BIVIUM · Standing at the Crossroads: Doubt in Early Modern Italy (1500-1560)
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-09-03 → 2021-09-02
- EU contribution
- €229,761
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-GF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Standing at the Crossroads: Doubt in Early Modern Italy (1500-1560)
At the end of the fifteenth century and in the first decades of the sixteenth century, extraordinary events drastically altered the course of Italian and European history. The discovery of the ‘New World’, the outbreak of the ‘wars of Italy’, that of the so-called Reformation, the conflicts with the Ottoman empire, the Sack of Rome (1527), caused a sense of anxiety and bewilderment. What people had been holding true for centuries suddenly became outdated, unreliable, unsatisfying. What were the consequences of such tumultuous events on the mindset of Italian people? This project explores a new phenomenon, the rise of a series of discourses on, and descriptions of doubt. It moves the focus from individuals voicing doubts to how, when and why doubt became a cultural object. Moving away from traditional studies on skepticism or unbelief, this projects explores the polysemic and multifaceted notion of doubt, an intellectual habit but also a condition affecting the mind, the soul, and the body. When dealing with early modern uncertainty scholarship has explored a restricted canon of outstanding, generally male-authored philosophical and theological works. BIVIUM explores a more diverse set of sources in the vernacular in the attempt to retrieve the voices of women and of the uneducated. Third, it adopts an interdisciplinary methodology that brings together literature, religious history, and cultural history. The early sixteenth century experienced for the first time major issues of connectivity: a global world made European acquainted with previously unknown cultures and faiths. The Reformation brought in a religious divide whose traumatizing effects caused issues of religious tolerance and coexistence. The printing press began to spread news that in many cases were not reliable and could be manipulated. Wars caused economic stagnation and epidemics. Many of these issues call for comparison between the early sixteenth century and our own world. Understanding the intellectual and emotional response to doubt of sixteenth-century may allow us to better understand and handle our responses to an age of doubt. This project is a cultural history of doubt unravelling the complexity of this notion, its uses, its goals, and its strategies within different cultural contexts, thus retrieving a fundamental category of European cultural identity.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
This three-year research project aims to produce the first comprehensive social and cultural history of doubt and unbelief in Renaissance Italy. The project is timely since scholarly attention to the topic of unbelief and skepticism in Early Modern Europe is growing, as evidenced by recent publications and major research projects. In a period of dramatic cultural, political and religious change, traditional ideas and beliefs were shaken; and doubts on human reason and its powers arose. As a result, intellectual and religious authorities and long-standing truths began to be questioned by intellectuals and commoners alike, and anxiety over the powers and reach of human reason spread. A number of works were published in the vernacular that dealt with doubt and addressed a broad public. These works have never been coherently and systematically studied. This project will fill the void analysing such works with an ground-breaking interdisciplinary methodology. It will result in new comprehension of crucial aspects of European cultural identity such as the rise of the notion of freedom of conscience and the development of intellectual inquiry, and will revolutionise the traditional scholarly approach to a key moment in Italian and European civilisation.Marco Faini, an experienced researcher with international experience in Germany (Wolfenbüttel, Münster), in the UK (Cambridge), and at Villa I Tatti, is confident that the development of this project will profoundly impact his career. Thanks to the training provided by Ca’ Foscari University in Venice and by the Faculty of History at Toronto University, Faini will acquire new skills and build fruitful relations with European and North-American institutions and scholars. The training, networks and publication of the project’s outcomes will increase Faini’s possibilities of obtaining a future ERC Grant and may also result in a tenure-track position at Ca’ Foscari University.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
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Data: CORDIS, © European Union