About Cristianesimo Nella Storia

Cristianesimo nella Storia: Journal Profile

Cristianesimo nella Storia — Christianity in History — is a peer-reviewed Italian scholarly journal devoted to the history of Christianity, published in Bologna by the Fondazione per le scienze religiose (the Foundation for Religious Sciences, the Bologna institute long associated with the historian Giuseppe Alberigo) and issued through Società Editrice Il Mulino, with its journal presence carried on the Rivisteweb platform. Its print ISSN is 0393-3598 and its electronic ISSN is 2612-2227. Founded by Giuseppe Alberigo and published since 1980, it appears three times a year and publishes research of international standing on how Christian faith, churches and cultures have interacted from the world of the Old Testament and Judaism through to the secularised societies of the present day.

To place the journal correctly, think of the Bologna school of church history. In the second half of the twentieth century Bologna became one of the world centres for the historical study of Christianity — above all for the history of councils, of Vatican II and of the institutions and ideas that have shaped Christian life — and Cristianesimo nella Storia is one of the journals that grew out of that milieu and still carries its intellectual signature: historically rigorous, theologically literate, international in authorship, and interested in Christianity not as an isolated doctrine but as a historical force in continuous contact with the cultures around it. Historians of Christianity, of the churches, of theology and of exegesis are its natural authors and readers.

At a glance

The older directory record for this title again carried artefacts worth correcting openly: it expressed the publisher as a bare numeric code and the scope as a quartile label. The journal's publisher, as its own platform states, is the Fondazione per le scienze religiose in Bologna, with Il Mulino as publishing house; its scope is the history of Christianity. This profile is built from the publisher's own description of the journal, from the bibliographic record for its ISSNs, and from foreground bibliometric resolution described below.

History: Alberigo, Bologna and a journal of the history of Christianity

Cristianesimo nella Storia was founded by Giuseppe Alberigo (1926–2007), one of the most influential church historians of the twentieth century, whose five-volume history of the Second Vatican Council set the terms on which that council is studied, and whose Bologna institute — the Institute for Religious Sciences, today the Fondazione per le scienze religiose Giovanni XXIII — trained and hosted generations of historians of Christianity from across Europe and beyond. A journal founded in that house, in 1980, was never going to be a parochial bulletin. From the start it was conceived as an international research journal in which the history of Christianity would be written with the full apparatus of modern historical scholarship and in conversation with theology and biblical exegesis.

The journal's longevity is itself documented in its own apparatus. In its thirtieth year the indices for 1980–2009 were issued as a supplement and made available in digital format, and the publisher's page lists general indices year by year through the present decade — a small detail that speaks to an editorial culture that treats its own back run as a scholarly resource to be kept usable. The first issue of each year also carries an index for the preceding twelve months. The Journals World record anchored to this title gives Scopus-era coverage spanning 2012–2025, but the journal's own history runs from 1980, and readers should not mistake a database's coverage window for the life of the journal: the 1980 start, the thirtieth-year index supplement covering 1980–2009, and the continuous annual indices are the stronger evidence, and they are the publisher's own.

Direction of the journal has passed within the Bologna tradition: the publisher's description named Professor Giuseppe Ruggieri as director in an earlier version, and the current Rivisteweb presentation names Professor Silvia Scatena. Both are scholars of the history of Christianity formed in the same research culture. Mastheads are living things; this profile records the current name as given by the publisher at checking time and advises authors to confirm the serving director and editorial contacts on Rivisteweb when they need them.

Aims and scope

The publisher's own description defines the journal's territory precisely: it publishes research of international importance by authoritative scholars on the history of Christianity, focusing in particular on the contexts and cultures with which Christians have come into contact, from the Old Testament and Judaism to the secularised society of today. Each element of that sentence does real work, and unpacking it gives the clearest guide to what belongs in the journal.

The whole chronological span. Few journals of religious history genuinely cover two millennia plus their biblical antecedents. Cristianesimo nella Storia does: ancient Christianity and its Jewish and Greco-Roman matrices; medieval Christendom in East and West; the Reformations and the confessional age; missions and the global expansion of Christianity; the churches under modernity, totalitarianism and secularisation; and the contemporary period, including Vatican II and its reception — a subject on which the Bologna tradition has a particular authority. An author whose work falls in any of these periods is working inside the journal's map.

Contact and context as the organising idea. The journal's distinctive emphasis is Christianity in contact: with Judaism, with Islam, with the religions and cultures of Asia, Africa and the Americas, with states and empires, with philosophy, law, art and science, and with the secular cultures of modern Europe. Studies that isolate a doctrine from its historical setting fit less well than studies that show a belief, an institution or a practice being formed, contested or transformed in a concrete historical world.

Three disciplines in one conversation. The journal explicitly updates its readers on new ideas emerging from international research in history, theology and exegesis, and it publishes across those boundaries: historical studies proper; work on the history of theology and of theological ideas; and exegetical and biblical-historical research where it bears on the history of Christianity. The common thread is historical method and international scholarly significance, not confessional allegiance; the journal is a scholarly publication of a research foundation, and its pages are open to the international community of the discipline.

Article types. A typical issue combines full research articles; reports and shorter notices that register ongoing work and debates; and reviews that keep readers current with international scholarship. One issue each year is a monographic special issue devoted to a single theme, a format the Bologna journals use to define a problem and gather the scholars best placed to advance it. Prospective authors should note the implication: alongside the open submission stream stands a curated thematic stream, and a manuscript that fits a forthcoming theme may find its natural home by that route, while a manuscript outside any theme competes in the general stream on its merits.

Editorial and publishing arrangements

The journal is published by the Fondazione per le scienze religiose in Bologna, and Società Editrice Il Mulino — one of Italy's principal academic publishing houses, itself based in Bologna — is the publisher of record, with the journal presented, sold and read digitally through Rivisteweb, Il Mulino's journal platform. That three-part arrangement (research foundation as the journal's home, established academic publisher as producer, dedicated platform as the digital channel) is characteristic of serious Italian humanities publishing, and it gives the title both its scholarly governance and its professional production: structured issues with DOIs at article level, a searchable archive on the platform, and the indexing of its tables of contents year by year that the publisher maintains.

Peer review is stated plainly in the publisher's description: this is a peer-reviewed journal. Submissions are assessed by specialists, and the journal's reputation in the discipline rests on the authority of its authors and the rigour of that assessment. Details that change over time — the exact submission route, the current editorial board, the names of section editors — are not frozen in this profile, deliberately: they are stated on the journal's Rivisteweb page, which is where an author should take them from at the time of submitting. An article processing charge position is not publicly disclosed in the sources consulted for this profile; subscription humanities journals of this type ordinarily do not finance themselves through author charges, but authors should confirm the current position with the publisher rather than rely on any generalisation, including this one.

Indexing, identifiers and ranking context

The title's identifiers are print ISSN 0393-3598 and electronic ISSN 2612-2227, and both should be given when cataloguing or citing the journal, because databases differ in which form they index. The pre-existing Journals World record placed the journal in the fourth quartile (Q4) in its categories with an h-index of 6, and secondary SCImago-derived listings report a SCImago Journal Rank around 0.10 for the title — values that are entirely typical for a national-language history journal and that require the standard interpretation: citation rankings in the humanities reward English-language, article-dense, science-adjacent publication patterns, and systematically understate the standing of a thrice-yearly Italian journal whose influence runs through books, councils scholarship and the formation of a discipline as much as through countable citations. Within the history of Christianity as a field, the journal's standing — founded by Alberigo, housed in his foundation, publishing the international scholarship of the discipline for over four decades — is the meaningful measure, and it is not the measure a quartile captures.

Foreground checks for this batch were run against the Directory of Open Access Journals search service for both ISSNs and returned no record. That outcome is recorded here for transparency, and it is consistent with the journal's actual model — Cristianesimo nella Storia is a subscription journal, not an open-access title, and DOAJ is a directory of open-access journals — but in line with this project's rule, a search return is reported as a search return, and any reader who needs the journal's status in a specific database or evaluation list (Italy's ANVUR journal classifications matter greatly to Italian academics, for example) should verify it in that list itself, where classifications are published and periodically revised.

Metrics from foreground resolution

At checking time for this batch, resolving print ISSN 0393-3598 through OpenAlex returned a single source record for Cristianesimo nella Storia which reported, at that moment: 475 works and 210 citations, a two-year mean citedness of approximately 0.042, an h-index of 6 and an i10-index of 2. OpenAlex source resolution by ISSN is known to be unstable over time, so these figures are reported strictly as the values that resolution returned at checking time, attributed to OpenAlex, and not as permanent properties of the journal; the electronic ISSN resolved to the same record family in the checks made. Two things about the figures are worth noting. The h-index of 6 agrees with the value carried in the site's pre-existing record for this post, which gives that legacy figure a measure of independent support. And the ratio of works to citations — a long back run of historical scholarship, cited steadily rather than spectacularly — is the classic signature of a humanities journal whose articles are used for decades, above all through the monographic literature they feed, which citation counts capture only in part.

What the metrics cannot tell a prospective author is the thing that matters most in this discipline: whether the journal's readers are the people who will build on the work. For the history of Christianity in the Italian and wider European scholarly world, they are. A paper placed in Cristianesimo nella Storia is placed before the community that writes the histories of the churches, councils and Christian cultures — the audience whose judgement constitutes standing in this field.

Author guidance

Fit first. The manuscript should be a work of historical scholarship on Christianity — its history, its theology in historical perspective, or the exegesis and history of its texts — addressed to an international scholarly readership and situated visibly in the international literature, not only in one national conversation. The journal's signature interest in contexts and contacts means a paper should show its subject in its historical world: the cultures, institutions and interlocutors with which its Christians were in contact.

Language and presentation. This is an Italian journal of international scholarship; articles appear in Italian and in the other major languages of the discipline, and authors should confirm the current language and formatting instructions on the journal's Rivisteweb page, including abstract requirements, before submitting. Historical journals of this tradition expect the full scholarly apparatus to be in order: archival and primary sources cited precisely, editions identified, and engagement with prior scholarship that is current and international.

Monographic issues. One issue each year is thematic. If your work matches a theme the journal has announced or is plausibly preparing, say so in your covering communication; if it does not, submit in the general stream without trying to force a thematic fit that is not there — editors can tell, and the general stream is the journal's main road in any case.

Process. Expect peer review by specialists, a decision interval measured in the rhythms of a thrice-yearly journal, and publication in one of the three annual issues, in print and on Rivisteweb, where the article receives its DOI and joins the platform archive. Because one issue a year is pre-committed thematically, the general stream effectively fills two issues a year plus space in the third, and allowing for that cadence in your own publication planning — for a tenure file, a project report, a habilitation — is simple prudence. Where a specific deadline matters, raise it with the editorial office early rather than at acceptance.

Reviews and shorter pieces. The journal also carries reports, shorter notices and reviews. Scholars who wish to contribute a review should approach the journal through the channels its page indicates rather than sending an unsolicited review text; review coverage is commissioned to serve the journal's stated purpose of keeping readers current with international research in history, theology and exegesis.

Is Cristianesimo nella Storia the right venue for your work?

Choose this journal when your manuscript is a substantial, source-based study in the history of Christianity, written to the standards of the international discipline and enriched by attention to the contexts and cultures in contact with Christian life; when appearing in the Bologna tradition's journal carries the professional meaning you need, particularly in the Italian and European academic systems; and when a thrice-yearly print-and-platform journal's timescale suits your plans. Look elsewhere when the work is devotional rather than historical, when it is a work of systematic theology or biblical studies with no historical dimension, when open-access publication is a formal requirement of your funder (this is a subscription title), or when the paper's conversation is wholly outside the history of Christianity. Within its field, however, this remains one of the addresses that specialists read first — and that, for a historian of Christianity, is the decisive fact.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs of Cristianesimo nella Storia? Print ISSN 0393-3598 and electronic ISSN 2612-2227.

Who publishes the journal? The Fondazione per le scienze religiose in Bologna, with Società Editrice Il Mulino as publisher and the Rivisteweb platform carrying the journal digitally. An older directory record showing the publisher as a number was an artefact of that record.

Who founded it, and when? Giuseppe Alberigo, in 1980. The journal's thirtieth-year index supplement covers 1980–2009.

Who directs it? The publisher's current presentation names Professor Silvia Scatena; an earlier version of the same presentation named Giuseppe Ruggieri. Confirm the serving director on Rivisteweb.

How often does it appear, and what does an issue contain? Three times a year. Issues contain research articles, reports, shorter notices and reviews; one issue per year is a monographic thematic issue, and the first issue of each year includes an index of the preceding year.

What subjects does it cover? The history of Christianity across its full span, with particular attention to the contexts and cultures with which Christians have come into contact, from the Old Testament and Judaism to today's secularised society — drawing on history, theology and exegesis.

Is it peer-reviewed? Yes, as the publisher states.

Is it open access? No. It is a subscription journal read through Rivisteweb and in print. A DOAJ search for both ISSNs at checking time returned no record, consistent with that model.

What are its metrics? OpenAlex resolution at checking time reported 475 works, 210 citations, h-index 6 and i10-index 2 for the source record; the h-index of 6 matches the site's pre-existing record. Secondary listings place the title in Q4 with a SCImago Journal Rank around 0.10 — typical values for a national-language humanities journal, to be interpreted as described in this profile.

Sources and verification note

This profile is anchored to the live Journals World record for post 36712 (slug cristianesimo-nella-storia, ISSNs 2612-2227 and 0393-3598, status publish, thin template content before this rewrite). Its description of the journal's publisher, founder, direction, frequency, article types and scope follows the publisher's own presentation of the journal on Rivisteweb (Società Editrice Il Mulino), including the statement that one issue a year is monographic and that the indices for 1980–2009 were issued in the journal's thirtieth year. Metrics are from foreground OpenAlex ISSN resolution at checking time, with the instability caveat stated in the text, and DOAJ results are reported exactly as returned. Where a detail could not be verified — for example, any article charge — it is written as not publicly disclosed rather than inferred.