Giovanni Valentino Gentile

Giovanni Valentino Gentile (born around 1520 in Scigliano ; died on September 20, 1566 in Bern ) was an Italian humanist and representative of Reformation anti-Trinitarianism .

life and work

Giovanni Valentino Gentile was born around 1520 as the son of the landowners Margherita and Francesco Gentile in Scigliano in Calabria in southern Italy . As a student in Naples , Gentile came into contact with humanistic and Reformation views. Here he also came into contact with the Waldensians . Gentile took a stand against infant baptism and transubstantiation and, with such Anabaptist positions , approached the radical Reformation . In 1546 he took part in meetings of the Collegia Vicentina , an association of anti-Trinitarians in Vicenza , together with Lelio Sozzini and Camillo Renato . He later met the lawyer and anti-Trinitarian Matteo Gribaldi in Padua , who had a lasting influence on him. Like Gribaldi, Gentile advocated a subordinate tritheism from that time on .

In 1557 emigrated to the Gentile Calvinist embossed Geneva , where only a few years before Michael Servetus for his anti-Trinitarian views of Calvin had been killed and he with Giorgio Biandrata and Giovanni Paolo Alciati belonged to the circle of the Italian anti-Trinitarians. After the group was crushed by the authorities, he signed the Reformed Creed submitted by the Geneva Consistory of the Italian migrant community on May 18, 1558. However, he soon distanced himself from it again, which led to his arrest in the summer of 1558. During the process that followed, he renounced his anti-Trinitarian views. After his imprisonment, Gentile went to Farges to Gribaldi and then to Lyon , where he wrote the tritheist text Antidota , among other things .

In the summer of 1563 Gentile traveled to Poland at the request of Giorgio Biandrata , where at the same time Biandrata laid the foundation stone for the Reformation-Anti-Trinitarian Church of the Polish Brothers . Gentile lived in Kraków (Cracow) and Pińczów , among others . In Kraków he seems to have worked again with Alciati, who had previously fallen out with Calvin due to his rejection of the pre-existence of Christ .

Due to the Parczower Edict passed by King Sigismund II on August 7, 1564 , which expelled the foreign anti-Trinitarians from the country, Gentile had to leave Poland again in the same year. Gentile emigrated via Moravia and Austria to Switzerland, which he had had to leave only a few years earlier because of his views. On June 11, 1566, Gentile sent Bailiff Simon Wurstenberger a letter in which he added theses for a denominational disputation on the Trinity . Wurstenberger reacted differently than Gentile assumed, imprisoned Gentile and finally transferred him to Bern for trial . There he was sentenced to death on September 9, 1566 for his anti-Trinitarian convictions and beheaded a day later .

literature

• Irene Dingel (ed.): Antitrinitarian disputes. The tritheistic phase (1560–1568). Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-525-56015-0 .
• Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer: Protestant religious refugees in Switzerland (1540–1580). In: Hartmut Laufhütte , Michael Titzmann (ed.): Heterodoxy in the early modern times (= early modern times. Vol. 117). De Gruyter, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-1109-2869-3 , pp. 119-160.
• Manfred E. Welti: Brief history of the Italian Reformation (= writings of the Association for Reformation History . Vol. 193). Mohn, Gütersloh 1985, ISBN 3-579-01663-6 , pp. 31-135 ( digitized in the Google book search).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Manfred Edwin Welti: Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio, marchese d'Oria in exile 1557-1597: a biography and a contribution to the history of Philippism . Geneva 1976, p. 71 .