I margini dell’eresia : indagine su un processo inquisitoriale (Oulx, 1492)

Starting with a fragment of a trial hold in 1492 against two Waldensian barbes, the author uses an analysis of the unusually rich marginal comments in the manuscript in order to tell a story. Different handwritings make it possible to trace its textual transmission, and this in turn opens a window onto religious controversy in the Europe of the seventeenth century. Closer examination of the two barbes themselves leads to the question, were they really Waldensian preachers? The contents of a cartula enclosed in the manuscript suggest instead a multiple identity and throw new light on the two itinerant preachers, who had come from the centre of Italy – from the Spoleto Valley in Umbria – and travelled through various countries before their capture in the ‘Waldensian valleys’. Though they came from a milieu that was marginal in relation to the alpine area, the judges took it for granted that they were barbes. In fact, the evidence points to a different religious context, and a religious anxiety moving from the centre of Italy, where the Capuchin Reform would take place, to the alpine valleys containing the Waldensians, who were soon to join the Protestant Reform.