Here’s a book I’ve been studying for a few months. It’s in Latin and Spanish so I’ll go through each photo and write notes that relate to the image.
Remaining questions-
How likely is it that this was a working inquisitors manual? Possibly the Spanish Inquisition
Could this have been used in South America? There are several copies of Carena in South American institutional libraries. I’ve assumed European Spain as there are no references that I can find to Mexico etc.
How should I proceed in terms of research? Any prominent academics that might be interested in this annotated copy?
Any further lines of enquiry of study that you maybe suggest?
Summary of photos
Photo 1- binding, which is limp vellum and has discoloured over the centuries
Photo 2- title page: 1669 Lyon manual for inquisitors, covering heresy, criminal procedure and the workings of the Holy Office — with Carena’s separate treatise on witches explicitly advertised on the title page.
Cesare Carena was a practising seventeenth-century Inquisition lawyer in Cremona — consultor and fiscal advocate to the local Holy Office. His Tractatus became one of the major learned manuals for inquisitors, covering heresy, evidence, confession, torture, sentencing and, in later expanded editions, witchcraft procedure.
Photo 3 - a woodcut decoration which looks out of place in a serious religious law book. Woodcuts were often reused over many decades, but the presence of an exuberantly bare-breasted grotesque is pretty odd in this context.
Photo 4 - a piece of loose marginalia found in the early part of the book. The seller hadn’t noted any marginalia at all, yet there are several pieces like this scattered throughout. This one is in Latin, the others Spanish.
I have the translation as follows-
Ignorantia crassa, sive supina est…”
Gross, or supine, ignorance is when someone does not remain ignorant deliberately or by design, but through a certain negligence, of those things which he could and ought to know.
Then it moves to:
“Ignorantia affectata est…”
“Affected [deliberate] ignorance is when someone intentionally wishes to remain ignorant of something.”
And then the key inquisitorial point:
in a case of heresy, this occurs when a person does not wish to use due diligence to discover what the Church teaches, so that he may persist in his own opinion; or because learning the truth of the Catholic faith is difficult or laborious.
Im assuming he annotator is distinguishing between simple/gross negligence — you ought to have known better; affected ignorance — you actively avoid finding out because knowing the answer would interfere with what you want to continue believing?
Photo 5 - This section is specifically on witch trials: Carena’s Annotations on the procedure in cases of witches and malefactors. What surprised me is that the contents include “errors commonly committed” in witchcraft proceedings, sentences overturned in Spain, and warnings about how cautiously judges should proceed. Rather than being a witch-hunting manual, it’s also a manual for trying to stop inquisitors getting witchcraft cases wrong.
Before the 1st edition was published in 1636, Europe had already witnessed several disastrous witch persecutions, including the Basque witch panic of 1609–14 and the enormous German hunts at Bamberg and Würzburg in the 1620s and early 1630s. The Basque trials were particularly important because the Spanish inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías exposed the unreliability of confessions and testimony produced by fear, suggestion and torture, helping prompt the Suprema’s much stricter 1614 rules for witchcraft cases.
Carena’s later witch-procedure material reflects this, ie he discusses errors commonly made in prosecutions, sentences overturned in Spain and the need for caution by inquisitors. The belief in witchcraft remains intact, but inquisitorial lawyers had learned that the legal machinery used to prosecute it could itself manufacture false evidence and wrongful convictions??
Photo 6 - this shows the earlier bit of marginalia I referenced in photo 4 showing how these notes were found, and they tend to be placed at relevant pages in the book. The heading at this page relates to the slip as it’s positioned immediately beside/above § XI, headed “An ignorantia excuset ab haeresi” — “Whether ignorance excuses from heresy.”
Photo 7 - another bit of marginalia. The clearest section concerns jurisdiction over polygamy:
My translation = Bulls that declare exclusive jurisdiction over a crime due to the suspicion against the faith arising from it, even if directed to a single Province, extend to the others.
Trasmiera, On Polygamy, Book 3, question [1], nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4, regarding the fact that the Bull dispatched to the Inquisitors of Portugal, declaring the crime of polygamy to be under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Tribunal due to suspicion against the faith, extends to the other Inquisitions outside that Kingdom.
Carena, Part 2, Title 6, "On Soliciting Confessors", § 1, no. 9, states that although the Bulls of Paul IV, Pius IV, and Clement VIII regulating the crime of solicitation were directed to the Inquisitor General of Spain, they must be extended to other [Inquisitions...]
In summary: a papal bull sent to the Inquisitor of Portugal declared polygamy to fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Inquisition because it created suspicion against the faith. The note then cites further authorities and bulls, apparently comparing how the offence was treated in Portugal and Spain.
The opening lines likewise seem to reference a papal bull defining an offence as being within the Inquisition’s exclusive domain because of the suspicion of heresy it generated.
Photo 8 - section of the book, printed page is headed “Titulus Secundus, § V. De Relapsis” — the section on relapsed heretics, i.e. people who had abjured heresy and were subsequently accused of returning to it.
Photo 9 - This page is the opening of a separate appended legal case, the Decisio Granatensis Tribunalis Sancti Officii — a decision of the Granada tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition. It concerns a notorious libel publicly posted against Christianity and, specifically, against the perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary; the original decision was printed at Granada in 1641 and attributed to Francisco Marín de Rodezno.
Photo 10 - this reads “Titulus Octavus. De confessionibus reorum” — “Title VIII: On the confessions of accused persons” — and § I is “De confessione qualificata,” dealing with qualified or limited confessions: when an accused person admits a fact but adds some qualification, explanation or defence that alters its legal effect.
The summary on the left is basically a checklist of problems surrounding confessions: whether a confession is sufficient for conviction, false or inconsistent confessions, revocation of a confession, confessions made under torture, whether inquisitors may rely on them, and what happens when the accused retracts or modifies what was said.
Photo 11 - this bit of marginalia appears to summarise the approach to naughty priests. Why it was written in this way, presumably because trials moved quickly and reading heavy tracts of text would be too slow in a trial scenario?
This note explains the rules the Inquisition used when a Catholic priest hit on or propositioned someone around the time of confession. Normally, the Inquisition only went after heresy (false religious beliefs), not sexual misconduct; however, because the priest was messing with a holy sacrament, the court treated it as an indirect sign that he held heretical views about the church.
This suspicion applied whether the priest made a move right before, right after, or simply used the excuse of hearing confession to make an advance, even if the confession never actually happened. Legal experts like Cesare Carena and António de Sousa noted that while inquisitors had the leeway to hand out standard disciplinary punishments instead of treating every case as full-blown heresy, there was one major line you could not cross: if a priest completely faked a confession just to hit on someone, he couldn't get off lightly and was forced to make a formal, public renunciation of heresy.
Photo 12 - Last photo of the bookplate, there’s also an ownership mark of Michael Roy Barton who appears to have donated the book to the seminary at the end of this life. Rev. Michael Roy Frederick Barton, whose small label is still on the pastedown: “MICHAEL ROY BARTON / MOUNT SAINT GABRIEL / PEEKSKILL, NEW YORK.” Barton was born at Cowes in 1889, ordained in 1918, and served as assistant chaplain to the Community of St Mary at Mount Saint Gabriel, Peekskill, from about 1919–22. He later became rector of St Mark’s, New Canaan, and died in 1964.
