Inquisition, Index, Zensur: Wissenskulturen der Neuzeit im Widerstreit (review)

The opening of the archives of the Roman Inquisition and the Congregation of the Index in 1998 was a much-publicized event. The fact that the documents of both congregations were withheld from scholars even after the opening of the Vatican Archives in the nineteenth century naturally gave rise to much speculation as to their content, some of it quite fanciful and unfounded. In the years since Pope John Paul II mandated that scholars be given access to these materials, several conferences have been organized with the aim of giving a more accurate and comprehensive picture of what the archives actually contain and of evaluating their holdings. The volume under review presents the papers, some in the form of finished articles, of a conference on the Inquisition, the Index, and censorship held in May, 2000, at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt.

Four parts, unequal in length, make up the book. Predictably, contributions in the first serve as a general introduction except for an essay by Hugo Wolf devoted to the "German" revision of the Index of Forbidden Books. It shows that the censors and counselors whom Pope Leo XIII put in charge of this enterprise were almost all Germans and men informed about major intellectual currents of their time. They belonged to different parties, argued and disagreed, and in general made obvious that Rome was no "Big Brother" when it came to censorship.

Part Two, entitled "Foudations," is devoted to information about the newly organized archive and the sorts of materials it contains or contained. Alejandro Cifres, the current archivist, gives a short history of the archive's holdings and a description of its major fondi, capped by a very useful table of the organizational schema adopted for their cataloguing. This is followed by John Tedeschi's magisterial discussion of Inquisition documents that found their way to the library of Trinity College, Dublin, in the early nineteenth century. Giving a brief overview of their history and contents, he adds useful suggestions for their further study and stresses their utility not only for historians of early modern Italy but also for those of European culture broadly defined as well. Herman Schwedt summarizes his detailed work on the personnel of the two congregations from their founding in 1542 and 1571 respectively to 1917, and arrives at the figure of more than 3300 men. Surprisingly, a large number were not officials but consultores drawn into the work of the congregations as the result of "outsourcing."

Section Three is entitled "The Roman Inquisition in the Early Modern Period," and contains essays using newly accessible documents for specific studies. In the first, Peter Schmidt asks how commercial relations between regions with different religious affiliations functioned in the light of the Inquisition's claim to have jurisdiction over cases of foreigners who resided in Catholic countries. He shows that their secular rulers were anxious to give merchants of other religions guarantees as long as they did not trouble public order, and resisted the efforts of inquisitors to prevent Protestants from coming into Catholic lands. In fact, the latter, together with their Catholic colleagues, strenuously resisted the Inquisition's efforts to control them. This essay is followed by Massimo Firpo's "Theology, History and Politics in the Last Trial of Pietro Carnesecchi by the Inquisition (1566-67)." Historians know Firpo's impressive edition of the documents pertaining to the case of Carnesecchi, and this piece is but a small part of a large enterprise. His argument has been made before: that this trial was alsothe occasion to posthumously accuse the irenic spirituali of the 1540's of heterodoxy with the possible purpose of going again after Cardinal Morone. But Firpo also suggests the possibility of a political deal between Cosimo I de'Medici and Pope Pius V: if the former would extradite Carnesecchi, the...