Skip to Main Content

Anna and Tranquillo: Catholic Anxiety and Jewish Protest in the Age of Revolutions

Online ISBN:
9780300224719
Print ISBN:
9780300219043
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Book

Anna and Tranquillo: Catholic Anxiety and Jewish Protest in the Age of Revolutions

Kenneth Stow
Kenneth Stow
Smith College
Find on
Published:
25 October 2016
Online ISBN:
9780300224719
Print ISBN:
9780300219043
Publisher:
Yale University Press

Abstract

This text presents an historical interpretation of the diary of an eighteenth-century Jewish woman who resisted the efforts of the papal authorities to force her religious conversion. After being seized by the papal police in Rome in May 1749, Anna del Monte, a Jew, kept a diary detailing her captors' efforts over the next thirteen days to force her conversion to Catholicism. Anna's powerful chronicle of her ordeal at the hands of authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, originally circulated by her brother Tranquillo in 1793, receives its first English-language translation along with an insightful interpretation in this book of the incident's legal and historical significance. The book's analysis of Anna's dramatic story of prejudice, injustice, resistance, and survival during her two-week imprisonment in the Roman House of Converts—and her brother's later efforts to protest state-sanctioned, religion-based abuses—provides a detailed view of the separate forces on either side of the struggle between religious and civil law in the years just prior to the massive political and social upheavals in America and Europe.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close