Dall'Olio, Guido and Machielsen, Jan  ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8492-0263
2026.
Scourging demons with exorcism: Girolamo Menghi's Flagellum daemonum.
Machielsen, J., ed.
The Science of Demons: Early Modern Authors Facing Witchcraft and the Devil,
London:
Routledge,
pp. 216-228.
(10.4324/9781003476153-19)
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Abstract
Girolamo Menghi earned his nickname – ‘Il Viadana’ – from the city of his birth. He was born in 1529 in Viadana, in the Duchy of Mantua, and he died there in July 1609. 1 During his long life, he witnessed the religious and political transformation of the Italian peninsula. The Italian wars, begun in 1494, were still raging when Menghi was born. They ended only in 1559, when most of the Italian states submitted directly or indirectly to Spanish control. In his youth, Menghi would have seen the books and doctrines of Luther, Zwingli, and more radical religious reformers spread across the peninsula. Religious dissent continued to grow in many Italian cities (Venice, Modena, Lucca, Faenza, among others) even after the establishment of the Roman Inquisition (1542) and the convocation of the Council of Trent (1545), which were intended to stem the Protestant tide. Protestantism failed in Italy, partly because of a lack of political support, partly because of the smallness of the numbers of followers. At Menghi's death, however, Italian religious dissent had evaporated. Only the Waldensians, settled in the alpine valleys near Turin, survived. From the late sixteenth century until the age of the Enlightenment, social, political, and cultural life in Italy was dominated by Roman Catholic institutions, especially the Inquisition and the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books. The trials against the freethinker Giordano Bruno and the astronomer Galileo Galilei were only the most notorious examples of this repressive climate.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Date Type: | Publication |
| Status: | Published |
| Schools: | Schools > Global Humanities |
| Publisher: | Routledge |
| ISBN: | 9781003476153 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Sep 2026 13:30 |
| URI: | https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/189356 |
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