Italian Antitrinitarianism and the Legitimacy of Dissent

The place of early modern antitrinitarianism in the history of religious toleration has long attracted scholarly attention. This is especially true of the vast historiographical tradition which has explored the fortunes of the so-called Italian heretics of the Cinquecento: Matteo Gribaldi Moffa, Valentino Gentile, Bernardino Ochino, Lelio Sozzini, and the many other Italian exiles who made up the early antitrinitarian movement culminating in the rise of Socinianism. Previous accounts of the Italians’ experience have provided conflicting interpretations of the relationship between their rejection of the Trinity and their vindication of the legitimacy of dissent in matters of religion: some read their antitrinitarianism as a consequence of their underlying belief in the value of free enquiry and rational criticism in the quest for religious truth; others, on the contrary, regard it as the motivating factor behind a self-interested attempt to defend their own freedom of speech. Yet the extent to which their antitrinitarian allegiance shaped the specific arguments they adopted to defend dissent remains unexplored. This chapter addresses this question by considering the place of trinitarian doctrine in various writings against religious coercion produced by Italian exiles in the years following the execution of Michael Servetus in Geneva in 1553. By investigating the intersection of antitrinitarianism and freedom of expression, I seek to identify the distinctiveness of antitrinitarian critiques of coercion and to determine whether belief in the value of dissent was indeed a fundamental feature of Italian antitrinitarianism.