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. Results Achieved The Bologna research unit, whose members included research fellow Stefano Tomassetti and, for the medieval period, Giacomo Mariani (a specialist in medieval history who joined the unit through the cooperative Hibou) investigated death sentences imposed during the Middle Ages and, for the early modern age, those carried out under the jurisdiction of the Roman Inquisition in the Republic of Genoa, the Duchy of Massa and Principality of Carrara, and the Duchies of Savoy, Milan, Mantua, Parma and Piacenza, Ferrara, and Modena and Reggio. This wide geographical and chronological mandate required the unit to work across a markedly heterogeneous documentary landscape, shaped by different political jurisdictions, uneven archival survival and varying degrees of historiographical coverage, and to ensure methodological consistency between the medieval and early modern segments of its research. Part of the activity was carried out in close collaboration with the other two research units and with Hibou, the partner responsible for the technical development of the project's database. Together with the units of Padua and Urbino, the Bologna group took part in the collective definition of the database's content and formal structure, a process pursued through a series of periodic joint meetings involving the research fellows, the members of all three units and the IT specialists at Hibou. This shared effort led to the decision to create an individual record for each person condemned to death, on the basis of clearly defined inclusion criteria — the involvement of an inquisitorial tribunal, the identifiability of the individual, and the actual execution of the sentence, including sentences carried out in effigy — and to the identification of fifteen thematic categories. This joint methodological work ensured a common analytical framework capable of accommodating the considerable heterogeneity of sources and contexts across the whole project, while supporting both quantitative analysis — allowing executions to be mapped across time and space and variables such as gender, crime typology and geographical distribution to be studied statistically — and qualitative consultation of individual records. The adoption of English as the working language, together with standardised categories and controlled vocabularies, was also designed to ensure the database's interoperability with other digital resources in the field of legal and religious history at the European level. The three units also jointly organised the project's final international conference. Within this shared framework, the Bologna unit conducted its research autonomously. Work began with a systematic survey of the bibliography and printed sources, proceeding methodically by inquisitorial seat and vicariate in order to trace the individual executions attested within each jurisdiction; this made it possible to reconstruct a comprehensive bibliographical overview of the assigned territories and to extract all information retrievable from existing historiography, complemented by a systematic collection of printed sources such as martyrologies, polemical histories, local repertories, chronicles and collections of letters. The unit then undertook an investigation of unpublished archival material. A significant methodological challenge emerged at this stage, since the inquisitorial records for most of the areas under investigation have been largely destroyed or survive only in fragmentary form; this gap was addressed through printed sources reworking judicial proceedings and sentences, together with chronicles, letters and registers of the condemned, which yielded valuable contextual information on the executions and, in some cases, on the trials themselves. Through this combined methodology, the unit identified and documented approximately two hundred individuals condemned to death across the tribunals active in its assigned territories, each recorded in a detailed file structured according to the fifteen shared thematic categories and drawing on historiography, printed sources and unpublished archival documentation. These records were subsequently uploaded into the project database, made freely accessible online, in full compliance with Open Access principles, since November 2024. The database now stands as the project's central and lasting scholarly output: a structured, queryable and freely available census of the Inquisition's death sentences in the Italian peninsula, combining biographical, judicial and documentary information for each case and offering a durable research infrastructure (designed to be expandable to further geographical and chronological areas) for future work on the history of inquisitorial justice. Alongside this database-oriented work, individual members of the unit devoted part of their research to specific cases and thematic questions falling within their own areas of expertise. These ranged from the legal and medical culture surrounding capital punishment in the early modern period to medieval death sentences in Italy. They also included the broader question of the public dimension of executions, and how it was variously conceived and managed by inquisitorial justice, as well as the ways in which such executions were subsequently recounted and circulated in manuscript and printed form. This complementary strand of individual research fed directly into the unit's contributions to the final conference. The unit's findings were presented at the project's final international conference, "Sacred Fire", held on 18–19 September 2025 at the Department of History, Cultures and Civilizations of the University of Bologna and organised jointly by all three research units, with twenty-one participants from Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and Canada. Members of the Bologna unit contributed the papers "Cultures of Fire, Cultures of the Body: Early Modern Legal and Medical Literature" (Fernanda Alfieri), "Senza clamore: le condanne a morte e l'Inquisizione" (Vincenzo Lavenia), "Sentencing to Death without Proofs: Paul IV, the Portuguese Jews of Ancona, and its Aftermath" (Giacomo Mariani), "Roghi medievali: Italia, XIII–XV secolo" (Riccardo Parmeggiani), and "Roghi d'inchiostro. Notizie a stampa sulle vittime dell'Inquisizione romana" (Stefano Tomassetti). These contributions are currently being developed into chapters for a collective volume, to be published by Viella in Open Access, with publication expected in 2026.
Project details
Unibo Team Leader: Vincenzo Lavenia
Unibo involved Department/s:
Dipartimento di Storia Culture Civiltà
Coordinator:
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - Università di Bologna(Italy)
Total Eu Contribution: Euro (EUR) 170.768,00
Total Unibo Contribution: Euro (EUR) 62.004,00
Project Duration in months: 24
Start Date:
28/09/2023
End Date:
28/02/2026
