"Il regno dei gesuiti". Olindo Guerrini e la letteratura barocca

Most scholars and the general public know of Olindo Guerrini through the success of his poetry collections published under the nickname of Lorenzo Stecchetti. But Guerrini also was a talented philologist and literary critic, particularly in Renaissance and Baroque literature. A close reading of Guerrini’s critical essays suggests an intelligent, shrewd scholar, acutely aware of the complexity of seventeenth-century literature. In many of his works, Guerrini points out the different aspects of the literary tradition in Italy after the Council of Trent. Therefore he does not hesitate to resort to sarcastic motives to denounce the Jesuitical action on intellectual life, and the pernicious political theory of Ragion di Stato. By taking into account some of his several essays, quite unusual for a librarian as Guerrini was, the aim of the present paper is to analyse in depth the topics (in the field of research on the Baroque) in which he clearly brings innovations: with particular attention to the seventeenth-century vernacular poetry