Introduction

      As the popular historian Dava Sobel put it without much exaggeration, “no other process in the annals of canon or common law has ricocheted through history with more meanings, more consequences, more conjecture, more regrets” than Galileo’s.¹ And as Adriano Prosperi, a dean of historians of the Inquisition, well says that processo is “more intricate and problematic” than most historians think.² One of the most serious problems in understanding what happened to Galileo is that his trial has almost never been treated as a legal event. Without an understanding of both how the Roman Inquisition worked and how the law it applied was constantly modified, grasping how Galileo came to be condemned is impossible. Building on my earlier work on both points, this book marks the first full-length attempt to study Galileo’s trial as such, and one of a handful of any size

      Galileo’s case resonates far outside academe. Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, like his Da Vinci Code, spins yarns about the Vatican’s inner workings. It also partly concerns Galileo’s trial. Although most of what Brown says about both is purely fictional, he agreed about the trial’s importance with no less an authority than Stephen Hawking. Like many others, both make Galileo an icon of modern Western culture, the heroic scientist martyred by a reactionary church for daring to claim that the earth moved and the sun did not. Even for those who do not draw the lines so starkly, Galileo stands at the watershed of the divide between science and religion, notably in Wade Rowland’s recent Galileo’s Mistake, a widely reviewed book and almost as fictional as Brown’s. To Brown, Hawking, and Rowland, Galileo’s trial lacks intrinsic interest. They are as wrong on that score as they are about its significance.

      Method

      There have been only a handful of previous studies of Galileo’s trial.³ This one differs in a number of ways from them as well as the hundreds (thousands?) about his case or affair.

      This books rests on a simple philosophical premise. Humans make history. One of my central objects is to restore agency to all the individual actors involved, above all to Galileo, who has most often been left a passive victim, even in his own view. Thus I have followed a similar prosopographical approach to that used in The Roman Inquisition, providing capsule biographies where possible designed to help navigate the complicated world of Roman bureaucracy and courts.⁴ These biographies also sometimes contain sufficient detail to allow inferences about motives. That said, I do not dwell on them, preferring to lay out events, rather than contributing to the miasma of speculation about why Urban or Galileo or anyone else did what he did. In order to make such inferences more concrete, I have paid careful attention to detailed chronology, which at least allows the possibility of better guesses based on who was where, when, and doing what. While introducing faction as an element in Galileo’s trial certainly pushed its study in the direction of human actors, it has been both over- and underdone. Faction between religious orders, especially Dominicans and Jesuits, has become an almost universally accepted factor, with the two orders reversing positions relative to Galileo over the course of his trial. No doubt this interpretation has much value, but it almost always overlooks the fact that neither order had an agreed position about Galileo (Copernicus may have been another matter), that factions within orders could be as important as battles between them, especially at the origin of Galileo’s troubles, and that other orders should come into consideration. Similarly, the analysis of the outcome of Galileo’s trial as founded in infighting among the Cardinal Inquisitors has become almost as solid an article of faith, despite the fact that it is supported by precious little evidence, primarily the fact that only seven of ten Inquisitors signed Galileo’s sentence.⁵

      This book differs most from other studies nominally about Galileo’s trial in that it treats his trial, not his case, nor his affair. Thus the second important element in my approach is a careful study of the law and procedures involved. For procedure, I draw on The Roman Inquisition, while the treatment of the law applied to Galileo is new. In this book I offer a detailed study of the device of the precept, the first since the 1940s, in particular, the Roman Inquisition’s jurisprudence and practice in its regard, which has never been given attention despite the precept’s centrality to the proceedings against Galileo.