The study of Protestantism has been plagued by the ghosts of the past. Long seen as a struggle between northern (Protestant) and southern (Catholic) Europe, the echoes of Martin Luther, the Thirty Years War, ‘the German Theology’, and transatlantic fundamentalist reaction continue to dominate its interpretation. On the surface, this makes a certain kind of sense – that is where the ‘numbers’ were in terms of adherents up until the end of the nineteenth century. Those membership networks established self-sustaining institutions, and so this where the institutional base for scholars is still best resourced. The scholarship follows the money – the jobs, the grants, the publishers, and all the essential underpinnings for a well-articulated literature in depth. In 2017, the 500th anniversary of the Reformation drew millions of visitors to Germany – reportedly, two million to Wittenberg alone, a town of less than fifty thousand inhabitants.1
This popular view of the Reformation and its Protestant offspring as an essentially German or Anglo-Teutonic story can, however, be deceiving. The photographs of large South Korean or South American tour groups, trawling through Wittenberg, reveal the flip side of the story. One can arrive at the end of the 20th century puzzled as to where all those ‘other’ people came from – the hundreds of millions of Protestants around the world who are not German, British or North American. It is now commonplace for histories of Protestant evangelicalism to begin with observations as to the ‘drift’ towards the global South which typified that century. As Brian Stiller’s popular account notes (drawing on the work of Todd Johnson and others) the demographic centre of world Christianity ‘has literally moved from Jerusalem to Timbuktu’.2 Working in the tradition of Andrew Walls, Jehu Hanciles is among a number of scholars demonstrating the essential nature of Christianity as a trans-boundary rather than a purely national or regional phenomenon.3 The dominant accounts, however, still depend on ‘meta’ mechanisms such as economic and political imperialism to account for such shifts, as if there were not other more oblique and long-running causations to be found outside the historic centres of the Protestant narrative. The historiography still largely assumes a monopolar world.
The inhabitants of the Italian peninsula and the larger islands closest to it were among the most migratory peoples on Earth. Just look at a geographical map to understand the reason: they rarely lived far from the sea, and most of their lands were in mountainous areas, where it was very difficult to obtain food, space, and shelter. Emigration from Italy, already significant by the end of the Middle Ages, took on epic proportions in the modern era. Between 1790 and 1870, 2 million individuals emigrated. Another 14 million requested permission to leave from the new government
between 1876 and 1914, while another 4 million declared the same intention between 1916 and 1945. More than 7 million people left Italy between 1945 and 1975 (not counting the 9 million who in the same years traveled the long road that still separated the deep South of Italy from the continental North).4
Even apart from cyclical labour migration (a factor reaching far back into Mediterranean history), then, Italian migration has been a significant factor in the history of the West. Yet this factor and its religious consequences are almost invisible in standard histories of Protestantism. And within Italy, while there has been a great deal of attention paid by scholars to the growing interdependence of liberal and fascist regimes and cultural Catholicism, there is also a growing literature on the importance of both Italian Protestantism and of Italians to the particular inflections of Protestantism which have developed elsewhere in the world. Unfortunately, as David Martin and Paul Freston have separately noted with regard to Latin American Protestantism,5 the literature on the long-running Anglo-Hispanic contest falls afoul of language and cultural barriers. Apart from translated works such as Caponetto’s The Protestant Reformation in Sixteenth Century Italy (1999), and Audisio’s History of the Waldensians (originally published in French), very little of the quality and detailed literature on Protestantism being produced in Italy, and the interaction of its subject with the larger diaspora, is available to monolingual Anglophones. The work of Simone Maghenzani, Danilo Raponi, Paul Palma and few others now indicate that this is not an adequate basis for understanding Protestantism, particularly (but not only) in its nineteenth century context. Moreover, while there is some hope that advances in AI-mediated digital publishing will create more flow between scholarly linguistic communities, obviating the need for individual scholars to take up the arduous task of mastering multiple languages, that future is still some way off. In the interim, the depth, nuance and extent of the Italian contributions to the global history of Protestantism remain substantially obscured by the cultural enclosures and organizational connectivities inherent in the standard accounts.
For the first time, this work specifically seeks to make available the works of leading scholars of Italian Protestantism, particularly by those who write only in Italian and/or with direct and intimate connection with the Italian academy. Most of the chapters herein began life in Italian, and have been translated into English – the particular cadences of Italian academic writing will be apparent in the text for those with ears to hear. The story is told through the mechanism of a connected framework spanning the entire history of the various movements, while also providing keys to the historiographical debates and essential case studies. Each chapter has sufficient background to be read on its own, while working together towards a temporally united narrative, without sacrificing depth, detail and windows onto a literature which many students of the Protestant traditions may have not previously encountered. The hope is that a body of readers will start at the beginning, and explore the story over its whole arc. Commencing with the pre-Protestant period, Volume I unpacks the origins of reform movements in the mediaeval period as a source of alternative Protestant origins stories – not with the ‘nailing’ (actual or not) of 95 theses on a church door in Wittenberg, but within deeply rooted, social movements connected to the main flow of European history. Were the Waldensians pre-Protestants, or (as Audisio argues) something quite different? How does one’s position on this discussion shape the way that we understand European history? These questions are addressed in Section 1, curated by Marina Benedetti, whose recently edited volume
Section 2 in Volume 1 picks up the story with the advent of the Reformation. Curated by the leading Early Modern historian of religious dissent, conversion and reformism Matteo Al Kalak, this section explores the significant contribution made by Italians to the emergence of the (particularly Reformed) strain of the magisterial Reformation, the emergence of both Calvinist and broader Protestant traditions, within the context of what might be called the ‘first Italian Protestant globalisation’, wherein centres of influence emerged along the lines of migration often forced by the political, economic and social turbulence contingent on the Reformation itself. Whilst religious innovation (such as Socianism and Illuminism) owed much to Italian migrants abroad, it was the absorption of the Waldensians into the Protestant fold which had long-running consequences for both Britain and Italian Protestant engagements on the continent. This section traces these influences up to and through the French Revolution and Empire, which provided Italian Protestants with unparalleled mobility and a central place in the emergence of modern conceptions of religious freedom in Europe. The combination of Italian humanist, Enlightenment, and reformist circles of thought made the cities and states of the Peninsula a fertile ground for philosophers, Scientists and thinkers who, like Giovanni Salvemini (mathematician and astronomer), or Giambattista Passerini (philosopher) made significant contributions to European thought precisely because of their Protestantism.
The second volume picks up these themes of enlightenment, revolution and revival, and unpacks the significant contributions of Italian Protestantism through the Risorgimento and the second and third Italian globalisations (from the end of the Napoleonic era through to the present). Part 1, curated by Paolo Zanini and Daniela Saresella, covers the close link between Italian Protestantism and the emergence of liberalism (both Italian and more broadly throughout Europe), with a special focus on the previously underexplored ties between Italian Protestantism and European nationalism. This part follows the expansion of Italian influence through the second globalisation to explore the worldwide spread of Waldensianism and the emergence of Italian Pentecostalism, while case studies connect Italian developments to transatlantic revivalism, Modernism, social Protestantism, indigenisation waves (particularly in the Abruzzo, Puglia and the South), and the emergence of Fascism.
In Part 2, curated by Mark Hutchinson, leading scholars such as Renato Moro, Giorgio Vecchio and others explore the third globalisation in the context of fascist repression and two world wars, the dramatic impact of Italian Protestantism on Latin America (now known as one of the world’s great centres for Protestantism) and on the worldwide charismatic renewal and global Protestant ecumenism. While some of these influences are implicit in the text, the presence of a second-generation italo-Argentine as pope, and the work of Italian actors in every part of the global Protestant-Catholic dialogue, should make the connections sufficiently obvious to the reader. Such a present reality provides an equally ready link into the past realities of the Italian Protestant movements explored in these volumes—realities worked out in settings which coexisted or were even overshadowed by the institutional and popular presence of the Roman Catholic Church. Other focus studies unpack the impact of Italian Protestant voices in American and European attitudes towards postwar Europe, and so political responses to, for instance, the Cold War.
In preparing this two volume history, we would in particular like to thank the Dipartimento di Studi Storici at the Università degli Studi di Milano, its staff and leadership; and Tessel Jonquiere, Senior Acquisitions Editor (Religion, Theology & World Christianity) at Brill, for their support of this significant project. With COVID and various other disruptions, it took rather longer than expected. Across that extended time, my respect and thankfulness for my colleagues, professori Marina Benedetti, Matteo Al Kalak, Daniela Saresella and Paolo Zanini, started high and has only continued to grow. We have been helped by friends such as Gianclaudio Civale. We feel that, while the story of global Italian Protestantism is still far from complete, this two volume history is the fine beginning of which we all hoped: it says much about the depth, quality and ongoing curiosity which fuels scholarship in the Italian academic community, of which my fellow editors are stellar examples. This book will make a contribution to the ongoing task of understanding global Protestantism, and its inflections and interactions with religion in the modern world.
Sydney, 30 December 2025
Eliot Stein, ‘A quiet German town welcomes some 2 million visitors for Martin Luther’s 500th’, Wall Street Journal 22 June 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/a-german-town-pop-2135-welcomes-some-2-million-visitors-for-martin-luthers-500th/2017/06/22/45e54b7c-4c6e-11e7-9669-250d0b15f83b_story.html.
Todd M. Johnson, and Sun Young Chung, ‘Tracking Global Christianity’s Statistical Centre of Gravity, AD 33-AD 2100’, International Review of Mission 93.369 (04.2004): 166–181; Brian C. Stiller, From Jerusalem to Timbuktu: A World Tour of the Spread of Christianity (Downer’s Grove: IVP, 2018)
Jehu J. Hanciles, Migration and the Making of Global Christianity (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2021).
Donna R. Gabaccia, Emigranti: Le diàspore degli italiani dal Medioevo a oggi (Einaudi: Torino, 2000), p. XIV.
Paul Freston, Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge Universiaty Press, 2001), pp. 4–5; David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World their Parish (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002).
Marina Benedetti and Euan Cameron (eds.), A Companion to the Waldenses in the Middle Ages (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2022).