Notes on the Contributors
Silvia Apollonio
is Adjunct Professor of the History of Criticism and Literary Historiography at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, from 2019–2020, and was formerly Adjunct Professor of Italian Literature at the same university. Her principal research interest is the Italian literary culture of the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries, focusing in particular on Barberini Rome in the early decades of the 17th century. She has written on Sforza Pallavicino, Giovanni Ciampoli, and Agostino Mascardi, and published a critical edition of Pallavicino’s I Fasti Sacri in 2015. Her current project is a critical edition of Ciampoli’s Poetica sacra. She also studies epistolography and criticism in the transition between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a particular focus on Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, Roberto Titi, and Malatesta Porta.
Stefan Bauer
is a Lecturer in Early Modern World History at King’s College London. He is an intellectual and cultural historian of early modern Europe; his research interests cover humanism, religious polemic, church history, and censorship. He previously taught at the University of Warwick, the University of York, and Royal Holloway, University of London. Bauer was also a Marie Curie Fellow at York, and a Researcher both at the German Historical Institute in Rome and the Italian-German Historical Institute in Trent. His books include The Censorship and Fortuna of Platina’s “Lives of the Popes” in the Sixteenth Century (2006) and The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform (2020). Bauer is currently co-editing (with Simon Ditchfield) A Renaissance Reclaimed: Jacob Burckhardt’s “Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy” Revisited.
Eraldo Bellini
was Professor of Italian Literature at the Facultà di Lettere e Filosofia at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan. His research dealt with Italian literature from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, with studies on Sforza Pallavicino and the milieu of Barberini Rome, the dialogue between literature and science in the ambit of Galileo, as well as Milanese romanticism and the work of Italo Calvino. His numerous publications included Il vero e il falso dei poeti. Tasso, Tesauro, Pallavicino, Muratori (1990, with Carlo Scarpati), Umanisti e Lincei. Letteratura e scienza a Roma nell’età di Galileo (1997), Agostino Mascardi tra ‘ars poetica’ e ars historica’ (2002), and Stili di pensiero nel Seicento italiano. Galileo, i Barberini, i Lincei (2009).
Chiara Catalano
was ancienne pensionnaire étrangère at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris, International Scholar at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (2010–2011) and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Salento (Lecce), where she collaborated on an online edition of Descartes’s Letters (directed by Giuseppe Belgioioso) and the Nouvel Index Scolastico-Cartésien (forthcoming, ed. Igor Agostini). Her research interests include Jansenius and his criticism of philosophy and stoicism, scholasticism, Jesuit thinkers (Garasse, Suárez, Vasquez), Pascal, and Descartes. Her book, Philosophie et philosophes dans l’Augustinus de Cornélius Jansénius, was published in 2016.
Maria Pia Donato
is CNRS Research Professor at the Institut d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine in Paris, and was formerly Associate Professor in Modern History at the University of Cagliari, Italy. Her research focuses on early modern Rome, the history of science and medicine in the Catholic context, and cultural history. Her publications include Conflicting Duties: Science, Medicine and Religion in Rome, 1550–1750 (2009, ed. with Jill Kraye), Sudden Death: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth-century Rome (2014, translation of the original Italian edition of 2010), Medicine and the Inquisition in the Early Modern World (ed. 2018 and 2019), and L’archivio del mondo. Quando Napoleone confiscò la storia (2019), which was recently translated into French (2020).
Federica Favino
is Assistant Professor at the Department of History Anthropology Religions Art History, and Performing Arts at the Sapienza University in Rome. Her research concerns scientific culture in early modern and modern Rome, with a special focus on the world of the Curia, the academies, the university, and the religious orders, and the relations between gender, culture, and knowledge. She is the author of La filosofia naturale di Giovanni Ciampoli (2015), Donne e scienza nella Roma dell’Ottocento (Rome 2020), and co-editor of Copernicus Banned. The Entangled Matter of the Anti-Copernican Decree of 1616 (2018, with Natacha Fabbri).
Irene Fosi
was formerly Professor of Modern History at the Dipartimento di Lettere, Arti e Scienze Sociali, Università ‘G. D’Annunzio’, Chieti-Pescara. She was an Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Fellow at the universities of Marburg, Tübingen, Freiburg im Br., and Berlin, respectively. Her main research topics are related to justice and society in early modern Italy, diplomatic and cultural relations between the Roman court and the Holy Roman Empire, and religious conversion in early modern Europe. Her publications include La società violenta. Il banditismo nello Stato Pontificio nella seconda metà del Cinquecento (1985), All’ombra dei Barberini. Fedeltà e servizio nella Roma barocca (1997), La legazione di Ferrara del cardinale Giulio Sacchetti (1627–1631), 2 vols. (ed. 2006), “La peste a Roma 1656–1657”, special issue of Roma moderna e contemporanea (ed. 2006), La giustizia del papa. Sudditi e tribunali nello Stato Pontificio in età moderna (2007, translated into English as Papal Justice. Subjects and Court in the Papal State, 1500–1750, 2011), Papato e Impero nel pontificato di Urbano VIII (1623–1644) (2013, ed. with Alexander Koller), Convertire lo straniero. Stranieri e Inquisizione a Roma in età moderna (2011, translated into English as Inquisition, Conversion, and Foreigners in Baroque Rome, 2020).
Sven Knebel
is a freelance researcher and former Privatdozent at the Institut für Philosophie der Freien Universität Berlin (2000–2013). He is a historian of philosophy and theology, and his publications include Wille, Würfel und Wahrscheinlichkeit. Das System der moralischen Notwendigkeit in der Jesuitenschiolastik 1550–1700 (2000), Suarezismus. Erkenntnistheoretisches aus dem Nachlass des Jesuitengenerals Tirso González de Santalla (1624–1705) (2011), and Scientia Media. Der Molinismus und das Faktenwissen (2021).
Alessandro Metlica
is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies (DISLL), University of Padova. He is a former Marie Curie CO-FUND Fellow (2013–2015) and FNRS chargé de recherche (2015–2018) at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. His research focuses on the representation of power in early modern Europe, both as regards subversion (libertinism, free thinking) and containment (eulogy, praise literature, propaganda). His publications include editions of Pallavicino Ferrante’s Libelli antipapali: la Baccinata e il Divorzio celeste (2011) and Casti Giovan Battista’s Il poema tartaro (2014), and the edited volumes Il fantasma dell’Unità. Riletture del Risorgimento tra Grande Guerra e Fascismo (2013, with Pellegrino Favuzzi), Canzonieri in transito. Lasciti petrarcheschi e nuovi archetipi letterari tra Cinque e Seicento (2015, with Franco Tomesi), “Paris baroque. G.B. Marino et la France”, special issue of Les lettres romanes (2016, with Agnès Guiderdoni). Recently, he wrote Le seduzioni della pace. Giovan Battista Marino, le feste di corte e la Francia barocca (2020).
Anselm Ramelow
is Professor of Philosophy at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, Berkeley, California, and has been a Senior Fellow of the Berkeley Institute since 2016. He is a former Visiting Professor at the Hochschule für Philosophie, Munich, and Adjunct Professor at the University of San Francisco. His current research interests are Thomas Aquinas, Free Will, philosophical aesthetics, the philosophy of language, faith and reason (including the philosophy of miracles), the concept of personhood, and family rights. His publications include Gott, Freiheit, Weltenwahl. Die Metaphysik der Willensfreiheit zwischen Antonio Perez, S.J. (1599–1649) und G.W. Leibniz (1646–1716) (1997), Beyond Modernism?—George Lindbeck and the Linguistic Turn in Theology (2005), God: Reason and Reality (editor and contributor, 2014), and a translation and edition of Thomas Aquinas’s Quaestiones disputatae de veritate 21–24 (2013).
Pietro Giulio Riga
is a research fellow at the Department of Modern Letters and Cultures at Sapienza Università di Roma and a former research fellow at the Università degli Studi di Bergamo. His research focuses on various aspects and issues of Italian literature from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, particularly Southern Baroque, the relationship between politics, diplomacy, and literary communication, and the genres of lyric poetry, satire, and epistolography. His publications include Giovan Battista Manso e la cultura letteraria a Napoli nel primo Seicento. Tasso, Marino, gli Oziosi (2015), L’elogio del Principe. Ritratti letterari di Eugenio di Savoia-Soissons (2019), an annotated edition of Pietro Metastasio’s letters to Giuseppe Bettinelli (2021), and a collected edition of Giovan Battista Marino’s works (2017, with Lorenzo Geri).
Jon R. Snyder
is Research Professor of Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has served as Professor at the University of California, San Diego, as well as Visiting Professor at the universities of Turin and Macerata, respectively. He has published widely on early modern and modern literature, art, and culture, with a special focus on Baroque Italy. His publications include a translation of Gianni Vattimo’s The End of Modernity (1988), Writing the Scene of Speaking: Theories of Dialogue in the Late Italian Renaissance (1989), L’estetica barocca (2005), Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (2009), a translation and bilingual edition of Giambattista Andreini’s 1622 play, Love in the Mirror (2009), and “Italy and the Sacred”, special issue of California Italian Studies (2014). Along with numerous articles and studies, he has published translations from the French and Italian of plays, stories, essays, and books. Some of Jon’s most recent work is available in the open-access online journal, California Italian Studies, of which he is a co-founder. He is currently completing an edition/translation of Vincenzo Corrado’s Del cibo pitagorico (1781).