Conversione come scelta: Libertas Cominetti e Shlomoh Molko a confronto

The article examines the promelatic concept of religious freedom in the Renaissance by presenting the parallel case of two converts, Libertas Cominetti, who was born Jewish, converted to Catholicism at the beginning of the 16th century, and then, according to some sources, converted to islam, only to be quartered by the Knights of Rodi in 1522, and the case of Shelomoh Molko, who was born a Catholic in a converso family and then, after meeting David Reuveni, converted to Judaism, and circumcised himself with a sharp stone. He ended up becoming a prophet and was burned at the stakes in Mantua in 1532. These two destinies seem apt to illustrate the price of religious freedom, if anything of that sort is possible, in a growingly confessionalized European panorama. At the same time their individual fate seems to point to a further declination of religious freedom, that is to say, freedom from religion, as a utopian and probably unatteinable horizon.