Witchcraft and the Papacy: An Account Drawing on the Formerly Secret Records of the Roman Inquisition (review)

The opening of the archives of the Holy Office in 1998 has cast considerable light on the long-obscure workings of the Roman Inquisition and related institutions, as witnessed by Peter Godman’s recent studies of St. Robert Bellarmine’s career in the Holy Office and the Index. It has also shown, as Pope Leo XIII predicted at the opening of the Vatican Archives in 1881, that the Church has “nothing to fear from the publication of documents”—or, in this case, at least relatively little. Decker’s study Die Päpste und die Hexen (Darmstadt, 2003), here augmented by two new chapters dealing with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and ably translated by Erik Midelfort, effectively uses what survives in the much-traveled, reduced, and battered Roman Inquisition records, chiefly with the help of the Decreta, annual summary reports of the transactions of the Holy Office. These matters of the Roman Inquisition constitute the substance of the papal views on witchcraft and of course are only valuable for the period between the mid-sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

For the earlier period, dealt with in the first seven chapters, Decker uses the infrequent ideas concerning sorcery and witchcraft found in papal correspondence and canon law, essentially summarizing current scholarly views on the development of witchcraft theory, from Pope Gregory VII criticizing the pagan practices of the king of Denmark to the debating theologians of the early-sixteenth century (logged pro and con in table I, p. 78). Not a medievalist, Decker makes a number of irritating slips—in 1309 the pope was not forced to move to Avignon (p. 23), and King Philip IV did not confiscate the Templars’ wealth (p. 24)—and surprisingly omits some scholarship, notably that of Valerie Flint, Michael Bailey on Nider, Jan Veenstra, and Chris MacKay on the Malleus. Seven of the illustrations are from Samuel Chandler’s 1731 translation of Philip van Limbroch’s Historia Inquisitionis and therefore misleading before the early-modern period.

But from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, Decker has much to work with, and he does it very well. His maps show the tribunals of the Roman Inquisition (p. 88) and the intensity of the European witchcraft trials from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century (p. 211).The latter is particularly important, because Decker is emphatic about the differences between the Roman/Italian ideas and discourses about witchcraft and sorcery and those in northern Europe. His second table shows executions in Rome by decade, 1551–1800, in both the aggregate and the much lower numbers ordered by the Inquisition. Rome burned its last witch in 1572. The two largest Inquisition territories, Rome and Spain, were also the first major jurisdictions to stop prosecuting people for witchcraft.

Chapter 10, “The Papal Instruction Concerning Witchcraft Trials,” is illustrated by a handy diagram on page 120 of the procedure outlined in the Instructio of 1593–1603 (first printed in 1657) written by Giulio Monterenzi and later absorbed into the De inconstantia in jure admittenda vel non by Cardinal Francesco Albizzi in 1654 (printed in 1683). These treatises circulated throughout territories subject to the Roman Inquisition and helped to circulate the increasingly rigorous standards of evidence and proof of that institution. Chapter 12, on the persecutions of children in the Grisons in 1654 and 1655, tells of Albizzi’s distaste at the methods of the prosecutors and his and others’ successful efforts to save them. Chapter 13 tells of a terrible case of demonic possession in Paderborn in the 1650s in which communication with Rome elicited a stunning, if secondhand, quotation from Alexander XII (r. 1655–67) on the incompetence and ignorance of the Paderborn judiciary (pp. 168–69).

Decker does not, indeed, replace a black legend with a rosy one, but...