I processi inquisitoriali di Pietro Carnesecchi.

Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto, eds. I processi inquisitoriali di Pietro Carnesecchi (1557-1567), Volume 1: I processi sotto Paolo IV e Pio IV (1557-1561).

(Collectanea Archivi Varicani, 43.) Vatican City: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 1998. cxx + 577 pp. n. p. ISBN: 88-85042-30-9.

Massimo Firpo. Dal sacco di Roma all'Inquisizione: Studi su Juan de Vald[acute{a}]as e La Riforma italiana.

(Forme e Percorsi della Storia, 3.) Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso, 1998. 232 pp. IL 35,000. ISBN: 88-7694-336-6.

The indefatigable team of Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto, having completed their six-volume edition of the Processo Morone, have turned to another holy grail of even longer-standing interest: the case of Pietro Carnesecchi. Ever since Giacomo Manzoni spirited a part of the record out of the Inquisition archives in the nineteenth century and published it, historians have longed for a sight of the original. It turns out that Marcatto has had that for the last ten years, one of the very first (if not the first) scholars in recent times to have access to the original records. That the publisher should be the Archivio Segreto Vaticano offers an interesting commentary on the state of inter-agency relations inside the Vatican in the wake of the mini-glasnost that has finally thawed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

This volume offers a glimpse of the massive documentation Marcatto has unearthed (the full file is over a meter high). As before, he and Firpo preface the edition with a detailed commentary, both historical and philological, and append explanatory notes which often unsurprisingly refer to their early work. Again as in the Processo Morone, the editors include ancillary material, mostly correspondence between the commissary of the Inquisition in Rome and his agents elsewhere in Italy. With a few exceptions, the materials published here come from ACDFSO, Stanza Storica R. 5-b, II.2, II.4 and 11.8-10. The very first item, the deposition of Niccol[grave{o}] Bargellesi, was previously published in the final volume of the Processo Morone.

The introduction considers Carnesecchi's first and second investigations. The first, under Paul III, has left few traces, beyond frequent references to the resulting extrajudicial absolution, and a single letter from Cardinal Pole on Carnesecchi's behalf. Therefore, most of the discussion centers on the second trial which began under Paul IV and was concluded under his successor Pius IV. The story has been known in outline, even if few of the documents have been (Manzoni's publication concerned Garnesecchi's final trial). Perhaps the greatest surprise to emerge from this new material is the dogged resistance of the congregation of the Inquisition to the papal will. Cardinal Ghislieri, chief of the Inquisition under Paul IV, in particular did all he could to prevent Pius from absolving Carnesecchi, including digging up new evidence against him in the course of what was supposed to be a process of exoneration. Pius finally had to run in a brand-new cardinal, Girolamo Seripando, to put Ghislieri in his place. T he composition of the congregation is also of some interest, since a substantial number of its members were imperialists who should therefore have supported Carnesecchi, almost equalling the contingent put in place by Pope Paul. This near-balance highlights the degree to which bureaucracy helped to cause the delay in Carnesecchi's exculpation, since the functionaries of the institution wound up with a good deal of discretion, and more than a few irregularities resulted, including major differences between the list of witnesses Carnesecchi submitted and those actually interrogated. But this was a very complex trial, with depositions taken in Rome, Bologna, Venice, Padua, and a number of other sites where witnesses were tracked down. Despite this complexity, the prosecution's case was very simple, and largely derived from the testimony of two hostile witnesses, G. B. Scatti and Bernardo de' Bartoli, both of whom had made careers out of delating members of the reform tendency. Glimpses of the Inquisition's conce rn with the reputation of its cofounder Paul IV have been seen before, but it emerges here as a rooted interest. This was in keeping with the emphasis on Carnesecchi's reputation, his publica fama, in the interrogatories. For obvious reasons of its being nearly impossible to refute, this was one of the Inquisition's favorite lines of investigation. Despite this, it is very interesting that only one witness referred to Carnesecchi's reputation for sodomy.

A good deal of the material is highly formulaic, including, of course, the interrogatories, which leads to a great deal of repetition in the edition arising from slightly over the top philological fastidiousness. Yet it is highly revealing of the thinness of the charges to read witness after witness repeatedly answering "no" or "I don't know" to a vast range of questions. My favorite deponent is the papal diplomat and later cardinal Michele Della Torre, nearly every one of whose responses was tersely (and haughtily) negative. Not everyone was terrified of the Inquisition. The newest dimension to the case to be brought out is the unsuccessful attempt to make Carnesecchi a sacramentary.

The contents of this volume are not as exciting as those of the first volume of the Processo Morone, but with Manzoni's edition as a tease, we can only await eagerly the appearance of further volumes and hope that they do not take the eight years it did to complete their predecessor.

Firpo's collection of essays does not break much new ground. All the pieces have been published at least once before. The first, only tangentially related to the volume, surveys prophetic expectations of the Sack of Rome. All the rest concern Firpo's b[hat{e}]te blanche, Juan de Vald[acute{e}]s, and most develop points made in his Tra alumbrados e 'spirituali', Studi su Juan de Vald[acute{e}]s e il valdesianesimo nella crisi religiosa del '500 italiano (Florence: Olschki, 1990.) Thus, there is an essay on the connection between the council of Trent and the circulation of the Beneficio di Christo in manuscript, which rehearse the Firpo-Paolo Simoncelli view of a spilt in the reform tendency between factions led by Pole and Gasparo Contarini, and their related theory of open warfare against both on the part of the "intransigents." The assembly of these essays in one place allows historiographical reflection on the development of Firpo's work, seen in miniature in the progressively greater certainty he sometimes displays in what were originally conjectures (cf. 117 vs. 142, for example).

As the Processo Carnesecchi again reveals, the Inquisitors, like Firpo, were very concerned about Vald[acute{e}]s and his disciples. But despite the impression Firpo's work sometimes gives, they were not the only religious game in town, and however disingenuously, the answers to questions about him were frequently of the "I don't know" variety.