When I first began to study early modern Italy in the 1970s, it was a commonplace that the country offered little of interest to historians after the full flower of the Renaissance in the middle of the sixteenth century, and that it had been deservedly forgotten. This prejudice was already out of date with respect to Italian-language scholarship, stimulated by the appearance of innovative journals like ÒQuaderni StoriciÓ. Nevertheless, outside Italy, there was nothing resembling a coherent textbook to introduce students to the fundamentals and the problems of the era. When I was first permitted to teach the period to undergraduates in the mid-1980s, I had to compile a reading list for my students, almost none of whom could read Italian. The most diligent of them could read French, for it remains a widely-taught international language. Within a few years, my reading list reached hundreds of titles. Periodic trips to the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto enabled me to enlarge the list considerably. Soon it made little sense to include only the titles I felt would be the most fruitful, for the readings covering the full arc of disciplines dealing with Italy are too numerous for anyone to read, let alone master. So here below you will find most of the titles extant, save those I have not yet encountered.

   This bibliography aims to be exhaustive; that is, it aims to record the entire English and French production on Italian history pertaining to the period (1550-1800) over the last 150 years, roughly the time that scholars have worked from archives. Quite apart from the huge, and often excellent production of Italian scholars, the period has attracted the talent and energy of thousands of authors working outside Italy. It is not my concern here to pronounce judgments on the utility of specific items on the list, for large fields of interest like this one permit a wide array of intellectual enterprises, from diverse points of view.

   The result of the bibliography deployed below is to refute, once and for all, the notion that the Early Modern period of Italian history has been ÒforgottenÓ by historians. The very existence of this didactic tool will allow scholars and students greater ease of consultation. It is designed to allow even a non-specialist to have a comprehensive view of the field in the two principal languages of the Western world. With time, I realized that the compilation has another purpose. It is through these languages that a new generation of international students and scholars can be introduced to this long and central epoch of Italian and European history.

   Even ÒexhaustiveÓ bibliographies must make certain choices. The list contains studies, not published sources, except where they have been enhanced by critical introductions by editors. One arbitrary series of choices must relate to where exactly the boundaries lie between history and other disciplines. I have thus incorporated many titles dealing with art history, with single artists and works concerning important projects, but I have excluded publications devoted to the analysis of a single work, articles concerning the dating and identification of specific pieces, or those dealing with interpretations of specific figures. The compilation ignores exhibition catalogues and collections of images where they are not accompanied by synthetic studies. Similarly in the language arts, I include studies of specific literary figures and their influence, but ignore discussions of most single works or characters figuring in them. In science and philosophy, I have neglected to include the elaboration of single theories, or articles commenting on single examples of correspondence. These studies are more narrowly philological rather than historical, and their mass would swell this bibliography without making it much more useful.

   Another series of choices had to delimit ÒItalyÓ, which was larger before the Unification than it has since become. Certainly Corsica belonged to it, even if the result would be to swell the number of French titles. I hesitated a moment before including the island of Malta, but I had no good argument to exclude it. While the population did not speak Italian, that was true of Sardinia as well. On the other hand, Malta had such close ties with Sicily and Rome, and since the papal inquisition held sway there, and since a large fraction of the knights were Italian, and since Italian served as the Ôlingua francaÕ for the whole region, it could not be left out. The case of Savoy is a bit different. While it comprised part of the Piedmontese state, culturally and economically it looked more towards Geneva, Lyon and Paris. So I have included titles dealing with Savoy when they dealt with themes it shared with Piedmont, like war or administrative centralization on Turin. The criteria of the closeness of links to the Italian world similarly governed the choice to include titles concerning Nice, the Venetian overseas empire and Ragusa.

   The material listed below has been divided among ten headings; 1) General and Historiography; 2) Travel and Historical Geography, 3) Politics & Administration; 4) Economics and Demography; 5) Social Stratification & Behavioural Studies; 6) Religious History; 7) Literature, erudition and book culture; 8) Music and Spectacle; 9) Beaux-Arts and Architecture; and 10) History of Science. General history includes syntheses both national and local, which often cover a long period. The recent development of the history of travel literature made it possible to create a separate rubric for it, but I lump with it works of historical geography, and the handful of titles dealing with the environment in general. The section on politics includes traditional political history, and public administration in its various branches, like justice, state finance and war. One will also find there the biographies of princes and their important ministers. Economic history includes private and public finance and exchange, but also demographic and family history. Social stratification I combine with studies of behaviour, deviance and crime, public assistance and so on, often inspired by the concept of ÔmentalitiesÕ. Religious history would appear to be the most homogeneous category, but in it I include most studies dealing with the Jewish minority and those treating Protestants and Valdesi. Intellectual history embraces many different activities, which I have attempted to organize by separating philosophy, philology and the language arts (including what some now call Ôbook cultureÕ), from music and spectacle, which is separate from art, architecture and gardens. History of science is the final category, often considered a discipline of its own for the specialization of knowledge it requires. I have opted for a single citing of works, instead of citing the same work several times across different rubrics. This is somewhat arbitrary, I recognize; whether a work on religious imagery should be slotted under religious history or history of art is sometimes difficult to assess.

   A rapid quantitative survey of the titles in each of the previous categories teaches us something of the major historical trends over more than a century. The most surprising finding is that French-language historiography dominated Italian topics until fairly recently, even in quantitative terms. French historians consistently surpassed English-language writers in output until about 1960, even if one were to exclude the substantial amount of work devoted to Corsica. This is a tribute to the Ecole Francaise de Rome, a competitive ÒGrande EcoleÓ that sponsors scholarship of the highest level. The alumni of the school include Maurice Aymard, Gerard Delille, Gerard Labrot, Yves-Marie Berce, Jean Delumeau, Jean-Michel Sallmann, Francoise and Jean-Claude Waquet and others besides. Even before the turn of the last century, French historians were writing important works of political history, often the consequence of the weighty ÒtheseÓ required by French universities. Art historians inescapably dealt with Italian subjects. French Catholics also produced numerous books and articles where real scholarship enhanced devotion, particularly at the turn of the century when the Dreyfus affair and the separation of Church and State heightened passions. This wave of fine scholarship paused suddenly in 1914, but recommenced with warÕs end. Political, religious and cultural history continued to constitute the lionÕs share throughout the 1920s. The importance of French historiography was not only statistical, it was also qualitatively sophisticated in most fields.

   In the 1930s a new current emerged, timidly at first. Economic history, the study of prices and exchanges, merchants and peasants began to gather momentum. As it did, French historians diversified their interests and their specializations earlier than those of other nations. The war years marked another pause without inciting scholars to go into new directions. Then the 1950s witnessed a surge of economic and socio-economic history as the Annales school historians in the wake of Fernand Braudel made Italian economic history one of its most important ÒchantiersÓ. BraudelÕs disciples included Italian pioneers, Ruggiero Romano, Domenico Sella, Carlo Cipolla, who adopted the sources, the methods and the concepts of the French and popularized them in Italy too. French economic historians took over the academy in the 1960s, though they never constituted the majority of productive scholars. French art and literary historians discovered the charms of the Baroque aesthetic in the 1960s simultaneously. Those two rubrics accounted for 2/3 of the titles in Italian history produced in French, and their sway throughout the Western world was considerable.

   French historiography diversified again in the 1970s, as Òsocial historyÓ ceased to refer automatically to economic life and social class. Instead, a new sensitivity to anthropological models focused many minds on the notion of ÒmentalitiesÓ proper to early modern Europe. We began to see the application of quantitative methods and anthropological concepts to political history too, which thereby acquired new depth. These tools of investigation showed their worth across a wide array of topics. Even art historians discovered markets, patrons and religious sentiments, through the serial exploitation of archival documents. Today we no longer speak of ÒmentalitiesÓ for the concept was tautological and it has no foundation in cognitive psychology. However, this field of studies is one of the most active today, whereas it barely existed forty years ago.

   Assuredly, the French historiographical revolution is over. One sure sign of it is the relative abandonment of economic history in favour of the most traditional kinds of political history. Whoever visits the FNAC or other large French bookstores today cannot help but notice the presence of biographies on the shelves. But the high quality of French scholarship has endured, through a training that promotes a scientific outlook in research, and close contact with archival documents from the early years of university. This orientation the French share with the Italians. Italian scholars who hesitated between the two international languages until the 1970s now publish outside Italy primarily in English. But one cannot specialize in early modern Italian history without reading French. In the 7th Edition of the bibliography, French-language titles constitute 38% of the whole. French-language studies accounted for about half of the total in 1960, and still constituted one-third (32%) of the number of titles in the 1990s. Given that the French-language population (including Belgium, Switzerland and Canada) stands at 75 million as opposed to 400 million Anglophones, this activity is still well above its weight, and in my view, it is more consistently high-quality thanks to the emphasis on archival sources over literary texts and theories. Still today, many senior Italian historians have some of their best work published in French-language journals.

   Studies published in English were long aimed at the ÒgentlemanÓ reader of political and cultural history. Catholic devotional studies comprised a modest part of the whole, which expanded as the church multiplied the number of colleges and universities affiliated with it. London appeared more often as a place of publication than the United States at least until the 1920s, and both of them combined constituted but a fraction of French-language studies. The 1930s saw the first hint of a swell in this scholarship, in religious and cultural history especially, along with the history of science. Italian immigrants to the United States were generally not well educated and were still quite peripheral to the academic world. There was no modification of the prevailing themes in English-language historiography of Italy before 1950.

   In the decade after 1950 this production more than doubled! Most of it was comprised of art history. Italian art, architecture and music are central to the Western canon, and the expansion of arts faculties in those years meant that scholars of traditional fields were in high demand. Political history kept pace with the expansion as well. These trends began to broaden in the course of the 1960s, as the influence of French economic and social history infiltrated the United States and Britain, later than in Italy itself. Science history was always important to the canon. As the university experience underwent a process of democratization on both sides of the Atlantic, interest in Italian history grew with it.

   Since then, the production in English continues to grow. In the 1970s, titles in art, music and literature still constituted the leading rubric, with political, economic and religious history sharing most of the rest. English-language scholars still thought of themselves as ÒRenaissanceÓ specialists, with most of their work focusing on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, very rarely exploring beyond 1620. If British historians rarely took the lead in adapting new ideas from the social sciences to historical documents, the scholarly quality of their work was usually very solid. British historians were less conceptual, but generally better trained than Americans. They retained a keen interest in traditional political, diplomatic and military history, which was their forte. The work of J.R. Hale, whose Renaissance scholarship widened to include a concern for finance, fortifications and logistics, was especially influential. Britain is now probably the most important contributor to Italian economic history (outside Italy, of course). British historians were among the first, after the Italians, to realize the crucial importance of inquisition archives and ecclesiastical tribunals as sources liable to shed light on a broad range of behaviour. Following Brian Pullan, they also opened up the world of charitable institutions and hospitals, with a sequel dealing with the history of illness. Most importantly, British historians revolutionized art history in the twentieth century, in two phases: first by creating iconography as a special discipline distinct from the study of artists and styles: and a second phase, led by Francis Haskell, whereby interest focused on those who commissioned works of art, the working conditions of artists, and most recently, the existence of a proper art market. These themes were soon explored by historians of music and spectacle. The social context of Italian culture remains central to British scholarship.

   In contrast, the American academy long remained attached to cultural history as the 19th century conceived it. It is still heavily saturated in idealist philosophy, in the superiority of ideas over matter, of representations over phenomena. This generalization must be hedged with some important qualifications. America is very big and it boasts a wide variety of postsecondary institutions. If the predominant stream still conceives of politics in tandem with intellectual history, in the tradition of Franco Venturi and Eric Cochrane, American scholars led the French and British in exploring the archives of church and state tribunals to better understand ordinary attitudes and behaviour. Often inspired by the pioneering work of Natalie Davis on nearby France (though she in turn, began with French models), Americans more frequently employ microhistory as a heuristic tool. If their interest in social and economic history was new in the 1970s, multiplying threefold in that decade, intellectual history was never far from the main focus. North American historians were beginning to discover ÒmentalitiesÓ as well, though the ÔpriestÕs-eye viewÕ they often adopt reflects the unusual religiosity of the United States. By the 1990s, when economic history ceased to be fashionable, studies of the origins and application of Tridentine reforms became very numerous, and they show no sign of flagging. Under the influence of feminism, we see fresh interest in nuns, women saints, women writers and readers, and women painters, too. The traditional study of academies is giving way to the examination of collectors and collections, in both art and science. Postmodern theories (an updated form of relativism) applied to science sometimes give us a better understanding of how patronage and convention shaped the scientific revolution. American anthropological and behavioural history is often inspired by the theories of French intellectuals like Michel Foucault. Ironically, given his empirical shortcomings, he has not the place in France that he has acquired in the United States where archival training is often summary or lacking altogether even at the most advanced levels.

   In the mass of new publications, a growing number of good historians now choose Italy as their field of investigation. In the course of the 1980s, and above all in the 1990s, with more than 3,000 titles, early modern Italy was finally ÒrecoveredÓ. Today there are probably around 2,000 active scholars in the community publishing work in English or French. Together, they produce something over 300 books and articles annually, around 5 every week. The university courses including early modern Italy or exclusively devoted to it are ever more numerous. One telling sign of it is in the number of textbooks. European surveys often ÔforgotÕ to include anything on Italy, or dismissed the region under the pretext that Ònothing happened thereÓ. Not having a proper textbook for the course I taught, I wrote the first one myself, published in 2000. Within eighteen months, two others appeared in English, and two more in French, all destined for undergraduates. If traditional Renaissance history is in decline, the history of Early Modern Italy continues to expand, for there are still new and important questions to investigate for the first time. The field still lacks a proper journal, however, which would surely gain by being multilingual. By deliberately excluding studies before circa 1750, the Journal of Modern Italian History remains faithful to a 19th-century vision of the country. Fortunately, the leading journals of the historical profession - Journal of Modern History, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Past and Present - concede an ever-greater space to the history of the peninsula.

   Let us venture beyond a simple statistical analysis to look at the country that emerges from almost 9,300 titles. A bibliography that included Italian-language publications too, would cover every corner of the territory. This is both an advantage and a defect of Italian historiography, whose inspiration is local above all. There is an infinite number of local studies researched with filial love for the ÒpatriaÓ. Very few Italian historians of the early modern period are interested in the entire area. Many senior researchers are not even interested in the towns where they hold a chair at the local university, for they come from away and take the first convenient train home.

   On the other hand, titles published in English and French must usually satisfy the strategy of the publisher, either scientific or commercial. These strategies influence quite a bit the offer of titles on the marketplace, again either academic or commercial. No-one should study a small - or ugly - locality unless it offers some greater interest. There will always be room for yet another book on Rome, or Venice, or Florence. The result, when I could identify that the bookÕs theme dealt with a specific place, was that publishers prefer books that deal with places we already know well.

   A recent collection of articles entitled, ÒBeyond FlorenceÓ, implied that historians are interested primarily in the Tuscan capital. The bookÕs title is misleading. It is Venice that comes first as the object of the most studies, in the most rubrics. Behind it comes Rome. Florence and Naples are also well served. It would be inaccurate to claim that the Mezzogiorno is forgotten entirely, although the preponderance of studies looks at Italy north of the Arno river. Early modern Italy to judge from this bibliography alone comprises of a few big cities, with little thought even to the other ÔcapitalsÕ: Genoa, Bologna, Mantua, Parma, Ferrara, Torino. The precise hierarchy depends upon the rubric. In the history of science one will find Padua and Milan.

   There are a few good reasons to showcase the principal cities. They were centres of the higher administration, places of power and decision. One could claim (though I doubt it) that in these few cities, we see the origins of todayÕs Italy, the starting point of the modern world. But to study just a few places gives a false idea of Italy as it was, that is, a country primarily rural and agricultural. But some of the big cities are almost invisible too! Every city in the Mezzogiorno outside Naples, for example. The most flagrant example of scholarly neglect would be Messina, a giant before the revolt of 1674, centre of commerce and naval power, and who knows what else? Catania doesnÕt figure alone in a single instance. The cities and regions of central Italy - even beautiful ones - are hardly visible. Large, busy and rich cities, centres of culture and innovation, figure rarely. Piacenza and Cremona, Vicenza and Pavia, Lucca and Perugia, Como, Ravenna, Reggio Emilia and Padova; the complete list of forgotten cities would be a long one, as would be the list of forgotten regions - the Marches, Abruzzo, Umbria, Romagna, Liguria, Basilicata, Calabria and Sardinia. Perhaps fires or earthquakes have deprived some of them of precious archives. But often the neglect is just due to the lack of imagination of thesis supervisors.

   Merely plugging holes makes little sense by itself, however much we should diversify the places we study. Here I would like to indicate some personal inclinations of where I would like to see historians work, in terms of problems rather than locales. Here I am referring still to works published in English or French. Sometimes there are excellent Italian-language studies of these problems. And sometimes not.

   If the work on travel literature is now abundant, historical geography remains afflicted with the curse afflicting geography in general. Nevertheless, what we could call historical ecology, the study of the environment and the ways people adapted to it, is well worth investigating. We lack above all works on the mountains and their inhabitants, problems of the exploitation of woodlands and fields, river and stream management, and the multiple activities that the mountain environment permitted or fostered.

   In political history, we should follow the French lead again and multiply the number of biographies, because this genre awakens the curiosity of readers like few others. It engages their imagination and draws them into the time and place. They cannot help but engender more analytical studies in the aftermath. What a marvellous work, the biography of the Bolognese general Marsigli by John Stoye! Would that there were one on Francesco Morosini, or Ambrogio Spinola. We cruelly lack biographies of important princes, like Ferdinando I and Cosimo III deÕMedici, Francesco I dÕEste, Ranuccio I and Ranuccio II Farnese, Filiberto Emanuele and Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy, Francesco Maria II della Rovere of Urbino. We have numerous studies now of the bureaucracy, and ever more titles dealing with military institutions. But we lack good, comprehensive works of Italy in war, which is a British strength. Who will undertake a good account of the Thirty Years War in Italy over its full breadth - 1613-1659? Its absence is a serious hindrance to a good understanding of virtually every aspect of Italian life in the 17th century.

   Economic history has traditionally dealt with markets and manufactures, but often neglects the daily business of merchants and shopkeepers of the kind Renata Ago has done for Rome. We also lack systematic studies of what we could call the standard of living, which should be central to every economic analysis. Although it is not easy to define, the huge number of post-mortem inventories buried in notarial registers of city and country make its study feasible. Along with them are the dowry descriptions, the expenses on orphans, the inventory of village shops, the pension allowances in testaments and so on. Was there really a decline in Italian standards of living during the period? These documents could answer that question.

   Social stratification and behavioural history will soon outgrow the concept of mentalities, which is both conceptually and empirically untenable. Many studies of behaviour are normative - that is, they are inspired by citations from literary texts and observations of intellectuals. This too has serious shortcomings, as does the very notion that our values are embodied in ÔdiscoursesÕ in a Foucaultian sense, which we unconsciously enact. To my mind, the developments over the last few decades in evolutionary psychology and human ethology have huge implications for behavioural history, especially when we can mine the judicial and notarial archives for empirical evidence. Any history of gender, of violence, of social stratification and of sociability that is innocent of these developments is likely to be obsolete before it is printed.

   Religious history is well developed, but it too relies on a number of key assumptions that require verification. The normative documents of the church usually only measure conformity, not belief. Now that we have access to inquisition archives, it should be possible to study not only conformity, or those practices that the church did not sanction, but also skepticism and unbelief that lay at the root of modern social secularization.

   Historians should also profit from Inquisition archives to rewrite the intellectual history of Italy. To what point did the institution interfere with the universities and colleges, did it place the teachers under surveillance, did it guide the curriculum, or did it convoke independent spirits? These are urgent questions we can now hope to answer. Today our understanding of Italian intellectual life lacks depth, but this will change when it is no longer just concerned with intellectuals. How many Italians possessed books at home, compared to French, Dutch, German or English households? It might be that Italians always read less than their neighbours, out of gregariousness. Levels of literacy in the 17th and 18th century were staggeringly low compared to northern Europe, especially given that rapid progress was noticeable in the 16th century. Here is a worthy subject of investigation if ever there was one. Did the Church stifle the development of mass literacy in Italy, unlike in France?

   Post-mortem inventories can also give us more depth in our understanding of the place of art in Italian society. They will show an astonishing number of cheap paintings and prints. Ex-voto images, left in their hundreds in sanctuaries, have not yet elicited much interest, despite their charm and their power as documents. How widespread were portraits? Who collected landscapes and still lifes, and what was the market for foreign art (principally Flemish and Dutch) in Italy? If we know a great deal about princely and elite patronage, interest tends to stop there. Interest in art also tends to limit itself to painting, sculpture and architecture. Yet there was an explosion of artistic creation in jewelry, furniture, ceramics, touching a whole panoply of luxury objects pretty much ignored by art historians.

   For the history of science, do we really need more studies on Galileo? What of the process of creeping mathematization of natural philosophy after the late 16th century, in countless forgotten theses deposited in Jesuit colleges?

   There are many other dimensions of early modern history hardly noticed in these few paragraphs, and every scholar has his or her own list of priorities. In their mass, they should help transform the field over the next generation. And through this bibliography, their efforts can be more widely known.

   A note on accents: Given the unpredictability of the transformation of accents from one programme to another, I have had to dispense with them altogether.