The Deceivers Deceived: How a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Anti-Jesuit Circle Duped a Jesuit Rector

Abstract

In 1608, Antonio Barisone (1557/8–1623), rector of the Jesuit college at Ferrara, became ensnared in an elaborate deception designed to expose the unscrupulous methods by which Jesuits exploited vulnerable wealthy widows and enlarged the material wealth of their Society. Entering into a correspondence with a Venetian noblewoman who lamented the loss of her Jesuit confessor following the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from Venice (1606), it took several months before Barisone realized that the letters he was receiving actually had their origins in the anti-Jesuit circles linked to Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623). In addition to throwing light on Venice as a hotbed of espionage, political rumors, and conspiratorial activity in the early sixteenth century, this episode foregrounds several themes and leitmotifs that would go on to dominate anti-Jesuit polemic over the subsequent centuries.