Un reato di parola fra governo della città e governo delle coscienze: bestemmia e miscredenza nella Venezia di Età moderna

This essay examines blasphemy in early modern Venice as a "word crime" located at the intersection of two distinct yet deeply entangled regimes of governance: the government of the city and the government of consciences. Rather than treating blasphemy as a straightforward matter of religious transgression, the essay foregrounds its semantic instability and procedural elasticity, arguing that what made blasphemy historically significant was precisely its nature as a threshold — a point at which the regulation of public speech, the management of urban order, and the surveillance of inner belief converged and were continuously negotiated. The essay begins by establishing the performative character of blasphemous speech: blasphemy was not merely an offence against God but a public social act that produced effects, activated reactions, and demanded either sanction or complicity. This performativity placed it at the juncture of religious and legal history, making it simultaneously a sin to be managed through pastoral care and a crime to be prosecuted by secular or ecclesiastical courts. The persistent competition between the two — the lay Esecutori contro la bestemmia, established by the Council of Ten in December 1537, and the Roman Inquisition — is a central thread of the essay. Venice is shown to be an especially revealing case: its dedicated lay magistracy made visible the ways in which a republican state could appropriate the protection of the sacred as a matter of civic order and political identity, transforming blasphemy into a question of urban decorum, collective reputation, and republican self-representation. A substantial portion of the essay is devoted to the operative category of "heretical blasphemy," understood not as a natural juridical type but as a practical device — a mechanism for moving cases and persons from one court to another, for authorizing more invasive investigations, and for converting a street-level quarrel into a question of doctrinal orthodoxy. The criteria that activated this shift are examined in detail: the repetition of offensive speech as evidence of intention rather than impulse; doctrinal content touching articles of faith; the social visibility of the act and the size of its audience; and the convergence of blasphemous words with other suspect behaviours — avoidance of the sacraments, mockery of the clergy, suspect readings. Crucially, the essay shows that "heretical blasphemy" was also a biographical procedure: blasphemy gave inquisitors a point of entry from which to reconstruct an individual's moral identity, social reputation, and religious consistency. This argument is developed through a close reading of several archival cases drawn from the Venetian Sant'Uffizio, including the extended prosecution of the Sienese nobleman Mario Tolomeo Nerucci — a habitual blasphemer in the city's gambling houses whose words were gradually transformed, through the testimony of neighbours and acquaintances, into a coherent narrative of irreligion — and the case of Girolama Bonotti, whose propositions against auricular confession illustrate how domestic and parish settings could produce doctrinally significant material no less effectively than taverns and streets. A third case involves a German visitor who blasphemed in his native language before translating his insults for an Italian audience, revealing the specific vulnerability of foreigners in a city of transit and the ways in which linguistic difference could map onto moral suspicion. The essay also addresses the social geography of Venetian blasphemy: the role of workshops, barbershops, and gambling dens as spaces of verbal circulation; the asymmetry between social strata in terms of exposure to prosecution (blasphemy was widespread across classes, but the capacity to escape the archive was itself a privilege); the function of anonymous denunciation as a tool for activating judicial intervention; and the relationship between the pastoral campaign against blasphemy — sermons, confessors' manuals, anti-blasphemy tracts — and the coercive apparatus of secular and inquisitorial courts. In the longer term, the essay traces blasphemy's gradual migration, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from the register of public crime to that of incivility and moral deviance — a shift that did not signal the disappearance of the word as a social indicator but rather a change of register, from offence against the sacred to index of self-control and civilised conduct.