If you have ever wondered how the Roman Inquisition actually functioned on a daily basis: who helped the judges prepare their cases, assisted them in the censorship of print, managed their properties, carried out arrests on their behalf, organised public processions, oversaw the building and maintenance of their prisons and so on; then this is the book for you. In addition to the forty-seven tribunals distributed throughout most of central and northern Italy (the Kingdom of Naples operated a hybrid jurisdiction whereby the archbishop of Naples worked uneasily with a papal representative), there were over ten times that number of inquisitorial deputies or vicars. In 1657, for just the eight tribunals of the papal states – Ancona, Bologna, Faenza, Fermo, Ferrara, Gubbio, Perugia and Rimini – there were 424 vicars operating. Interestingly, most of these, unlike the inquisitors, were not mendicants but secular clergy (though from the mid-seventeenth century a concerted effort was made to make it a requirement that they were also members of religious orders). So it was these more numerous representatives of the inquisitors who rooted the Holy Office in their local communities and who also bore the brunt of local hostility. However, even before the opening of the archives of the Congregations of the Holy Office and of the Index in 1998, the relevant historiography risked replacing the so-called ‘Black Legend’, itself the product not only of contemporary Protestant propaganda, but also, as notably Massimo Firpo (b. 1946) and Adriano Prosperi (b. 1939) have taught us, instrumentalised by the inquisitors themselves, for whom fear and intimidation were important weapons in their battle against heresy and immorality, with what one might call the ‘White Legend’. The latter has been built on two main pillars: firstly, the distinction – championed famously by John Tedeschi (b. 1931) but also supported by the indefatigable research of, among others, Andrea Del Col (b. 1943) – made between moral and legal justice, with the contention that the Holy Office, subject to unprecedented concern with standardised procedures and centralised scrutiny from Rome, was often more scrupulous in upholding the latter than were secular courts. Secondly, and more recently, there has been a significant shift from concern with the (exaggerated) body count of victims to interest in the bodies that count; in other words, with the inquisitors themselves; their education and their careers. This has been the work of a younger generation of scholars: notably, by the American historian Kimberly Lynn (b. 1979), whose brilliant, game-changing book Between court and confessional (2013) illuminated the careers and writings of five inquisitors of the Suprema (i.e. Spanish Inquisition). These included Luis de Páramo (1545–1608), long-serving judge of the faith in Palermo, then under Spanish rule. Much of the groundwork for this shift in focus in attention of scholars of all three Inquisitions – in order of foundation, the Spanish (1478), Portuguese (1536) and Roman (1542) – has been laid by the monumental, four-volume, Dizionario storico dell'Inquisizione (2010), which was co-edited by Prosperi and Tedeschi, but energised by the tireless Vincenzo Lavenia (b. 1970), who has taken on Prosperi's mantle as, inter alia, co-founder in 2020 of INQUIRE (International Centre for Research on Inquisitions) at the University of Bologna. However, it is only now, with the publication of this book by Lavenia's student, Dennj Solera, that we have finally a synthetic study of the culture and ‘Society of the Roman Inquisition’ as an Italian counterpart to the work of Lynn cited above; but with broader range. Importantly, Solera has already won his spurs with a fine, prize-winning study of the inquisitor's household in the important Adriatic port of Ancona (‘Sotto l'ombra della patente del Santo Officio’: i familiares dell'inquisizione romana tra XVI e XVII secolo, 2020). The book under review is divided into three sections, beginning with a close-up look at the key office-holders of the inquisition: aside from the inquisitor himself, these included his vicar, his notary, his attorney who acted as prosecutor at the tribunal (avvocato fiscale) and finally his nominated agent (mandatario) who represented the Inquisitor in discussions with other bodies. The second section of the book widens the focus to include also the inquisitors’ legal experts (consultori) who defended him with their quills and then those licensed members of his household (familiares) permitted to bear arms so they could defend and enforce the inquisitor's will. The final section steps back to consider the ‘inquisitorial society’ referred to in the book's title as a whole: namely the frequently disruptive impact of these privileged associates of the local inquisitors, identified not only by their distinctive livery based on the sign of the cross (hence the term crocesignati), but also by their right to bear arms as well as the privilege or licence (patente, hence their name patentati) of being excused various local taxes as well as being exempt from trial by civil courts, though significantly the ecclesiastical jurisdiction they were subject to excluded the local bishop. Collectively, these privileges draw attention to the paradox that even as the tribunals of the inquisition have come to be associated with the imposition of a suffocating social discipline, the very instrument used was a law unto itself. This comprehensive, finely granulated study of the officials who assisted the judges of the faith and made their authority real even as their not infrequently disruptive behaviour compromised their effectiveness takes our understanding of the Roman Inquisition to another level. Therefore I sincerely hope that such an important study will soon be translated into English.
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