Diego Pirillo
Diego Pirillo (Ph.D., Scuola Normale Superiore) is Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where is also affiliated with the History Department. He has been fellow of Villa I Tatti (the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), and his work has been supported by institutions such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Houghton Library, the Newberry Library, the American Philosophical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. His work focuses on Italy, Europe, and the Atlantic world between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, with a strong interest in intellectual history, the history of books and reading, refugee studies, colonialism, the history of news and information. He has a secondary interest in modern Italian intellectual history with special attention to authors such as Croce, Gentile and Gramsci.
He is the author of three books: 'Filosofia ed eresia nell’Inghilterra del tardo Cinquecento: Bruno, Sidney e i dissident religiosi italiani' (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 2010), 'The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England and the Reformation' (Ithaca, Cornell: University Press, 2018, awarded the 2019 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies), and 'The Atlantic Republic of Letters. Knowledge and Colonialism in the Age of Franklin' (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), which frames early American intellectuals as agents of empire and shows that knowledge became a tool of colonialism, facilitating the dispossession of Indigenous peoples while silencing the Republic of Letters’ ties to the slave trade.
His current book project, entitled 'Renaissance Refugees: Negotiating Coexistence in the Age of Mass Expulsions' (under contract with Cambridge University Press), is a comparative study of four displaced communities and investigates how early modern refugees coped with forced displacement and negotiated with governments to prevent persecutions and expulsions.
Recent publications include:
-“How Knowledge Travels: Learned Periodicals and the Atlantic Republic of Letters,” Journal of the History of Ideas (in press).
-“New England, 1648: Italian Refugee Literature and its Transatlantic Audience (1542-1702),” in Warren Boutcher (ed.), "Europe in the World: A Literary History, 1529-1683" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press).
-“Refugees, Diplomats, and the Reformation that Never Happened” in Giorgio Caravale (ed.), "A Companion to the Italian Reformation" (Leiden: Brill, in press).
–"Reframing Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West", ed. by Isabella Lazzarini, Luciano Piffanelli and Diego Pirillo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press).
-“‘The excellent civil Policy of the Jesuits…deserves our imitation’: Anglican Missionaries, Native Americans, and the Jesuit Utopia of Paraguay,” in "Early Modern Improvisations. Essays on History and Literature in Honor of John Watkins" (Oxford and New York: Routledge 2024).
–“Rethinking Catholicism in Early Modern Italy: Gender, Space, Mobility”, ed. by John Christopoulos and Diego Pirillo, special issue of Religions, 2023.
He is the author of three books: 'Filosofia ed eresia nell’Inghilterra del tardo Cinquecento: Bruno, Sidney e i dissident religiosi italiani' (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 2010), 'The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England and the Reformation' (Ithaca, Cornell: University Press, 2018, awarded the 2019 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies), and 'The Atlantic Republic of Letters. Knowledge and Colonialism in the Age of Franklin' (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), which frames early American intellectuals as agents of empire and shows that knowledge became a tool of colonialism, facilitating the dispossession of Indigenous peoples while silencing the Republic of Letters’ ties to the slave trade.
His current book project, entitled 'Renaissance Refugees: Negotiating Coexistence in the Age of Mass Expulsions' (under contract with Cambridge University Press), is a comparative study of four displaced communities and investigates how early modern refugees coped with forced displacement and negotiated with governments to prevent persecutions and expulsions.
Recent publications include:
-“How Knowledge Travels: Learned Periodicals and the Atlantic Republic of Letters,” Journal of the History of Ideas (in press).
-“New England, 1648: Italian Refugee Literature and its Transatlantic Audience (1542-1702),” in Warren Boutcher (ed.), "Europe in the World: A Literary History, 1529-1683" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press).
-“Refugees, Diplomats, and the Reformation that Never Happened” in Giorgio Caravale (ed.), "A Companion to the Italian Reformation" (Leiden: Brill, in press).
–"Reframing Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West", ed. by Isabella Lazzarini, Luciano Piffanelli and Diego Pirillo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press).
-“‘The excellent civil Policy of the Jesuits…deserves our imitation’: Anglican Missionaries, Native Americans, and the Jesuit Utopia of Paraguay,” in "Early Modern Improvisations. Essays on History and Literature in Honor of John Watkins" (Oxford and New York: Routledge 2024).
–“Rethinking Catholicism in Early Modern Italy: Gender, Space, Mobility”, ed. by John Christopoulos and Diego Pirillo, special issue of Religions, 2023.
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Pirillo reconsiders how diplomacy worked, not only within but also outside of formal state channels, through underground networks of individuals who were able to move across confessional and linguistic borders, often adapting their own identities to the changing political conditions they encountered. Through a trove of diplomatic and mercantile letters, inquisitorial records, literary texts, marginalia, and visual material, The Refugee-Diplomat recovers the agency of religious refugees in international affairs, revealing their profound impact on the emergence of early modern diplomatic culture and practice.
Books in Progress
Edited Volumes and Special Issues
our attention to smaller ‘contact zones’, such as ports and frontier towns that enabled the circulation knowledge across linguistic, cultural and religious barriers. The France-Berkeley fund will create an international research group that will meet in two workshops and present its results both in print and digital form (in a collective volume and a website).
Today, all these terms coexist, often uneasily, and continue to shape research projects. Instead of taking sides on the never-ending controversy over how to label, research and tell the story of religious change in early modern Italy, the goal of this Special Issue is to bring together some of the most innovative recent work on the period by a new generation of scholars. The fourteen articles collected here, by European, Israeli and North American scholars, showcase the plurality of approaches used today to study the epoch that is still commonly referred to as the “Counter-Reformation”. Reflecting the two different backgrounds of the two editors, the issue was also borne out of the effort to bridge the gap between Italian and Anglo-American scholarship that often run on two parallel tracks ignoring each other. In this respect, it is perhaps not just a coincidence that many of the conversations that led to this Special Issue began in an ideal “contact zone”, the Villa I Tatti, where we were both fellows in 2016/2017.
Dr. Diego Pirillo
Dr. John Christopoulos
Guest Editors
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/special_issues/Religion_Approaches
Articles
interdisciplinary research, early North America has remained largely
impermeable to this new body of scholarship. In this article I use the
category of the Republic of Letters to overcome some of the limitations
of the 'Atlantic world' paradigm and to shed new light on the intellectual
history of eighteenth-century America. Along with studying the means
through which American savants gathered information about scholarly
trends and recent publications, I also bring to light the strategies they
used to actively contribute to the production and organization of
knowledge.
Book Chapters
Pirillo reconsiders how diplomacy worked, not only within but also outside of formal state channels, through underground networks of individuals who were able to move across confessional and linguistic borders, often adapting their own identities to the changing political conditions they encountered. Through a trove of diplomatic and mercantile letters, inquisitorial records, literary texts, marginalia, and visual material, The Refugee-Diplomat recovers the agency of religious refugees in international affairs, revealing their profound impact on the emergence of early modern diplomatic culture and practice.
our attention to smaller ‘contact zones’, such as ports and frontier towns that enabled the circulation knowledge across linguistic, cultural and religious barriers. The France-Berkeley fund will create an international research group that will meet in two workshops and present its results both in print and digital form (in a collective volume and a website).
Today, all these terms coexist, often uneasily, and continue to shape research projects. Instead of taking sides on the never-ending controversy over how to label, research and tell the story of religious change in early modern Italy, the goal of this Special Issue is to bring together some of the most innovative recent work on the period by a new generation of scholars. The fourteen articles collected here, by European, Israeli and North American scholars, showcase the plurality of approaches used today to study the epoch that is still commonly referred to as the “Counter-Reformation”. Reflecting the two different backgrounds of the two editors, the issue was also borne out of the effort to bridge the gap between Italian and Anglo-American scholarship that often run on two parallel tracks ignoring each other. In this respect, it is perhaps not just a coincidence that many of the conversations that led to this Special Issue began in an ideal “contact zone”, the Villa I Tatti, where we were both fellows in 2016/2017.
Dr. Diego Pirillo
Dr. John Christopoulos
Guest Editors
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/special_issues/Religion_Approaches
interdisciplinary research, early North America has remained largely
impermeable to this new body of scholarship. In this article I use the
category of the Republic of Letters to overcome some of the limitations
of the 'Atlantic world' paradigm and to shed new light on the intellectual
history of eighteenth-century America. Along with studying the means
through which American savants gathered information about scholarly
trends and recent publications, I also bring to light the strategies they
used to actively contribute to the production and organization of
knowledge.
recognizable framework: while they allow the historian to take a comprehensive look at a cultural history of peace from a Western perspective, they also offer him/her a chance to throw more than casual glances at the world beyond.
Giovedì 28 aprile ore 17.30
Una conversazione su Zoom a cura del Centro culturale protestante P.M. Vermigli a partire dai libri:
"British Protestant Missions and the Conversion of Europe, 1600-1900" a cura di Simone Maghenzani e Stefano Villani
"Making Italy Anglican. Why the Book of Common Prayer was Translated into Italian" di Stefano Villani
Questo è il link per partecipare all'incontro:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88633531389...
ID riunione: 886 3353 1389
Passcode: 406722
Intervengono:
Laura Ronchi (Università di Roma "La Sapienza")
Diego Pirillo (University of California, Berkeley)
Coordina:
Lucia Felici (Università degli Studi di Firenze)
Saranno presenti anche gli autori:
Stefano Villani (University of Mariland)
Simone Maghenzani (Cambridge University)