ABSTRACT
A closer look at the dynamics and the results of the widespread enterprise of confiscation of the property of those condemned in trials of faith can help us better understand the plurality of cultural and operative levels brought into play. The physical localities of religious repression initiated by the Holy Office in early modern Italy will be identified far from the convent walls and the episcopal and papal palaces. The will to confiscate unavoidably shattered the secrecy of the courts’ procedure and drew the Inquisition to the centre of society. Necessarily, the formal rules governing the procedure in cases of faith had to be adapted to accommodate specific agreements and “trade-offs” as well as tenacious and pervasive informal incumbencies or obligations, conventions, traditions and local usages in their more simple forms, as well as socially approved behavioural norms, ways of speaking/expressing, ethos and codes of conduct deriving from family, education, literacy, or from the professions, or an ideology.
