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The Catholic Historical Review 88.3 (2002) 597-599



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Book Review

Processus in Causa Fidei.
L'evoluzione dei manuali inquisitoriali nei secoli XVI-XVIII e il manuale inedito di un inquisitore perugino


Processus in Causa Fidei. L'evoluzione dei manuali inquisitoriali nei secoli XVI-XVIII e il manuale inedito di un inquisitore perugino. By Andrea Errera. [Archivio per la Storia del Diritto Medioevale e Moderno. Studi e Testi raccolti da Filippo Liotta, 4.] (Bologna: Monduzzi Editore. 2000. Pp. xvii, 427.)

In the course of the renaissance in inquisitorial study now under way, a large variety of sources has been identified that directly enlightens us about the organization and activities of the Roman Inquisition and its peripheral tribunals. The most relevant are trials, sentences, the correspondence exchanged between the Supreme Congregation of the Inquisition in Rome and its outlying branches, or between the latter and its smaller outposts staffed by lower officials. These documents have long been available in Italian public and ecclesiastical libraries and archives, or dispersed abroad in such accessible repositories as the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris or Trinity College Library in Dublin. The recent, formal opening in January, 1998, of the Roman Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the former Holy Office) has made available in a long, virtually unbroken series an important new source, the decreta generated by the Cardinal Inquisitors at their weekly meetings in which they expressed opinions on the matters that had come before them, frequently pertaining to queries and requests for clarification submitted by the peripheral tribunals. The aforementioned records, the vast majority still available only in manuscript, help to illuminate the actual day-to-day practice of the Inquisition.

But there is still another, key source that has long been known to students interested in penetrating the juridical side of inquisitorial activity, namely, the law books or manuals, generally written by inquisitors steeped in both law and theology, for the guidance of those Dominican and occasionally Franciscan friars, the humble officials frequently lacking in formal legal training who administered the local courts and were responsible for conducting trials for heresy. Unlike the other aforementioned sources, these law books, with a few notable exceptions, were printed and are available in many major research libraries on both sides of the Atlantic. While trials, sentences, correspondence, and decrees permit us to view the Inquisition in action, the manuals enunciate and clarify the underlying theory, although they occasionally refer to actual, historical cases to illustrate points of law.

It is on the inquisitorial law book, its evolution and its most prominent and widely used examples, focusing chiefly on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that Andrea Errera bases his fine, thoroughly researched and elegantly presented work. Other studies devoted to the Inquisition have to some degree had to confront the issue of the manuals. There also have been some recent, unsatisfactory attempts to publish abridgments and vernacular translations of such leading examples as Nicolau Eymeric's fourteenth-century Directorium Inquisitorum or Eliseo Masini's early seventeenth-century Sacro Arsenale. But Errera's is, to the best of my knowledge, the first, comprehensive, full-length work devoted entirely to the subject and thus constitutes a milestone in the ongoing research. [End Page 597]

The Processus in causa fidei begins with a survey of the medieval beginnings of inquisitorial activity and then passes to a comparison between this earlier phase and the modern institution that was called into being in mid-sixteenth century Italy to respond to the Protestant threat there. The work argues cogently how the altered circumstances required the creation or re-elaboration of the juridical literature. Errera identifies the three principal sixteenth-century phases in manual production, first the Spanish, then the Italian, and finally the era from the final decades of that century into the first years of the next dominated by the Spaniard Francisco Peña (d. 1612), prominent curialist and arguably the chief Roman expert in inquisitorial jurisprudence. His final, critical redaction of...

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