The divergence in religious ideas and energies between the different Christian Churches of the age of the Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent has often been a dominant theme in Adriano Prosperi’s consequential research.

In the academic discourse, led by catholic, protestant and liberal historians, a fundamental difference of opinions regards the process of modernization within the Catholic Church, from the vestige of a Medieval Church into its modern counterpart: was it merely the repression of the ideas brought forth by the Protestant Reform or was it an actual reform of the Church?

This difference of opinions is crystalized by the opposing dichotomy in the terminology: on the one hand Counter-Reformation and on the other Catholic Reform. But both definitions are unsatisfactory. Actually, most of the population was not involved in this process of reform. Faced with a similar historical occurrence, the Italian Risorgimento, Antonio Gramsci noted how this was an upheaval that did not touch on the masses and did not spring from a transformation within the social fabric of the country. Gramsci borrowed an expression by Vincenzo Cuoco to label what he thought the Risorgimento was: a ‘passive revolution’.

In publishing this collection of essays, Adriano Prosperi proposes to use this definition to characterize the historical process of Reform that took place in Italy, under the aegis and the hegemony of the Roman Church. A (Counter-) Reformation, thus, seen as a major reorganization of the power structure and as a ‘passive revolution’.