardinals (J. C. Robertson ed.), Camden Society, XCII, 1867, pp. 54-5. “Il Conte Gualdo Priorato hath written in Italian 10 books of the Revolutions of France, where all the intrigues of Mazarino and Gundi are mentioned; and in his 9^th book of Gundi’s imprisonment, and the resentiment the Pope had about it. I made an acquaintance with that author at Venice, at the shop where his book in folio is sold, and I bought one, ‘Appresso Paolo Baglioni’, MDCLV”. Ibid., p. 78.

^[36] Cf. Bargrave, Pope Alexander the Seventh…, p. xxv (cf. also p. 17, 19).

^[37] Mario M. Rossi, La vita, le opere e i tempi di E. Herbert di Chirbury, Firenze, Sansoni, 1947, vol. i, pp. 233, 290, 359, vol. ii, pp. 524-8; cf. ODNB, s. v..

^[38] L’Argenide … tradotta da Francesco Pona, Venetia, G. Salis, ad instantia di P. Frambotti, 1629; L’Argenide … tradotta da C. A. Cocastello, etc. [Edited by Christofero Tomasini.], Venetia, P. M. Bertano, 1631. Other editions Pona 1630, 1634, 1644, 1651, 1663, 1669 (sixth edition) 1675, 1682. Cf. A.N. Mancini, Il romanzo nel Seicento – Saggio di bibliografia, “Studi secenteschi”, XII, 1971,  num. 88-97.

^[39] Annabel Patterson, Censorship and interpretation: the conditions of writing and reading in early modern England, Madison, Wisc., University of Wisconsin Press, 1984; Paul Salzman, Royalist epic and romance, in N H Keeble (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 215-232; Id., English prose fiction, 1558-1700: a critical history, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985, pp. 149-155; Id., Literary culture in Jacobean England: reading 1621, Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York, Palgrave, 2002, pp. 75-81.

^[40] On the relationship between Sarpi and England cf. John Lievsay, Venetian Phoenix: Sarpi and Some of His English Friends (1606-1700), Lawrence, Kansas University Press, 1973.

^[41] Eleonora Belligni, Auctoritas e Potestas: Marcantonio De Dominis fra l’Inquisizione e Giacomo I, Torino, Franco Angeli, 2003; W.B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom, Cambridge, University Press, 1997; Enrico De Mas, Sovranità politica e unità cristiana nel Seicento anglo-veneto, Ravenna, Longo, 1975.

^[42] Rosario Villari,  Elogio della Dissimulazione. La lotta politica nel Seicento, Bari, Laterza, 1987, p. 61. On Santacroce cf. Carmine Jannaco , Martino Capucci, Il Seicento, Milano, Casa editrice Vallardi, 1986, p. 656 n. 158.

^[43] Cit. in Spini, Ricerca dei libertini, cit., p. 254.

^[44] The first edition of La Secretaria d’Apollo was probably published at Venice, per Francesco Storti, 1653. In the same year it was published also with the tile La Secretaria d’Apollo. Che segue li Ragguagli di Parnaso del Boccalini. Amsterdam per Fran. Ma. Boccafranca, 1653. We know copies of this edition with different title-pages, but published in 1653 (Venezia per Fr. M. Boccafranca; Amsterdam per il Blum e Combalsense; Amsterdam, si vende a Parigi; in Amsterdam, Per Fra. Boccafranca). Cf. Firpo, T. Boccalini ed il suo pseudoepistolario, in “Giornale Storico della Letteratura italiana”, CXIX, 1942, p. 113 and Spini, Ricerca dei libertini…, p. 255.

^[45] English edition 1704. A new English edition was published in 1714 with the title Fourth Volume of the Works of the Celebrated Trajano Boccalini; containing his Secretaria di Apollo, or, Letters from Apollo, London, Richard Smith, 1714.

^[46] Santacroce, Secretaria d’Apollo…, pp. 356-7 (al popolo inglese).

^[47] Ibid., pp. 211-3. Cf. Spini, Ricerca dei libertini…, p. 256.

^[48] Messina, La rivoluzione inglese…, pp. 745-6.

^[49] “Una eccessiva bontà, non è meno dannosa, anzi non è meno empia, d’una eccessiva crudeltà. Voi per essere troppo buono, siete stato crudele a voi medesimo, ed al vostro Stato, il quale non sarebbe stato aggittato da guerre civili se aveste tenute lontane le cagioni. Un Prencipe, a cui si fa di mestieri purgare il suo Stato, prima di goderlo, non deve addormentarsi, con isperanza che gli umori cadano da se, perché risvegliato, li troverà cresciuti a segno di non poter abbassarsi senza pericolo di cadere con esso loro. Le guerre civili non si fanno se non colla forza tolta, e coll’autorità usurpata al Prencipe, il quale trascura, ò non può moderare la potenza de’ suoi sudditi”, Santacroce, Secretaria d’Apollo, p. 238 (la lettera è alle pp. 234-9).

^[50] Luigi Fassò, Avventurieri della penna, Firenze 1923, pp. 8, 9, 10.

^[51] Cf. Ibid., p. 246. For a comment by Bayle to Leti’s biography of Cromwell cf. Franco Barcia, Un politico dell’età barocca: Gregorio Leti, Milano, Angeli, 1983, p. 45. For the its numerous editions cf. Ibid., p. 71 e n. 76, p. 146 n. 4 and  Id. , Bibliografia delle opere di Gregorio Leti, Milano, Angeli, 1981, pp. 388-408 (cf. also Nati Krivatsy, Bibliography of the Works of Gregorio Leti, New Castle, Delaware, Oak Knoll Books, 1982, pp. 33-37).

^[52] Gregorio Leti, Historia e memorie recondite sopra alla vita di Oliviero Cromvele, detto il tiranno senza vizi, il prencipe senza virtù, Amsterdamo Appresso Pietro e Giovanni Blaev, 1692, parte I.

© 2006 - Cromohs | Web Design: Mirko Delcaldo