The Roman Inquisition. Thomas F. Mayer
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two actions. Beretta calls the “material authenticity” of its second half “very problematic,” before concluding that it was forged in 1632 in order to extricate from trouble the man who had licensed the Dialogue.36
Beretta admits that the palaeographical and codicological evidence is against him. Thus, all of No. 2 “appears” to be in the hand of Andrea Pettini, the chief notary in 1616.37 Furthermore, he concludes on formal grounds that the first half of the precept minute is authentic, and does not criticize the second in these terms.38 He also disproves the theory that the document was interpolated into the dossier at a later date.39 Finally, Beretta shows that witnesses’ signatures would not have been expected on a document like No. 2, an imbreviatura or minute.40 Its authenticity derived not from those signatures but from the notary’s, which Beretta claims normally occurred only once per dossier, at the bottom of the front cover.41 Galileo’s file lacks such a signature. Beretta rather tendentiously maintains that either Pettini never signed it or his signature had already been torn off before Galileo was sentenced, making the outcome illegal. This point signifies little, since it is impossible to say when the damage occurred.42 Nor, given the loss of nearly all the Inquisition’s processi, can Beretta cite evidence for his description of normal practice in cases like Galileo’s. He seems instead to base himself on the files in Trinity College Dublin, MS 1232.43 This comparison may not hold up, since these dossiers (1) concern suspects who appeared spontaneously before the Inquisition and, therefore, merited substantially different treatment from other accuseds, which may well mean that their records were handled differently; and (2) include multiple proceedings, not one.44 Nor even on these dossiers is the (same) notary’s practice uniform. Some signatures appear to be autograph for example, fo. 1r), others fair copies probably written by a substitute notary (for example, fo. 9r). In short, neither the signatures of the witnesses—which would not have been expected—nor the notary’s—which, unlike the witnesses’s, may really be missing—effect No. 2’s authenticity.
Monitio caritativa or Fraternal Correction?
Many commentators read No. 1 as ordering a two-phase proceeding, a “warning” by Bellarmino, followed by a precept from Seghizzi. No one before Beretta had tried to explain that “warning.” He identified it as a caritativa monitio recorded in the authentic part of No. 2. Bellarmino did not take even the next step, a denunciatio evangelica, much less administer or countenance the administration of a precept.45 This assertion drives Beretta’s case for forgery.
As little as has been said about precepts in connection with Galileo’s trial, until Beretta’s thesis almost nothing had been entered into evidence about either admonition or “evangelical denunciation” (denunciatio evangelica).46 His discussion draws mainly on three works, Sigismondo Scaccia’s Tractatus de iudiciis, Francisco Peña’s unpublished “Introductio, sive Praxis Inquisitorum,” and Prospero Farinacci’s Tractatus de haeresi. All are roughly contemporary with the beginning of Galileo’s trial, and all constitute reasonably weighty sources. The author of the first had experience as inquisitor of Malta, and Peña had sat for years as a consultor to the Roman Inquisition in his capacity as dean of the Rota.47 Farinacci had never had any position in the Inquisition, but he had been for a long time the fiscal general (roughly chief prosecutor) for the city of Rome; his book was dedicated to the Congregation of the Inquisition, and he claimed that Bellarmino had read it.48 All three agreed that the essence of a monitio caritativa was secrecy in order to protect the sinner; for just that reason, it preceded the denunciatio. They also all agreed that heresy did not require such a monitio because it was a public crime.49 Beretta saves what looks like an unpromising situation by noting that prior to such an admonition ignorance excused misdeeds, but not afterward. Thus Galileo, charitably warned, amended his ways especially by protesting at the beginning of his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems that he always intended to submit to the Church’s judgment. Had he persisted in error after such an admonition, that would have constituted pertinacy that became heresy.50 Thus by implication since Galileo got only an admonition, he could not have been accused (even tacitly) of heresy, and the entire proceeding was extrajudicial.
Unfortunately, Beretta is unlikely to be correct about Bellarmino’s action. As we shall see in the next chapter, the Inquisition used monitiones in exactly the way I think Bellarmino did, not out of charity but as a means to suspend or to conclude process, and therefore in almost exactly the same way it used precepts; by contrast, I have not found a single monitio in the decree registers qualified as charitable. Again in the next chapter we shall see that, while the jurists’ commentary on the use and nature of admonitions is nothing like as extensive as in the case of precepts (unsurprising, since they were not a legal device), there is more than enough to demonstrate against Beretta that what happened to Galileo was not a “charitable admonition,” and that in fact the kind of “warning” he got is virtually indistinguishable from a precept.
At more or less the same time as Beretta, Matthias Dorn, a geologist, also undertook to demonstrate that the precept minute, No. 2, had been forged.51 In addition to repeating Wohlwill’s twin claims (again, without acknowledgment), Dorn offered a quasi-scientific criticism based on observations by an apparently professional document examiner, G. Schöneberg.52 Almost certainly working at second hand from photographs supplied by Dorn, Schöneberg identified four differences in the hand of the first and second parts of the minute: (1) in the form of characters, especially “d”; (2) in the ductus, the general way in which a particular writer forms characters, especially Oberlän-genverzierungen, which I take to mean serifs on the ascenders; (3) in the size of the characters; and (4) in the ligature between magiscule “T” and “e.”53 These results are all open to serious question. Above all, small, sometimes very small details best distinguish one hand from another, especially in the case of scripts as highly formalized as papal chancery hand. Many such will be hard to see in photographs. I have not been able to see the originals, but, on the basis not of the tiny prints reproduced in Dorn’s book but of Henri de L’Épinois’s much clearer (in part because more than a century older) photographic reproductions and the strength of professional training in palaeography and thirty years practice and teaching of it, I reject all Schöneberg’s points.54 Neither of the most solid-looking ones, 1 and 4, is true. Any alleged difference in the characters’ size could easily be explained by the fact that the first half of the text is written into a smallish space at the bottom of a mostly full page, while the second half is at the top of a new, otherwise blank one. Schöneberg did not perform the surest test to distinguish two hands, including their ductus, the measurement of the characters’ slant. I do not detect any variation in slant from either set of plates. The second surest measure, differences in infrequently written characters, is impossible since there are none to compare.55
Annibale Fantoli offers a number of extrinsic criticisms of Beretta’s forgery thesis. One of the best involves the witnesses’ names. How would a forger in 1632 have known them?56 This objection has a possible answer. An especially clever man could have found them in a biography of Bellarmino published in 1624 and again in 1631. The first, the Cypriot Badino or Bandino de Nores, served as maestro di camera to both Cesare Baronio and Bellarmino.57 The second, Agostino Mongardo, served Bellarmino as one of Nores’s subordinates (cubiculi administer).58 In a note, Fantoli speculated that the public version of No. 2 is missing because it went into the now mostly lost series of Libri extensorum.59 Fantoli adopts Beretta’s description of this formerly extensive set of volumes as “the registers of acts emitted in public form by the notary.”60 Once again, Beretta painted a bit broadly on the basis of limited evidence. One of the few surviving such volumes I examined, ACDFSO, St.st.LL-5-g, contains no public instruments. Finally, like Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Fantoli pointed to the seeming contradiction between Nos. 1 and 2 to support the second’s authenticity, arguing that a forger would have tried to make his work agree with an authentic document.61 And one might add, especially since he had taken care to unearth the real witnesses.
Most recently, Frajese has revisited the precept leading to a rejoinder from Pagano who also