1/16/22, 2:34 PM Cromohs Seminari - Villani - The English Civil Wars and the Interregnum in Italian Historiography in the 17th century https://oajournals.fupress.net/public/journals/9/Seminar/villani_ecw.html 1/15 Seminar index 1. Radicalism and the English revolution Mario Caricchio Glenn Burgess Ariel Hessayon Nicholas McDowell Nigel Smith 2. Britain 1660- 1714: competing historiographies Giovanni Tarantino Mark Knights Yaakov Mascetti 3. The Church of England in the eighteenth century Guglielmo Sanna William Gibson Robert G. Ingram Robert D. Cornwall 4. Non-British readings of the English revolution Stefano Villani Gabi Mahlberg Pietro Messina 5. Rediscovering radicalism in Cromohs Virtual Seminars The English Civil Wars and the Interregnum in Italian Historiography in the 17 th century Stefano Villani Università di Pisa S. Villani , "The English Civil Wars and the Interregnum in Italian Historiography in the 17 th century", in M. Caricchio, G. Tarantino, eds., Cromohs Virtual Seminars. Recent historiographical trends of the British Studies (17th-18th Centuries), 2006-2007: 1-4 <http://www.fupress.net/public/journals/49/Seminar/villani_ecv.html> 1. The English civil wars and the Italian historiography in the 17 th century. The revolutionary events in England aroused a remarkable amount of attention in contemporary Italian historiography. There are numerous works specifically dedicated to those events and a simple list of them bears witness to this interest. Perhaps the most detailed and complete narrative that appeared in print in Italy during the 17 th century was that contained in the fifteen volumes of the Mercurio by Vittorio Siri, the first volume of which was published in 1644. In the total economy of the work the space dedicated to the English Revolution was so large that one reader even criticized the author for having been "too precise" ("troppo minuto") in the narration of the English events (as a matter of fact, out of the approximately 16.900 pages that compose this monumental work, approximately 2.300 narrate the English vicissitudes). [1] But beyond this merely quantitative aspect, the thing that a reader of these pages of the Mercurio notices most of all is that Siri here makes available for the first time in Italian translation many documents produced during the civil war from both sides of the conflict. To select just one example, he publishes the reports of Charles I's trial in their entirety. He also made use of first-hand information supplied by some of the protagonists of those events (not least those of cardinal Rossetti, who was in London as papal representative to Queen Henrietta Maria between June 1639 and July 1641). In the publishing history of Mercurio one can readily distinguish two great blocks: the first comprising the first five volumes of Mercurio, published between 1644 and 1655, in which Siri describes European history up to 1645 using documentary material collected for the most part when he lived in Venice; the second comprising the remaining ten volumes, published between 1667 and 1682, which are essentially based on the French diplomatic material that Siri used in order to describe European events up to 1655.