1626: A Year in the Life of the Roman Inquisition

In 1626, Europe was in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War; a flu pandemic began spreading in Asia; the Dutch acquired the island of Manhattan; Queen Christina of Sweden was born; and Francis Bacon died. A lot can happen in a year, and 1626 was no exception. It was an exceptional year for the Roman Inquisition, however, but not because of anything that happened. What makes it exceptional is that an extraordinarily large body of archival material from that year has been preserved. Drawing on this hitherto unexamined material, Stefania Tutino reconstructs all the activities of the Roman Inquisition in the year 1626.
This book demonstrates that the early-seventeenth-century Roman Inquisition was not solely the expression of the most militant and repressive aspects of post-Reformation Catholicism. Rather, to understand the historical role the Holy Office played, we need to see its development in terms of the tension between rigidity on the one hand and flexibility and complexity on the other. Having the opportunity to see all the activities of the Holy Office in one entire year makes the centrality of this tension easier to appreciate than if we just focused on a specific and necessarily limited subset of issues such as witchcraft or book censorship. Conversely, the granular analysis of those activities provided in this book is necessary to get a concrete sense of all the ways in which this tension manifested.
The strength of the Roman Inquisition in 1626 -and simultaneously the reason for its downfall in the long run-is that an institution that thrives on rigidity and whose core mission is to maintain inflexible boundaries between the one true faith and all deviations is intrinsically unable to deal with complexity, mobility, and fluidity. All those factors rendered the imposition of stringent norms increasingly difficult and ultimately impossible. The Holy Office tried to keep up, but the complexity of the world that Roman Inquisitors presumed to oversee overwhelmed the intrinsic rigidity of their mandate.

Stefania Tutino is Professor of History at UCLA. She is a cultural and intellectual historian of post-Reformation Catholicism and she has written on Catholic political thought, moral theology, the process of saint-making, the history of the Society of Jesus, and the Roman Inquisition.