«La terribile verità». Una lettura storico-giuridica di Morte dell’inquisitore

This essay rereads Sciascia's "Death of an Inquisitor" from a historical-judicial perspective. The novel offers not only a detailed picture of the institutional dialectic between the State and the Church in seventeenth century Sicily, but also provides a well-informed analysis of heterogeneous legal sources. A staunch believer in the Enlightenment, Sciascia was under no illusions that the abolition of the Holy Office in the late Eighteenth Century had led to a real caesura: indeed, he feared that the inquisitorial mentality continued to influence the administration of justice and to turn it into a potential instrument to repress dissent.