Michael Tavuzzi begins this important contribution to the history of the inquisition in Renaissance Italy by discussing the origin and development of the three Lombard provinces which controlled and directed Dominican activity in Northern Italy between 1474 and 1527: the Province of St Peter Martyr (Upper Lombardy), the Province of St Dominic (Lower Lombardy) and the Observant Congregation of Lombardy. This third province was formed in 1459 to regulate the observant convents established in the wake of the reform movement inspired by Raymond of Capua. Inquisitorial responsibilities had been imposed on the Dominican order in 1237. In 1304 Benedict xi accorded to the provincials of the two Lombard provinces then existing the power of appointment and dismissal of inquisitors. Seven inquisitors were to operate in the Province of Upper Lombardy, and three in the Province of Lower Lombardy. There were still only ten inquisitors for Lombardy in 1475, but this huge area had by that time been split up into inquisitorial districts, where the inquisitors enjoyed the use of special buildings, archives and inquisitorial manuals, and were assisted in their duties by vicars and lay auxiliaries. The inquisitor himself was usually an experienced administrator. He had normally to be at least forty years old on appointment, and to have enjoyed a prolonged academic education culminating in graduation as a master or doctor of theology, a process slower and more arduous for observant than for conventual Dominicans. The fundamental point of divergence between these two was their interpretation of the vow of poverty. The conventuals were allowed individual ownership of books, clothes and money sufficient for day-to-day expenses, but the important criteria for judging between conventuals and observants were apostolic fervour and efficiency on the one hand and academic dedication and prowess on the other. It is not clear which of the two did better on the whole on these criteria, but the observants seemed to do better as inquisitors for they were more active and professional. Since Renaissance Italy was not a land of heretics, antisemitism was rare, and there were only two major persecutions of Waldensians (1487–8 and 1509), the major preoccupation of Dominican inquisitors, both conventual and observant, was the prosecution of witchcraft, usually as a result of insistent popular demand. This insistent demand leads Tavuzzi to suggest that ‘It might well turn out that whatever might have been the defining traits of the “civilization of the Renaissance in Italy”, witch-hunting was an integral part of it.’ He further points out the puzzling fact that whereas the inquisitorial response to witchcraft in the fifteenth century comes mostly from the conventuals, the inquisitorial response in the sixteenth century comes mostly from the observants. Tavuzzi argues that the reasons for this are firstly the observant takeover of many north Italian conventual convents, and secondly the sheer professionalism of the observant inquisitors, best exemplified by Michele Ghislieri, the future Pius v, who became a Dominican in the Lombard Congregation in 1520, and in due course after 1542 imposed on the Roman inquisition the standards that he had first learned and practised as an inquisitorial vicar in 1528.