Publications

“The End of the Catholic Enlightenment”

In Shaun Blanchard, Mary Dunn, Rebecca Messbarger, and Jürgen Overhoff, eds., The Global Catholic Enlightenment: Balancing Church Authority and Modern Allegiances across Europe, the Americas, and Australia, 1700–1840. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming.

The Catholic Enlightenment did not simply fade away; it failed. Reform-minded Catholics tied church reform so closely to enlightened state power that, when the French Revolution shattered that alliance, they struggled to imagine a church independent of the state. Their ultramontane opponents, paradoxically, proved better equipped for a postrevolutionary world increasingly defined by church–state separation: their counterrevolutionary defense of ecclesiastical autonomy helped give rise to liberal Catholicism.

“Going South: Catholics, Liberals, and the Rise and Fall of a Mediterranean Path to Revolution, 1820–23”

In Dzavid Dzanic and Corey Tazzara, eds., A Resonant Sea: Religious, Revolutionary, and Imperial Currents in the Mediterranean, 1610s–1860s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming.

The revolutions of 1820 briefly suggested that revolution did not have to follow the French path. In Spain, Naples, and Portugal, constitutional regimes proclaimed Catholicism even as they challenged old political orders. Drawing on papal diplomatic sources, this chapter shows how conflicts over church reform and the revolution’s expansion beyond Spain destroyed that Mediterranean alternative, discrediting a liberal Catholicism tied to state power and clearing the way for one built around papal authority and church–state separation.

“Experimental Politics: The Middle Ages, Counterrevolutionary Catholics, and the Politics of History, 1780s–1820s”

Studi storici 65, no. 4 (2024): 869–882.

Counterrevolutionary Catholics looked to the Middle Ages not simply out of nostalgia, but because they treated history as what Joseph de Maistre called “experimental politics”: historical knowledge that could diagnose the present and guide the future. This article argues that medieval Christendom taught them why religion had once been so dominant: Christianity permeated society and culture, not merely the state. In a modern world where that centrality had eroded, restoring throne and altar was not enough; Catholicism had to become a force capable of competing again for social and cultural hegemony.

“Social Rights”

With Charles Walton.

In Dan Edelstein and Jennifer Pitts, eds., The Cambridge History of Rights, vol. 4, The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024, 71–92.

Social rights are often treated as twentieth-century additions to an older tradition of civil and political rights. This chapter pushes their history back to the eighteenth century and earlier, showing that claims to subsistence and assistance emerged from Christian, liberal-economic, revolutionary, and counterrevolutionary traditions well before socialism. Their recurring obstacle was not whether people deserved support, but disagreement over who was obligated to provide it.

“The Abbé Grégoire Eulogizes Port-Royal”

In Shaun Blanchard and Rick Yoder, eds., Jansenism: An International Anthology. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2024, 352–361.

The ruins of Port-Royal were not empty for Henri Grégoire. Walking its paths, he imagined its vanished community coming back to life—Hamon tending the sick, Pascal lost in thought, Arnauld and Nicole still debating. This translation presents a selection from his 1809 eulogy, published a century after Louis XIV suppressed the abbey and dispersed its nuns, showing how Jansenism could survive institutional defeat as a moral and intellectual tradition of learning, virtue, and conscience.

“Una rivoluzione italiana: Costruire il popolo nella Repubblica cisalpina, 1797–99”

An Italian Revolution: Making the People in the Cisalpine Republic, 1797–1799

Rivista storica italiana 134, no. 2 (2022): 595–626.

In the Cisalpine Republic, popular sovereignty posed an immediate problem: the new regime proclaimed “the people” sovereign, but patriots believed there was not yet a people—a collective political body—capable of exercising that sovereignty. By bringing people together in a shared, formally egalitarian space, constitutional clubs were meant to turn individuals into members of a political community—to make a sovereign people. Seen from this angle, the years 1796–99 emerge not merely as a French import or a three-year parenthesis, as they have often been portrayed, but as an Italian revolution—the attempt to create “the people” as a new political subject.

“18th-Century Crusaders: The War against France and the Catholic Counterrevolution, 1789–99”

In Matthijs Lok, Friedemann Pestel, and Juliette Reboul, eds., Cosmopolitan Conservatisms: Countering Revolution in Transnational Networks, Ideas, and Movements, c.1700–1930. Leiden: Brill, 2021, 152–71.

The crusade did not disappear with the Middle Ages. During the wars of the 1790s, Catholic writers from Spain to Rome revived it as a model for fighting revolutionary France. Their project joined an idealized vision of medieval Christendom, in which the church directed the political powers of Europe, to a distinctly modern lesson learned from the Revolution itself: politics now required mobilizing the masses. The result was an early blueprint for a nineteenth-century Catholicism built around papal leadership and mass mobilization, and directed toward the reconstruction of a Catholic order.

“A Female Mystic of the Catholic Enlightenment: Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799)”

In Shaun Blanchard and Ulrich Lehner, eds., The Catholic Enlightenment: A Global Anthology. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2021, 37–74.

One of eighteenth-century Europe’s most accomplished women mathematicians was also the author of an intensely traditional work of Catholic mysticism. This introduction and translation present Maria Gaetana Agnesi’s unfinished Il cielo mistico, a Christ-centered guide to contemplation rooted in medieval mystical traditions and filled with bridal imagery, ecstasy, meditation on Christ’s Passion, and even the possibility of bodily participation in his suffering. Her unlikely combination of cutting-edge scholarship and traditional devotion reveals the limits of the Catholic Enlightenment: intellectual engagement with the new did not necessarily entail religious reform.

“L’Europa vista dal Mediterraneo: Idee per un nuovo ordine continentale nell’Italia di fine Settecento”

Europe Viewed from the Mediterranean: Ideas for a New Continental Order in Late Eighteenth-Century Italy

In Franco A. Cappelletti and Luisa Simonutti, eds., L’idea di Unione Europea: Dal Rinascimento al Manifesto di Ventotene. Rome: Castelvecchi, 2021, 122–52.

For some Italian revolutionaries, remaking Europe meant turning its map upside down. This chapter reconstructs late-1790s projects by Enrico Michele L’Aurora and Matteo Galdi for a republican and federal Europe in which national liberation and supranational union reinforced rather than opposed one another. By imagining the Mediterranean as the continent’s new political and cultural center, and federalism as an alternative to French revolutionary imperialism, they challenged the hierarchies of civilization that had cast Italy and southern Europe as backward peripheries.

“Confessional Modernity: Nicola Spedalieri, the Catholic Church, and the French Revolution, c.1775–1800”

Modern Intellectual History 17, no. 3 (2020): 677–705.

Honorable Mention, Article Prize for Modern Italian History, Society for Italian Historical Studies, 2021

Could Catholics accept revolutionary politics without accepting secularization? This article reconstructs Nicola Spedalieri’s wager that they could. His 1791 On the Rights of Man embraced popular sovereignty, contractualism, and even the right of revolution while insisting that the resulting political order remain confessionally Catholic. Attacked from opposite directions for conceding either too much or too little to 1789, Spedalieri’s project reveals an early strategy for fighting secularization not by rejecting modernity, but by appropriating and reshaping it.

“Una virtù per il popolo: Repubblica, propaganda popolare e carattere nazionale nel triennio repubblicano italiano, 1796–1799”

A Virtue for the People: Republic, Popular Propaganda, and National Character in Italy’s Republican Triennium, 1796–1799

In Anna Maria Rao, ed., Il popolo nel Settecento. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2020, 281–90.

Republican virtue had traditionally been heroic: citizens were expected to subordinate their private cares to the public good, sacrifice even family affections, and, if necessary, lay down their lives for the republic. Italian patriots of 1796–99, trying to make that ideal workable for ordinary people—and for Italians they imagined as more attached to family and peaceful pursuits than to martial self-sacrifice—increasingly recast virtue in domestic terms: affection, fidelity, generosity, and everyday moral conduct. The paradox was that propaganda meant to draw the people into republican politics helped legitimize a private sphere in which one could be a good citizen without making public life the center of existence, nudging classical republicanism toward the “liberty of the moderns.”

“Building the Third Rome: Italy, the Vatican, and the New District in Prati di Castello, 1870–1895”

Modern Italy 24, no. 1 (2019): 63–79.

A Roman legend holds that Prati di Castello, the neighborhood beside the Vatican, was deliberately laid out so that St Peter’s dome would disappear from view. The story is probably false, but it captures the politics of the neighborhood’s creation. This article shows why plans to build there stalled in the 1870s despite strong economic incentives to develop it, then revived in the 1880s as the young Italian state moved from Cavour’s “free Church in a free State” toward militant anticlericalism. Street names, monuments, and the new Palace of Justice turned Prati into a secular national landscape, where a “cathedral of law” confronted the cathedral of faith.

“La religione dei repubblicani: Rivoluzione e riforma religiosa nella Milano cisalpina”

The Republicans’ Religion: Revolution and Religious Reform in Cisalpine Milan

In Patrizia Delpiano, Marina Formica, and Anna Maria Rao, eds., Il Settecento e la religione. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2018, 353–64.

In revolutionary Milan, republicans tried to invent a religion they could share. Advocates of a purified Christianity, deists, and even thinkers drawn toward materialism disagreed about religion’s ultimate future, but in the Constitutional Circle they converged on a cautious program: purge superstition, retain belief in God, immortality, and love of one’s neighbor, and let deeper reform unfold gradually. Their compromise reveals the pragmatism of revolutionary politics—and its limits: even this moderate religious reform remained too distant from popular Catholic sensibilities, allowing counterrevolutionaries to cast the republicans indiscriminately as atheists.

“Una politica delle emozioni: L’immagine del nemico nei circoli costituzionali cisalpini, 1797–1799”

A Politics of Emotions: The Image of the Enemy in the Cisalpine Constitutional Circles, 1797–1799

In Marco Manfredi and Emanuela Minuto, eds., La politica dei sentimenti: Linguaggi, spazi e canali della politicizzazione nell’Italia del lungo Ottocento. Rome: Viella, 2018, 19–37.

Revolutionary patriots, heirs to the Enlightenment and its cult of reason, did not rely on reason alone. In the constitutional clubs of Cisalpine Italy, they staged politics as performance, portraying their enemies as hydras, wolves, tigers, masked conspirators, and even cannibals. This chapter shows how such theatrical images were meant to create a republican “us” by contrast, turning fear and hatred of the enemy into attachment to the new regime. Their failure in 1799 should not obscure what they attempted: one of Italy’s earliest experiments with the theatrical language of modern mass politics.

“Venti lettere inedite dal carteggio Scipione de’ Ricci – Henri Grégoire”

Twenty Unpublished Letters from the Correspondence between Scipione de’ Ricci and Henri Grégoire

Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 52, no. 2 (2016): 259–314.

Scipione de’ Ricci’s 1805 recantation had seemed to mark the beginning of the end of his friendship with Henri Grégoire. Twenty newly discovered letters tell a different story. This documentary edition shows two leading Catholic reformers remaining in close contact through Ricci’s final years, exchanging books, news, introductions, and plans across Napoleonic Europe. The letters also uncover Ricci’s previously unknown late devotional writings and reveal how a transnational network of reformers adapted its ambitions as the possibilities for direct religious and political change narrowed.

“La fucina dello spirito pubblico: L’organizzazione dei circoli costituzionali nella prima Cisalpina, 1797–1799”

The Forge of Public Spirit: The Organization of Constitutional Circles in the First Cisalpine Republic, 1797–1799

Società e storia 38, no. 150 (2015): 689–719.

How do you build a national political movement before modern parties exist? This article reconstructs the constitutional clubs that spread across the Cisalpine Republic in 1797–99, tracing how statutes and organizational models traveled from Milan to Bologna, Faenza, Ferrara, and beyond. Patriots opened meetings to ordinary citizens and experimented with songs, civic rituals, dialect, charity, women’s participation, and missions to the countryside. Taken together, the clubs were more than a collection of local societies: they represented an effort to create a common political practice—and to turn association itself into a “forge of public spirit.”

“Un rito rivoluzionario: I banchetti per i poveri in Emilia e Romagna, 1797–1798”

A Revolutionary Ritual: Banquets for the Poor in Emilia and Romagna, 1797–1798

Contemporanea 18, no. 2 (2015): 197–220.

In revolutionary Emilia and Romagna, patriotic banquets came with an unusual rule: every subscriber had to bring a poor person and sit beside them at the table. The article traces the brief vogue of these meals in 1797–98: former nobles, officials, priests, and ordinary citizens ate with the poor and sometimes even shared the same plate. The point was not primarily to relieve poverty, but to make people see and feel the difference between the old and new order. By turning equality and fraternity into a public spectacle and bodily experience—one made of embraces, kisses, and processional walks hand in hand—patriots hoped to create a “revolutionary faith” in the new republic. Civic ritual, they believed, could do what law and argument alone could not.

“‘Niente di più bello ha prodotto la rivoluzione’: La teofilantropia nell’Italia del triennio, 1796–1799”

“Nothing More Beautiful Has Been Produced by the Revolution”: Theophilanthropy during Italy’s Republican Triennium, 1796–1799

Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 50, no. 2 (2014): 379–433.

Theophilanthropy was one of the French Revolution’s strangest religious creations: a simple deist cult without a clergy, built around belief in God, the immortality of the soul, and civic virtue. For Matteo Galdi, the Revolution had produced “nothing more beautiful,” while activists in Milan, Bologna, Ferrara, and Turin translated its manuals and tried to establish it as an alternative—or, in some cases, a partner—to a reformed Christianity. This article reconstructs the forgotten Italian history of the new cult and its rapid failure: attempts to give it durable institutions came to nothing, and within a decade it had been so thoroughly forgotten south of the Alps that even Scipione de’ Ricci, one of the era’s leading Catholic reformers, barely knew what it was.