Introduzione

This introduction, co-authored by Federico Barbierato and Pierroberto Scaramella, lays out the conceptual and methodological foundations of the volume. Starting from the deceptive familiarity of the word "blasphemy," the two editors argue that the phenomenon resists stable definition precisely because of its semantic instability: it shifts in intensity and meaning across contexts, oscillates between registers of play and violence, and belongs simultaneously to a culture of the sacred, a grammar of offence, a discipline of emotions, and a politics of public order. Rather than a "theme," blasphemy is proposed here as a threshold — a mobile boundary that different societies draw, redraw, and contest. A central thread is the distinctively Italian configuration of the problem. Unlike what English and French historiographies tend to emphasize — blasphemy as a question of free expression versus the sacred, or as a marker of confessional fracture — the Italian case reveals a more layered and elusive object. Blasphemy in early modern Italy took shape within an irreducible plurality of overlapping competences: moral theology, pastoral care, social discipline, civil tribunals, ecclesiastical courts, and everyday practices of mediation. The editors insist on the double jurisdiction that characterises it: both ecclesiastical and secular authorities claimed the right to define, prosecute, and punish, producing logics that sometimes converged, sometimes competed, and sometimes worked at cross-purposes. This jurisdictional ambiguity is not a secondary complication but a structural feature of the object itself. The introduction also addresses the problem of social distribution. Blasphemy was a thoroughly everyday practice, cutting across estates, trades, ages, and genders; attributing it to a specific class or historical stage, the editors argue, is more revealing of the institutional gaze that repressed it than of any sociological reality. Equally discussed are the methodological challenges posed by the sources: judicial records, pastoral texts, normative documents, and linguistic corpora each construct blasphemy differently, and no single documentary family restores the phenomenon in its entirety. A foundational part of what remains outside the archive — unreported, unrecorded, normalised — must always be reckoned with. The volume is organised around two main observatories: the Republic of Venice, with its specialised lay magistracy (the Esecutori contro la bestemmia) and its exceptionally rich documentation, and the Kingdom of Naples, where a more fluid institutional landscape and stronger entanglement between blasphemy, iconoclasm, and local devotional cultures offers a different kind of evidence. These are not presented as two closed cases in a binary comparison, but as vantage points for observing how a shared discursive and normative repertoire distributes itself differently across jurisdictions and practices. The editors then guide the reader through each of the eleven contributions, tracing four interpretive polarities that run through the volume as a whole: word versus gesture; diffuse practice versus institutional construction; repression versus tolerance; uniformity versus local difference. The introduction closes with a dedication to Gian Luca D'Errico, member of the Bari research group and specialist in the history of the Roman Inquisition, who died in January 2026 after a brief illness.