The Roman Inquisition
The Roman Inquisition: A Papal Bureaucracy and Its Laws in the Age of Galileo
Thomas F. Mayer
Series: Haney Foundation Series
Copyright Date: 2013
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Pages: 392
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fhz2m
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The Roman Inquisition
Book Description:

While the Spanish Inquisition has laid the greatest claim to both scholarly attention and the popular imagination, the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542 and a key instrument of papal authority, was more powerful, important, and long-lived. Founded by Paul III and originally aimed to eradicate Protestant heresy, it followed medieval antecedents but went beyond them by becoming a highly articulated centralized organ directly dependent on the pope. By the late sixteenth century the Roman Inquisition had developed its own distinctive procedures, legal process, and personnel, the congregation of cardinals and a professional staff. Its legal process grew out of the technique of inquisitio formulated by Innocent III in the early thirteenth century, it became the most precocious papal bureaucracy on the road to the first "absolutist" state. As Thomas F. Mayer demonstrates, the Inquisition underwent constant modification as it expanded. The new institution modeled its case management and other procedures on those of another medieval ancestor, the Roman supreme court, the Rota. With unparalleled attention to archival sources and detail, Mayer portrays a highly articulated corporate bureaucracy with the pope at its head. He profiles the Cardinal Inquisitors, including those who would play a major role in Galileo's trials, and details their social and geographical origins, their education, economic status, earlier careers in the Church, and networks of patronage. At the point this study ends, circa 1640, Pope Urban VIII had made the Roman Inquisition his personal instrument and dominated it to a degree none of his predecessors had approached.

eISBN: 978-0-8122-0764-4
Subjects: History
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. [i]-[iv])
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. [v]-[vi])
  3. Introduction
    Introduction (pp. 1-8)

    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...

  4. CHAPTER 1 The Roman Inquisition’s Operations
    CHAPTER 1 The Roman Inquisition’s Operations (pp. 9-37)

    The Roman Inquisition belonged to the pope. Gregory IX originally created it, Paul III revived it, Paul IV and Pius V (both former Inquisitors, Pius also having served as commissary) made it a fearsome institution. It reflects better than any other papal institution the long-term tendency to concentrate power in the pope’s hands. It gave him his most effective institutional means of exercising that power. Unlike older central organs, the Inquisition could take cognizance of nearly any kind of case and be put to nearly any purpose. Its predecessors, especially the three papal courts of the Segnature di Grazia and...

  5. CHAPTER 2 The Sacred Congregation: Inquisitors Before 1623
    CHAPTER 2 The Sacred Congregation: Inquisitors Before 1623 (pp. 38-75)

    In this chapter and the next, I offer a prosopographical study of a group of Inquisitors, originally those involved in significant ways in Galileo’s trial.¹ These men represent a majority of Inquisitors between about 1610 and 1635.² They are divided between cardinals created before and after Urban VIII’s election in 1623, the first group being mainly the creatures of Paul V. In order to try to understand their actions, I offer statistical evidence about patterns of attendance, followed by thumbnail sketches of their careers, to show as much of each man’s personality as possible, before turning at the end of...

  6. CHAPTER 3 The Sacred Congregation Under Urban VIII
    CHAPTER 3 The Sacred Congregation Under Urban VIII (pp. 76-109)

    The vast majority of the cardinals considered in Chapter 2 were promoted by Paul V. Things had changed by the time Antonio Barberini, Sr., became secretary in 1629. He together with Francesco and the Barberini “creatures,” literally, those cardinals created by Urban, made up a majority of the Congregation of the Holy Office. In addition to designated lawyer Fabrizio Verospi, the other three were lawyers as well: Laudivio Zacchia, Berlinghiero Gessi (both promoted in January 1626), and Marzio Ginetti (promoted with Verospi in August 1627). All but Verospi had in strict succession been maestro di camera to Urban, the official...

  7. CHAPTER 4 The Professional Staff
    CHAPTER 4 The Professional Staff (pp. 110-154)

    The Roman Inquisition’s professional staff provided its backbone, especially the four major officials: the commissary, assessor, notary, and fiscal. Unlike the cardinals, most of these had serious training before taking up their jobs in Rome. As with the cardinals, a historical evolution meant that by the early 1630s the principal qualification had become loyalty to one or the other of the Barberini, including of course Urban VIII. Except for the fiscal, who remained Carlo Sincero throughout our period, all three of the other offices were held by men substantially more poorly prepared than their predecessors. The most striking case is...

  8. CHAPTER 5 Inquisition Procedure: The Holy Office’s Use of Inquisitio
    CHAPTER 5 Inquisition Procedure: The Holy Office’s Use of Inquisitio (pp. 155-205)

    Adriano Prosperi has noted that the “obscurity” of the Inquisition’s rules dominates the institution’s historiography.¹ This perception contains some truth: the rules did indeed become complex, and it is likely the vast majority of defendants had little idea what they might be. Nevertheless, rules there were, and although hedged in by ramparts of sometimes impenetrable commentary and subject to constant modification, the Roman Inquisition’s trial process can be fairly clearly explicated.

    That trial process was rooted in canon law, beginning with the legislation of Innocent III.² Innocent treated inquisitio as a straightforward procedure that could be summed up in the...

  9. Conclusion
    Conclusion (pp. 206-216)

    In this book, I have recounted the evolution of the Roman Inquisition from about 1590 to 1640 as the most direct institutional expression of papal will. Originally aimed by Paul III at the threat from northern European heretics, already in the 1550s Paul IV, its motive force from the beginning, turned it more frequently against his enemies. In those first couple of decades of the institution’s existence, both purposes coexisted, in part because the Inquisition had yet to develop its own “style,” or customary procedure, and neither of those popes had trained as a lawyer. From the time Sixtus V...

  10. APPENDIX
    APPENDIX (pp. 217-226)
  11. List of Abbreviations
    List of Abbreviations (pp. 227-230)
  12. NOTES
    NOTES (pp. 231-358)
  13. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
    SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY (pp. 359-366)
  14. INDEX
    INDEX (pp. 367-382)
  15. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (pp. 383-386)
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