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The Roman Inquisition's precept to Galileo (1616)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2009

THOMAS F. MAYER
THOMAS F. MAYER
Affiliation:
Department of History, Augustana College, Rock Island, IL, USA. Email: ThomasMayer@augustana.edu.
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Abstract

On 26 February 1616 Galileo was ordered to cease to defend heliocentrism in any way whatsoever. This order, called a precept, automatically applied to anything he might later attempt to publish on the subject. Issued at the end of his first trial by the Roman Inquisition, the precept became the spark that triggered his second trial in 1632–3 and figured importantly in the justification of his sentence. This precept has been a subject of controversy since the late nineteenth century for its authenticity, legality and legitimacy. This paper addresses the first two points and establishes the facts of what probably happened in 1616. It does so by examining seven texts that bear on the event. All but one of these (plus Galileo's first deposition in 1633) agree tolerably well that Galileo did indeed receive the precept in the strongest form. An examination of the singleton text in the context of how the Inquisition produced and kept its records as well as of its procedures and personnel shows that it is the least reliable source. This context also supports the argument that certainty about what happened is impossible to achieve. The theory that the document most damaging to Galileo was a forgery is also disposed of. Examination of the crucial phrase successive ac incontinenti in one of the documents supports the paper's suggestion that more caution is in order before accepting the currently nearly universal claim that the precept was improper in law.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , September 2010, pp. 327 - 351
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2009

In late 1615 Galileo came to Rome against advice in order to enter into the debate about Copernicus's heliocentric ideas. While he made the rounds of Roman salons arguing the case and both he and his supporters dealt with authoritative cardinals, Galileo cast about for the right agent to make his case directly to Pope Paul V. He finally hit on Cardinal Alessandro Orsini, twenty-three years old and new to the office. Galileo dedicated to him the most explicit statement yet of his cosmological beliefs, the ‘Discourse on the Tides’. Perhaps drawing on it, Orsini entered consistory (a formal meeting between Pope and cardinals) on 24 February 1616 and demanded that Pope Paul clear not only Galileo but all Copernicans of the aspersions recently cast on them in Florence and elsewhere. Visibly annoyed, Paul instead retorted that the matter had been turned over to the Inquisition, as in fact it had been. In highly irregular fashion, he then seems to have ordered that body to make its decision the very next day.Footnote 1 Eleven theological consultants reported on two propositions: first, the Sun was the centre of the universe; and second, the Earth moved. They declared the first ‘formally heretical’ and the second ‘at least erroneous in the faith’.Footnote 2

Galileo might have foreseen this outcome. One of those theologians' masters, Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, among Paul's chief advisers and perhaps the most respected theologian in Rome, had warned Galileo before he ever thought to visit that staying too long would provoke a reaction.Footnote 3 It came the day after the consultants' report. The Inquisition's secretary (a cardinal and its highest executive under the Pope) formally notified his chief subordinate, Commissary-General Michelangelo Seghizzi, of Paul's order to Bellarmino to tell Galileo about the two censured propositions. On 26 February, Bellarmino and Seghizzi executed that order.

Summoned to Bellarmino's apartment, in the presence of Seghizzi, other witnesses and a notary, Galileo got a warning from the cardinal. Galileo objected in some fashion. As a result, Seghizzi, still on Paul's direct orders and in the name of the Congregation of the Holy Office, took action. He ‘gave a precept’ to Galileo to ‘abstain from teaching or defending or treating [tractare] this doctrine and opinion [Copernicus's] in any way at all’.Footnote 4 Galileo could scarcely think about Copernicus. Now he promised to obey. The sequel shows Galileo observing this precept in its full form reasonably carefully for almost a decade.Footnote 5 When he sought permission to publish his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems in 1630, he failed to tell the chief papal censor, Niccolò Riccardi, about the precept and it became one of the two central elements in his condemnation.

This article will demonstrate two points: first, the precept was real and probably given in the strongest form; and second, it was almost certainly not legally improper. Although Galileo's trial (or trials; whether he had one or two is hotly disputed) has almost always been treated in terms of the large issues raised about religion and science, the focus here is limited to the legal meaning of 1616 and on understanding, not justifying or condemning, what happened.

As the popular historian Dava Sobel puts 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.Footnote 6 And as Adriano Prosperi, one of the deans of historians of the Inquisition, well says, that processo is ‘più intricato e problematico’ than most historians think.Footnote 7 The problem in establishing the events of 1616 concerns both the textual evidence of what happened, and the law and jurisprudence governing those texts and events. Some of each is more than a little tricky, causing problems both to the original actors and to historians. Here I shall deal primarily with the textual evidence, leaving for separate treatment what canon lawyers would have made of it. Most scholars have thought that the minute of 26 February recording the administration of the precept (item 2 below) makes the most trouble. This is not the case. That honour instead belongs to the same kind of note of the Inquisition's meeting a week later (the decretum of 3 March; item 3 below). Given improving knowledge of how the Inquisition worked, including how it produced and preserved its records, it becomes possible to create a consistent account of what happened in 1616, like that sketched above. Once that moment is better understood, so will the vital role it played in Galileo's second trial. A contribution to the calmer discussion of the relations between religion and the sciences involves getting to closer grips with the dynamics of Galileo's trials as legal events on their own terms, including his role in them, rather than a suprahistorical moment of conflict between ‘the Church’ and ‘science’ – thereby perhaps helping to cool the debate over Galileo's fate.Footnote 8

Six documents relate what happened in Bellarmino's palace on 26 February, all in the Inquisition's files, but only four of them in Galileo's dossier.Footnote 9 The first three of these are minutes:

  1. 1 Paul's order on 25 February to Bellarmino and Seghizzi via the Inquisition's secretary Cardinal Giovanni Garzia Millini (hereafter also ‘Paul's order’).

  2. 2 The precept dated the next day (see Appendix; hereafter also ‘the precept minute’); there is also an abbreviated (and irrelevant) eighteenth-century copy of both 1 and 2.

  3. 3 Report of a meeting of the Congregation of the Inquisition on 3 March 1616, found among the Decreta, the largest surviving – almost intact – run of its documents (see Appendix; hereafter ‘the decretum’).Footnote 10

The three remaining texts probably descend from item 2 and therefore have less authority about the events of 1616:

  1. 4 Part of the briefing document probably of September 1632 drawn up by the Inquisition's assessor; its precise legal status is ambiguous, but politically it spelled the end for Galileo.Footnote 11

  2. 5 The notorious ‘Summary’ prepared by that assessor's successor at the end of Galileo's trial in 1633.

  3. 6 Galileo's sentence.

Finally, there is a seventh text (item 7), Bellarmino's certificate requested by Galileo dated 26 May 1616 (‘Bellarmino's certificate’). Despite the fact that it says nothing directly about what happened on 26 February, nearly all commentators treat it as if it speaks most authoritatively to the point.

One other piece of evidence will be reserved for separate treatment – Galileo's deposition of 12 April 1633 – in large measure because it is the only one of these texts which on its face is likely to offer a slanted view of the precept. Despite the deep suspicions of many interpreters, there is much less reason to think any of the other documents were falsified or otherwise manipulated than to think that Galileo might have engaged in a little prevarication when on trial before the Inquisition. When carefully read, Galileo's testimony agrees closely with the interpretation argued here for the reality and force of the precept.

Since so many of those involved in compiling these texts were lawyers, we might hope that they would write especially precisely. Alas, they did not. At the most basic but largely insignificant level, they could not settle on a stable text of the strongest form of the precept even when allegedly quoting it directly.Footnote 12 A parody of the lawyer's maxim summum ius summa iniuria, ‘the strongest law [causes] the greatest injury’, should warn us immediately that trying for too much precision will harm our understanding of what happened. Any reconstruction is never going to meet the standard of legal proof; we are never going to know exactly what happened. The interpretation argued here is no more than the most probable.

The decretum of 3 March

The only seriously discordant document about what happened on 26 February 1616, item 3 (the decretum), has Bellarmino report simply that Galileo had ‘agreed’ to ‘abandon’ heliocentrism after being ‘warned’ to do so.Footnote 13 This statement appears to mean both that Galileo still had room for manoeuvre afterwards and that Commissary Seghizzi never did anything. The other texts disagree. Paul's order (item 1), the one missing from the Decreta but found in Galileo's dossier, said that Seghizzi should proceed to the precept if Galileo ‘refused’ to agree to Bellarmino's ‘warning’. It described the precept as enjoining Galileo ‘to abandon completely teaching, defending or treating this doctrine’ of the Earth's movement and the Sun's fixity, which is nearly the same thing as item 2 says. Item 4 read that Galileo could ‘in no manner whatever hold, teach or defend [Copernicus's ideas], in word or in writing’, or he would be proceeded against, and that he promised to obey. Item 5 combines all these texts, perhaps sloppily, perhaps maliciously, and has Bellarmino alone give Galileo the precept in its strongest form. Just to bring confusion full circle, item 6 (sentence) contains the most detailed account, having Bellarmino warn Galileo ‘benignly’ before Seghizzi gave him the strongest form of the precept. Item 7 (Bellarmino's certificate) makes no explicit reference either to precept or to warning.

Thus except for the decretum of 3 March (item 3), all the texts agree that Galileo got the precept in full form, leaving a little unclear only from whom, a point which may be entirely irrelevant. We could conclude that since we have item 3 outnumbered, we can discard it. This move would be silly, but it does highlight one crucial fact: item 3 stands alone both in its content and, more importantly, in its status and location. The second point is crucial to Galileo's second trial. Since it was not in his dossier, the Inquisition's staff in 1632–3 could not have been expected to know about it unless someone had ordered them to search all of the Inquisition's voluminous records.Footnote 14 The absence of an order for such a search might mean that it was never handed down and that item 3 therefore never came into evidence.Footnote 15 Hence the near-perfect consistency between the other two documents of 1616, the ‘Summary’ and the sentence.

The decretum of 3 March might seem the most authoritative document, since it records what happened at the Inquisition's Thursday meeting, the only one of its weekly assemblies that the Pope usually attended. Inclusion in the Decreta meant that the text became a precedent which the Inquisition relied on almost as much as common lawyers do.Footnote 16 Although both points are significant, neither is as weighty as it at first might sound. Above all, the Decreta were frequently sloppily kept. The minute of Paul's order (item 1), recording a direct, if informal, command from the Pope via the Inquisition's secretary to the two heads of its permanent staff, is a good example of the many notes in the decree registers scrawled in the margin or crammed in at the end of a meeting.Footnote 17 Since it had not gone through the congregation of cardinals, the Pope's order need not have been recorded there at all, although more than a few similar acts were. As just one example, take the informational note exactly like item 1 saying that Millini ‘told me, the assessor, that the Pope had ordered’ that recommendations – letters offering protection to suspects – were not to be accepted in Inquisition cases.Footnote 18 Or, even better, an entry in a case much like Galileo's – and a text very similar in form and content to the precept minute (item 2) – simply noting another papal order that did not require the Congregation's action:

8 March 1629. The Reverend Father Commisssary of the Holy Office reported that the Pope had ordered the bishop of Puzzuoli to be relegated to the monastery of Santa Prassede of the monks of Vallombrosa near Santa Maria Maggiore. In the execution of which order the present Reverend Father Commissary and I the notary took the aforesaid bishop to the aforesaid monastery super Rheda and there in my presence and that of the below written witnesses notified the same bishop of the Pope's order and ordered [praecipit] him not to leave the aforesaid monastery under penalty at the will of the Pope, and successive commended him to the abbot of the same monastery. ‘Super quibus etc’ [the boilerplate authenticating the document as a notarial act] in the aforesaid monastery in the rooms of the palace of the titular cardinal, in the presence of Angelo Finati of the diocese of Otranto and Anello de Sancto, priest of Puzzuoli diocese, witnesses.Footnote 19

It will bear remembering that the witnesses did not sign this minute, any more than they did Galileo's.

Next, the way the records were produced contained one notable weakness that bears directly on the status of item 3, the only one of these documents explicitly to identify itself as a second-hand summary. The notary said he had transcribed a text given to him by the assessor, the permanent head of the Inquisition's staff, who had taken notes on what Bellarmino had said during the secret part of the Inquisition's meeting which the notary could not attend.Footnote 20 Francesco Beretta alleges that the Inquisition's de facto head, Millini, kept close tabs on the assessor's accuracy.Footnote 21 Whether or not this claim holds in general, he failed this time. In the next clause of the same document the same notary, again following the assessor's lead, noted the Congregation of the Index's order that Copernicus's De Revolutionibus and two other books had been ‘prohibited and suspended, respectively’, and then reversed the sequence of those words followed again by ‘respectively’ at the end of the note. By also listing the books incorrectly relative to which was prohibited or suspended, the assessor/notary created an irresolvable mess.Footnote 22 There is every reason to think he did the same in item 2, the precept minute. Besides, as its context shows, the decree of 3 March did not primarily concern Galileo, who appeared in it only as advance recipient of the Index's action, so the notary (and maybe Bellarmino himself) worried less about getting what happened to him right.

The precept minute: a forgery?

From the moment serious study of Galileo's trial began in the late 1860s, item 2 has been the centre of attention and, because it is the most damaging to Galileo, of concerted efforts to dispose of it.Footnote 23 In fact, it is more dangerous than anyone has thought. Incredibly enough, one phrase in it that would by itself settle once and for all what happened has been overlooked.Footnote 24 It consists of two words, et constituto, which occur between ‘praedicto Galileo adhuc ibidem praesenti’ (‘the aforesaid Galileo being still present’) and ‘praecepit et ordinavit’ (both meaning ‘ordered’) in recording Seghizzi's action. Constitutus (‘Constituted’) appears at the beginning of a deposition before the Inquisition to signify the deponent's change in status qua deponent and thereby indicates the legal nature of the proceeding. Its predicate here is Galileo and in tandem with adhuc ibidem praesenti, the key word being the adverb, it signifies that at least the notary regarded both Bellarmino's and Seghizzi's actions as part of the same legal action. This is a point, by the way, which is only strengthened by the interpretation of successive ac incontinenti offered below. Further, there could be no question of a so-called charitable admonition, an act which by definition could not have legal significance, followed by a judicially binding precept. We shall return to this problem.

The campaign against the precept minute took two forms, put forward most forcefully by Emil Wohlwill.Footnote 25 He argued that it was a forgery and, even were it not, still illegitimate in law. Both criticisms shared a key point: the lack of the witnesses' signatures. Although the forgery thesis proved popular for a long time, only one well-informed historian still seriously entertains it, paradoxically the man who has done most to demonstrate its unlikelihood, Francesco Beretta. His case for forgery rests not on palaeographical or codicological grounds but on Wohlwill's original (if unacknowledged) argument about the contradiction between item 3 and item 1, leading to the slippage between item 2's two actions. Beretta argues that the ‘material authenticity’ of its second half is ‘very problematic’, before concluding that it was forged in 1632 in order to get Riccardi, who had licensed the Dialogue, out of trouble.Footnote 26 Many commentators have taken item 1 as ordering a procedure in two phases, a ‘warning’ by Bellarmino followed by a precept from Seghizzi. Beretta was the first to try to explain that ‘warning’, identifying it as a caritativa monitio recorded in the authentic part of item 2.Footnote 27 This assertion drives his case for forgery. Unfortunately, it is much less than certain that he is right about the nature of Bellarmino's action. The Inquisition regularly used a monitio in exactly the way I think that Bellarmino did, not as a charitable warning, but as a device to suspend process; by contrast, I have not found a single monitio in the registers qualified as ‘charitable’. As just one example of a usage that could be identical to what happened to Galileo, a decree of 18 August 1616 allowed a consultor of the Holy Office in Pavia to return there, ‘a monitio and judicial precept having been given him not to speak about his case’ (‘facta ei monitione et praecepto iudiciali de non loquendo de causa sua’).Footnote 28

Beretta admits that the palaeographical and codicological evidence is against him. Thus all of item 2 ‘appears’ to be in the hand of Andrea Pettini, the chief notary in 1616.Footnote 29 Further, he concludes that the first half of the precept minute is unequivocally authentic on formal grounds, and does not criticize the second in these terms.Footnote 30 He also proves that the entire document could not have been interpolated into the dossier at a later date.Footnote 31 Finally, Beretta shows that the allegedly missing witnesses' signatures would not have been expected given the kind of document item 2 is, an imbreviatura or minute.Footnote 32 Its authenticity derived not from those signatures but from its place in Galileo's dossier. The only signature required was the notary's and it was normal practice for Inquisition notaries to sign only once per file, at the bottom of the front cover.Footnote 33 Galileo's dossier lacks such a signature. Beretta rather tendentiously maintains that either it never had one or the signature had already been torn off before Galileo was sentenced, making the outcome illegal. This point will not bear the weight placed on it. Although it is hard to miss the damage to the dossier's cover, there is no way to say when that might have happened.Footnote 34 Nor does Beretta cite evidence for his description of normal practice which he appears to base on the surviving processi in Trinity College, Dublin, MS 1232.Footnote 35 This comparison may or may not be warranted, since these dossiers, first, concern cases of 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 second, include multiple proceedings, not just one.Footnote 36 Nor even on these dossiers is the (same) notary's practice uniform. Some signatures appear to be autograph (e.g. fo. 1r), others fair copies probably written by a substitute notary (e.g. 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 item 2's authenticity. If Bellarmino's was not a ‘charitable admonition’, not much is left of Beretta's case for forgery.

At the same time as Beretta, Matthias Dorn, a geologist, also undertook to demonstrate that the precept minute, item 2, had been forged.Footnote 37 In addition to recycling Wohlwill's twin claims (again, without acknowledgement) Dorn offered a quasi-scientific criticism based on observations by an apparently professional document examiner, one G. Schöneberg.Footnote 38 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: first, in the form of characters, especially ‘d’; second, in what palaeographers call the ductus, the general way in which characters are formed, especially Oberlängenverzierungen, which means serifs on the ascenders; third, in the size of the characters; and fourth, in the ligature between majuscule ‘T’ and subsequent ‘e’.Footnote 39 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 of twenty-year-old photographs and Henri de L'Epinois's much clearer (in part because more than a century older) photographic reproductions and on the strength of professional training in palaeography and thirty years' practice and teaching of it, I do not accept any of Schöneberg's points.Footnote 40 Neither of the most solid-looking ones, the first and fourth, is true. Compare the initial minuscule ‘d’ on ‘doceat’ (fo. 44r, right margin) to that on ‘defendat’ in the next line – both different in form, both allegedly in the hand of the forgerer – and to the initial ‘d’ on ‘de’ (in the phrase de lauda) in the third line of the first part of minute which is identical to the ‘d’ on ‘doceat’. For medial position ‘d’ compare for example that in ‘suprad[ic]to’ (middle of the second line, first part of the minute) to the same word in the first line of the second part (both words being almost identical, by the way, the minute difference being a function of their position in the text, the second at the upper margin allowing the writer more room to be florid). As for ‘T’ and ‘e’, we are lucky to have two instances at the beginning of the same word (‘testium’ on the third line from the bottom of fo. 43v, near the right margin, and ‘testibus’, the last word of the document), and both are identical, as they are to the majuscule ‘T’ on ‘Terrae’ (line 2, fo. 44r). Finally, 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 unusual characters over which the writer therefore had to concentrate, is impossible since there are none to compare.

In the most recent consideration of the documents and events of 1616, Annibale Fantoli offers a number of extrinsic criticisms of Beretta's forgery thesis. One of the most powerful concerns the names of the witnesses. How, wonders Fantoli, would a forger in 1632 have known the witnesses' names?Footnote 41 It might be replied that a clever forger could have got them from the same place where I confirmed their identities, a biography of Bellarmino published in 1624 and again in 1631. The Cypriot Badino or Bandino de Nores was maestro di camera to both Cesare Baronio and then Bellarmino.Footnote 42 Agostino Mongardo served Bellarmino as a chamberlain (cubiculi administer).Footnote 43 In a note, answering an objection by Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Fantoli hypothesizes that the version of item 2 as a public document (that is, with all the required signatures, properly sealed) is missing because it went not into Galileo's dossier but into one of the Libri extensorum.Footnote 44 Fantoli draws on Beretta's characterization of this once quite extensive series of volumes as ‘the registers of acts emitted in public form by the notary’, but it is difficult to put full faith in Beretta's broad-gauge conclusions about them since so few survive.Footnote 45 One that I examined, for example, ACDFSO, St.st.LL-5-g, marked as part of the series on its spine, contains no public instruments. Finally, like Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Fantoli adduces the apparent contradiction between items 1 and 2 as evidence of the second's authenticity.Footnote 46 Why, they suggest, would a forger have made such a gross mistake? Would he not have been sure to make his forgery consistent with an authentic document? And, I might add, especially if he had gone to all the trouble to ferret out real witnesses' names.

Bellarmino's ‘certificate’ and evidence from Galileo's trial in 1633

Galileo thought he got off lightly in 1616, failing so much as to mention the precept. Of course, he might for once have been playing by the rules, since the Inquisition's proceedings were supposed to be top secret. Since he made light of the Index's decree of 5 March against Copernicus, we may think that Galileo took none of this with the requisite seriousness.Footnote 47 But he did. He heard the rumours that ran through both Rome and Venice of his conviction and abjuration. Naturally, this news worried him. Here is where the seventh document comes in. Galileo asked Bellarmino to testify that he had not abjured or been otherwise punished. The cardinal agreed. He took care over his text, writing at least one draft before settling on the final form.

The letter is dated 26 May 1616 and reads as follows:

We, Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino, having understood that Signor Galileo Galilei is being slandered or accused of having abjured in our hands, and also of being ‘penanced’ [punished] for this with salutary penances, and having been sought out about the truth, we say that the said Signor Galileo has not abjured in our hands nor in those of others in Rome, nor anywhere else that we know, any opinion or doctrine, nor even more has he received salutary penances nor of any other sort, but has only had announced to him the declaration made by Our Lord [the Pope] and published by the Sacred Congregation of the Index, in which is contained that the doctrine ascribed to Copernicus that the earth moves around the sun and the sun is at the center of the world without moving from east to west is contrary to Holy Scripture and therefore cannot be defended nor held. And in testimony of this we have written and signed this document with our own hand.Footnote 48

Like Galileo, Bellarmino was an accomplished rhetorician, and he put his skills to use in this text. Not only did he carefully avoid assigning responsibility for the precept (letting himself off the hook, just in case), but he also adroitly, as if casually, said that Galileo had been warned not to defend or hold either of the two condemned propositions. Although the judges in 1633 took this passage as further incriminating Galileo, the opposite of the position taken by most modern historians, this fede (testimonial) says nothing directly about the event of 26 February.

One more kind of evidence bears on what happened – Galileo's testimony in his opening deposition on 12 April 1633.Footnote 49 Unravelling it is even more complicated than working through the texts already discussed.

Galileo was quickly asked whether he had been in Rome in 1616. His reply seems designed to misdirect, drawing his hearers away from the precept, even though he had not yet been asked about it. He began by alleging that he came to Rome in 1616 ‘to hear what was proper to hold’ about Copernicanism. He embroidered this assertion by further alleging that he met with five cardinals inquisitor at their invitation because they wanted help understanding Copernicus. This was safe, since four of the five had died and the last was a man Galileo thought he could either count on or expect to be out of Rome. Except for Galileo's obviously self-interested claim, there is no evidence that he ever met any of them to talk about anything, another instance like the long conversation he is supposed to have had with Paul V in the wake of his silencing.Footnote 50 Next, he played the Bellarmino card, accurately enough citing a letter from the cardinal to the author of the only book to be outright condemned in 1616, Paolo Antonio Foscarini, saying that Foscarini was wise to defend Copernicus hypothetically (as, of course, was Galileo), but Galileo overlooked the fact that it bore a date almost a year before the Index's decree.Footnote 51 Then came item 7, Bellarmino's certificate. It is highly important that Galileo, in the act of handing over an authentic copy of the text, testified that it said something other than it did, or rather said two contradictory things about it. Item 7 read that Copernicus's ideas were ‘contrary to Holy Scripture and therefore cannot be defended nor held’. Galileo first repeated Bellarmino's statement in the letter to Foscarini and then tried to make it appear that item 7 said the same thing, while quoting it accurately. Even Galileo's prodigious rhetorical powers had their limits. He made a bad mistake by introducing item 7, which plainly said ‘cannot be defended nor held’, at the same time as he tried to obscure it in a cloud of words. ‘In any manner whatsoever’ (as the precept minute reads) almost becomes superfluous.Footnote 52

At this point Galileo repeated his story of the interview with Bellarmino, perhaps inadvertently emphasizing the intensity of the prohibition given him. When pressed on the question whether Bellarmino had given him a precept as well, Galileo admitted ‘maybe’. Then he destroyed himself. ‘I do not claim not to have in any way violated that precept.’ Just in case his examiners missed this admission, he made a long further statement, in which he conceded that everything alleged about 26 February 1616 could be true, before quoting the strong form of the precept – ‘in no way whatsoever’ – as if he had received it in that form. He ended the interrogation by repeating what was at best an equivocation that he had not told the papal censor about the precept because the Dialogue did not defend Copernicus. However much bias the ‘Summary’ (item 5) may manifest against Galileo, it strictly accurately records this moment: ‘he confesses the precept’.Footnote 53

Galileo continued to follow this line in his brief defence document submitted on 10 May 1633, the same day as his third deposition, which seems to rule out much reflection on its content.Footnote 54 Reiterating the initial denial in his first interrogation that he had received a precept (which he twice also called a comandamento) from the Holy Office in 1616 by covering himself with Bellarmino's certificate, Galileo claimed to have had the order from Bellarmino orally. With ‘in any manner whatsoever’ removed from it as he said he remembered it (because that phrase did not appear in the certificate), he blithely observed ‘that there remains no reason to doubt that the comandamento made in it [item 7] is the same as the precept which was made in the decree of the sacred congregation of the Index’. He then insisted on the purity of his intention and that he had never set out to violate any comandamenti.Footnote 55 But then in his final interrogation on 21 June he changed his mind; at any rate he now spoke of ‘that precept’ he had received as the watershed in his intellectual life, after which he scrupulously and sincerely adhered only to Ptolemy's cosmology, as he continued to maintain throughout the balance of his last interrogation that he had always done.Footnote 56

Thus, except for the document of 10 May, Galileo himself seems to have admitted that he received a precept from Bellarmino, never saying anything of Seghizzi's action, and at least leaving open the possibility that the precept took the strong form. Galileo's own words isolate item 3 that much more.

Then comes the last and perhaps oddest moment in this whole tangled episode – Galileo's abjuration. His sentence is replete with accusations that he had violated the precept so it is no surprise that he confessed to having done so, saying that he had been properly condemned ‘because after having been legally informed [intimato] with a precept that I should entirely leave the false opinion [of the Earth's movement] … and that the said false doctrine could not be held, defended nor taught in any way whatsoever, not verbally nor in writing’, he had published his Dialogue anyway.Footnote 57 As he apparently told his first biographer, Giovanfrancesco Buonamici, the only thing Galileo refused to admit was that he had committed fraud in concealing the precept from Riccardi.Footnote 58

The legal impropriety thesis

Given this reasonably clear general line on the content and reality of Galileo's precept, the most important remaining point is a consideration of the evidence bearing on its legality. Critics of the precept minute rely on two principal arguments to make what has been dubbed the legal impropriety thesis.Footnote 59 First, Seghizzi failed to give Galileo a chance to accept Bellarmino's warning and, second, even if he had, the precept was still illegitimately administered. The first point depends on the meaning of the phrase successive ac incontinenti, usually translated as ‘immediately thereafter’. The second rests on a comparison with the ‘precept’ of 1632 ordering Galileo to Rome.

Successive ac incontinenti

To take these in order, ‘immediately’ makes it sound as if Seghizzi abused Galileo in his zeal for Holy Church. Twenty years ago Thomas Kurig, now an intellectual-property lawyer, put forward a radically new translation as a solution to the problem. His argument depended on two grammatical points. ‘Immediately’ (gleich darauf in German) is mistaken and ignores ac incontinenti. Successive should be translated not in a temporal sense but as ‘following thereon (expressing the papal will)’, while ac incontinenti is a causal dative modifying ‘Galileo’ and the phrase should therefore be rendered as ‘since Galileo was unwilling’ or ‘being impudent’.Footnote 60 The first of these at least raises a question about the usual translation. No doubt because of the incorrect linkage to incontinenti, successive lost its simple meaning of ‘after’ with no necessary implication of ‘right after’. Kurig's second point appears even more vital, if not as original as he claims; it had been made, if not published, already in 1964.Footnote 61 By almost literally translating si recusaverit of item 1, incontinenti would remove the most important contradiction between it and item 2. That contradiction has been overdrawn even without the correct translation of incontinenti, because recusaverit need not mean ‘refuse’. Recusare principally means ‘to object’, but it also has the sense ‘to be reluctant’ or ‘to be unwilling’. It is not necessary to belabour the point that this last meaning agrees exactly with incontinenti as translated by Kurig. Thus Galileo would not have had to do anything more than hesitate to obey or give some sign of annoyance and Seghizzi would have thought himself within his rights to give the precept.

Unfortunately, Kurig's elegant solution is wrong. I have found no other instances of incontinenti used in the way he suggests, in either a search of the Patrologia latina database, a less systematic survey of other medieval and early modern writing, or most importantly among the lawyers. Nowhere in their extensive attention to the word is a definition like Kurig's so much as hinted at. More curiously yet, none of the commentators I have checked discusses the phrase successive ac incontinenti.

When in doubt about the meaning of a term, the best historical move is to look for other contemporary uses, as Beretta does in this case. Several nineteenth-century scholars had already taken that route, including Philippe Gilbert and Franz Reusch. Both looked in inquisitorial manuals, Gilbert in Repertorium Inquisitorum (1575) and Reusch in Eliseo Masini's widely used text for provincial inquisitors, Sacro arsenale (first edition 1621 and frequently reprinted). A note added to a passage in the Repertorium by Quintiliano Mandosio, one of its editors, left incontinenti almost entirely indeterminate as to the length of time denoted.Footnote 62 Masini's book gave other examples of actions linked by successive ac incontinenti, as well as a larger number where just the first word appears.Footnote 63 In one of the instances having both, Masini set it parallel to the Italian immediatamente, a word at first glance at least as strong as its modern English cognate.Footnote 64 Yet Masini cannot have meant this, since his phrase connected two actions that could never happen ‘immediately’ after one another in a temporal sense: bringing a suspect from prison (even if in the same building) in order to confront another suspect. Thus on Masini's evidence successive must mean no more than ‘after’ (maybe even ‘as soon as possible after’) or perhaps better ‘directly’ in both the temporal and procedural sense. This comes close to Beretta's gloss on it of ‘in continuity with the previous event’ – that is, as part of the same legal action – even if he continues to use the temporal meaning of ‘immediately’.Footnote 65Successive by itself says nothing about whether Galileo had a chance to respond.

The entry in Du Cange might make it appear that successive is a fifteenth-century neologism, since the sole citation comes from a letter of Pius II of 1459 and most lexika have similarly impoverished entries for it.Footnote 66 The only other textual citation in any of them I have yet found, in Andreas Stübelius's Thesaurus latinitatis, is to Aelius Spartianus on Caracalla taken from Robert Constantin's Supplementum linguae latinae where Stübelius correctly emended the reading to successisse.Footnote 67 The full title of Constantin's work underscores the word's rarity: Supplementum linguae Latinae, seu dictionarium abstrusorum vocabulorum.Footnote 68 Johann Matthias Gesner cited the same passage without emendation in his slightly later Novus Linguae et Eruditionis Romanae Thesaurus.Footnote 69 In fact, although undoubtedly rare, a number of instances of the word come up in a search of the Patrologia latina database covering patristic and medieval writing before 1215.Footnote 70 The interval between then and the seventeenth century still needs investigation, but by the later period the word appears fairly frequently – two or three occurrences in Melchior Adam's Vitae Germanorum iureconsultorum et politicorum … et Germanorum Theologorum,Footnote 71 as well as two occurrences in a file of Inquisition cases.Footnote 72 Unlike its mate incontinenti, successive did not interest the jurists, either because of its rarity or perhaps because the meaning was obvious.

While still far from a common word, incontinenti has a much richer history. It appeared along with the then more usual ex continenti a number of times in Justinian's Code with such a variety of possible meanings as to generate a substantial amount of jurisprudential commentary.Footnote 73 Albericus de Rosate (c. 1290–1360) offered one of the most detailed discussions in his Dictionarium iuris tam civilis, quam canonici, which went through many editions.Footnote 74 He gave an almost bewildering number of definitions, most in the temporal sense from statim onwards, and a number of cognates (all meaning, at first glance, ‘immediately’) extending all the way to three days as the time limit for revoking an attorney's errors (citing C. 2. 9 and his own discussion in Commentariorum iuris utriusque summi practici Domini Alberici de Rosate Bergomensis pars Prima super Codice Footnote 75). His gloss on confestim, one of the synonyms he suggested for incontinenti, defined it again as sometimes statim, but sometimes ten days. The word also had nontemporal meanings, especially continuus, without any ‘extraneous acts’. In this case, the time period might be left entirely undefined; Albericus again suggested the figure of ten days. In his third entry he gave the example of merchants going off in search of a notary or a celebratory drink at the conclusion of a deal, both (especially the second) denoting a possibly protracted interval of time. Other commentators often cited Albericus's three days in the case of a man who died that long after being wounded.Footnote 76 Others stretched the time indefinitely, for example the great late fifteenth-century canonist Felino Sandeo, who left it up to the judge's decision how long an heir had to prove his claim incontinenti.Footnote 77 In short, the general opinion was that the word ‘receives a varying interpretation according to the matter … and we [in this case Bernabé Brisson, but it could be any of a number of commentators] interpret it with some modest space of time’.Footnote 78 German commentators introduced a distinctive subtlety, saying the term should not be interpreted literally but instead civiliter, moraliter, leaving its precise temporal component up to the judge's discretion, as Sandeo had thought.Footnote 79

As little as we know about its constituent elements, we have even less to go on about the phrase successive ac incontinenti. As far as anyone now knows, it appears for the first time in the precept minute and might therefore have been invented especially for Galileo.Footnote 80 (I make this point facetiously in order to underscore another crucial gap in our knowledge.Footnote 81) Wohlwill correctly identified it as a ‘formula’ while translating it in a number of different ways. But no one has yet tried to dig very far into its contemporary meanings.Footnote 82 This omission partly arises from lack of evidence since so much of the material produced by the Roman Inquisition has been destroyed. Thus far, the only evidence I have found in such sources comes from Trinity College, Dublin, MS 1232, which post-dates Galileo's trial.Footnote 83 Unlike most of these volumes, it is composed of case files rather than sentences. Beretta looked it over, but confined himself to the two instances of successive ac incontinenti, ignoring other terms being used in similar ways that may help to define the phrase. The first of the two occurrences he did discuss is much like the one in Masini in which a prisoner confronted another prisoner; that is, some indeterminate interval of time must have intervened between two acts. The phrase follows the accused's signature at the end of a verbale with the note that he was returned to prison and successive ac incontinenti searched.Footnote 84 The other case is even less help, except that there are two other phrases on the same page that appear to serve the same function. The passage begins with ‘successive et immediate ubi coram S. fuit ei dictum per Dominum an velit repeti testes examinatos in presenti causa quia dabuntur, etc’, to which the accused replied in the negative. ‘Successive et incontinenti supradictus D. fuit ipsi (?) assignatus terminus decem dierum ad faciendum suas defensiones’, which he also declined. ‘Deinde mandavit dominus reponi ad locum suum.’Footnote 85 Thus we have incontinenti parallel to immediate, but also to deinde, which simply means ‘thereafter’, almost the same thing as successive. There are many cases where deinde or even more basically tunc (then) do the work that successive ac incontinenti sometimes does.Footnote 86 In short, the translation of successive ac incontinenti as ‘immediately thereafter’ is open to doubt.

Seghizzi's caution

An external case can be made to support Seghizzi's caution. He had a distinguished record as an inquisitor and was a stickler for proper procedure. In 1601 he was made socius (official substitute) of the commissary, giving him experience of Roman procedure.Footnote 87 Then it was off to Cremona as inquisitor before earning promotion in 1609 to Milan.Footnote 88 In both places he bombarded Rome with questions, contributing greatly to the development of Inquisition jurisprudence by leading the Congregation to enumerate a number of general principles.Footnote 89 Further, the post of commissary of the Inquisition often served as a springboard to higher position, including cardinal. No one took it without knowing this potential, as Seghizzi did almost exactly a year before he gave Galileo the precept.Footnote 90 Fumbling such an important case, especially in Bellarmino's presence, would end any such ambition for Seghizzi. About the time of Bellarmino's certificate, negotiations began for Seghizzi's provision to the bishopric of Lodi.Footnote 91 This meant an exceptionally short tenure as commissary. We cannot say exactly what Seghizzi's move means because he died shortly thereafter, so it could be that he was banished for exceeding his orders. Two other explanations are more likely: first, a native of the place, he went home at his own request to acquire seasoning for promotion; or second, he was shouldered aside to make room for his more highly favoured successor, Desiderio Scaglia. Interestingly enough, Scaglia's socius (deputy), Deodato Seghizzi da Lodi, had already taken office on 7 September.Footnote 92 He must have been Seghizzi's relative. Even better for Seghizzi, his own socius, Jacopo Tinti, was made inquisitor of Casale in August 1616 and a year later moved to Como.Footnote 93 Since ordinarily the commissary probably named his own socius, the fact that Scaglia did not do so, together with Tinti's appointment and Seghizzi's own to his hometown see, make it look very much as if these were bribes intended to induce him to make way for Scaglia.

The ‘precept’ of 1632

Now to the parallel alleged between 1616 and 1632. Giorgio de Santillana probably made the most out of it and his argument has recently reappeared in much the same form in Fantoli's piece.Footnote 94 In using 1632 to shed light on 1616 de Santillana committed two mistakes as well as accidentally raising a serious problem for his case. The first was to think that the surviving version of the document of 1632 – with signatures appended – was the original. It is plainly headed ‘copia’.Footnote 95 Perhaps the original should have gone into the archives of the Florentine Inquisition, where it is also not to be found, but this does not clear away the mistake.Footnote 96

De Santillana shared his second mistake with everybody else. It can be read more charitably for that and for several other reasons. First, we have next to no evidence about how precepts were normally given. Second, taken by itself, the document of 1 October could look as if it recorded Galileo receiving one such. But did it? Matters become doubtful when we note that the text did not call what had happened a precept, coming no nearer than commandamento, one of the words Galileo sometimes used as a synonym. There was room for imprecision on the score of terminology, it is true, so maybe we can still salvage something for comparison to 1616. Turning to the act's context raises more problems, both about what to call it and about what happened.

The story in 1632 is even more complicated than that in 1616, in no small part because the event involved two Roman bureaucracies much more independent of each other than Inquisition and Index. This time it was the papal secretary of state, Urban VIII's nephew, Francesco Barberini on the one hand, and his uncle (and Urban's brother) Antonio Barberini, the Inquisition's secretary, on the other.Footnote 97 The initial order to summon Galileo to Rome appears in the Decreta. It ends by spelling out that the inquisitor in Florence was ‘to receive from him [Galileo] a promise to obey this precept which should be given to him in the presence of witnesses who in case he [Galileo] would not accept it [the precept] and not promise to obey could testify to the fact if need be’.Footnote 98 Except for the fact that the witnesses were there to authenticate Galileo's refusal rather than his acquiescence, the reverse of 1616, this appears to be a fairly straightforward order.

Its execution proved anything but. Antonio Barberini, who should have been entirely in charge, made the better job of it, getting things to his satisfaction in one try. He spelt out exactly what the inquisitor was to do:

‘But your lordship [the inquisitor] should summon him [Galileo] to a place where witnesses and the notary should be present, without indicating to the said Galileo why the aforesaid were present’ and order him to come to Rome before the end of October ‘and if he agrees to come, your lordship will induce him to testify to what you have told him and to what he has promised and if he does so, your lordship, after his departure, will procure that the witnesses and the notary, who will have been present, attest to the fact that the aforesaid testification had been written and signed by the same Galileo; but if he refuses to do what has been said, in that case, you will give him a precept in the presence of the notary and the witnesses and then draw up this act, that he should appear in Rome’.Footnote 99

According to Antonio, then, the order to come to Rome was not a precept, which Galileo was to receive only if he refused to obey.

Antonio was a theologian, so perhaps he did not have the law quite clear. Francesco, however, was a lawyer and he did much worse, taking two letters on the same day to get straight what should happen, the second apparently written almost immediately after the dispatch of the first but perhaps not encyphered for three days while the cardinal and his clerk scratched their heads over whether the first letter had done the job properly. (Francesco was only involved at all out of respect for Galileo's patron the grand duke.) The text of the first of these letters published in Favaro's great edition of Galileo's Opere obscures just how much trouble Cardinal Francesco and his clerk had in drawing up instructions for the nuncio.Footnote 100 The minute is an exceptional mess.Footnote 101 The passages about the precept had to be reworked at least twice and possibly three times.Footnote 102 The final version read that Galileo was to be given a precept by the Pope's order and asked to obey it in the presence of witnesses so that in case he refused he could still be ‘examined’.Footnote 103 In the second letter, Francesco came closer to the Pope's original order, adding both that Galileo was not to be told why the witnesses were there and that they were to authenticate his document only after he had left. After these two departures from the decretum and from Antonio's instructions, Francesco ended by agreeing with his uncle that Galileo would be given a precept only if he refused to obey the summons to Rome.Footnote 104 The nuncio could be forgiven for thinking that he had been ordered to act only if Galileo meant to publish something new.Footnote 105

As we have seen, Galileo's acceptance of the summons did not refer to it as a precept either. Nor during November and December do any of the surviving Inquisition documents call the action of 1 October a precept.Footnote 106 Even the decree of 30 December threatening to haul Galileo to Rome in chains does not do so.Footnote 107 In his first interrogation Galileo himself called it a comandamento (as well as saying that he had been ‘ordered’ – ordinato – to come to Rome).Footnote 108 Only one text other than the original note of the Pope's action calls it a precept – Antonio's letter of 10 January 1633 transmitting that order to Florence, saying that ‘by this congregation [of the Inquisition] … it is very badly understood [i.e. taken very badly] that Galileo Galilei has not promptly obeyed the precept given to him to come to Rome’.Footnote 109 This appears to be a helpful rewriting of the record in order to put Galileo into greater difficulties. If this interpretation is correct, it means that de Santillana was wrong about when that happened (in 1633, not 1616) and that the parallel he alleged between 1 October 1632 and 26 February 1616 probably fails.

Conclusion

In sum, it is likely that Galileo did indeed receive a precept, probably in the strongest form. I have suggested an interpretation of the only document causing difficulties for that conclusion, the decretum, which removes much of its force. It also seems likely that the entire action against Galileo of 26 February 1616 was legal. If so, caution should be the order of the day about the ‘legal impropriety thesis’ on grounds both intrinsic (primarily the meaning of successive ac incontinenti) and extrinsic (Seghizzi's career), as well as because it rests implicitly on comparative evidence which is not yet to be had (the ‘precept’ of 1632). Beyond this we cannot presently go, and it may well be that the apparent contradictions in the documents will prevent any greater degree of certainty. Nevertheless, given the probabilities demonstrated here, it would be wise to stop appealing to the law in any future attempt to demonstrate that the precept of 1616 was illegitimate.

Appendices

Documents numbered as in the text

2. Die veneris 26 eiusdem [February]. In palatio solitae habitationis dicti illustrissimi Domini cardinalis Bellarminii et in mansionibus dominationis suae illustrissimae, idem illustrissimus Dominus cardinalis, vocato supradicto Galileo, ipsoque coram domo sua illustrissima existente, in praesentia admodum reverendi Patris fratris Michaelis Angeli Seghitti de Lauda, Ordinis Praedicatorum, Commissarii generalis Sancti Officii, praedictum Galileum monuit de errore supradictae opinionis et ut illam deserat; et successive ac incontinenti, in mei etc. et testium etc., praesenti etiam adhuc eodem illustrissimo Domino cardinali, supradictus Pater Commissarius praedicto Galileo adhuc ibidem praesenti et constituto praecepit et ordinavit [proprio nomine]Footnote 110Sanctissimi D. N. Papae et totius Congregationis Sancti Officii, ut supradictam opinionem, quod sol sit centrum mundi et immobilis et terra moveatur, omnino relinquat, nec eam de caetero, quovis modo teneat, doceat aut defendat, verbo aut scriptis; alias, contra ipsum procedetur in Sancto Officio. Cui praecepto idem Galileus aquievit et parere promisit. Super quibus etc. Actum Romae ubi supra, praesentibus ibidem reverendo Badino Nores de Nicosia in regno Cypri, et Augustino Mongardo de loco abbatiae Rosae, diocesis Politanensis, familiaribus dicti illustrissimi Domini cardinalis, testibus etc. Footnote 111

3. Facta relatione per Ill.mum D. Cardinalem Bellarminum, quod Galileus Galilei Mathematicus, monitus de ordine Sacrae Congregationis ad deserendam opinionem quam hactenus tenuit, quod sol sit centrum sferarum [EN and Processo: spherarum] et immobilis [‘x’ in left margin, but no insertion; vertical stroke in right margin], terra autem mobilis, acquievit, [EN and Processo: ;] ac relato Decreto Congregationis Indicis, quo fuerunt prohibita et [above, ‘x’ in front and below fuerunt] suspensa, respective [ab.; EN and Processo add comma] scripta Nicolai [above] Cupernici [followed by mark keyed to marginal insertion] *De revolutionibus orbium caelestium, Didaci Astunica in Iob, [in margin] et fratris Pauli Antonii Foscarini Carmelitae, [EN: ;] S.mus ordinavit publicari [EN: publicam] aedictum a Magistro Sacri Palatii huiusmodi suspensionis et prohibitionis, respective. Footnote 112

References

1 P.-N. Mayaud, La Condamnation des livres coperniciens et sa révocation à la lumière de documents inédits des Congrégations de l'Index et de l'Inquisition, Rome, 1997, 42–3; and M. Feingold, ‘The grounds for conflict: Grienberger, Grassi, Galileo, and posterity’, in The New Science and Jesuit Science: Seventeenth-Century Perspectives (ed. M. Feingold), Dordrecht, 2003, 121–57, 135. The ultimate source of both interpretations is Ambassador Guicciardini's report of 4 March 1616: A. Favaro (ed.), Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, 20 vols., Florence, 1933, xii, no. 1185 (EN in appendix). Beretta, Francesco offers a partly similar reading in ‘Le Procès de Galilée et les Archives du Saint-Office. Aspects judiciaires et théologiques d'une condamnation célèbre’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques (1999), 83, 441–90Google Scholar, 454, 471 and 475, but he thinks Paul V acted out of charitable motives rather than irritation.

2 S. M. Pagano and A. G. Luciani (eds.), I documenti del processo di Galileo Galile, Città del Vaticano, 1984, 99–100.

3 Favaro, op. cit. (1), xii, no. 1149.

4 Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 101. I have chosen to use the term ‘precept’ instead of ‘injunction’ because it both comes closer to praeceptum (Latin) or precetto (Italian) and also avoids any confusion with an injunction in common law, which it only partly resembles. The key difference is that an injunction in common law must be issued by a competent court while in canon law any superior with the proper jurisdiction (which need not be public) may issue a precept. See http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/index.php/Injunction. I shall return to this point elsewhere. For now see P. Fedele, ‘Dei precetti ecclesiastici’, in Scritti giuridici in onore di Santi Romano, 4 vols., Padua, 1940, iv, 267–310.

5 W. R. Shea and M. Artigas, Galileo Observed: Science and the Politics of Belief, Sagamore Beach, MA, 2006, 140.

6 D. Sobel, Galileo's Daughter, New York, 1999, 232.

7 A. Prosperi, ‘L'Inquisizione fiorentina al tempo di Galileo’, in Novità celesti e crisi del sapere (ed. P. Galluzzi), Florence, 1984, 97–124, 315; reprinted in Prosperi, L'Inquisizione romana, letture e ricerche, Rome, 2003, 183–98, 184.

8 See also Kracher, A., ‘Credibility and credulity: experiment versus authority as a false dichotomy’, Studies in Science and Theology (2005), 10, 147–60.Google Scholar

9 I have numbered them for ease of reference.

10 Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 223–4. See A. Errera, Processus in Causa Fidei: L'evoluzione dei manuali inquisitoriali nei secoli XVI–XVIII e il manuale inedito di un inquisitore perugino, Bologna, 2000, 77 and 140.

11 Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 108.

12 The four texts read respectively: (1) ‘omnino abstineat huiusmodi doctrinam et opinionem docere aut defendere, seu de ea tractare’ (Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 101); (2) ‘omnino relinquat, nec eam de caetero, quovis modo teneat, doceat aut defendat, verbis aut scriptis’ (ibid.); (3) almost quotes the last except it substitutes verbo for verbis (ibid., 108); (4) ‘omnino desereret dictam opinionem, nec etiam de caetero illam quovis modo teneret, doceret et defenderet’, the three verbs corrected from the ‘teneat, doceat aut defendat’ of (2).

13 ‘In qua propositae fuerunt infrascriptae causae, quas in notam sumpsit idem Dominus Assessor et mihi Notario tradidit, videlicet: … Facta relatione per illustrissimum Dominum cardinalem Bellarminum, quod Galileus Galilei mathematicus, monitus de ordine Sacrae Congregationis ad deserendam opinionem quam hactenus tenuit … acquievit’. Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 223. The opening clause through videlicet was standard boilerplate. See e.g. Favaro, op. cit. (1), xix, 275.

14 Based on my experience reading the registers (granted, more difficult than it would have been then since many of them are badly damaged now), it might have taken in the vicinity of three months to go through the previous sixteen years' worth of them.

15 The contemporary indices added to the front of most of the decree registers suggest that such searches must have been fairly common. I have noted two orders for them: 3 January 1604 for a case from 1559 (!) (Archivum Congregationis Doctrinae Fidei Sancti Officii (hereafter ACDFSO), Decreta 1604, fo. 2r); and 23 August 1608 for letters from 1550 (ACDFSO, Decreta S.O. 1608–1609, fo. 176v and 1608, 364).

16 As evidenced by the existence of various collections of precedents, e.g. Assessor Girolamo Casanate's volumes, among them Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome, MS 2631, as well as the decree registers themselves and possibly correspondence registers like that in Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (hereafter BAV), Barb. lat. 6334. Cf. Pierroberto Scaramella, Le lettere della Congregazione del Sant'Ufficio ai tribunali di fede di Napoli 1563–1625, Trieste, 2001, p. xlii.

17 See e.g. ACDFSO, Decreta S.O. 1615, 327 and 490.

18 First entry for the meeting without the Pope of 12 December 1628: ‘Ill.mus D. Card.is Millinus retulit mihi assessore (?), S.mus mandasse, ut literae commendationes quarumque personarum inquisitarum in S. Off.o, quae commendationes vigore decreti S.mus mense Januarii praeteriti emanaret (?) non sint recipiandae, legand. [sic] quando proponend. (?) causae et processus praedictorum reorum’. ACDFSO, Decreta S.O. 1628, fo. 206v.

19 ‘Die 8 [prima in Copia] Martii 1629 Adm. R. P. Com.rius gn.lis S. Officij retulit, SS.mum mandasse E.pum Puteolarum relegari in Monasterio S.tae Praxedis Monachorum [after deleted Ordinis Vallis] Vallis Vmbrosae prope S. Mariae Majoris [both in accusative in Copia]. In cuius ordinis executionem [exequutionem in Copia] idem adm. R. P. Com.rius unamecum [unà mecum in Copia] Not.o etc p.tum E.pum duxit ad p.tum Monasterium super Rheda, ibique coram me not.o, et Testibus infrascriptis eidem E.po notificavit ordinem S.mi, eique praecipit, ne discedat [discederet in Copia] a p.to Monasterio sub poenis arbitrio S. S.tis, successiveque illum commendavit Abbati eiusdem Monasterii. Super quibus etc Actum Romae in p.to Monasterio in mansionibus Palatii Illmi Card.llis titularis, presentibus Angelo Finati Hidruntin. [Hidrumentin. in Copia], et Anello de Isanto [Sancto in Copia] P.bro Puteolan. testibus’ (ACDFSO, Decreta S.O. 1629, fo. 45r–v and Decreta S.O. 1629 copia, unfoliated; I have not expanded abbreviations in order to give the flavor of the original). Interestingly enough, the witnesses were almost certainly the bishop's servants, just as they allegedly were Bellarmino's in Galileo's case.

20 ‘Dichiaratione di Concistori’ etc. in BAV, Chigi N. III 84, fo. 63r. The text probably dates from c. 1604.

21 Beretta, op. cit. (1), draws on Vita dell'eminentissimo Signor Cardinale Gio. Garzia Mellino Romano. Scritta dal Sig. Decio Memmoli suo Segretario, Rome, 1644, 35. Memmoli said that Millini ‘[s]tava in oltre attentissimo alle risolutioni, che si pigliavano accioche se l'Assessore, il quale ha la cura di stendere i decreti, non havesse preso bene il senso della Congregatione potesse farvelo avvertito. Ne le bastava la sustanza del decreto, se non si sodisfaceva anco del modo di spiegarlo’.

22 Mayaud, op. cit. (1), Condamnation, 47–8; and Neveu, B. and Mayaud, P.-N., ‘L'Affaire Galilée et la tentation inflationiste. À Propos des notions d'hérésie et de magistère impliquées dan l'affaire’, Gregorianum (2002), 83, 287–311, 294.Google Scholar

23 See Mayer, Thomas F., ‘The status of the Inquisition's precept to Galileo (1616) in historical perspective’, forthcoming in Nuncius (2009), 24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 The phrase is omitted from the translation in M. A. Finocchiaro (ed.), The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, Berkeley, 1989, 147; nor does any commentator take cognizance of it. As he often did, Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue, in I processi di Galileo e l'epistemologia, Rome, 1981, revised edn; first edn Milan, 1963; originally published in Rivista di storia della filosofia, 1947, nn. 2, 3; 1948, n. 1, 20, accidentally used exactly the right legal language to describe Galileo as ‘costituto quasi l'avvocato del sistema copernicano’, but with reference to item 1, not item 2.

25 See Mayer, op. cit. (23).

26 Beretta, op. cit. (1), 479. Annibale Fantoli agrees in ‘The disputed injunction and its role in Galileo's trial’, in The Church and Galileo (ed. Ernan McMullin), Notre Dame, 2005, 117–49, 121–2, 138.

27 Beretta, op. cit. (1), 475.

28 ACDFSO, Decreta S.O. 1616, 367.

29 Beretta, op. cit. (1), 477.

30 Beretta, op. cit. (1), 476.

31 Beretta, op. cit. (1), 457, 459 and the appendices.

32 Beretta, op. cit. (1), 447–8.

33 Beretta, op. cit. (1), 460.

34 Fantoli, op. cit. (26), 145 n. 16. He bases his judgement on the photograph in Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), Plate 1 (Fantoli says it is on 256, but actually all the plates follow that page).

35 Most of the Inquisition's processi have been lost.

36 For the special handling of such suspects see e.g. Francisco Peña, Directorium inquisitorum (ed. N. Eymeric), Rome, 1587, 409ff; or F. Albizzi, De inconstantia in ivre admittenda, Amsterdam, 1683, 68–81.

37 Beretta, F., ‘Le Siège apostolique et l'affaire Galilée: Relectures romaines d'une condamnation célèbre’, Roma moderna e contemporanea (1999), 7, 421–61Google Scholar, 455 n. 36, refers to Dorn's work without expressing an opinion about it.

38 M. Dorn, Das Problem der Autonomie der Naturwissenschaften bei Galilei, Sudhoffs Archiv, Beiheft 43, Stuttgart, 2000, 167–77.

39 Dorn, op. cit. (38), 175.

40 H. L'Epinois, Les Pièces du procès de Galilée précédees d'un avant-propos, Rome, 1877, plate facing 40. For one effect of the manuscript's deterioration see Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 70–1 n. The original is now in the Reserva of the Archivio Segreto Vaticano (hereafter ASV) and inaccessible for consultation. The Xerox copy made available to researchers is useless on fine points of palaeography or of codicology.

41 Fantoli, op. cit. (26), 146 n. 24.

42 For the first post see G. Mocenigo to doge, Ferrara, 26 June 1598 (Archivio di Stato, Venice, Senato Dispacci Roma, f. 41, fo. 313r) and X.-M. Le Bachelet, Bellarmin avant son Cardinalat 1542–1598. Correspondence et documents, Paris, 1911, 385 n; and for the second G. Fuligatti, Vita del Cardinale Roberto Bellarmino della Compagnia di Giesù, Rome, 1624, 150; and X.-M. Le Bachelet, Auctarium Bellarminianum. Supplément aus oeuvres du Cardinal Bellarmin, Paris, 1913, 458.

43 Fuligatti, op. cit. (42), 150; 1626 edition, sig. HHr–v; and 1631 edition, 247. His place of origin was probably Badia. S. Quirico delle Rose, also called ‘a Nasciano’, a former Camaldolese monastery, near Pozzo in Val di Chiana, attested from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries and still a villa c. 1833, now Foiano della Chiana (AR). E. Repetti, Dizionario geografico fisico storico della Toscana, vol. 1, Florence, 1833, 156; and F. Gabbirelli, Romanico Aretino. Architettura protoromanica e romanica religiosa nella diocesi medievale di Arezzo, Florence, 1990, 188. I am grateful to Erik Gustafson for helping locate this place.

44 Fantoli, op. cit. (26), 145 n. 15. He extends a point made by Beretta in ‘L'Archivio della congregazione del Sant'Ufficio: Bilancio provvisorio della storia e natura dei fondi d'antico regime’ in L'inquizione romana: Metodologia delle fonti e storia istituzionale (eds. A. Del Col and G. Paolin), Triest, 2000, 119–44, 126.

45 ‘[I] registri degli atti emessi in forma pubblica dal notaio’. Beretta, op. cit. (1), 124. He cites as examples ACDFSO, L-3-a and Q-1-a through s.

46 Fantoli, op. cit. (26), 121–2, citing Morpurgo-Tagliabue, op. cit. (24), 18–20, recte 21.

47 Favaro, op. cit. (1), xii, nos. 1187 and 1189.

48 ‘Noi Roberto cardinale Bellarmino, havendo inteso che il sig. Galileo Galilei sia calunniato o imputato di havere abiurato in mano nostra [la dottrina del Copernico circa la mobilità della terra, et immobilità del sole cancelled], et anco di essere stato per ciò penitentiato di penitentie salutari, et essendo ricercati della verità, diciamo che il suddetto sig. Galileo non ha abiurato in mano nostra né di altri *qua in Roma, né in altro luogo che noi sappiamo, alcuna sua opinione, o dottrina [phrase added in margin], né manco [meno in the draft] ha ricevuto penitentie salutari né d'altra sorte, ma solo [added above si bene, che cancelled] gli è stata denutiata la dichiaratione fatta da Nostro Signore et publicata dalla Sacra Congregatione dell'Indice, nella quale si contiene che la dottrina attribuita al Copernico, che la terra si muova intorno al sole, et che il sole stia nel centro del mondo senza muoversi da oriente ad occidente, sia contraria alle Sacre Scrit[tu]re, et però non si possa difendere né tenere. Et in fe[de] di ciò habbiamo scritta et sottoscritta la presente di nostra propria mano, questo dì 26 di maggio 1616’. Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 138. The draft is in Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Opera nostrorum, 243 I, fo. 243r, printed in U. Baldini and G. V. Coyne (eds. and trans.), The Louvain Lectures (Lectiones Lovanienses) of Bellarmine and the Autograph Copy of his 1616 Declaration to Galileo, Vatican City, 1984, 25–6, with facsimile reproduction. I am grateful to T. M. McCoog, SJ, for sending me a copy of the manuscript.

49 Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 124–30.

50 The only scrap of support comes from Ambassador Guicciardini's report of 4 March 1616 in which he noted that he, Cardinal Del Monte (not on Galileo's list) ‘and more cardinals of the Holy Office’ had tried to persuade Galileo to calm down (‘et il Sig.or Card.le dal Monte et io, in quel poco che ho potuto, et più Cardinali del S.to Offizio l'havevano persuaso a quietarsi’), but this does not much sound like the topic was how to understand Copernicus. Favaro, op. cit. (1), xii, no. 1185. Shea and Artigas, op. cit. (5), 45, translate ‘as well as several cardinals’.

51 12 April 1615. Favaro, op. cit. (1), xii, no. 1110.

52 F. Reusch, Der Process Galilei's und die Jesuiten, Bonn, 1879, 144.

53 Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 66.

54 Fantoli, op. cit. (26), 127, is typical in claiming that Galileo ‘must have’ prepared his defence carefully. There is no evidence to support this allegation. The single document that appears to have anything to do with Galileo's defence, titled by Antonio Favaro ‘Per la licenza di stampa del Dialogo dei Massimi Sistemi’ and supposititiously dated 1633 (Favaro, op. cit. (1), xix, 401–2), never entered into the trial. The latest text cited in it is probably Riccardi's letter of 24 May 1631, which makes it more likely to be a summary of the negotiations over the imprimatur designed to force Riccardi's hand.

55 Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 135–6. Italics in original.

56 Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 155.

57 ‘Ma perché da questo S. Off.io, per aver io, dopo d'essermi stato con precetto dall'istesso giuridicamente intimato che omninamente dovessi lasciar la falsa opinione che il sole sia centro del mondo e che non si muova e che la terra non sia il centro del mondo e che si muova, e che non potessi tenere, difendere né insegnare in qualsivoglia modo, né in voce né in scritto, la detta falsa dottrina, e dopo d'essermi notificato che detta dottrina è contraria alla Sacra Scrittura, scritto e dato alle stampe un libro nel quale tratto l'istessa dottrina già dannata e apporto ragioni con molta efficacia a favor di essa, senza apportar alcuna soluzione, sono stato giudicato veementemente sospetto d'eresia, cioè d'aver tenuto e creduto che il sole sia centro del mondo e imobile e che la terra non sia centro e che si muova’. Favaro, op. cit. (1), xix, 406.

58 ‘[S]upplicò li SS.ri Cardinali che, poichè si procedeva con lui in quella maniera, li facessero dire quanto a loro Eminenze piaceva, eccettuando solamente due cose egli non dovesse mai dire di non essere cattolico, perchè tale era et voleva morire, a onta e dispetto de’ suoi malevoli; l'altro, che nè meno poteva dire di havere mai ingannato nessuno, et specialmente nella publicatione del suo libro, il quale haveva sottoposto alla censura ecclesiastica et, havutane legitimamente l'approvatione, fattolo stampare.' Favaro, op. cit. (1), xix, 411. Buonamici was in close touch with Galileo during much of the final phase of his trial. Favaro, op. cit. (1), xv, nos. 2424, 2432 and 2437.

59 M. A. Finocchiaro's coinage in Retrying Galileo, 1633–1992, Berkeley, 2005, 245. See Mayer, op. cit. (23).

60 Kurig, Thomas, ‘Ein gravierender Fehler in der Übersetzung und Interpretation der Akten des Galileischen Inquisitionsprozesses’, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte (1987), 10, 15–16, 16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar ‘Im lateinischen Original sind die beiden Maßnahmen durch die drei Wörter “successive, [sic] ac incontinenti” getrennt. Man muß sie etwa folgendermaßen übersetzen: “darauf folgend [entsprechend dem päpstlichen Willen] und, da Galilei unwillig war …” Das Partizip incontinenti bezieht sich eindeutig im Dativ auf den später folgenden Galilei und muß kausal übersetzt werden. Man kann es auch mit “sich nicht mäßigend”, “frech” wiedergeben.’ The English abstract confuses the issue by having Kurig say that Galileo really did refuse, which would make the precept legitimate, which Kurig doubts, apparently thinking it a forgery. Only Dorn, op. cit. (38), 172, has taken note of Kurig's point, and only to reject it. His criticism is founded in an incorrect characterization of the wide separation between incontinenti and praedicto Galileo as ‘high classical’ style and on an originally eighteenth-century dictionary of classical Latin which took no account of later developments.

61 By Joseph Clark in 1964 at the Galileo conference at Notre Dame cited in J. J. Langford, Galileo, Science, and the Church, 3rd edn, Ann Arbor, 1992, 96. For some reason his paper was not included in E. McMullin (ed.), Galileo: Man of Science, New York, 1967. Giorgio de Santillana predictably savaged Clark's suggestion, calling it a sign of the poor state of modern Latin instruction. Giorgio de Santillana, ‘Nuove ipotesi sul processo di Galileo’, in Pubblicazioni del Comitato nazionale per le manifestazioni celebrative del IV centenario della nascita di Galileo Galilei, 3:2, ed. Carlo Maccagni, Saggi su Galileo Galilei, Florence, 1972, 474–86, 482–3. I am grateful to my colleague Emil Kramer for further advice on this point.

62 Repertorium inquisitorum prauitatis haereticae. In quo omnia, quae ad haeresum cognitionem, ac S. Inquisitionis forum pertinent, continentur. Correctionibus, & annotationibus praestantissimorum iurisconsultorum Quintilliani Mandosij, ac Petri Vendrameni decoratum & auctum, Venice, 1575, 431.

63 First published 1621. I quote from the expanded Genoa: Giuseppe Pavoni, 1625 edition; the 1639 edition contains the same text. For Gilbert see Mayer, op. cit. (23).

64 The only glimmer of hope in the entry in S. Battaglia and G. Bàrberi Squarotti (eds.), Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols., Turin, 1961–2002, vii, 355, is the application of the term to the legal succession of an heir which may or may not in reality follow ‘immediately’, with no interval of time whatsoever, on the death of the testator. See further below. I am grateful to Stefania Tutino for advice on this point.

65 F. Beretta, Galilée devant le Tribunal de l'Inquisition, Fribourg, 1998, 192.

66 C. du Fresne du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinitatis, 5 vols. Graz, 1954; reprint of 1883–9 edn, iii, 331 s. v.

67 I have used a copy of the Thesaurus formerly in the Augustana College Library. It is missing the title page and I have not yet been able to provide bibliographical details. It does not appear in the Worldcat, for example. The dedication is dated Leipzig 1717. This is probably one of the many updatings of Robert Estienne's dictionary of 1531 and later. Spartianus's text is part of the Historia Augusta.

68 It went through at least two editions, the first known that of Eustace Vignon, 1573. The work is relatively rare with only seven holders in Worldcat.

69 Johann Matthias Gesner, Novus Linguae et Eruditionis Romanae Thesaurus, vol. 4, Leipzig: Widow of Caspar Fritsch and Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf, 1749, 625.

70 E.g. in Lactantius, De falsa sapientia philosophorum (PL, 6, col. 425B), Gregory the Great, Moralia (PL, 76, col. 500A), William of Malmesbury, De antiquitate glastoniensis ecclesiae (PL, 179, col. 1684A), Alan De Lille, De Fide Catholica Contra Haereticos Sui Temporis (PL, 210, col. 316B), or a number of occurrences in Innocent III's correspondence in PL 214 and 215. See http://pld.chadwyck.com.

71 Melchior Adam, Vitae Germanorum iureconsultorum et politicorum … et Germanorum Theologorum, Frankfurt (am Main): Heirs of Johann Rosa; Heidelberg: Johannes Georg Geyder, 1620, 6, 758 and 770.

72 Trinity College, Dublin (hereafter TCD), MS 1232, fos. 432v and 450r, probably both from 1636.

73 The sixteenth-century humanist jurist Andrea Alciati put it among inusitata vocabula in Roman law. K. A. Duker (ed.), Opuscula varia de latinitate jurisconsultorum veterum, Leipzig, 1773, 356 [389].

74 Alberici de Rosate begomensis ivrisconsvlti celeberrimi Dictionarium iuris tam ciuilis, quam canonici. Quod equidem post omnes omnium editiones diligentissimè emendatum, ac praeter additiones ad hanc usque diem impressas, quibus authorum suorum nomina in fine singularum sunt descripta, plus mille & octingentis additionibus nunquam anteà in lucem emissis, auctum & locupletatum est (ed. G. Deciani), Venice, 1581, no foliation or pagination. The copy I used in the Diamond Library of Columba University Law School lacks a colophon, but its printer's device is the same as on that library's copy of F. Sandeo, Commentariorum Felini Sandei ferrariensis, in Decretalivm libros V, pars prima[-tertia] Venice: [Sub signo aquilae renouantis], 1574; vol. 3 G. Bindoni, 1575; and of its 1600–1 edition of the same book, so the publishing house is probably the same for all three. For some of its other editions see http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/1298A-B.html. I am grateful to Whitney S. Bagnall, former librarian of Special Collections in Law at Columbia, and Ryan Greenway for their help with these texts.

75 Albericus de Rosate, Commentariorum iuris utriusque summi practici Domini Alberici de Rosate Bergomensis pars Prima super Codice, 2 vols., Lyon: George Regnault, 1545, ii, fo. 87v.

76 E.g. P. Du Prat, Lexicon ivris civilis et canonici, sive potivs thesavrvs, de verborvm, quae ad ius pertinent, significatione, Lyon, 1567, fo. 104r.

77 F. Sandeo, Commentariorum Felini Sandei Ferrariensis, iuris canonici interpretis acutissimi … ad quinque libros Decretalium pars prima [-tertia]: eruditiorum virorum adnotationibus atque rerum summis illustrata innumerisq[ue] prope mendis nunc denuò collatione vetustroum exemparium expurgata communes item opiniones passim ab suthore citatae hoc signo [right hand with index finger pointed] praenotantur, 3 vols, Venice: [Sub signo aquilae renouantis], 1600–1601, iii, fo. 140v. See also one of his Consilia in a separately foliated appendix to the same volume, fo. 89r.

78 ‘[V]ariam secundum rem propositam interpretationem recipit. Incontinenti, cum aliquo moderato spatio interpretamur’. B. Brissonii in svprema parisiensi cvria advocati, De verb. qvae ad ivs pertinent, significatione, libri XIX. Per ordinem literarum dispositi, indicem memorabilium omnium verborum quaoin libris juris ciuilis reperiuntur, infinitorum′que prope locorum explicationem continentes. His accesservnt appendix praetermissarum quarundam vocum, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1578; also later editions, col. 278. For other similar entries, see A. Nebrissensis [A. de Lebrija (died 1522), Vocabularium vtriusque iuris, Venice, 1599, sig. 154v and 131v; Christoph Besold, Thesaurus Practicus, Nuremberg, 1643, 356 and 654.

79 S. Schard, Lexicon ivridicvm, sive Verborvm et rervm ad ivris rom. civilis simvl et pontificii theoriam et praxim pertinentivm thesavrvs locvpletiss … opus nunc demum studio et opera doctorum virorum sexcentis in locis adauctum, etc, preface dated 16 March 1616 signed by Johannes Gymnicus, Cologne, 1616, unpaginated and unfoliated. J. Kahl in his very popular Lexicon Iuridicum Iuris Caesarei, Geneva, 1612, 1338 (recte 1308) followed Schard almost word for word. The work went through at least fifteen editions after it first appeared in 1600. See http://www.richardwolf.de/latein/kahl.htm.

80 Masini's text post-dates it by five years, the two instances Beretta cites from TCD, MS 1232 by twenty. T. K. Abbott, Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, Dublin and London, 1900, 257.

81 In an intensive and extensive search I have thus far found but three occurrences in addition to the three just cited. One instance, missing any conjunction, comes between the end of one deposition and the beginning of the next in a processo in Archivio di Stato, Venice, Santo Uffizio, b. 71, unnumbered and unfoliated piece dated 4 October 1651 at head. The other two have a conjunction, in the first case of 1630 in the middle of the conferral of a laurea in philosophy at La Sapienza, the second between the first and second questions of the suitability hearing of an auditor of the Rota dating from 1632. The laurea is reproduced in Plate 5 part 2 in Candida Carella, L'insegnamento della filosofia alla ‘Sapienza’ di Roma nel Seicento. Le Cattedre e i Maestri, Florence, 2007; and the second is in ASV, S. R. Rota, Processus in admissione auditorum, b. 1, no. 67 (A. Boccabella).

82 E. Wohlwill, Ist Galilei gefoltert worden? Eine kritische Studie, Leipzig, 1877, 138 n. For his translations see Der inquisitionsprocess des Galileo Galilei. Eine prufung seiner rechtlichen grundlage nach den acten der romischen inquisition, Berlin, 1870, 4–5 (‘und darauf folgend und sofort’); 7 (‘ohne ihm [Galileo] zur Antwort Zeit zu lassen’ or ‘ohne Pause’); and 57 (‘unmittelbar darauf’).

83 For these famous volumes, see J. Tedeschi, The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy, Binghamton, NY, 1991, 25–6.

84 ‘Successive ac incontinenti facta per custode de mandato perquistione super persona eiusdem Innocentii inventae fuerunt aliquae scripturae et alia fragmenta tracta de reperientis thesauris, et similibus, quae omnia ab(?) ipso subscripta fuerunt hic inserta, et signata’. TCD, MS 1232, fo. 217v/181v (the volume has two foliations, neither of which is exactly right). There is also one case of the older ‘in continenti’ (sic) used by itself (fo. 243r/246). Beretta, op. cit. (65), 192.

85 TCD, MS 1232, fo. 453r/416r.

86 Deinde: TCD, MS 1232, fos 83r/74r, 86/77v, 87/79/78, 178/147r, 456v/419v (in the midst of torture); tunc: fos. 257v and 296/273r.

87 ACDFSO, Decreta S.O. 1601, fo. 213r.

88 ACDFSO, Decreta S.O. 1603, fo. 188v and Decreta S.O. 1608–1609, fo. 397v.

89 See the typical run of his correspondence from Milan in late 1613 with letters of 22 and 31 October; 5, 6 (either two separate letters or two problems in the same letter) and 13 November (ACDFSO, Decreta S.O. 1613, 543, 557, 563, 567 and 586) and 4 December (ACDFSO, Decreta S.O. 1614, 3). If anything, he wrote even more frequently from Cremona.

90 He swore the oath of secrecy on 25 February 1615. ACDFSO, Decreta S.O. 1614, 98 and 99.

91 The holder was given permission to resign on 22 May and Seghizzi underwent the examination required of a prospective bishop two days later. BAV, Urb. lat. 1084, fos. 197r and 204r. He was ‘elected’ on 25 May and provided on 13 June. ACDFSO, Decreta S.O. 1616, 208, and ASV, Arch. concistoriale, Acta miscellanea, 97, fo. 893r. The process went remarkably quickly.

92 ACDFSO, Decreta S.O. 1616, 369.

93 ACDFSO, Decreta S.O. 1616, 329, and ACDFSO, Decreta S.O. 1619, 419. In 1626 he was transfered to Modena. BAV, Barb. lat. 6334, fos. 22v–3r.

94 G. de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo, Chicago, 1955, 267–9. Although old, this is still the only full-length study of Galileo's trials, is still in print, and still frequently cited, e.g. the Italian translation by Stabile, G., ‘Linguaggio della natura e linguaggio della Scrittura in Galilei. Dalla ‘Istoria’ sulle macchie solari alle lettere copernicane’, Nuncius (1994), 9, 37–64, 47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; or the treatment specifically of the precept by O. Gingerich in The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus, New York, 2004, 72–3. In his Galileo for Copernicanism and for the Church, translated by G. V. Coyne, Vatican City, 2003; third English edn, Fantoli treats Santillana's arguments at length, 102–4 and 193–5, as well as quoting liberally from his translations throughout. In his similarly wide-ranging Talento y Poder. Historia de las Relaciones entre Galileo y la Iglesia católica, Pamplona, 2006, A. Beltrán Marí also gives considerable attention to Santillana's treatment of the precept, e.g. 290, 300, 306–7.

95 Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 116.

96 M. Cioni, I documenti galileiani del S. Uffizio di Firenze, Florence, 1996; reprint of Florence, 1908 edn.

97 Francesco's prominence might make it appear that he was in charge of the Inquisition, but this is not the case. Antonio remained secretary until at least September 1633 and Francesco did not certainly succeed him until March 1634. Cioni, op. cit. (96), 40–1. He was not appointed secretary for life until 9 December 1633 after Antonio Barberini's resignation (ASV, Secretaria Brevium 948, fo. 277r–v). This breve is dated 1632, perhaps a typographical error, in A. Kraus, Das päpstliche Staatssekretariat unter Urban VIII 1623–1644, Römischer Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde and Kirchengeschichte, Supplementheft 29, Rome, 1964, 278. Francesco was then the second most junior member of the Congregation and is not recorded as attending any of its meetings during Galileo's trial after the date of his appointment as secretary. Favaro, op. cit. (1), xx, 280–1. He never attended very assiduously until about eighteen months after the trial ended.

98 Decretum of 23 September 1632: ‘Relata serie totius facti circa impressionem libri a Galileo de Galileis Florentiae factam, nec non praecepto eidem ab hoc S. Officio anno 1616 facto, Sanctissimus mandavit Inquisitori Florentiae scribi, ut eidem Galileo, nomine Sanctae Congregationis, significet ut per totum mensem octobris proximum compareat in Urbe coram Comissario generali Sancti Officii, et recipiat ab eo promissionem de parendo huic praecepto, quod eidem faciat coram testibus, qui, in casu quo illud admittere nolit et parere non promittat, possint id testificari, si opus fuerit’. ACDFSO, Decreta, 1632, fo. 145r; printed in Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 225; and Favaro, op. cit. (1), xix, 279–80.

99 ‘[P]erò V. R. lo faccia chiamare in luogo dove siano presenti i testimonii et il Notaro, senza significare al detto Galilei per che fine li sudetti si trovino ivi presenti; et gli dirà che si contenti per tutto il mese di ottobre prossimo ritrovarsi in Roma, et far capo al P. Commissario del S.to Offitio, dal quale gli sarà significato quello che haverà da fare; et accettando egli di venire, V. R. lo ricercherà a fargli fare fede di quanto ella gli ha fatto sapere, e di quanto egli ha promesso; e si ciò eseguirà, V. R. doppo la sua partenza farà che li testimonii, et il Notaro, che saranno stati presenti, faccino attestatione, essere stata scritta la sudetta fede et sottoscritta dal medesimo Galilei; ma s'egli ricuserà di fare quanto di è detto, in tal caso gli farà precetto coram Notario et testibus, quale si rogarà di questo atto, che comparisca in Roma’. A. Barberini to inquisitor of Florence, 25 September 1632. Cioni, op. cit. (96), 25.

100 BAV, Barb. lat. 7310, fo. 37v (?) for the apparent date of encypherment.

101 I base this assertion on many years of experience reading such documents. Anyone who wishes to test its truth-value can look at the numerous entries in the same volume as these two letters, the vast majority of which are nearly fair copies.

102 ‘Essendosi scoperte nell'opere del Gallileo [sic] alcune cose sospette N. S.re in riguardo del S.r Gran Duca *ha comesso [above] ad una congreg.ne particolare che [after deleted accio] le esaminasse e vedesse se si poteva far di meno di non le portare nella S. Cong.ne del S.to Offitio, et essendosi quelli SS.ri congregati insieme per cinque volte, e considerato bene il tutto hanno risoluto che non poteva farsi di meno di non portar il negotio nella Congre.ne. Questa necessità è stata fatta rapresentare da S. B.ne al S.r Amb.re di S. A. *da Benessi [in margin] quale haveva supplicato la S.ta S. in nome della med.a A.za a non portar il negotio in Cong.ne accioche l'A. S. si sodisfacesse della buona volonta di S. B.ne verso il [altered from la] *suo gusto [above deleted sua sodisfatione; note in margin (che fu il Benessi, di cui è questa minuta)]; quale replicò chi li portò l'Amb.ta che l'esser stato visto e passato il libro dal Maestro di Sacro Palzzo [e passato here deleted] faceva un poco di senso, ma li fu risposto che se effettivamente conteneva il libro errori, non dovevano in modo alcuno per questo rispetto lasciarsi correre. Tuto [sic] questo fù participato [sic] a S. E. con vincolo del segreto del S.to Offitio, li fu ben dato licenza di comunicarlo al S. Gran Duca sotto il med.o vincolo di segreto. Fu dunque portato il libro nella Cong.e del S.to Offitio e *dopo esser stato [above deleted fù] considerato con ogni maturità il tutto fu risoluto di ordinare al P. Inquisitore di cotesta città che chiami il Galileo e che *d'ordine di S. S.ta li facci un precetto di presentarsi per tutto il prossimo mese di Ottobre avanti il P. Commissario del S.to Offitio, e si fare [?; EN: facci] prometter di obedire a detto precetto in presenza de testimonii accio ricusando di obedire e di accettarlo si possino in ogni caso esaminare [marg. replacing li dice che si contentti di essere in Roma per {ellipisis in original}; following text (item 1 in Favaro, op. cit. (1), but misleadingly presented) deleted and replaced in margin, also deleted (item 2; not in Favaro, op. cit. (1)): 1) se egli prometerà di farlo non procede più oltre et se peraventura, o ricuserra di volerlo venire o lo difficoltasse che il Padre habbi pronto colà il notaro e {above} che la li facci precetto di presentarsi in Roma nel sudetto tempo;’ 2) ‘e che a cio l'esersi representandogli che (?) con la sua presenza haverebbe riparato a molte cose e data e ricevuta sodisfatione’] Io do parte a V. S. di tuto [sic] questo per sua notitia solamente acciò che se le sarà parlato possa ella risponder con fondamento non dovendo ella da se parlarne ne molto ne poco. Intendo che non ostante che il Galileo sappi che in quella opera la Sacra Congregatione vi riconosce degli errori pensa con tutto ciò mandar in diverse parti del mondo li detti libri ad effetto di dispensargli, del che V. S. procuri di saper la verità [e va dia re (?) deleted] e trovando che si voglino inviare, avvisi il S.r Card.l Legato di Bologna e di Ferrara, acciocchè li faccino trattenere così ancora tutti gl'altri ministri e Vescovi [after deleted per] o Inquisitori per dove potrebbeno passare e tenga mano di sapere in ogni modo quando doveranno muoversi questi libri di costà per reiterar l'avviso alli sudetti Em.mi et altri ministri, ma V. S. non confidi ciò [above] antecedentemente a' Vescovi et Inquisitori fuori dello Stato Ecc.co, bastando di avvisarlo allhora quando si moveranno li medesimi libri, parlo [after deleted e forse sarebbe meglio farlo che] però di quelle balle che non doveranno necessariamente passare per Bologna o Ferrara o altro passo dello Stato Ecc.co, perchè per esse basta avisare gli Em.mi Legati e Governatori'. F. Barberini to nuncio in Florence, 25 September 1632, encyphered same day. BAV, Barb. lat. 7310, fos 34r–5r; Favaro, op. cit. (1), xiv, no. 2311.

103 ‘Fu dunque portato il libro nella Congregatione del S.to Offitio, e dopo esser stato considerato con ogni maturità il tutto, fu risoluto di ordinare al P. Inquisitore di cotesta città che chiami il Galileo, e che d'ordine di S. S.tà’ li facci un precetto di presentarsi per tutto il prossimo mese di Ottobre avanti il P. Comissario del S.to Offitio, e si facci promettere di obedire a detto precetto in presenza de' testimoni, acciò, ricusando di obedire e di accettarlo, si possino in ogni caso esaminare'. F. Barberini to nuncio in Florence, 25 September 1632. Favaro, op. cit. (1), xiv, no. 2311 from the register copy.

104 ‘Non ostante quello che io scrivo a V. S. del precetto da farsi al Gallileo [see last note], le soggiungo che N. S.re ha ordinato che si scriva all'Inquisitore che chiami il Gallileo, et in presenza del notaro e testimoni, non però qualificati alla sua presenza per tali, gli dichi che la volontà della Congregatione è che egli per tutto Ottobre si trasferisca a Roma, e che lo esorti ad ubidire: se egli dirà di volerlo fare, che si facci far fede di sua mano che dall'Inquisitore gli è stato significato il senso della Congregatione e che lui haverebe ubidito; la qual fede, partito lui, doverà far riconoscer et autenticar dal notaro e testimonii che vi furono presenti: e se il Gallileo ricusasse di far la scrittura o di voler venire a Roma, che all'hora il Padre Inquisitore li facci il precetto in forma. Tutto si fa sapere a V. S. per sua notitia’. F. Barberini to nuncio in Florence, 25 September 1632. Favaro, op. cit. (1), xiv, no. 2312.

105 ‘Mi valerò della notitia, che V. E.mza s’è degnata darmi [see last?] nel particolare dell'opera del Galileo, mentre me ne sia parlato, come V. E.mza mi comanda, e se il med.mo Galileo havrà pensiero di mandar fuori di qua li libri stampati, eseguirò quanto V. Em.za mi ordina intorna a ciò'. Nuncio in Florence to Francesco Barberini, 30 September 1632; BAV, Barb. lat. 7307, fo. 41r; this text is not in Favaro, op. cit. (1), xiv, no. 2314, taken from the register copy of the nuncio's letter.

106 Decretum of 11 November 1632 (ACDFSO, Decreta 1632, fo. 172r, printed in Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 225–6; and Favaro, op. cit. (1), xix, 280); A. Barberini to inquisitor of Florence, 13 November 1632 (Cioni, op. cit. (96), 27); decretum of 9 December 1632 (ACDFSO, Decreta 1632, fo. 188v, printed in Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 226–7; and Favaro, op. cit. (1), xix, 281); A. Barberini to inquisitor of Florence, 11 December 1632 (Cioni, op. cit. (96), 27).

107 30 December 1632. ACDFSO, Decreta 1633, fo. 4v, printed in Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 227; and Favaro, op. cit. (1), xix, 281.

108 Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 124.

109 A. Barberini to inquisitor of Florence, 10 January 1633. Favaro, op. cit. (1), xx, no. 2376 bis; and Cioni, op. cit. (96), 28–9, misdated 1 January.

110 The words in square brackets were already illegible in the nineteenth century when Karl von Gebler suggested this reconstruction. K. von Gebler (ed.), Die Acten des Galilei'schen Processes nach der vaticanischen Handschrift herausgegeben, Stuttgart, 1877, reprinted with idem, Galileo Galilei und die römische Kurie nach den authentischen Quellen, n.d.; reprint of undated Phaidon edn, 305.

111 Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 101–2.

112 ACDFSO, Decreta S.O. 1616, 99, in middle of page. Pagano and Luciani, op. cit. (2), 223–4.