The Roman Inquisition at the heart of society. The employees of the ecclesiastical court between privileges, conflicts, and indiscipline (16th-18th centuries)

This essay aims to investigate a subject hitherto neglected by historians, namely the extensive and problematic personnel that served the Roman Inquisition in Italy and the tribunals of faith operating elsewhere over three centuries. The methodology used is twofold, drawing on both religious-institutional and social-historical studies. The extensive documentary research carried out in the Vatican and Italian archives has made it possible to reconstruct the main features of the Italian Inquisitorial staff, to observe its evolution over time, its different geographical locations and the varying relations that the papal Church established through it with the cultural and political elites of Italy during the Ancien Regime. This has led to important historical considerations that highlight a phenomenon that has been studied on other fronts, such as the relations between the Counter-Reformation Church and the faithful between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The clientelist system allowed the most intransigent wing of the Church to establish a relationship of protection and acquiescence with thousands of violent notables. They, in return, guaranteed intellectual, material, and political support to the ecclesiastical hierarchies of the peninsula until the Italian Risorgimento.