Abstract

The article analyzes how in recent decades early modern historians have been dealing with the relationship between literacy, religion, and the press in the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries, and how they have been rethinking and reshaping the centuries-long pattern marked by the dramatic division between Catholics and Protestants - a rift that among other things was to affect books and reading skills. Questioning the recent, more conciliatory historiography, which is inclined to emphasize similarities, connections and exchanges between the two sides, this paper aims to design (or, better, redesign) what we could call a «geography of differences». By focusing on the Italian and Iberian peninsulas and their particular features, two key issues are reconsidered and reinterpreted: the first is the individual reading of the vernacular Bible with all it entailed; the second is the role of catechisms in literacy processes.