Documentary
Thought Crimes in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Girolamo Donzellini and his Heretical Network
This non-profit documentary is the result of an encounter between two young early-modern historians, Alessandra Celati and Emma Hinchliffe. Believing that the past has significant value in the present, these two historians share the same strong passion for telling stories from the past. They want these stories to be known outside an academic context, so that the significance of history can reach a wider audience and improve its understanding of what it has inherited. Celati and Hinchliffe believe that the story conveyed in this documentary is a great and vital story to be told because of the perseverance and diligence that shines regardless of its tragic end.
Alessandra Celati is an Italian researcher who works between Stanford University and the University of Verona. She has been dealing with the history of religious dissent in sixteenth-century Italy over the past 10 years, receiving a PhD in 2016 for her thesis on “Physicians and heresy in sixteenth-century Italy.” She has long been dreaming of t the possibility to share her research, and the underground histories she came across in the archives, with a non-specialist audience. Emma Hinchliffe, who is completing her PhD in early modern British history at The University of Washington, is a young scholar and filmmaker whose ultimate career goal is to work in non-fiction production making historical documentaries. She was instantly fascinated by the story of a secret social network of dissenters in Italy when she heard Alessandra present on the topic at the Renaissance Society of Southern California Conference, held at the Huntington Library in 2018.
This non-profit project was born out of this serendipitous and international collaboration.
The documentary intends to tell the story of an Italian physician named Girolamo Donzellini, who worked in the Venetian Republic in the sixteenth century and was sentenced to death as a heretic by the Inquisition in 1587. Donzellini crossed paths with other Italian religious dissenters on the stage of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The narration of his life and the description of his network both encourage reflections upon the value of personal and intellectual freedom, critical thinking, and anti-dogmatism, promoting rumination on the dangers of repression, conformism, and homogeneity.
Combining fictional scenes with scholarly contributions, the documentary will be divided into eight sections. Relying upon information uncovered by a detailed examination of original historical sources, each section of the documentary will describe a different phase of the adventurous life of Girolamo Donzellini, an archetypal Italian heretic. Staged reconstructions of Donzellini’s life will be contextualized by a team of select historians who will elaborate on the context of his actions and lead the audience on a historical trip through sixteenth-century Italy in a time of great suspicion and tension. We chose this approach to emphasize the connections between major historical transformations and the daily life of individuals in the past. Major themes that the documentary will address are the Protestant Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Republic of Letters, and the problem of religious tolerance in the early modern period.
The production of this non-profit documentary is sponsored by the European Union, under the Horizon 2020, Marie Curie Global Fellowship that Alessandra Celati currently holds. The documentary will mainly be shot in Venice in 2019. Along with the two scholars who conceived the documentary, several young artists and a small film crew will also be involved in the project. The documentary is a thoroughly international project that brings together an English film director, an Italian screenwriter, an American crew, and young actors from across Europe. We believe that this level of globalism is important, and that the mix of different experiences, skills, intellectual perspectives, and cultural approaches to the past and to our contemporary world will result in highly successful and illuminating work. We hope that you will share our enthusiasm for this project!
If you want to contribute to this project, please visit our crowdfunding webpage.
To find out more about the history we are going to tell in this documentary, please read the following section.
The theme of the documentary
“A noi è concessa la libertà di pensiero. Non è concesso un pensiero di libertà”.
(“Today we are granted with freedom of thought. But we are denied a <true> thought concerning freedom”.)
Mario Tronti, Dello spirito libero, 2015
In the sixteenth-century religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants, there was no space for theological minorities. Those who deviated from the mainstream position of their homeland, no matter how slightly, were considered outsiders and enemies to the integrity of their society. Those who defended religious peace and valued freedom of thought in spiritual matters paradoxically faced a greater risk of ostracization and oppression, doomed to be persecuted by all institutionalized denominations of European Christendom. These people would have been erased from the pages of history if the traces of their militancy had not been preserved in their correspondence, in the books they wrote, and rather ironically, in the historical archives of their persecutors, the Inquisitors.
These historical records often tell stories of violence, exile, betrayal, torture, and death, but they can also tell us about other things like courage, hope, tenacity, kinship, and solidarity. These stories illuminate the development of a secret social network of dissenters, whose cultural values of intellectual curiosity, early cosmopolitanism, and anti-authoritarianism are still at the core of the modern Western identity.
Who were these dissenters? What kinds of lives did they live? What motivated them to risk, and sometimes to lose, their own lives in the name of something so opposed by the authorities of their societies? In an attempt to answer these questions and more, this documentary aims to reconstruct the biography of the heretical physician Girolamo Donzellini and the physical and social environments in which he lived. In the documentary, the fictionalized reconstruction of Donzellini’s life will be combined with interviews of scholars who specialize in the history of the Reformation and religious dissent in the sixteenth century in order to clarify the complexity of this fascinating period.
Girolamo Donzellini, our main character, was born in 1513 in Orzi Nuovi, a little town in the Venetian Republic, during the most traumatic plague the town had ever experienced. Against the odds, Donzellini survived. Considering how precarious Donzellini’s adult life would be and how many times he would escape death, it is tempting to imagine that by breathing death and sorrow in the first months of his life, Girolamo Donzellini acquired a sort of resilience that allowed him to survive all sorts of peril—all but one. He survived the plagues of 1513 and 1575, torture, and religious exile, but he would meet his end at the hands of the Venetian inquisition, drowned in the Venetian lagoon one spring night in 1587. He was 74 years old.
To recreate the events that led to such a tragic resolution, the documentary will follow Donzellini and travel to Padua, Rome, Venice, and Basel, navigating pharmacy shops, centers of power such as embassies and the Emperor’s itinerant court, and the Inquisition’s prisons.
Although Donzellini’s father instilled heretical beliefs in him from a young age, it was in Padua, where Girolamo Donzellini graduated in medicine, that his heterodox ideas intensified and radicalized. What had started as an opposition to Roman Catholicism became a commitment to the defense of religious peace and the complete rejection of any form of institutionalized Christianity. Donzellini went through four Inquisition trials. He survived torture, jail time, and plagues, but in this period of dogmatism and uniformity of thought, his intellectual liveliness ultimately led to his execution. He was caught and charged for the last time for the possession and distribution of prohibited books in 1587. As a highly intelligent individual and a cosmopolitan humanist, Donzellini had been able to escape the Inquisition many times by disguising his aversion for the Roman Church. He could abandon his wife, his son, and his patients in order to flee from Italy when he needed to, but he could never renounce his intellectual curiosity. That was his undoing.
Donzellini’s case, alongside the interviews with historical experts, will be used in the documentary to illustrate the experiences of early modern religious dissenters, who, hopeless and doomed as they were, embodied a small, but vitally important step towards the rise of the freedom of thought. The story of Donzellini and his network is an authentic testimony of the most genuine refusal to conform and a sincere defence of peace and intellectual creativity, which had nothing to do with the abstract conception of “freedom” all too often mistaken, abused, and banalized today. If history is written by the winners, this documentary hopes to bring to light the legacy of a “secret sociability” and the radical life choices of men and women that while branded as “scandalous”, represent the true banner of freedom. Their stories encourage us to re-think our own understanding of what that term truly means.