Glauco Schettini, “Confessional Modernity: Nicola Spedalieri, the Catholic Church and the French Revolution, c. 1775–1800,” Modern Intellectual History 17:3 (2020), pp. 677-705.
The committee unanimously and enthusiastically awards an Honorable Mention to Glauco Schettini for his article ‘Confessional Modernity: Nicola Spedalieri, the Catholic Church and the French Revolution, c. 1775–1800’ (Modern Intellectual History, 2020). By providing an in-depth reading of Spedalieri’s 1791 work On the Rights of Man and by historically contextualizing it within the debates it sparked in Italy and beyond, Schettini’s essay offers an excellent example of the state of the art in intellectual history. Taking up new directions and conceptualizations of the Enlightenment, Schettini rethinks the old dichotomies between religion and secularization, and revolution and reaction, through which we are used to reading the history of long nineteenth-century Italy. In doing so, he uncovers the lost history of ‘confessional modernity’ and evidences the multiple paths to modernity possible at the time.
In the below-provided video, Dr. Amanda Madden and Schettini discuss the research behind “Confessional Modernity,” among other topics.