about Bellarmino’s action. As we shall see in the next chapter, the Inquisition used monitiones in exactly the way I think Bellarmino did, not out of charity but as a means to suspend or to conclude process, and therefore in almost exactly the same way it used precepts; by contrast, I have not found a single monitio in the decree registers qualified as charitable. Again in the next chapter we shall see that, while the jurists’ commentary on the use and nature of admonitions is nothing like as extensive as in the case of precepts (unsurprising, since they were not a legal device), there is more than enough to demonstrate against Beretta that what happened to Galileo was not a “charitable admonition,” and that in fact the kind of “warning” he got is virtually indistinguishable from a precept.
At more or less the same time as Beretta, Matthias Dorn, a geologist, also undertook to demonstrate that the precept minute, No. 2, had been forged.51 In addition to repeating Wohlwill’s twin claims (again, without acknowledgment), Dorn offered a quasi-scientific criticism based on observations by an apparently professional document examiner, G. Schöneberg.52 Almost certainly working at second hand from photographs supplied by Dorn, Schöneberg identified four differences in the hand of the first and second parts of the minute: (1) in the form of characters, especially “d”; (2) in the ductus, the general way in which a particular writer forms characters, especially Oberlän-genverzierungen, which I take to mean serifs on the ascenders; (3) in the size of the characters; and (4) in the ligature between magiscule “T” and “e.”53 These results are all open to serious question. Above all, small, sometimes very small details best distinguish one hand from another, especially in the case of scripts as highly formalized as papal chancery hand. Many such will be hard to see in photographs. I have not been able to see the originals, but, on the basis not of the tiny prints reproduced in Dorn’s book but of Henri de L’Épinois’s much clearer (in part because more than a century older) photographic reproductions and the strength of professional training in palaeography and thirty years practice and teaching of it, I reject all Schöneberg’s points.54 Neither of the most solid-looking ones, 1 and 4, is true. Any alleged difference in the characters’ size could easily be explained by the fact that the first half of the text is written into a smallish space at the bottom of a mostly full page, while the second half is at the top of a new, otherwise blank one. Schöneberg did not perform the surest test to distinguish two hands, including their ductus, the measurement of the characters’ slant. I do not detect any variation in slant from either set of plates. The second surest measure, differences in infrequently written characters, is impossible since there are none to compare.55
Annibale Fantoli offers a number of extrinsic criticisms of Beretta’s forgery thesis. One of the best involves the witnesses’ names. How would a forger in 1632 have known them?56 This objection has a possible answer. An especially clever man could have found them in a biography of Bellarmino published in 1624 and again in 1631. The first, the Cypriot Badino or Bandino de Nores, served as maestro di camera to both Cesare Baronio and Bellarmino.57 The second, Agostino Mongardo, served Bellarmino as one of Nores’s subordinates (cubiculi administer).58 In a note, Fantoli speculated that the public version of No. 2 is missing because it went into the now mostly lost series of Libri extensorum.59 Fantoli adopts Beretta’s description of this formerly extensive set of volumes as “the registers of acts emitted in public form by the notary.”60 Once again, Beretta painted a bit broadly on the basis of limited evidence. One of the few surviving such volumes I examined, ACDFSO, St.st.LL-5-g, contains no public instruments. Finally, like Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Fantoli pointed to the seeming contradiction between Nos. 1 and 2 to support the second’s authenticity, arguing that a forger would have tried to make his work agree with an authentic document.61 And one might add, especially since he had taken care to unearth the real witnesses.
Most recently, Frajese has revisited the precept leading to a rejoinder from Pagano who also criticizes other work from Wohlwill forward, both men recycling a number of earlier arguments, both adding a few original points.62 Frajese’s argument rests on a distinction between a “private and extrajudicial admonition” given by Bellarmino and Seghizzi’s “judicial precept.”63 Instead of demonstrating the nature of Bellarmino’s action, Frajese rests his case on the claim that the precept minute is a forgery. In addition to most of the timeworn arguments dating back to Wohlwill, especially the allegation that the precept minute is an unicum, contradicting all the other documents, and that the putative original should have been signed by Galileo and the witnesses—a claim constantly repeated, even though, given the lack of any original precepts, one necessarily without evidence—he bases his conclusion on more or less original codicological and palaeographical grounds.64 First, the minute is in an odd place, beginning on the verso of one sheet and continuing on the recto of another, the reverse of what should have happened according to the papal chancery’s customs.65 The minute began in that spot because the notary Pettini had to work around a date already entered, which Frajese thinks was that of the presentation to the pope of the theologian consultors’ opinion condemning two propositions allegedly drawn from Galileo’s Sunspot Letters.66 Instead of entering the pope’s decision about the opinion (because he took none), Pettini began the precept minute following Seghizzi’s orders.67 Second, Frajese makes a great deal of changes in the hand over the course of the minute’s text. Although constantly qualifying the point with phrases like “if we are dealing with him,” Frajese seems to agree with Beretta that the whole of the minute is in Pettini’s hand, the only time it occurs in Galileo’s dossier.68 Based on a change in the size of the text on the initial verso, he theorizes that the minute was not written continuously but in three separate blocks. He thinks it highly significant that the hand begins to shrink as it approaches the word successive and becomes smaller thereafter, a point once more adapted from Wohlwill. Therefore the text must originally have ended with the word “deserat.” After the interruption, the notary resumed with another pen or ink. Frajese concludes that Seghizzi ordered Pettini to enter the precept minute instead of leaving the two sheets blank; Bellarmino’s extrajudicial action should have left no record.69 Third, a point about the document’s form. While allowing that the text is an imbreviatura, that fact deprives it of legal validity since such documents were intended only for internal use and in the absence of the proper signatures (again) lacked legal validity.70 Finally, an argument from content. Frajese alleges that the precept minute was modeled—with suitable alterations to the truth—on the the text of Paul’s order located immediately before it in Galileo’s dossier.71 The notary had no choice but to do that, since he had “no real referent” (that is, a legitimate precept) to follow. From this, Frajese concludes that no original precept ever existed.72 The blame for all this falls on Seghizzi.73
Pagano has disposed of most of Frajese’s points, while operating within the same undemonstrated opposition between an “admonition” and a “formal precept.”74 Like Frajese, he makes assumptions about the Inquisition’s record-keeping practices, especially that it was normal for its notaries to write up documents later. This point happens to be true, but Pagano infers it from a couple of sixteenth-century examples of Holy Office officials visiting suspects at their houses.75 He further alleges without evidence that the Inquisition often used the resulting minute (which following Beretta he calls an imbreviatura or matrix seu originale instrumentum) during an informative process, a point he then contradicts by incorrectly claiming that Galileo did not undergo such an investigation in 1615–1616.76 More substantial criticisms of Frajese follow. First, Pagano easily disproves Frajese’s largest codicological claim. The precept minute’s location is not unusual: Pagano cites a number of instances of documents in Galileo’s dossier beginning on the reverse of sheets and in the middle of the page.77 Next, he almost as easily quashes Frajese’s palaeographical evidence. Pagano sees no change in the hand’s size on the initial verso, calling the allegation “unconvincing” and the supposed change in the ink as due to the degradation of oak gall ink over time.78 The abbreviations Pettini used and to which Frajese pointed as evidence of the writing’s compression are also found throughout the dossier and are those usually
