The Roman Inquisition: A Papal Bureaucracy and Its Laws in the Age of Galileo

Introduction

1 Introduction Ignorance and prejudice shroud few institutions as they do the Inquisition.1 About the prejudice there is probably little more to be done than about any other kind. About the ignorance there is hope. For a simple start, historians can abandon their predecessors’ seriously distorting tendency to lump together into a single entity the numerous medieval inquisitions and their major early modern successors, one of which, the subject of this book, the Roman Inquisition, had branches that bore only a family resemblance to each other. The target of mob action from at least the sixteenth century and of polemics from at least the seventeenth, until recently “the Inquisition” or most of what was known about it concerned the Spanish variety, one of three early modern versions (the Portuguese is the third) and a major element in the black legend of the evils of Spain and Spanish Catholicism.2 About the Roman Inquisition , the most important of these versions, for a long time little more was known than could be gleaned from the study of a handful of important cases, especially Galileo’s, reinforced by fairly regular use of published inquisitorial manuals.3 Then in the 1990s, scholarship turned a corner. The decade began with the publication of a collection of John Tedeschi’s articles, some of which had originally appeared almost thirty years earlier, and ended with the opening of the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1998.4 In between came Francisco Bethencourt’s The Inquisition: A Global History, 1478–1834 and Francesco Beretta’s doctoral thesis on Galileo’s trial.5 Together, these set the stage for an assault on the fastnesses of the Roman Inquisition’s archives. A framework had been built, and the documents were at last available with which to flesh it out and test its soundness.6 In addition to the Vatican’s robust refusal to admit more than a handful of scholars to the Congregation’s records at any time—the reading room still seats only twelve—a number of other prejudices and omissions in historical scholarship made, and still make, study of the Roman Inquisition difficult. introduction 2 One major problem is that its status as chief guardian of the faith automatically means that issues of personal belief enter in, and usually not to the Inquisition ’s advantage. Its defenders have often done more harm than good. Another serious distortion arises from that fact that its “victims” have always attracted most interest.7 The existence of victims presupposes victimizers, men who abused power and procedure, not to mention prisoners. Unfortunately, next to nothing was known about either how the Inquisition’s power developed or its procedures. Thus another difficulty arose. The study of bureaucracy and law has not been much in favor for a generation. Just when the Inquisition ’s own bureaucratic and legal documents became available, the opportunity to profit from them was largely missed. Instead most studies continued to run along the old tracks laid down by those seventeenth-century polemics, perhaps especially in the study of Roman censorship.8 Further, the history of early modern law and lawyers, canon and civil, is much less well served than is that of their medieval predecessors.9 The excellent theoretical and historical reconstruction of Western law in the central Middle Ages in Harold J. Berman ’s Law and Revolution had no sequel, or rather, the sequel concentrated on Germany and England and the impact of the Protestant Reformations.10 It seems nothing of legal or constitutional consequence happened in the home of what Berman in the subtitle of his first volume called “the western legal tradition .” Berman might be forgiven for shying away from Italy, given the complexities of its legal landscape that almost defy description much less analysis.11 The sheer quantity of legal publication, the subject of intense interest by the Inquisition, combined with the often gnomic discourse and system of reference in which it was couched, presents another deterrent.12 If we confine our attention simply to Rome and the papacy, much of the administrative and constitutional history needed to provide context for any individual papal judicial organ has not been done. Rome has had no Geoffrey Elton, for good or ill.13 Instead, historians have thought themselves forced back on antique and usually anachronistic handbooks designed to serve inhabitants of the Roman bureaucracy at various moments, and therefore by definition not safely used in other periods.14 Thus any study of...