RECENT STUDIES of the ROMAN INQUISITION* Anne Jacobson
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RECENT STUDIES OF THE ROMAN INQUISITION* Anne Jacobson Schutte Pope Paul III’s constitution Licet ab initio, issued on 21 July 1542, established the Roman Inquisition. A belated institutional response to the Protestant challenge, this new-model Inquisition differed in several ways from its predecessor, which had operated since the early thirteenth century. Judges of the faith bearing an old name, inquisitors, reappeared on the scene.1 Like their predecessors in the medieval Inquisition, holders of this position were Observant Dominican or Conventual Franciscan friars. From the mid-sixteenth century on, however, they were nominated by and reported to a committee of cardinals in Rome, the Congregation of the Holy Of\ ce, the rst of \ fteen such central organs eventually put in place. By the early seventeenth century, when all the congregations were in full operation, the papacy was well on the way to becoming what some historians consider the rst “modern” bureaucratic government.2 Except for the Republic of Lucca (which never accepted it) and Sic- ily and Sardinia (under the jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition), the Roman Inquisition operated across Italy, with a presence much thinner in the south than in the center and north, and on the islands of Corsica * I am very grateful to Andrea Del Col for furnishing information essential to the completion of this essay. 1 As scholars now recognize, the term “judge of the faith” is more accurate than “inquisitor,” for other of\ cials—above all, ordinaries and their vicars—investigated and prosecuted heresy. Silvana Seidel Menchi “I giudici dell’Inquisizione romana: inquisitori e vescovi, commissari, nunzi, cardinali, papi,” Cromohs: Cyber Review of Modern Historio- graphy 10 (2005) (unpaginated), to be found at http://www.cromohs.uni .it. 2 See Paolo Prodi, Il sovrano ponti ce, un corpo e due anime. La monarchia papale nella prima età moderna (Bologna, 1982); in English, The Papal Prince, One Body and Two Souls: The Papal Monarchy in Early Modern Europe, translated by Susan Haskins (Cambridge, 1988). The system of governance by congregations supplanted an older model, the papal consistory (cardinals meeting as a committee of the whole). Agostino Borromeo, “Il dissenso religioso tra il clero italiano e la prima attività del Sant’Uf\ cio Romano,” in Per il Cinquecento religioso italiano. Clero cultura società, edited by Maurizio Sangalli (Rome, 2003), 455–85, at 466. For an intelligent assessment of work on this subject, see Moshe Sluhovsky, “Authority and Power in Early Modern Italy: Recent Italian Historiography,” The Historical Journal 47 (2004): 501–10. 92 anne jacobson schutte (until its passage from Genoa to France in 1768) and Malta.3 With a frequency and modality that have yet not been securely established, it was also present in the papal enclave of Avignon, in Franche-Comté, and in the cities of Carcassonne, Toulouse, and Cologne.4 In many procedural respects, it functioned differently from the Spanish and Por- tuguese Inquisitions. Most importantly, it did not begin as or become a department of any secular state. Popes did not unilaterally impose the Inquisition without obtaining consent from individual rulers, nor could they have done so. In the Venetian Republic, the only Italian state not under Habsburg domination, representatives of the secular government soon came to play a regular, formally recognized role in its operations.5 Everywhere, inquisitors and their masters in Rome continually struggled to maintain a cooperative relationship with the secular authorities, which was absolutely necessary for the Holy Of\ ce to function. In the second half of the eighteenth century, one Italian state after another abolished the Inquisition,6 but as a Roman tribunal it lived on. Renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1965,7 it operates out of the headquarters it has occupied since the 1560s: Palazzo del Sant’Uf\ zio, just south of Piazza San Pietro. From 25 November 1981 until 19 April 2005, when he was elected pope, the 3 On Lucca, where heresy was handled by the Of\ zio sopra la religione, a civic magistracy established in 1545, see Simonetta Adorni-Braccesi, “Una città infetta”. La Repubblica di Lucca nella crisi religiosa del Cinquecento (Florence, 1994), Chap. 5, 319–85. On the con ict-fraught sharing of responsibility for surveillance over heresy in the city of Naples, see Giovanni Romeo, “Una città, due inquisizioni. L’anomalia del Sant’Uf\ cio a Napoli nel tardo ‘500,” Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 24 (1988): 42–67. Still valu- able is the classic study by Luigi Amabile, Il Santo Of\ cio della Inquisizione in Napoli, 2 vols. (Città di Castello, 1892; one-volume reprint Soveria Mannelli, 1987). For a region southeast of Naples, see Pierroberto Scaramella, “Con la croce al core”. Inquisizione ed eresia in Terra di Lavoro (1551–1564) (Naples, 1995). On Malta, see Alexander Bonnici, Medieval and Roman Inquisition in Malta (Rabat, Malta, 1988). 4 Andrea Del Col, “Le strutture territoriali e l’attività dell’Inquisizione romana,” in L’Inquisizione. Atti del Simposio internazionale, ed. Agostino Borromeo (Vatican City, 2003 [but 2004]), 345–80, at 351–52. Whether these tribunals in fact depended on and were consistently supervised by the Congregation of the Holy Of\ ce in Rome remains to be veri ed in the Decreta Sancti Of\ cii (see below, pp. 102–3). 5 For a recent brief survey of the Inquisition in Venice, see Anne Jacobson Schutte, Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618–1750 (Baltimore, 2001), Chap. 2, 26–41. 6 On the abolition of the Inquisition, one may begin with a convenient but not completely reliable survey by Romano Canosa, Storia dell’Inquisizione in Italia dalla metà del Cinquecento alla \ ne del Settecento, 5 vols. (Rome, 1986–90). 7 Integrae servandae, a motu proprio issued by Paul VI on 7 December 1965..