Witchcraft and the Papacy: An Account Drawing on the Formerly Secret Records of the Roman Inquisition. By Rainer Decker. Translated by H. C. Erik Midelfort. Studies in Early Modern German History. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. xv + 262 pp. $45.00.

摘要

During the past three decades, the once fashionable thesis that the papacy and theninquisitors who operated under papal authority were primarily responsible fornthe great European witch-hunt has come under attack. Historians have pointednout the crucial role that secular and episcopal courts played in the early years ofnwitch-hunting, the low number of prosecutions in Italy in the late sixteenth andnseventeenth centuries, and the relatively high number of executions in manynProtestant countries. Rainer Decker’s illuminating study of the papacy’sninvolvement in witch-hunting from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth centurynrepresents the most sustained and comprehensive contribution to thisnrevisionism in witchcraft studies. Decker’s revisionism, however, bears nonsigns of confessional bias or special pleading. He fully recognizes, for example,nthat the papacy did play a role in the formation of the composite notion ofnwitchcraft in the late Middle Ages and that the Inquisition conducted a largennumber of witchcraft trials in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. But fornthe period after 1542, when Pope Paul III established the Roman Inquisition,nalso known as the Holy Office, the papacy’s record on witchcraft was markednby theoretical skepticism and judicial restraint. Unlike the medieval Inquisition,nwhich had also operated under papal authority, the Roman Inquisition was anhighly centralized institution that exercised jurisdiction over the Italiannmainland and a few locations outside Italy. The Dominicans and Franciscansnwho staffed this institution compiled a remarkably lenient record in prosecutingnwitches, especially after the death of the intolerant Pope Paul IV in 1559, just asnthe European witch-hunt was entering its most intense phase. In the city ofnRome the Inquisition executed its last witch in 1572, and by the 1630s itnstopped prosecuting witches throughout Italy.