Spanish Inquisition 1478 1614

This collection of previously untranslated court documents, testimonials, and letters portrays the Spanish Inquisition in vivid detail, offering fresh perspectives on such topics as the Inquisition's persecution of Jews and Muslims, the role of women in Spanish religious culture, the Inquisition's construction and persecution of witchcraft, daily life inside an Inquisition prison, and the relationship between the Inquisition and the Spanish monarchy. Headnotes introduce the selections, and a general introduction provides historical, political, and legal context. A map and index are included.

This collection of previously untranslated court documents, testimonials, and letters portrays the Spanish Inquisition in vivid detail, offering fresh perspectives on such topics as the Inquisition's persecution of Jews and Muslims, the role of women in Spanish religious culture, the Inquisition's construction and persecution of witchcraft, daily life inside an Inquisition prison, and the relationship between the Inquisition and the Spanish monarchy.

This book explores the activities of early modern Irish migrants in Spain, particularly their rather surprising association with the Spanish Inquisition. Pushed from home by political, economic and religious instability, and attracted to Spain by the wealth and opportunities of its burgeoning economy and empire, the incoming Irish fell prey to the Spanish Inquisition. For the inquisitors, the Irish, as vassals of Elizabeth I, were initially viewed as a heretical threat and suffered prosecution for Protestant heresy. However, for most Irish migrants, their dual status as English vassals and loyal Catholics permitted them to adapt quickly to provide brokerage and intermediary services to the Spanish state, mediating informally between it and Protestant jurisdictions, especially England. The Irish were particularly successful in forging an association with the Inquisition to convert incoming Protestant soldiers, merchants and operatives for useful service in Catholic Spain. As both victims and agents of the Inquisition, the Irish emerge as a versatile and complex migrant group. Their activities complicate our view of early modern migration and raise questions about the role of migrant groups and their foreign networks in the core historical narratives of Ireland, Spain and England, and in the history of their connections. Irish Voices from the Spanish Inquisition throws new light on how the Inquisition worked, not only as an organ of doctrinal police, but also in its unexpected role as a cross-creedal instrument of conversion and assimilation.

In this completely updated edition of Henry Kamen’s classic survey of the Spanish Inquisition, the author incorporates the latest research in multiple languages to offer a new—and thought-provoking—view of this fascinating period. Kamen sets the notorious Christian tribunal into the broader context of Islamic and Jewish culture in the Mediterranean, reassesses its consequences for Jewish culture, measures its impact on Spain’s intellectual life, and firmly rebuts a variety of myths and exaggerations that have distorted understandings of the Inquisition. He concludes with disturbing reflections on the impact of state security organizations in our own time.

"The thousands of years of the medieval period offer some fascinating facts--for example, that approximately 80 percent of the population was directly involved in food production. As illustrated by Eleanor of Aquitaine, the individuals of the period are no less intriguing: she accompanied her first husband on crusade and later ransomed her son Richard the Lionhearted and personally escorted him home. [This book] brings key events and individuals alive to enrich and stimulate students in challenging and enjoyable ways. Students from high school to college will be able to get a jump start on assignments with the hundreds of term paper projects and research information offered here. Each event entry begins with a brief summary to pique interest and then offers original and thought-provoking term paper ideas in both standard and alternative formats that often incorporate the latest in electronic media, such as the iPod and iMovie. The best primary and secondary sources for further research are annotated, followed by vetted, stable website suggestions and multimedia resources--usually films--for further viewing and listening."--Cover, p. [4].

The Inquisition! Just the word itself evokes, to the modern reader, endless images of torment, violence, corruption, and intolerance committed in the name of Catholic orthodoxy and societal conformity. But what do most people actually know about the Inquisition, its ministers, its procedures? This systematic, comprehensive look at one of the most important Inquisition tribunals in the New World reveals a surprisingly diverse panorama of actors, events, and ideas that came into contact and conflict in the central arena of religious faith. Edited and annotated by John F. Chuchiak IV, this collection of previously untranslated and unpublished documents from the Holy Office of the Inquisition in New Spain provides a clear understanding of how the Inquisition originated, evolved, and functioned in the colonial Spanish territories of Mexico and northern Central America. The three sections of documents lay out the laws and regulations of the Inquisition, follow examples of its day-to-day operations and procedures, and detail select trial proceedings. Chuchiak’s opening chapter and brief section introductions provide the social, historical, political, and religious background necessary to comprehend the complex and generally misunderstood institutions of the Inquisition and the effect it has had on societal development in modern-day Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras. Featuring fifty-eight newly translated documents, meticulous annotations, and trenchant contextual analysis, this documentary history is an indispensable resource for anyone seeking to understand the Inquisition in general and its nearly three-hundred-year reign in the New World in particular.

The first comprehensive account of Protestant and Catholic attitudes toward Jews and Judaism in the European Reformation ​In this rich, wide-ranging, and meticulously researched account, Kenneth Austin examines the attitudes of various Christian groups in the Protestant and Catholic Reformations towards Jews, the Hebrew language, and Jewish learning. Martin Luther’s writings are notorious, but Reformation attitudes were much more varied and nuanced than these might lead us to believe. This book has much to tell us about the Reformation and its priorities—and has important implications for how we think about religious pluralism more broadly.

Inquisitionis Hispanicae Artes (Heidelberg, 1567), the work of exiled Spanish Protestants, was a groundbreaking denunciation of the Inquisition which had a great impact on modern Europe, both in translation and as a source for anti-Spanish literature. This critical edition presents a new text as well as, for the first time, extensive notes.

While the Spanish Inquisition has laid the greatest claim to both scholarly attention and the popular imagination, the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542 and a key instrument of papal authority, was more powerful, important, and long-lived. Founded by Paul III and originally aimed to eradicate Protestant heresy, it followed medieval antecedents but went beyond them by becoming a highly articulated centralized organ directly dependent on the pope. By the late sixteenth century the Roman Inquisition had developed its own distinctive procedures, legal process, and personnel, the congregation of cardinals and a professional staff. Its legal process grew out of the technique of inquisitio formulated by Innocent III in the early thirteenth century, it became the most precocious papal bureaucracy on the road to the first "absolutist" state. As Thomas F. Mayer demonstrates, the Inquisition underwent constant modification as it expanded. The new institution modeled its case management and other procedures on those of another medieval ancestor, the Roman supreme court, the Rota. With unparalleled attention to archival sources and detail, Mayer portrays a highly articulated corporate bureaucracy with the pope at its head. He profiles the Cardinal Inquisitors, including those who would play a major role in Galileo's trials, and details their social and geographical origins, their education, economic status, earlier careers in the Church, and networks of patronage. At the point this study ends, circa 1640, Pope Urban VIII had made the Roman Inquisition his personal instrument and dominated it to a degree none of his predecessors had approached.

For Charles V and Philip II, both of whom expected to continue the momentum of the Reconquista into a campaign against Islam, the theology and political successes of Martin Luther and John Calvin menaced not just the possibility of a universal empire, but the survival of the Habsburg monarchy. Moreover, the Protestant Reformation stimulated changes within Spain and other Habsburg domains, reinvigorating the Spanish Inquisition against new enemies, reinforcing Catholic orthodoxy, and restricting the reach of the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution. This book argues that the Protestant Reformation was an existential threat to the Catholic Habsburg monarchy of the sixteenth century and the greatest danger to its political and religious authority in Europe and the world. Spain’s war on the Reformation was a war for the future of Europe, in which the Spanish Inquisition was the most effective weapon. This war, led by Charles V and Philip II was in the end a triumphant failure: Spain remained Catholic, but its enemies embraced Protestantism in an enduring way, even as Spain’s vision for a global monarchy faced military, political, and economic defeats in Europe and the broader world. Spain and the Protestant Reformation will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in the history and society of Early Modern Spain.

The first comparative analysis of Catholic inquisitions and Calvinist consistories in the great Christian age of reformation.

With their dramatic descriptions of black masses and cannibalistic feasts, the records generated by the Basque witch-craze of 160914 provide us with arguably the most demonologically-stereotypical accounts of the witches sabbath or akelarre to have emerged from early modern Europe. While the trials have attracted scholarly attention, the most substantial monograph on the subject was written nearly forty years ago and most works have focused on the ways in which interrogators shaped the pattern of prosecutions and the testimonies of defendants. Invoking the Akelarre diverts from this norm by employing more recent historiographical paradigms to analyze the contributions of the accused. Through interdisciplinary analyses of both French- and Spanish-Basque records, it argues that suspects were not passive recipients of elite demonological stereotypes but animated these received templates with their own belief and experience, from the dark exoticism of magical conjuration, liturgical cursing and theatrical misrule to the sharp pragmatism of domestic medical practice and everyday religious observance. In highlighting the range of raw materials available to the suspects, the book helps us to understand how the fiction of the witches sabbath emerged to such prominence in contemporary mentalities, whilst also restoring some agency to the defendants and nuancing the historical thesis that stereotypical content points to interrogatorial opinion and folkloric content to the voices of the accused. In its local context, this study provides an intimate portrait of peasant communities as they flourished in the Basque region in this period and leaves us with the irony that Europes most sensationally-demonological accounts of the witches sabbath may have evolved out of a particularly ardent commitment, on the part of ordinary Basques, to the social and devotional structures of popular Catholicism.

A renewed case for the inclusion of Spain within broader European Renaissance movements. This interdisciplinary volume offers a snapshot of the best new work being done in this area.

Among them are a politically incendiary prophet, a self-proclaimed hermaphrodite, and a morisco, an Islamic convert to Catholicism.

Ibtissam Bouachrine's Women and Islam: Myths, Apologies, and the Limits of Feminist Critique calls for a shift away from the unproductive paradigm of “us” vs. the West that has informed discourse on Muslim women and feminism in the post-9/11 era. Bouachrine challenges and calls for further challenge to the long-celebrated myths and ideologies that have circulated in academic and non-academic circles about Muslim women and the role of feminism, both within and outside the Muslim world.

Between Court and Confessional explores the lives of Spanish inquisitors, closely examining the careers and writings of five sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inquisitors. Kimberly Lynn considers what shaped particular inquisitors, what kinds of official experience each accumulated, and to what ends each directed his acquired knowledge and experience. The case studies examine the complex interplay of careerism and ideological commitments evident in inquisitorial activities. Whereas many studies of the Spanish Inquisition tend to depict inquisitors as faceless and interchangeable, Lynn probes the lives of individual inquisitors to show how inquisitors' operations in their social, political, religious and intellectual worlds set the Inquisition in motion. By focusing on specific individuals, this study explains how the theory and regulations of the Inquisition were rooted in local conditions, particular disputes and individual experiences.

A revisionist account of the Spanish witch-hunt that took place in northern Navarre from 1608 to 1614. Combines new readings of the Inquisitional evidence with archival finds from non-Inquisitional sources, including local secular and religious courts, and from notarial and census records.