Jane K Wickersham,Rituals of Prosecution,the Roman Inquisition and the Prosecution of Philo-Protestants in Sixteenth Century Italy

Reviewed by: Marco Piana, McGill University, Canada

In the past 20 years, the publication of theoretically informed works on the relationship between Inquisition and Protestant Reformation in Italy has seen a significant growth, drawing attention to several scholars in the field and expanding our overall knowledge of this fundamental aspect of Early Modern culture. Together with works such as Christopher F Black’s The Italian Inquisition, Adriano Prosperi’s L’Inquisizione romana: letture e ricerche and Salvatore Caponetto’s The Protestant Reformation in Sixteenth-century Italy, Jane K Wickersham’s book is a good example of this positive trend. Situated on the threshold between Edward Muir’s Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice and the celebrated Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione edited by Adriano Prosperi in collaboration with Vincenzo Lavenia and John Tedeschi, this volume ingeniously explores inquisitorial proceedings and practices while bringing forth an original interpretation of the diffusion of Protestant ideas in Italy.

The book is divided into seven main chapters. Chapter 1, ‘Philo-Protestantism in Italian Lands: Beliefs and Practices,’ explains how heterodoxy came to develop in Italy during the 16th century and introduces the historical context in which the renewed Roman Inquisition had to operate. Chapter 2, ‘He May be a Patron and Receiver of Heretics: Adapting the Principles of Prosecution,’ illustrates how the new manuals on inquisitorial law adapted the past encounters with heresy to the new context of the Protestant Reformation. Chapter 3, ‘Word and Deed: Indications of Suspicion,’ is twofold: the first section of the chapter examines the polemical literature of Protestant reformers concerning Catholic ritual practice and its impact on the faith of philo-Protestants living in Catholic lands. The second part addresses the Inquisition’s rules about witnesses and prosecutions, thus establishing a line of transmission between later recommendations of Inquisition manuals with earlier trial records. Chapter 4, ‘The Mercy of the Court,’ discusses the criteria by which inquisitors decided to employ mercy in their legal proceedings by examining in depth the case of two defendants who recanted and reconciled themselves with the Catholic Church. Chapter 5, ‘Confession and Defence: Aggressive Tactics,’ examines three different processes that took place in 1572 in Venice to illustrate a range of possible variations in inquisitorial procedure against impenitent philo-Protestants. Chapter 6, ‘Full Confessions of Faith: Ritual Practice and Intent,’ discusses three different trials to demonstrate the limits of the Inquisition as a legal process and the necessity of torture as a last resort to neutralize the threat of untruthful testimony and maintain the integrity of the process as a whole. Chapter 7, ‘Mind and Body: The Opportunity for Redemption,’ seeks to demonstrate that the inquisitor’s work was not only to investigate heresy and punish it, but also to guide the heterodox back into the orthodox community. By doing so, the chapter shows how the penances assigned to those who confessed their heretical error often coincided with the forced exercise of Catholic ritual practices.

Wickersham’s starting point is the hypothesis that ritual practices played a central role in Early Modern society. According to the author, ceremonies and religious observances permeated every aspect of an individual’s social life, and the attendance of such practices was crucial for the religious and civic education of the masses. This concept, already explored by authors such as Edward Muir and Richard Traxler, is here applied to the field of inquisitorial practice. For Wickersham, the evidence relating to ritual practice was crucial in prosecuting heresy, as a person’s engagement with certain religious exercises was an undeniable proof of religious error. Moreover, as we have seen, ritual practice was also the first step for the rehabilitation of the individual, often through the forceful enactment of selected ceremonies. On this subject, it is important to stress one of the book’s strongest arguments: the link between ‘word and deed’ in inquisitorial practice. In order to investigate and sanction ‘Lutheran’ heresies the Holy Office had, as a matter of fact, to adapt and update their legal procedures to the multifaceted context of religious practices in 16th-century Italy. In demonstrating this process of adaptation, the author analyzes in depth four of the most influential manuals on inquisitorial law: Nicholas Eymeric’s Directorium Inquisitorum, written in 1376 and revised by Francisco Peňa by the end of the 16th century; Prospero Farinacci’s Tractatus Haeresi, published in 1616; Sacro Arsenale by Eliseo Masini (1621); and Cesare Carena’s Tractatus de officio Sanctissimae Inquisitionis, first printed in 1636. Wickersham’s investigation remarkably stresses the direct relationship between doctrine and ritual practice, or rather between ‘word and deed,’ as a line of continuity among the four books, thus showing us how tools already employed to repress the Cathar and Waldesian heresies were equally utilized to prosecute philo-Protestant conventicles.

In spite of some minor uncertainties in the transcription of the documents, the point made by Wickersham is compelling, well developed and backed by a convincing bibliography. Merging the influences of at least three different currents in the field of Renaissance historiography, and combining Muir and Traxler’s research on ritual practices in Early Modern society with the latest studies on the Inquisition and the Reformation in Italy, the author succeeds in demonstrating how ritual practices characterized both Catholic and Protestant cultures, becoming a useful instrument in asserting one’s own identity against that of others. The proceedings considered by the author are spread all over the area of influence of the Roman Inquisition and support well the book’s thesis. Moreover, they show how the trials themselves were a form of ritual practice, often regulated by the manuals mentioned above. For all these reasons, Rituals of Prosecution is a valuable contribution to the contemporary historiography on the Reformation in Italy and is destined to be a point of reference for future studies on the subject.