Dans les abysses de l’ infidélité

In his History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages (rev. ante, iii [1888], 773–88), Henry Charles Lea devoted seven pages, based almost exclusively on published sources, to the ‘political’ use of the inquisition in Italy under John XXII, ‘not a pope to allow the spiritual sword to rust in the sheath’. The book under review, by Sylvain Parent, returns to the subject with almost seven hundred pages of exhaustive analysis of unpublished documents in the Vatican Archive. As it turns out, the ‘abyss of infidelity’ in the title is not a turn of phrase by John XXII. Instead, it came from Clement V (1305–14), whose pontificate witnessed the reanimation of Ghibellinism as a political force in Italy, with the papacy’s departure and the Emperor Henry VII’s arrival. ‘Lèse majesté’ was the accusation made by imperialists against Robert of Naples for opposing the emperor’s political ambitions. What equivalent charge did papalists have? Their answer was heresy—already associated with lèse majesté by Pope Innocent III. But this obvious answer only emerged in Italian inquisitorial proceedings in the early 1320s after some fits and starts

Ancient history · Art · Emperor · False accusation · Heresy · Humanities · Political science · Politics · SWORD · Theology · Classics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Medieval and Early Modern Justice · Philosophy