Christopher F Black,The Italian Inquisition

Reviewed by: Elena Bonora, University of Parma, Italy

Christopher Black's The Italian Inquisition aims to offer a critical and interpretative synthesis of work on the history of the Roman Inquisition, the Holy Office, created in 1542 and directly controlled by the Pope. Rather than outline the development of the Holy Office, its internal organization and its goals, Black presents the history of the inquisition as a collage, assembling ‘images’, ‘impressions’ (225), stories and information taken from a rich secondary literature, and from his own random researches in Italian archives.

An effective synthesis ought to highlight some actual and crucial issues. How far, for example, were the cardinals of the Holy Office able to influence the main decisions of the Church, and act independently of and even against papal policy? How far were the Holy Office and its representatives, scattered throughout Italy, able to work against the line adopted by the Council of Trent, and against the power granted to the bishops by the Tridentine reforms? What part did the Holy Office play in shaping Italian social, religious and cultural life, and how was this different from other Catholic countries? This could have brought out the specific features of Italian Catholicism, thereby providing the rationale for the subject of the book – the Italian, rather than the Roman inquisition.

However, instead of discussing problems, clarifying contexts, and offering plausible periodizations, the book just offers a colourful patchwork of ideas. These sometimes rest on outdated historical theses and approaches, such as the Holy Office's scepticism concerning witchcraft, the notion of the inquisitor as a mediator, the use of quantitative analysis in order to measure repression, and the alleged respect for legal procedures of the inquisition's courts. Although his bibliography mentions numerous recent studies dealing with such issues as the control of sanctity and superstitions, the links between the sacramental practice of confession and the inquisition, the social conflicts which were fuelled by the inquisition courts and their members, the problem of the transmission of norms and prescriptions from central to peripheral courts, and the conflictual relationships between the Holy Office and the other Roman congregations of cardinals, as well as those between the inquisitors and the bishops, Black does not always seem aware of their new findings.

Of course, the point is not to choose between more or less revisionist interpretations, more or less critical of the Church's repressive apparatus. The point is that the book's attempt to ‘measure’ the degree of repression of the inquisition's courts – often with the aim of minimizing it – and quantify what the documents do not consent to quantify or simplify by using tables, tends to lead towards an analysis that neglects key issues debated by the more recent historiography on the inquisition, and the post-Tridentine church.

As for the censorship, to which Black quite rightly devotes considerable space, the wish to narrow down and restrict the scope of coercion prevents the author from taking full account of the extent and pervasiveness of Roman censorship policies, which are amply attested by recent historiography. Instead, he devotes attention to quantifying prohibited titles listed in the indexes and confiscated books, and enumerating the ‘targets’ of the censors who, after all, ‘were not mindless fools’ (202). He also reaffirms the inefficiency of expurgatory censorship (163 onward), and gets rid of self-censorship as a phenomenon which cannot be historically assessed (207, 259). The problem of preventive censorship is addressed through the case of Galileo Galilei which – according to the author – would have been resolved more ‘softly’ if the aged scientist had ‘worked more patiently with Riccardi [maestro del sacro palazzo] over the final presentation’ of the Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, ‘but this might have meant a few more years’ work, and the old, sick Galileo was anxious for the final publication’ (175).

Black almost totally ignores the devastating consequences of Roman censorship policy on Italian culture. Tacit and massive manipulation of texts by means of expurgation was particularly severe in Italy. It was made even worse by the fact that – unlike in Spain, for example – no official index of expurgation was ever published by Rome, nor was there any clarity in the Regole which were included in the indexes of prohibited books. This left authors, printers and readers in a state of complete uncertainty. The norms were expressed in general and generic terms, and this obliged them to resort to personal negotiations with the ecclesiastical authorities. Similarly, Black does not look at the impact of the Roman church's intervention in reorganizing entire areas of knowledge, which affected scientific and legal works, as well as the way history could be written. Nor does he consider the disappearance from the Italian market not only of individual works which had been banned, suspended, or never published, but also of entire literary genres such as satire and humanist dialogue.

The concern of the book is to show that the inquisitors ‘followed fairly clear rules and guidelines, without being dictators’ (256); that the inquisition was also committed to re-education, persuasion and conciliation as well as punishment; that the number of its victims was much lower than previously thought, and that after all, things could have been much worse. The book misses an important opportunity to acquaint English-speaking readers with a body of historical work which it mentions but does not use adequately. Above all, it fails to account for a field of research which derives its value and dynamism from the sorts of questions it continually raises, rather than from reassuring labels and pre-packaged interpretations.