Known for his research on the Roman Inquisition, especially for his critical edition of the documents surrounding the trial of Cardinal Giovanni Morone, Firpo has given us a tour de force of the field and his critique of scholarship. This book is divided into Part One, The Historiographical Problem” and Part Two, “The Tridentine Paradigm between the 16th and 17th Centuries.” For some readers, it makes more sense to begin with the three chapters of Part Two before turning to Part One. In Chapter 3, “Church Reform and Council Decrees”, Firpo argues forcefully and persuasively for his understanding of the events from the Sack of Rome in 1527 to the conclusion of the Tridentine Council in 1563. A condensed version of his argument goes something like this: while there were various calls and actions for clerical and spiritual reforms before Trent, all these movements were swept away by the Papal response to the Protestant Reformation. The reformers – from Erasmus, Cardinal Jimenez, Lefèvre d’Étaples, and Reginald Pole beyond Italy to Seripando, Contarini, Giberti, and many other Italian churchmen (not forgetting the Roman noblewoman Vittoria Colonna) – came under the suspicion of the Roman Curia. It was precisely the calls for reforms and the critique of clerical abuse that led to the Lutheran Schism, according to the hardliners and conservatives. Instead of meeting the Protestants halfway, in terms of doctrine (faith) and sacraments (communion in both kinds), as Cardinal Morone was wont to do, the Papacy aimed for repression. This became crystal clear when Cardinal Carafa became Pope Paul IV in 1555, reaching the apex of the ecclesiastical hierarchy after many years at the helm of the Inquisition. If Paul III (Alessandro Farnese), the pope who declared the opening of the Tridentine Council, was indifferent to reform, concerned above all with safeguarding papal supremacy over conciliarism, the pontificate of Paul IV represented a power grab by the Inquisition. No less a figure than Cardinal Morone was imprisoned for two years by the pope and subjected to heresy proceedings. Released after Carafa’s death, Morone successfully presided over the third meeting of the Council of Trent and guided it to a successful conclusion. This achievement notwithstanding, another pope, Pius V, Michele Ghislieri, who followed the same career path as Carafa, rising from the Inquisition to the pontificate, subjected Morone to another Inquisition hearing. Firpo is not exaggerating when he claims that for a while, the Inquisition became the nerve center of the Papal Curia, which in turn saw itself as the indispensable essence of the Catholic Church, which must fight over every challenge to its authority from Protestants and Catholic dissidents alike. Given this imperative, papal supremacy and ecclesiastical privilege trumped pastoral care and spiritual renewal. The decrees of the Council of Trent attended more to dogma than reform; and the actual work of Tridentine reform in Itay turned out to be slow and paltry, as Firpo shows in Chapter 4, “Myth and Reality of the Reforms.” Drawing on the research of three generations of historians, mostly Italian, Firpo documents the appalling state of church buildings, clerical discipline, and pastoral care in all regions of Italy through the mid-18th century. A figure like Carlo Borromeo and a diocese like Milan stood out because they were unique. In northern and central Italy, slow reforms were visible here and there, but in most dioceses, very little progress was made one century after the conclusion of the Council. The situation was far worse in the south, due to a combination of baronial domination and popular adherence to magic and religious practices deemed wholly un-Tridentine. While Italian society was becoming more clericalized in the 17th century, thanks to the clergy’s entrenched privileges, ignorant, negligent, delinquent, and even criminal clerics were everywhere to be found. The Church hierarchy tolerated and protected these men – if heterodoxy was not involved – to safeguard ecclesiastical dignity and power.

Far from streams that all flowed into the waves of Tridentine reform, Firpo concluded, Catholic reform of the early 16th century was extirpated in mid-century by a Roman Church dominated by the Inquisition and repression. The goodwill for religious and spiritual reforms at the Council produced little water for the irrigation of a renewed religiosity, the bulk of which having been siphoned off by the dam constructed to preserve papal supremacy and ecclesiastical control.

Following Firpo’s arguments in Part Two, we can understand his sharp critique in Part One of an apologetic historiography inspired by the work of Hubert Jedin, the 20th-century German historian whose name became synonymous with research on the Tridentine Council. Arguing for the co-equivalency of the concepts of Catholic Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Jedin paid little attention to the repression of Catholic reformers and dissidents, downplayed the centrality of the Inquisition, and ignored the scant results of reform more than two centuries after Trent. The “Jedin Model” became so dominant that it influenced Anglo-American historiography. New Catholic apologetics acknowledged the inherent contradictions between the two terms, “Catholic Reformation” and “Counter-Reformation,” but replacing it with the bland and contentless term of “early modern Catholicism,” as advocated by the Late John O’Malley, still ignores the historical fact of repression. For more than a century, the Inquisition dominated Catholic life in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula. Avoiding the term “Counter-Reformation” is not different from church leaders closing their eyes to the sexual crimes committed by the clergy, even up to the present day, to paraphrase from Firpo’s feisty language.

This is a book of deep scholarship that represents a lifetime’s work. Always impeccable and fair in judgment, Firpo, however, condemns the work of some scholars in a language more resembling the Holy Office than the discourse of Christian charity. Italian, German, French, American, and British historians pass in review under the gaze of this passionate and harsh critic, who has offered us a fiery sermon.