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

Abstract

Rituals of Prosecution: The Roman Inquisition and the Prosecution of Philo-Protestants in Sixteenth-Century Italy, by Jane K. Wickersham. Toronto, Ontario, University of Toronto Press, 2012. viii, 430 pp. $80.00 Cdn (cloth). Cloaking one's religious identity was a common practice in early modern Europe --conversos and crypto-Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, Christian sailors and slaves turned Turk in the Mediterranean, and Protestants in Catholic lands all populated the religious landscape of the early modern world. In Catholic territories--where religious orthodoxy and solidarity were considered important by the Church and its leaders--institutions had been created to discover what John J. Martin has called hidden enemies in the sixteenth-century Venetian context. These institutions--both the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions--were tribunals created with the goal of detecting and rehabilitating heretics and, failing that, purging the body politic of the faithful of religiously diseased members. Scholars have long studied the Inquisition from a diversity of perspectives ranging from the legal and doctrinal theories and practices of inquisitions and their staff, to the religious beliefs of heretics, and even recently--as seen in the work of Richard Kagan and Abigail Dyer--to recreating the lives of the forgotten people of Europe. Jane K. Wickersham, in this original study of the legal practices and religious concerns of the Roman Inquisition, takes the novel approach of examining ritual practices as the basic criteria for both Inquisition manual writers and various regional tribunals for detecting Protestants in their territories. Her central argument is that, by the mid-sixteenth century, both in theory and in practice --that is in inquisition manuals and in the various trials of the actual tribunals--ritual practices had become the main means of identifying philo-Protestants, Italians holding religious and doctrinal views similar to those of Luther and other prominent reformers to the North. Failure to attend Mass, take part in penance, observe fasting times and a host of other rituals became de facto admissions of guilt. A second argument that Wickersham makes is that the Roman Inquisition's legal practices themselves should be seen as ritual. This argument is less successful than the first, primarily because it is pushed to the background and never receives a full theoretical investigation as does the primary thesis. In the first chapter, Wickersham lays down her working definition of philo-Protestantism in sixteenth-century Italy. Rather than seeing it as entirely influenced by specific currents of Protestantism and reform from the North--despite the Roman Inquisition's blanket use of the term Luterani to describe heretics--she finds that Italian Protestantism was fed by both homegrown and trans-Alpine currents of religious thought and that it was characterized by a diversity of belief and practice rather than adhering to any one doctrine or confessional system. What held this disparate group--both religiously and geographically disparate--together was their criticism of Catholic ritual as deterrent to true faith. Some of them refused to take part in any ritual whatsoever, whether Mass, penance, or observing Lenten fasts, while others took part in the rituals while meeting in secret to read the Bible and receive instruction in Protestant doctrines. …