Foto del docente

Vincenzo Lavenia

Full Professor

Department of History and Cultures

Academic discipline: M-STO/02 Modern History

Research

Keywords: Religious history in Early Modern World, Political Culture, Roman Inquisition, Moral Theology, Witchcraft

  1. History of the Roman Church. I'm preparing a monograph on the heretical pope as a juridical and theological exception and as a battleground in the history of Western Christianity.
  2. War and religious legitimacy of violence. After working on the history of military chaplains, I began a research concerning the figure of Samson as a suicide martyr in the age of confessional conflicts in Europe within a National Research Project devoted to sacrifice in early modern age.
  3. Roman Inquisition between the seventeenth and seventeenth centuries. I deal with the history of the court in the Marche and Piedmont. I'm preparing a book on the history of judicial control of witchcraft in Italy, with a look at the birth of forensic medicine, and (with others colleagues) a handbook on the history of Inquisition in French language.
  4. History of early modern culture. I'm working on the reconstruction of the affair of Flaminio Fabrizi, condemned to the stake by the Holy Office in 1591, in the context of the history of atheism and religious culture of the late Renaissance.
  5. Law, confession and casuistry. I dedicate myself to the problem of the relationship between the internal forum of auricular confession and the fiscal obligation and to the history of moral theology. I also began to work on the tales of conversion.
  6. Stories of nations and "war of races". Starting from "Il faut défendre la société" by M. Foucault, I will prepare a volume on the history of national genealogies and the birth of the concept of "anti-history", looking in particular at the fortune of Machiavelli in legal and historical literature : from Gentillet to Bouvainvilliers, from the theory of the élites to the debate on the "clash of civilization".