Inquisition

Montefeltro, Federico di [m. 1322], in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 76, Roma, Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 2012, pp. 53-58

by Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri

Review of Adriano Prosperi, Il seme dell'intolleranza. Ebrei, eretici, selvaggi: Granada 1492, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2011

by Daniele Santarelli

See: http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/view_by_stamp.php?&halsid=9ftkrlelale6ugkvtksga8a9r5&label=SHS&langue=fr&action_todo=view&id=halshs-00693974&version=2&view=short_view

1492: l’anno della scoperta dell’America che una lunga tradizione di periodizzazioni pone all’inizio dell’età moderna.... more 1492: l’anno della scoperta dell’America che una lunga tradizione di periodizzazioni pone all’inizio dell’età moderna. Gli eventi e le conseguenze di quell’anno memorabile sono al centro di questa breve ma densa sintesi/riflessione di Adriano Prosperi, divisa in tre parti, di cui la prima è significativamente intitolata “Alle origini dell’antisemitismo” ...

An example of collaboration between the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions: The Trials of the Converso Diogo Ramos and his Family (1680-1683)

by François Soyer

Does the Priest Have to Be There? Contested Marriages Before Roman Tribunals. Italy, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries. In: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften, 3, 2009, 10-30.

by Cecilia Cristellon

The Council of Trent established the requirements that a marriage be celebrated by the parish priest and two or more... more The Council of Trent established the requirements that a marriage be celebrated by the parish priest and two or more witnesses be present at the marriage (1563), but neglected to specify who the parish priest was. The decrees provoked confusion among both laymen and churchmen. Traces thereof can be found in the hitherto essentially unexplored documentation of The Congregation of the Council. This institution was founded in 1564 specifically to resolve the questions that arose all over the catholic world by the application of the decrees promulgated at Trent. The related records are held in the Vatican Secret Archive. Through an examination of this documentation, complemented by files of the Holy Office the author analyzes how the new rules were understood, experienced, used, circumvented, and manipulated both by laymen and churchmen in order to end an unwanted marriage, to facilitate a union that was socially transgressive, opposed by family, or even heterodox, and to respond to pastoral concerns.

Escravos judaizantes? Cristãos-novos, negros, índios e mestiços no Brasil colônia

by Bruno Feitler

Devarim, ano 7, n. 17, Abril de 2012

Les Albigeois et la procédure inquisitoire : le procès pontifical contre Bernard de Castanet, évêque d'Albi et inquisiteur (1307-1308)

by Julien Théry

Paru dans "Heresis", 33, 2000, p. 7-48

En 1307-1308, le pape Clément V fit mener une enquête sur les crimes imputés à l’évêque d’Albi Bernard de Castanet par... more En 1307-1308, le pape Clément V fit mener une enquête sur les crimes imputés à l’évêque d’Albi Bernard de Castanet par deux chanoines de la cathédrale, qui avaient présenté contre ce dernier, à la Curie romaine, une liste d’accusations. Le prélat était accusé négligence pastorale, de simonie, de dilapidation, d’irrégularités et cruautés systématiques dans l’exercice de la justice, d’assassinats, enfin d’incontinence. Peu après l’audition par les enquê­teurs pontificaux, à Albi, de cent quatorze témoins produits par les dénonciateurs, le pape annula la procédure. Mais trois jours plus tard, il désavoua l'évêque en le transférant du siège d’Albi à celui, bien moins prestigieux, du Puy.
L’étude de cette affaire, à partir d’une édition critique des actes de l’enquête d’Albi (conservés dans le registre 404 des Collectoriae aux Archives du Vatican), replace la démarche des dénonciateurs dans l’histoire conflictuelle de l’épiscopat de Bernard de Castanet (1276-1308) et démontre la continuité entre la volonté des témoins d’accréditer les crimes de ce dernier, d’une part, et, d’autre part, la lutte de l’oli­garchie urbaine contre la juridiction seigneuriale de l'évêque, mais aussi le mouvement anti-inquisitorial dirigé par frère Bernard Délicieux dans les années 1299-1306. Durement combattue par l'évêque, l’hérésie des bons hommes s’avère en effet être au cœur de l’affaire, bien qu’elle soit passée sous silence par les dénonciateurs. L’analyse met en valeur la nature informelle et les fondements sociaux et théologico-politiques de la dissidence religieuse. Par ailleurs, en replaçant la procédure dans la série des processus inquisitionis pour « crimes énormes » (enormia) menées par les papes contre les prélats depuis le début du XIIIe siècle et en l’étudiant en termes juridiques, l’étude de ce casus montre le rôle de l’enquête, comme instrument du gouvernement d’État, dans la construction d’une opinion publique (fama), ainsi que dans la différenciation d’une sphère administrative, à partir de la matrice judiciaire, à la fin du Moyen Âge.


Fama, Enormia. The inquiry into the crimes of bishop of Albi Bernard de Castanet (1307-1308). Government and contestation in the age of pontifical theocracy and of the heresy of good men.

In 1307-1308, pope Clement V had an inquiry made into a series of crimes attributed to bishop of Albi Bernard de Castanet by two canons of the cathedral, who had presented at the roman Curia a list of accusations against their spiritual ruler. The bishop was accused of pastoral negligence, of simony, of dilapidation, of irregularities and systematic cruelty in the practice of justice, of murders and of incontinence. Soon after the hearing by pontifical commissioners of a hundred and fourteen witnesses presented by the denouncers, the pope called off the procedure. But three days later, he implicitly penalized the bishop, removing him from the see of Albi to that of Le Puy, which was much less prestigious.
The study of this case develops from the critical edition of the records of the inquiry at Albi, which are held at the Vatican Archives (register 404 of the Collectoriae). The initiative of the denouncers is examined in the perspective of the conflictual history of Bernard de Castanet’s episcopate (1276-1308). A continuity is shown between the witnesses’ will to have the bishop’s guilt admitted, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the struggle of the urban élite against the bishop’s lordly jurisdiction, but also the anti-inquisitorial movement lead by brother Bernard Délicieux in 1299-1306. The heresy of the good men, which was vigorously fought by the bishop, proves to be at the heart of the matter, though the denouncer didn’t mention it at all. The analysis show the informal consistency and the social and theologico-political grounds of religious dissent. Besides, by replacing the procedure in the series of processus inquisitionis dealing with « enormous crimes » (enormia) launched by popes against prelates since the beginning of the XIIIth century and by examining it from a juridical point of view, the study of this casus shows the role played by inquiry, as a tool of State government, in the construction of a public opinion (fama), and in the differentiation of an administrative sphere from the judiciary matrix, in the end of the Middle Ages.

O ilustre humanista Fernão Lopes Milão e as tentativas de fuga da sua família para Hamburgo

by Florbela Veiga Frade

Published in "Revista de História da Sociedade e da Cultura". Vol. 10 (2010) T. 1, 195-218

The wealthy new Christian family Milão gained several royal contracts, providing for many decades significant input to... more The wealthy new Christian family Milão gained several royal contracts, providing for many decades significant input to the Portuguese economy. Fernão Lopes Milão was a polyglot that wrote, even under prison, several treaties on the topics of good governance and mathematics applied to the Holy Scriptures. He knew exact dates, the measurements of the Temple of Solomon and of the Ark of the Covenant. This Portuguese humanist was a pupil of Lavanha and of Father Manuel Correia, a Latinist and Hebraist friend of Luís de Camões. He corresponded with Lorenzo Ramirez de Prado, Martin de los Rios and Justus Lipsius on the translation to Portuguese of Tacitus’s Annales. His confinement under the Inquisition wiped from the collective memory all of Milão’s literary works. However, currently the Holy Office archive is public, which permits the reconstruction of part of the literary and cultural reality during Portuguese Renaissance.

Les avatars du ‘Turc’. Esclaves et commerçants musulmans en Toscane (1600-1750)/ The avatars of the 'Turk'. Muslim Slaves and Traders in Tuscany (1600-1750)

by Guillaume Calafat

Published in Jocelyne Dakhlia et Bernard Vincent (ed.), 'Les Musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe, tome 1. Une intégration invisible', Paris, Albin Michel, 2011, p. 471-522 [co-authored with Cesare Santus (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa)].

This paper deals with Muslim merchants and slaves in Early Modern Tuscany (1590-1750). The first part of this article... more This paper deals with Muslim merchants and slaves in Early Modern Tuscany (1590-1750). The first part of this article is a description of Livorno bagno (slave prison), and the second part of free Muslims (traders, diplomats, sailors) in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.

The Gallican and Jansenist Roots of Jean-Frédéric Bernard and Bernard Picart’s Vision of the Inquisition

by Guillaume Calafat

Published in Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob et Wijnand Mijnhardt (ed.), 'Bernard Picart and The First Global Vision of Religion', Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2010, p. 291-312.

This paper aims to demonstrate that the Gallican and Jansenist vision of the Catholic Inquisition influenced... more This paper aims to demonstrate that the Gallican and Jansenist vision of the Catholic Inquisition influenced Jean-Frédéric Bernard and Bernard Picart 'Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde'(1723-37).

Paolo IV (Dizionario dell'Inquisizione)

by Daniele Santarelli

Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione, ed. by A. Prosperi, Pisa, Edizioni della Scuola Normale Superiore, vol. III, 2010, p. 1164-66

“Les meilleures Causes embarassent les Juges, si elles manquent de bonnes preuves: Père Norbert’s Militant Historiography on the Malabar Rites Controversy”

by Paolo Aranha

Chapter puiblished in Thomas Wallnig, Ines Peper, Thomas Stockinger, Patrick Fiska (eds.), Europäische Geschichtskulturen um 1700 zwischen Gelehrsamkeit, Politik und Konfession (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012): 239- 268

Libros permitidos, lecturas prohibidas (siglos XVI-XVII)

by Manuel Peña Díaz

Cuadernos de Historia Moderna. Anejos, I (2002), pp. 81-101

This article study the books and other papers wich usually were read by the reli- gious minorities in Spain... more This article study the books and other papers wich usually were read by the reli- gious minorities in Spain —judaizantes, moriscos, alumbrados y luteranos—, trying to understand the form and the way this people could interpretate these books, some of them forbidden and the others wich license, according to censure of the Inquisition,

[Book Review: Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender In the Republic of Venice, 1618-1750]

by Michelle Laughran

“Conscience and Convention: the Young Furly and the ‘Hat Controversy,’” in SARAH HUTTON (ed.), Benjamin Furly 1646-1714: A Quaker Merchant and his milieu (Firenze: Olschki, 2007), 87-109, 171-268.

by Stefano Villani

In August 1661 the Quaker community of London was set in turmoil by the arrival of their fellow Irishman John Perrot.... more In August 1661 the Quaker community of London was set in turmoil by the arrival of their fellow Irishman John Perrot. The Quaker was a veteran of three years imprisonment in Rome where he had arrived in June of 1658 along with John Luffe with the intention of spreading the Creed of the Inner Light in Italy perhaps with the hope of converting the Pope. Immediately upon their arrival they had in vain asked for an audience with Pope Alexander VII and, instead, were that evening arrested by the Inquisition. Perrot was released after three years, in June 1661. During the long period of captivity Perrot had managed to get his writings to England. One of these documents fueled much discussion among the English Quakers leading to a deep schism within the movement. This document was a letter stating it was lawful for men to keep a hat on during prayer. This innovation proposed by Perrot was hardly a secondary issue: one must not forget that clothing was of great religious and civil symbolic significance that to some extent continues even in today’s secularized Europe as evidenced for example by the recent controversy on the chador. The violence of the divisions aroused by this proposal are stupefying especially considering that the Quakers, based as they were on the theology of the Inner Light had eliminated rituals and conceptions Christian tradition always considered essential (including baptism and the Eucharist). Perrot, however, did not insist on replacing the obligation of taking one’s hat off during prayer with the obligation to keep it on, but merely to contemplate the possibilities for those unwilling to take it off to remain covered if the spirit moved them to do so. Among his first supporters was Benjamin Furly, who lived in Rotterdam in 1659, who was likely in England when John Perrot entered into a collision course with the leading group of the movement. In 1662, just when the controversies surrounding the hat were at their height, Furly published a pamphlet in Dutch entitled De eere des werelds ontdeck, in which he, with a firm attitude, defended the Quakers’ right not to take off their hats in front of their superiors. The years that followed saw Furly in an eminent position among the Quakers. But from 1689 no traces of his active role inside the movement are to be found and around 1692 it is known his relationships with the Dutch Quakers were conflictual. From 1693, they did not consider him a Quaker anymore, accusing him of being worldly. The Quaker that thirty years before had written a book against the use of taking off the hat as a form of salute was accused of uncovering his head in the court and doing so for the ignoble reason of wanting to marry a rich widow. In fact, Furly, on 10 November 1693, married the widow Susanna Huis at the Stadhuis of Rotterdam. The civil wedding was not preceded by a Quaker matrimonial ceremony.

“Martirio, spionaggio e propaganda. I roghi di Richard Atkins (1581) e Walter Marsh (1595) condannati a Roma dall’inquisizione,” in La fede degli italiani. Per Adriano Prosperi, vol. I, edited by Guido dall’Olio, Adelisa Malena, Pierroberto Scaramella, Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore, 2011, 67-79.

by Stefano Villani

[Martyrdom, Espionage and Propaganda: the stakes of Richard Atkins (1581) and Walter Marsh (1595) condemned in Rome by... more [Martyrdom, Espionage and Propaganda: the stakes of Richard Atkins (1581) and Walter Marsh (1595) condemned in Rome by the Inquisition]. In August 1581, Richard Atkins was burned at the stake in St. Peter’s square in Rome. The Englishman had been sentenced to death because a few weeks before, in St. Peter’s basilica, at the moment of the elevation, he had snatched the host away from the priest and thrown the chalice on the floor. Some years later, in June 1595, for committing a similar act, another Englishman, Walter Marsh, was also condemned to the stake. He had attacked a procession with the intention of throwing the consecrated host to the ground. This time the sentence was executed in the Campo dei Fiori. The essay reconstructs the interest that these incidents aroused in Italy and abroad. Both cases were known in England and widely used in English anti-Catholic propaganda. The stories of Atkinson and Marsh, for example, were told in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments where they were celebrated as martyrs of the Protestant faith and contributed fundamentally to the anti-Catholic English imagination. Marsh is mentioned in the posthumous editions of Acts and Monuments of 1632, 1641 and 1684. These events were also much discussed on Italy and the burning Marsh was also remembered by Tommaso Campanella.

“‘Se è vero secondo Galileo che il mondo ha suo moto quotidiano, non è da maravigliarsi della instabilità d’ogni cosa in esso…’. Charles Longland: un “rivoluzionario” inglese nella Livorno del ‘600,” in Religione, cultura e politica nell’Europa dell’età moderna. Studi offerti a Mario Rosa dagli amici, edited by Carlo Ossola, Marcello Verga, Maria Antonietta Visceglia (Firenze: Olschki, 2003), 591-607.

by Stefano Villani

[Charles Longland: an English Revolutionary in 17th Century Leghorn]. Charles Longland (1603-1688) was an affluent... more [Charles Longland: an English Revolutionary in 17th Century Leghorn]. Charles Longland (1603-1688) was an affluent merchant of the British Factory of Leghorn and during the 1650s was the English agent for the Commonwealth and the Protectorate. An informer of John Thurloe, Longland after the Restoration remained in Leghorn and showed his nonconformist sympathies by refusing to contribute in 1668 for the salary of a chaplain of the Church of England for the Factory. In 1672 Longland was denounced to the Inquisition as a protestant preacher who gathered conventicles in the house of Origen Merchant, a French Huguenot, who converted to Catholicism and was known to own “an entire library of forbidden books.” Longland’s biography, which is here reconstructed analytically for the first time, helps to show the channels of information and intelligence for Oliver Cromwell and highlights the importance that they had for the merchants.

“Religione e politica: le comunità protestanti a Livorno nel XVII e XVIII secolo,” in Livorno dal Medieovo all’Età contemporanea. Ricerche e riflessioni, edited by Daniele Pesciatini (Pisa-Livorno: Banco di Sardegna, 2003), 36-64.

by Stefano Villani

[Religion and Politics: the Protestant Communities at Leghorn in the 17th and 18th Centuries]. In this essay Villani... more [Religion and Politics: the Protestant Communities at Leghorn in the 17th and 18th Centuries]. In this essay Villani highlights how the possibility for “heretics” to travel, trade and settle in a Catholic country, was theoretically impossible in early modern period but in reality things went quite differently. Since the sixteenth century the draconian regulations on travel were accompanied by a correspondingly flexible practice that left “heretic” travelers who acted with prudence completely unmolested. However, the existence of strict regulations, even if they were always disregarded, left ample room for abuse and selective prosecution over the years spurring Protestant countries to, often successfully, introduce some modicum of protection for Protestants travelling to or residing in Catholic countries. The vicissitudes of the Protestant English and Dutch communities in Leghorn in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their conflicts with the Inquisition and the religious and political authorities in Tuscany demostrated, concretely, how religious questions for these foreign communities assumed an identitarian dimension. Consequently they should be understood primarily in a political context.

“Donne inglesi a Livorno nella prima età moderna,” in LUCIA FRATTARELLI, OLIMPIA VACCARI, Sul filo della scrittura. Fonti e temi per la storia delle donne a Livorno (Pisa: Plus, 2005), 377-399.

by Stefano Villani

[English Women in Early Modern Leghorn]. The article deals with the history of the British community of Livorno in a... more [English Women in Early Modern Leghorn]. The article deals with the history of the British community of Livorno in a gender perspective. Reconstructing the history of an early modern foreign mercantile community usually means telling a history of men and about men. All the leading figures of the community – consuls, diplomats, ministers of religion – are men. And, of course, the merchants are men who went abroad, often leaving their families at home. When women appear on the scene they are, in general, wives and daughters of merchants, and often the documentation leaves only a faint trace, perhaps only their names mentioned in a will or marked on a register of baptisms or marriages or on a tombstone. More rarely, the elements at our disposal allow us to reconstruct their stories, and when this happens, they are often characterized by unique and exceptional events. These are women who had problems with secular or religious authorities or came into conflict with their community or their family or otherwise, left their country, suffered reverses of fortune abroad. A history of the women of the English ‘nation’ in Livorno inevitably – for the most immediately accessible sources to the scholar – would be so a history of autonomous women, often women involved in some scandal, meaning female figures atypical both for their country of origin and for that in which they lived. In addition to some case-studies (such as that of Lady Baltimore, Charlotte Lee, wife of Benedict Leonard Calvert, fourth Baron Baltimore) Villani reports the first results of a comprehensive study of the abjurations of Protestant people preserved among the Inquisition papers of the Archiepiscopal Archive of Pisa (the fund of the Inquisition is composed of 32 files with documents ranging from 1574 to 1734, but to date only a dozen of them are indexed and calendared). As for the British, often were sailors and small traders who abjured. Very few women: a first survey, but that must be confirmed by more systematic research, we can estimate that, apparently, of about 150 British abjurations preserved in the papers of the Inquisition of Pisa, those by women are fewer than 20. The examination of these documents provide a glimpse into the lives of many Catholic British (or Anglo-Italian) families who lived in Livorno indulging in petty trade and crafts in general, although there are families where the husband was a sailor or a soldier and the wife was a servant or a prostitute. The men of these families, being neither merchants nor factors, were not part of the British Factory, a sort of merchant guild which gathered all the British merchants that was formed in Livorno probably during the 1600s, was very well structured by the 1700s. Generally not fully integrated with the Italians and on the edge of the English “nation” with which they maintained close ties, these British Catholics had apparently a double identity as they were watched with suspicion and little sympathy both by English because they were Catholics and by Catholics because they were former Protestants. Since the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century there were some cases of conversions to Catholicism of young British women that often agitated relations between the British residents in Livorno and the Tuscan political and religious authorities. It is difficult to explain this phenomenon. If there is a strong feeling that many of the abjurations documented in the papers of the Inquisition were motivated by a desire for integration rather than by a true religious crisis, these eighteenth-century cases seem to have originated primarily as conflicts between the girls and their family of origin. The passage to Catholicism was, firstly, the rejection of the family religion. But it can not be excluded that the attraction to a Church that in those years was developing what has been called a “feminization” of devotional practices also played some role. The gender approach has allowed the author to investigate aspects so far ignored by all the historians who had dealt with the foreign presence in Italy in the seventeenth century.

"Fate, Prediction and the Threat of Total Destruction in Spain: A Fifteenth-Century Nightmare", International Consortium for Research in the Humanities, University of Erlangen-Nüremberg (Occasional Papers), 26 July 2011.

by Ángel Gómez-Moreno

Versión en español:

http://www.ikgf.uni-erlangen.de/content/event-docs/lecture_gomez-moreno_20110726_fatal_prognostications_spanish.pdf

"Multiculturalidad y arte en Valencia en la Edad Moderna. Fuentes para su estudio"

by Borja Franco

Publicado en "Anales de Historia del Arte", número extraordinario, 2011

This paper talks about the sources for the study of the religiosity and Art in Valencia during 16th Century, attending... more This paper talks about the sources for the study of the religiosity and Art in Valencia during 16th Century, attending not only to Catholic ideology but also to Protestant theology and moriscos ideas, which coex- isted with in this territory determining its Art.