The Republic of Venice was the only Catholic territory where an Anabaptist community was formed in the 16th century. The history of Venetian Anabaptism, little known in Reformation Studies so far, is at the heart of this book. On the basis of a large amount of archival material Riccarda Suitner reconstructs the lives of the Anabaptists of the Republic and inquisitorial repression they suffered, and analyses the doctrinal specificities of the Radical Reformation of that territory. Venetian events are presented within a broader comparative framework with particular attention to the development of the Reformation in the German states, Switzerland, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Transylvania, Tyrol, and the Kingdom of Naples. It will emerge that its Venetian history, too, cannot be ignored for a true understanding of the Radical Reformation as a whole, as well as of many significant developments of the European Reformation.

Riccarda Suitner is a Lecturer at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. Her research focuses on the period between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. She is the author, among other publications, of the monograph The Dialogues of the Dead of the Early German Enlightenment, previously also published in German and Italian. The first edition of the book won the German Humanities Translation Prize in 2019.