Inquisition

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 362 pages
• Published by: University of California Press April 14, 1989
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0520066308
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0520066304
• Book Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Weighs: 1.2 pounds

From Publishers Weekly
Inquisition history, a developing field, provides a key to the "understanding of past societies in their entirety." Peters, professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Torture, demonstrates this key function as he traces the transformation of the inquisition tribunal from a simple legal procedural of ancient Rome to its employ as a feared instrument of enforcing religious orthodoxy in the medieval period, to its symbolic use in the works of such contemporary writers as Kafka, Koestler and Miller. In Peters's view, the societal divisions brought about by the Reformation in the 16th century provide the grounds for centuries of polemic, fiction and a vivid mythology that caused the term "The Inquisition" to be persistently associated with coercive authority that attempts to stifle free expression. Richly detailed and relevant in application to contemporary philosophy, this study, mainly of interest to historians and social scientists, establishes the thesis that "the history of myth is a valid part of history."
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Review
"The term 'inquisitive' carries no frightening overtones; cats are inquisitive, and so are children. There is nothing wrong with an inquiry. But an inquisitor, grand or otherwise, and the inquisition over which he presides, smell of scorched flesh and ecclesiastical injustice. It is the aim of Edward Peters . . . to deal with the term, and its referents, as both true history and false myth. Inquisitions existed; the Inquisition was invented. . . . Mr. Peters's book is as good a enyclopedia as you will find -- scholarly, well annotated, exact but unpedantic." (Anthony Burgess, The New York Times Book Review

Reader Reviews
Edward Peters presents a tour-de-force of "Inquisition" as both history and myth. He declares at the outset: "There was never, except in polemic and fiction, 'The Inquisition', a single all-powerful, horrific tribunal, whose agents worked everywhere to thwart religious truth, intellectual freedom, and political liberty. That is 'The Inquisition' of folklore, martyrology artwork, and post-Enlightenment fiction." He traces the development of Roman Catholic inquisitions from their inception in the 900's, "pre-inquisitions" involving popular lynchings, secular judgments, and other forms of harsh coercion by Europe's laity, in contrast with the patient and persuasive methods used by the clergy. By the late 1100's and early 1200's, however, patience and persuasion ran their course, and inquisitions were officially chartered. The medieval inquisitions of the 1200's-1500's proceeded as formal but secret trials, guided by a doctrine of torture (outlined and explained at some length by the author), and they operated throughout Europe according to discretion, based on local needs. With the advent of the Protestant Reformation, they faded from history, and the Roman Inquisition (1542-1908) was chartered in their place to combat the new "heresy" tearing apart Europe, then later to focus almost exclusively on internal ecclesiastical discipline. It was the Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834), originating as a national and public institution to deal with problems unique to Spain, whose character -- especially when the nation became the great world power in the 1500's -- shaped, dramatically, subsequent perceptions of "The Inquisition", the (supposed) singular, malevolent Catholic tribunal inflicting tyranny and intellectual oppression everywhere. Unlike the medieval inquisitions, the Spanish Inquisition performed its function with aggressive popular support and governmental backing, and it focused on preserving orthodoxy in a national and xenophobic manner, publicly punishing Jews as "heretics". The procedures and personnel of the Spanish Inquisition were soon transformed by polemic, artwork, and fiction into the myth of "The Inquisition", a process begun in the 1500's and continuing to the present day (as evidenced in some of the misguided customer reviews below). This book is an instructive lesson not only in inquisition history, but in the way myth and history often compete with one another. It is not, by any means, a "whitewash" of the phenomenon, nor is it apologetic revisionism. It is an honest and accurate analysis of a religious-legal procedure which developed, changed, did good and bad, over the course of many centuries.