La nuova spiritualità dell'età moderna, 3 ed. riv. e ampl.

The new forms adopted by religious speculation and practices of the sacred at the threshold of the modern age, in a Europe crossed by strenuous and conflicting attempts to arrange the balance of power that were forming on the international scene, characterized large parts of European culture and gave rise to deep and irreversible changes that, from a simply philosophical and theological plane, in a few decades would affect more areas of political, economic and social development. The modern age, the men of the modern age worked out their own collective and personal relationships with God and with the sacred according to patterns, models and criteria in a very different way from those characteristic of earlier ages. The modern age, the states, the economies and the policies of the modern age could not ignore these changes. An epochal revolution took place, affecting cultures and mindsets, which opened the way for those complex processes of secularization and reinterpretation of the sacred that resulted in the culture of contemporary age, a revolution that led to one of the most important fractures ever occurred in Western history: the breaking of the "res publica christiana". Underlying these changes there was a distinctive cultural and political composition of elements, whose fusion, according to different times and different characters depending on the different regions in Europe, made it possible these conditions of change. The book traces, through the analysis of texts and sources of the period, the highlights of this process and the immediate outcomes. Some of the main characters of Christian humanism (Alberti, Valla, Pico, Savonarola, Erasmus, More, Castellione) founded the new feel of a European culture which began to appear on the reproof to the monolithic Church and the topics of religious tolerance. Evangelism reformed, with Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Bullinger offers, for its part, new models and new ways to the needs of the sacred. The results of the Reformation, both socially (Peasants' War) and politically as well as in the relations between religion and power finally contributed to the reorganization featuring the modern Europe until today.