Fordham University Press

From the registers of prayer to the secular ones of the interior voice, from contemplation to the inner scenographies of the fantasy, from the nonchalant daydream to boredom, from the writing of letters to the drawn-out time of waiting, these ways of the secret give onto a horizon of unlimited immanence

Even during the Inquisition, and under torture, anyone could invoke this inviolable place, the innermost heart, nobody’s business but God’s. This was a revolution that, little by little, would make the “intimate” a value and a subject, a being who belonged first to themselves before being part of the world

From the twelfth century on, the contradiction lay between the inner most heart (a zone exempt from all jurisdiction, beneath the eyes of God only) on the one hand and, on the other, the development of judicial practice that assumed the possibility of forcing a testimony or committing one’s word under the seal of truth