Literary Piracy in Seventeenth-Century Florence: Giovanni Battista Neri's "De iudice S. inquisitionis opusculum"

Abstract

In the course of researching criminal law treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at the Huntington Library, I was specifically concerned to compare secular proceedings with those practiced in the courts of the Italian inquisitions and to learn more about how the questions of magic and witchcraft were handled.1 This subject was of interest to me through the study of two unpublished and previously unstudied vernacular inquisitorial manuals, Prattiche or legal handbooks, both written in the early decades of the seventeenth century by highly placed ecclesiastics, Desiderio and Deodato Scaglia, uncle and nephew.2 A volume entitled De iudice S. inquisitionis opusculum, written by a certain Giovanni Battista Neri and printed in Florence in 1685, caught my attention. Despite well over a decade of research on the Inquisition, this was a totally new title to me, just as its author was unknown. The title page identified Neri as a Reader in Sacred Theology, professor of canon law and a former provincial of his order for Tuscany, the minorite friars of St. Francis of Paula. The title page also gave note that the book was dedicated from the heart (ex corde) to Cosimo III, sixth Grand Duke of Tuscany.3 The actual text of the dedication, with fitting modesty, invited the sovereign to accept the crude opuscle, not for the sake of Neri's own glory, which was as fleeting as a shadow, but for the public good.4 The author's greeting to the reader explained why he had set himself to the task of describing the duties of a judge of the Holy Office even though many before him had discoursed at length on the subject. From such a mass of diffuse