Questioning differences. Some Remarks on conversions, tolerance and coexistence in early modern Italy

This essay explores how religious diversity, mobility, and conversion shaped early modern Italy and Europe between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Against traditional narratives of confessional homogeneity after the Reformation, I highlight a world marked by constant encounters between Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and others—through exile, trade, travel, and missionary expansion. Drawing on travel literature, political thought, and Jewish writings, I examine how tolerance, coercion, and coexistence coexisted in practice. Through figures such as Giovanni Botero and Rabbi Simone Luzzatto, I reveal the tension between ideological purity and pragmatic pluralism. Conversion emerges both as a means of domination and as a framework legitimizing diversity. By analyzing representations of ghettos, forced sermons, and cross-cultural exchanges, I demonstrate how early modern societies negotiated “difference” not by erasing it but by incorporating it into their political, cultural, and religious order—an ambivalent legacy of coexistence that shaped modern Europe.