Out of the Margins: Religion and the Church in Renaissance Italy*

Abstract

In the last few decades religion and the church have moved from the margins — or, more precisely, the chronological borders — of Italian Renaissance studies to their center. Less than half a century ago it was possible for Étienne Delaruelle and his collaborators on the Renaissance volumes of Fliche and Martin's greatHistoire de l'Égliseto justify excluding from their survey of the emerging "national" churches of the period any consideration of Italy, "it being always subsumed within the history of the papacy." If religion had any place in the Renaissance it was, in the words of Carlo Angeleri, as "a problem."