1626

In 1626, Europe was in the midst of the Thirty Years' War; a flu pandemic began spreading in Asia; the Dutch acquired the island of Manhattan; Queen Christina of Sweden was born; and Francis Bacon died. A lot can happen in a year, and 1626 was no exception. It was an exceptional year for the Roman Inquisition, however, but not because of anything that happened. What makes it exceptional is that an extraordinarily large body of archival material from that year has been preserved. Drawing on this hitherto unexamined material, Stefania Tutino reconstructs all the activities of the Roman Inquisition in the year 1626. This book demonstrates that the early-seventeenth-century Roman Inquisition was not solely the expression of the most militant and repressive aspects of post-Reformation Catholicism. Rather, to understand the historical role the Holy Office played, we need to see its development in terms of the tension between rigidity on the one hand and flexibility and complexity on the