Giulia Gonzaga (1513-66) was renowned throughout sixteenth-century Italy
as a model of pious widowhood and of female beauty. Yet over three
decades she sustained a risky friendship and personal correspondence
with Pietro Carnesecchi (1508-67), the one-time papal favourite who
became infamous for his heretical religious beliefs and associations.
Indeed, Carnesecchi was condemned to death by the Tribunal of the Roman
Inquisition, implicated in part by evidence of his correspondence with
donna Giulia. This major new study traces the evolution of donna
Giulia's unorthodox religious ideas and networks. Considered alongside
inquisitorial trial records and contemporary religious treatises, donna
Giulia's written dialogue with Carnesecchi and others, vividly reflects
the religious tensions of mid-sixteenth-century Italy. Giulia Gonzaga
and the Religious Controversies of Sixteenth-Century Italy details
donna Giulia's important contribution to the exchange and currency of
reformist ideas amongst an intellectual elite of women and men, clergy
and laity that extended through the Italian peninsula and beyond.