Il Concilio di Trento tra storia e apologia: Sforza Pallavicino

The paper aims to investigate the theoretical developments and the many contradictions arising from a historiographical season lasting a century, from 1563 to the sixties of the seventeenth century, through the work of the Jesuit Father Pietro Sforza Pallavicino, whose story took place at the end of this path. From the very first period of the Counter-Reformation some writers dared to consider the role played by the Council of Trent in the revival of the institution after the Reformation. The task was difficult and delicate beyond any reasonable explanation and proved to be extremely sensitive to the need and the difficulty of managing censorship and reticence. In fact, the first major work on the synod was published in 1619: the English edition of the "Istoria" written by the Venetian Paolo Sarpi, that was a vehement attack to its function and a stigma of the failure of episcopalism. Yet the answer to Paolo Sarpi (which seemed to be extremely urgent), was delivered to a deathly silence that lasted several decades. After the substantial failure of the two historical writings of Felice Contelori and Terenzio Alciati, which, however, gained the credit of collecting and cataloging a huge amount of unpublished sources, the Jesuit Pallavicino, by order of Pope Innocent X, was identified as the right man for rewrite the history of Trent, but this time under the sign of the apology. The arguments raised by Sarpi were made harmless: no longer or not only with the threatening of censorship and violence, but with the government and the reasonableness of a new space for controversy, the historiae modernae. A space where it was legitimate to discredit the opponent, as a mendacious charlatan hired by an opportunist king. Even revealing the fails of his side allowed him to gain the fame of impartiality, in the hope that it had been too long for someone to complain. After the censorship time, Sforza Pallavicino will open the season of the "government of ideas": a new policy of enhancement through persuasion that helped the image of both the Church and the Society of Jesus.