The Business of the Roman Inquisition in the Early Modern Era by Germano Maifreda

Author:Germano Maifreda [Maifreda, Germano]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Renaissance
ISBN: 9781317034629
Google: yhaHDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-11-18T16:19:14+00:00

“From the day of your committed error”

With the almost total disappearance of local Inquisition archives, and the only partial survival of the central Holy Office archives, singling out the basic directions which governed confiscation policy in the middle centuries of the early modern era is arduous. We can observe that sixteenth-century legal studies continued to place publicatio bonorum at the heart of the procedure and to insist upon the highly dangerous right of ecclesiastical courts to confiscate – or have the secular judiciary confiscate – the property of individuals condemned for heresy a die commissi criminis, from the moment in which the individual had committed the crime of heresy, regardless of the date in which the trial had been completed and the sentence pronounced. Nor did the retroactivity of the confiscations ordered by the Officium fidei regard only the property possessed by laymen, it invested the whole system of the concession of ecclesiastical benefices. Even the previously cited 1556 decree annulling the benefices of religious figures suspected of heresy, had, in fact, declared that “the benefices of heretics, from the day of commission are invalidated”. The principle of confiscation from the day of commission of the crime was also constantly cited in the weighty pre-Tridentine Summae confessorum – among which, the influential Summa tabiena – as well as being cited in all the reference works present in the libraries of the Italian inquisitors.

The Dominican Friar and Commissar General of the Holy Office, Umberto Locati, spent a good deal of time on it in his renowned Praxis judiciaria inquisitorum, in which the section on confiscation was reproduced almost exactly in the Opus quod Iudiciale inquisitorum dicitur of 1568. Zanchino Ugolini repeated it with the authority of the medieval tradition in De haereticis.26 In its first book, the monumental and quickly deemed classic even in Italy, De origine et progressu Officii sanctae Inquisitionis (1598) – work of the Spanish Inquisitor Ludovico da Páramo, active in Sicily at the end of the 1500s – situated the roots of the Holy Office in the act with which God, in Genesis, drove Adam and Eve from Paradise, confiscating their property de facto (“Overthrowing all goods, he cast them out of the comforts of Paradise; thus the Inquisitor proscribes the property of heretics”). Páramus then inexorably recalled: “The property of heretics has not to be confiscated if not from the time the crime is committed”.27

Even the broader mercantile jurisprudence of the early modern period, in so far as regarding the general traits of confiscation, was quick to indicate the dangers of holding property acquired from heretics, recalling that they might be confiscated only if the heretic had owned or sold them from the moment in which he had committed the crime and that in which he had been sentenced. So property acquired by heretics after the sentence had been pronounced were to be considered safe.28 As a reminder of how inextricably secular and canon law were still intertwined in the early modern era, we should note

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.