L’attività dell’inquisitore Fra Giulio Missini in Friuli (1645–1653): L’efficienza della normalità (review)

A sufficiently rich vein of historical information can be mined profitably for many decades. In this case, the archives of the Roman Inquisition for the Venetian province of Friuli—among the best preserved of its forty-seven Italian branches, as Andrea Del Col reminds us in the foreword (p.7)—are still being exploited usefully more than forty years after The Night Battles, Carlo Ginzburg’s path-breaking study of Friuli’s “good witches” or benandanti, was published (Torino, 1966; English translation, Baltimore, 1983). As its subtitle suggests, Visintin’s careful investigation covers the eight-year tenure of a mid-seventeenth century Inquisitor during which “normality” prevailed. Fra Missini oversaw 284 summary procedures of various kinds, while 150 denunciations yielded twenty-seven formal trials but only sixteen final sentences. The only prisoner who was tortured, Gregorio Amalteo (pp. 158–68), faced a variety of charges, including heretical propositions and divinatory magic, and received the stiffest penalty—a five-year imprisonment.

Two other men facing serious charges died in prison before they were tortured. One of them, Michele Soppe (pp. 111–21), anchors a separate chapter on Friulian benandanti, who composed only seven men among the 146 cases of magic and witchcraft in Missini’s era. As the first and only benandante to make a full confession of maleficent witchcraft, Soppe became a key figure in Ginzburg’s work and Franco Nardon’s Benandanti e inquisitori nel Friuli del Seicento (Trieste, 1999). Denounced by several witnesses and imprisoned for eighteen months, Soppe—after making a confession that left Roman headquarters skeptical—died in prison and received Christian burial; his codefendant, Domenico Miol, was convicted of magical healing and given public humiliation.

The second man, Giovanni Pietro Franceschini, a Germanophile village merchant, had purchased fifty old books (published between 1512 and 1594), nearly all by such dangerous authors as Desiderius Erasmus, Lorenzo Valla, Philipp Melanchthon, Petrus Ramus, and Heinrich Bullinger. The defendant died repentant and received Christian burial, but his books were burned in public soon afterward (pp. 137–41).Publicity from this act spurred a remarkable spike of a hundred “spontaneous” confessions of having read prohibited books, which thus composed the second category of offense in Visintin’s sample.

In Friuli, inquisitorial “normality” included the same types of cases found elsewhere in seventeenth-century Italy, with the largest category (about 35 percent) involving demonic magic and witchcraft. There were also thirty-seven voluntary conversions to Catholicism among the 600 foreign mercenaries serving in the Venetian border fortress of Palmanova, including a twenty-seven-year-old English preacher, Edward Jackson, who had spent four years in America (pp. 196–98, 321–32). The most interesting female defendant, Marta Fiascaris, was charged with fictitious sainthood (pp. 217–25). Various minor charges rounded out its agenda: irreverence; eating meat during Lent; infractions of inquisitorial procedure; a few suspected bigamists. As elsewhere, many defendants were clerics (pp. 173–91). Rome rarely intervened in such routine business. In Missini’s time, the cardinals who managed the Holy Office sent only eight letters to Friuli per year (about the same as fifty years earlier) while sending two or three times as many to less remote tribunals such as Siena or Modena (pp. 250–52).