Private and Public Devotions in Renaissance Italy. The Role of Censorship

During the Middle Ages, the dimension of private and individual worship benefited from an important and illustrious tradition in the Catholic world. With the advent of the Reformation, this dimension was often – rightly or wrongly – identified with the Lutheran invitation to converse directly with God, thereby bypassing all ecclesiastical intermediation; as a result, the inquisitorial authorities viewed it with suspicion. However, although the Roman authorities supported and promoted forms of collective and public worship, they understood that the private dimension played an indispensable role in the spiritual and devotional life of the faithful: it needed to be regulated as much as possible, but not demonized. In the XVI century, attempts were made to impose restrictions on the excessive mystical impetus of individual prayer, along with superstitious practices used in worship, especially in protected environments such as convents or private houses. At the same time, Church censorship sought and found formulas of compromise that could guarantee a certain margin of freedom to forms of private worship, in contrast with the rigidity of the rules that regulated the public dimension of worship. This article aims to analyze these developments by contextualizing them within a more general reflection about the construction of an internal space in the conscience of believers, which the church authorities pursued with a degree of ambiguity during the decades in question