page_title: Celio Secondo Curione
section_title: In Switzerland
hierarchical_section_title: Celio Secondo Curione / In Switzerland
caption_attribution_description: English: Johannes Oporinus Polski: Johannes Oporinus
context_page_description: Celio Secondo Curione was an Italian humanist, grammarian, editor and historian, who exercised a considerable influence upon the Italian Reformation. A teacher in Humanities, university professor and preceptor to the nobility, he had a lively and colourful career, moving frequently between states to avoid denunciation and imprisonment: he was successively at Turin, Milan, Pavia, Venice and Lucca, before becoming a religious exile in Switzerland, first at Lausanne and finally at Basel, where he settled. He was famous and admired as a publisher and editor of works of theology and history, also for his own writings and teachings, and for the wide sphere of his friendships and correspondence with many of the most interesting reformists, protestants and heretics of his time, though his energetic influence was at times disruptive. The imputation of antitrinitarianism is very doubtful. Curio published under the Latin form of his name, but scholarship has adopted the Italian form.
context_section_description: With letters of recommendation from Konrad Pellikan and Heinrich Bullinger, Curio went by Bern to Geneva. He had crossed the frontier in Valtellina in company with another heretic, the antitrinitarian Camillo Renato, whom he described to Bullinger as "very outstanding in letters and religion" and "good and learned among the best". Eventually he obtained a place as Praefectus studiorum in the Latin school at Lausanne. In 1544 his plainly anticlerical and antipapistical dialogue Pasquillus Extaticus et Marphorius made its first appearance in a collection of Pasquinades, Pasquillorum Tomi Duo, by various authors, which Curio introduced through the press of Giovanni Oporino at Basel. Pasquillus Extaticus acquired a great following throughout Europe, and rapidly appeared independently of the collection in several different languages.
  Curio ventured back incognito into Italy to collect his wife and children from Lucca, and his movements were dogged by papal agents. While staying at an inn at Pescia, a senior bailiff came in looking for him. Curio was dining, and jumped up with a meat knife in his hand. The captain cowered in a corner, and Curio walked straight out past the guards outside, leapt on his horse and rode off. He was obliged to leave the youngest child Dorotea in care of the family of the humanist Aonio Paleario. He went on to Ferrara to deliver to Duchess Renata the Commentarii in Matthaeum which Bullinger had entrusted to him.
  Returning to Lausanne, where three more daughters were born to him, he maintained a diffident attitude towards the Calvinist theology prevalent there, but avoided open polemic or dissention. He revised his Aranei Encomion, publishing a second edition at Basel in 1544 under the title Araneus, seu De Providentia Dei, with which were included several shorter tracts including one on the Immortality of the Spirit, drawing overtly upon Pythagorean and Platonist concepts. He finished a new book, the Pro Vera et Antiqua Ecclesiae Christi Autoritate. In 1546 he had to leave Lausanne over an affair with a female student.
  In Basel, where he was reunited with his family, he held a teaching post at the University from 1547. Here he remained for the rest of his life as Professor of Rhetoric, as editor and translator. His circle of friends in Basel included theologian Martin Borrhaus, printers including Johannes Frobenius and Giovanni Oporino, and the academic jurist Bonifacius Amerbach. He maintained contact with other religious exiles, including Sebastian Castellio (who had left Geneva in 1544 having fallen out with Calvin), and with the Italian Lelio Sozzini. It is not agreed whether he was then in contact with the Netherlander David Joris, later sentenced as an heretic. From Basel he maintained a wide network of correspondence, principally with Bullinger, but also with Wolfgang Musculus, Johannes Sturm, Philipp Melanchthon and other theologians. Curio published part of his correspondence in 1553 (Selectarum Epistolarum).
  As Professor he gained high respect: he took on many students, some of whom lodged in his house, and had contact with the many Polish students who were then in Basel. Deeply interested in the English Reformation, Curio, who had prepared a Latin translation of a sermon of Bernardino Ochino published in 1544, made the most of Ochino's presence in Basel in 1547. When Ochino travelled into exile in England in that year he was carrying books and letters of introduction from Curio to Sir John Cheke, preceptor to King Edward VI.
caption: Ioannes Oporinus
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