VI.
REMARKS ON THE SENTENCE AND RECANTATION.[1]
We give the Sentence and Recantation as given by Giorgio Polacco in his work, "Anticopernicus Catholicus seu de terræ Statione, et de salis motu, contra systema Copernicanum, Catholicæ Assertionis," pp. 67–76, Venice, 1644. Everything indicates that these are the only authentic copies of the originals, while the opinion adopted by many authors that the Latin texts published by P. Riccioli in his "Almagestum Novum," 1651, are the originals, is not tenable on close examination, for it is obvious that they are translated from the Italian. According to the rules of the Inquisition, sentences and recantations were written in the mother tongue,[2] that they might be generally understood. P. Olivieri, General of the Dominicans and Commissary of the Inquisition, also says in his posthumous work, "Di Copernico e di Galileo," Bologna, 1872, p. 62, "We find the history of it, etc., in the sentence passed on Galileo, which is given in many works in a Latin translation. I take it from Venturi, who gives it in the Italian original."
Professor Berti, in his "Il Processo originale di Galileo Galilei," etc., pp. 143-151, has given the Sentence and Recantation in a Latin text which agrees precisely with Riccioli's, even in some misprints. He says that they are taken from some MS. copies in the Archivio del Santo, at Padua, and thinks that they are the very copies sent by the Cardinal
