Katherine Aron-Beller and Christopher Black bring together fourteen essays written by some of the most important scholars of the Inquisition from Italy, the United States, England, Greece and Germany. This collection begins with an historiographical overview by the editors who, in erudite and lively fashion, track the historical and methodological shifts in writing the history of the Inquisition over recent decades, with an eye in particular to the last twenty years. In 1998 the archives of the Roman Inquisition were opened, and since then knowledge of the Holy Office has radically changed even if a huge part of the archive has been lost; at the same time several outstanding pieces of research on the Roman Inquisition had been published without the aid of the (then inaccessible) Roman archive, using the documentation held in local archives (Rotondò, Romeo, Firpo, Grendler, Jacobson-Schutte, Tedeschi, Ginzburg, Del Col …). The essays in this volume bring together Roman and local sources to demonstrate the need to integrate both sources in order to construct a more complete picture, providing a comprehensive examination of the activities of the Holy Office in the Italian territories, in Rome and its peripheries. Moreover, they portray different regional inquisitorial offices and some of them try to bridge the gap between theory and action, focusing on some inquisitorial handbooks and correspondence with the Holy Office.
The book, which is divided into five thematic sections, seeks for a new perspective on the Roman Inquisition, shedding ‘light upon the success of controlling tentacles of the Italian institution’ (p.1). The very different reality of local inquisitorial tribunals depended on the relationship between political power, bishops and nuncios. Changing balances of power challenge any point of view and these essays help to delineate a more nuanced profile. This allows for authoritative examinations of areas as diverse as Ancona and Marche (Lavenia), Livorno (Villani), Modena (Black), Friuli (Ancona and Visentin), Novara (Deutscher), and it makes the book truly ground-breaking in the richness of its case studies. Two essays deals with the Jews and their difficult condition, with innovative interpretation, such as the importance of the personality of the prosecuting inquisitor (Al Kalak and Aron-Beller). Strict control provoked conversions, a new theme for investigation (Pitassi and Solfaroli Camillocci, Dursteler, and the AHRC project on Conversion Narratives in Early Modern Europe by Ditchfield, Mazur, Shinn and Smith at the University of York, among others): Plakotos examines several conversions in Venice during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, disentangling them from questions of identity and shedding light on the centralisation of Rome in that process.
The analysis of provincial tribunals and their relationship with Rome shows the ambiguities and contradictions of many institutional entities; moreover, thanks to several sources, Barbierato, Caravale and Villani point out some important outcomes in daily life, suggesting how ignorance, dissimulation and challenging attitudes intertwined.
Irene Fosi highlights the complex activities of different tribunals and judges in Rome and in the papal territories from 1550 to 1750 in order to evaluate the inquisition's authority and precedence over all the other tribunals (p. 37). Jurisdictional conflicts affected inquisitorial justice too, but collaboration and cooperation among different tribunals were not rare: Lynn underlines the intertwined development of the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions through the mobility of books and people, ideas and procedures, with an eye to the unresolved ambiguities of jurisdiction. A provocative reading on gendered investigation is provided by Starr-Lebeau.
This book also offers multiple starting points for further research, even if the perspective chosen (the relationship between the centre and peripheries) is not followed by all its contributors.
