Fatti attenenti all’Inquisizione e sua storia generale e particolare di Toscana

Venice: Vincenzio Formaleoni, 1782. . 2 folding engraved plates. Contemporary calf-backed marbled boards, spine and label gilt. Some minor foxing, but a very good copy. First edition (another edition was published the same year in Florence) of this history of the Inquisition in Italy, illustrated by plates depicting torture and inquisitor costume. Printed almost immediately after the Inquisition closed, this was a propaganda publication touting the success and necessity of the trials. (Rastrelli, to whom this work is attributed, had published a laudatory Vita of Girolamo Savonarola the previous year.) The text traces the history of clerical condemnation of heresy and witchcraft from 1204, and includes the trials of Galileo, Copernicus, Tommaso Crudeli, and the Jesuit Malagrida, who was condemned to be hanged then burned in 1761, despite being in his 80s.

OCLC records 6 copies in the U.S. (Cornell, Emory, Penn, Yale, Brown, Berkeley)

See Melzi I: 397.