Maledire Dio. La blasfemia e la sua repressione nell'Italia moderna

Maledire Dio. La blasfemia e la sua repressione nell'Italia moderna is a collective volume edited by Federico Barbierato and Pierroberto Scaramella, bringing together eleven contributions produced within the framework of the PRIN 2022 project "Cursing God. Blasphemy and its Repression in Early Modern Italy (late fifteenth – early nineteenth century)." The volume investigates blasphemy as a historical object defined by its intrinsic semantic instability: rather than a fixed category, blasphemy emerges here as a threshold — the point at which cultures of the sacred, grammars of offence, emotional discipline, economies of honour, and the politics of public order intersect and negotiate their claims. A central concern of the volume is the double jurisdiction that governs blasphemy in the Italian context. Both ecclesiastical and secular authorities claimed the right to define, prosecute, and punish blasphemous speech and gesture, producing logics that converge, compete, and interfere with one another. This jurisdictional ambiguity — more pronounced in Italy than in other European settings — shapes not only the legal history of the phenomenon but its very definition: what counts as blasphemy, who has the authority to say so, and with what consequences. The volume is organised around two privileged observatories: the Republic of Venice, where a dedicated lay magistracy (the Esecutori contro la Bestemmia) produced exceptionally rich documentation, and the Kingdom of Naples, where a more fluid and layered institutional landscape reveals the entanglement of blasphemy with local devotional cultures, iconoclasm, and communal negotiation of the sacred. These two settings do not function as closed case studies in a binary comparison; they serve instead as vantage points from which to observe how a shared discursive and normative repertoire distributes itself differently across jurisdictions, sensibilities, and forms of social control. The essays move across four main lines of tension that structure the volume as a whole. The first is the relationship between word and gesture: blasphemy is primarily a linguistic fact, but it also extends to objects, images, and bodies — wounded icons, profaned spaces, ritualised insults. The second is the gap between diffuse everyday practice and institutional construction: blasphemy becomes a "crime" only when a given apparatus decides to recognise it as such, to classify it, to render it visible and punishable. The third is the tension between repression and tolerance — the documentation speaks of penalties, but it equally reveals where and how the practice was normalised, absorbed, or resolved through informal mediation. The fourth is the dialectic between uniformity and difference: shared pastoral, juridical, and cultural models coexist with profoundly local geographies of the "acceptable." Contributors address these questions through a variety of approaches and source bases: normative and pastoral texts, inquisitorial records, civil tribunal archives, linguistic corpora, and micro-biographical case studies. Topics include the social and theological construction of blasphemy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the category of "heretical blasphemy" in the records of the Roman Holy Office across three centuries; the pastoral management of blasphemous speech through confessors' manuals and preaching; the gendered dimension of prosecution in Venetian sentences; the contiguity between blasphemy and heterodox proposition in a Modenese inquisitorial case; episodes of iconoclastic blasphemy in the Kingdom of Naples; and the long-term linguistic history of illness-related cursing formulas. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Gian Luca D'Errico, a member of the Bari research group and a recognised specialist in the history of the Congregation of the Holy Roman Inquisition, who died in January 2026.