Roman Thought Police and Early-Modern Astrology

摘要

The Roman Inquisition against Heretical Depravity, also known as the Holy Office (HO), established in 1542, and the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books (CI), announced officially in 1572, undertook to protect Italy from ideas and practices that menaced the authority of the Roman Catholic Church in this world and the salvation of its members in the next. This grandiose public-health program required trained and dedicated thought police to receive and evaluate alarms from the public and, when business was bad, to seek out sources of infection themselves. The resultant records of accusations, investigations, trials, condemnations, expurgations, and exceptions, if extant in its entirety, would go far to fill the nave of St. Peter's. Time has so withered the records, however, that it is now practical to consider a printed edition of all the documents pertaining more or less to natural knowledge created by the HO and the CI from their establishment in the sixteenth century to the suppression of papal government by Napoleon in 1808.