Conversionary Preaching and the Jews in Early Modern Rome*

Abstract

In the Vatican Archives, a manuscript diary records the daily activities of an unnamed Italian priest. When the household he served moved from Spain to Rome in the late 1570s, the diarist began to take especially careful note of the sermons he attended nearly every day of Lent. He continued the practice every year until the diary ended in 1593. 1 The priest belonged to an increasingly important entourage. During the 1580s his employer, Ippolito Aldobrandini, was elevated to the cardinalate, and later became Pope Clement VIII. Throughout the diarist's time in Rome, his patron's rising star led him increasingly to sermons in Rome's newest or grandest churches: Chiesa Nuova,

The converting sea: Religious change and cross‐cultural interaction in the early modern Mediterranean

“…This was not only a Venetian phenomenon, as conversionary preaching and other mechanisms of fostering and safeguarding conversions took place throughout Italy (Lazar, , pp. 116–117; Mazur, ; Michelson, ). Such entanglements of religious orthodoxy and political loyalty in the edification of converts were also widespread in the Iberian empires, which aimed to create ethno‐religiously homogenous states (Paiva, ; Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, Lopes de Barros, & Liba Mucznik, ; Roth, ; Soyer, ).…”