Sacred Fire: Inquisitions, Capital Punishment and Rites of Justice in Italy (13th-19th centuries)

Other Areas: 

History of Law 

Abstract: 

This project aims to reconstruct the history of death sentences imposed by the courts of the medieval Inquisition and the Roman Holy Office in the Italian peninsula from the 13th to the 19th century. Through a database, it will record the victims condemned for crimes of heresy, while an interdisciplinary approach will analyse the historical, anthropological, legal, medical, material, emotional, iconographic and narrative implications of the death penalty between the late Middle Ages and the end of the ancien régime, when the courts of faith dependent on the Papal Curia were active. The project members will analyse a wide range of sources (legal and theological-moral texts, manuals and instructions for judges, medico-legal treatises, collections of sentences, documents of confraternities for the spiritual comfort of convicts, account books, trials for magic spells, chronicles, diaries, avvisi, engravings, paintings, epigraphs, graffiti in court prisons) in order to address and better understand the following issues: how and to what extent the Inquisition applied the death penalty; how it was justified or contested; whether burning was the only way to wipe out the “heretical infection”; what impact the sentences had on families and communities; what political and religious significance this manifestation of ecclesiastical justice had in specific contexts; how the spectacle of public punishment was staged; how the reaction of the crowd was controlled; what fate the remains of the condemned had, what fears they aroused and what use was made of them in magical practices; what memories the death sentences left behind in monuments, iconography, diaries, news sheets and chronicles; how the bloody image of the Inquisition was constructed, and what differences existed between the punitive practice of the Roman Holy Office, that of the secular courts and the more spectacular practice of the Iberian Inquisitions in Europe and the rest of the Catholic world. 

Duration of the project (in months):
28/09/2023 – 28/09/2025 

Principal investigator: 

Vincenzo Lavenia 

Partnership: 

University of Padua 

University of Urbino 

Budget of the University of Bologna:
62.003 EUR 

ERC sectors: 

1. SH6_8 Early modern history 

2. SH6_13 Gender history, cultural history, history of collective identities and memories, history of religions 

3. SH5_8 Cultural studies, cultural identities and memories, cultural heritage