Putting things in order. Inventories and materiality of the Roman Inquisition

1998 was undoubtedly a watershed year for the study of the Roman Inquisition. Towards the end of a century marked by sometimes difficult relations between the leadership of the Holy Office and Italian intellectuals, the Papal Congregation made the remaining inquisitorial documents available to researchers. It was an epoch-making event, intended to manifest the new attitude of the Roman Church towards its history and its experts, which culminated in John Paul II’s request for forgiveness in his homily of 12 March 2000.

From a scientific point of view, the opening of the archive has radically changed our knowledge of the Tribunal of Faith and its historical development. In the last quarter century, the already extensive research on the history of the Inquisition in Italy has been furthered by the sources made available. The study of these documents has confirmed and, in some cases, updated what was already known about the Holy Office based on the papers consulted in other places, in both the Vatican archives and many other Italian and foreign archives. Those who crossed the threshold of this archive after its opening brought with them the wealth of knowledge, questions, and research methods that historiography had refined over the previous decades. Since the 1960s, many elements have contributed to the strong dynamism of this field in Italy, such as the affirmation of the micro-historical approach, the attention to subordinated classes, the trust in quantitative data, as well as the conviction that religious history was the privileged point of view for understanding the history of the Church, the Italian national state, popular customs over the centuries, and much more. These factors, which had differing levels of importance and played different roles in individual studies, have favoured the receptiveness of Italian scholars to certain international historiographical turning points, particularly to what was happening in Portugal and Spain in those years. The end of Salazarism and Francoism, and the nationalist ideologies associated with them, allowed a more attentive study of the history of these countries in which the inquisitorial courts played a decisive role. The availability of the vast archival resources left by the Iberian courts favoured the development of substantial historical research, of both the national territory and the Iberian colonial empires.