Inquisition

388 Pages·1989·24.89 MB·English

by  Edward Peters

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EDWARD
PETERS
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TheInquisition. For four hundred years, its specter
has haunted the Western imagination. Whether we
think of the bewildering trial of Kafka's Herr K or
the indictment of Christ by Dostoievsky's Grand
Inquisitor, this fearsome and much misunderstood
institution has been synonymous with cruel and
arbitrary punishment: the vanquisher ofthe human
spirit. In this meticulously researched history, dis-
tinguished medievalist Edward Peters strips away
the centuries-deep layers which have accumulated
to obscure the intellectual and social history of this
phenomenon over the past 2000 years.
This impressive volume is actually three histories
in one: ofthe legalprocedures, personnel, and insti-
tutions that shaped the inquisitorial tribunals from
Rome to early modern Europe; of the myth of
The Inquisition, from its origins with the anti-
Hispanists and religious reformers of the sixteenth
century to its embodiment in literary and artistic
masterpieces ofthe nineteenth century; and ofhow
the myth itself became the foundation for a ''his-
tory" of the inquisitions.
Peters reveals how "a single all-powerful, horrific
tribunal, whose agents worked everywhere to
thwart religious truth, intellectual freedom, and
political liberty" never existed. Begun as a simple
procedure in Romanlaw, the inquisitionwas adapted
by the Latin Christian Church to preserve orthodox
religious beliefs from the attacks ofheretics. Peters
explains that from the thirteenth to the fifteenth
centuries, popes appointed individuals to the func-
tionofinquisitorin specificcases. Itwasnotuntilthe
late fifteenth century that inquisitions were institu-
tionalized on a permanent basis to protect orthodox
beliefs and maintain ecclesiastical discipline in
several parts of Catholic Europe, including Spain,
Portugal, Rome, and Venice.
In the late skteenth century, the Spanish Inquisi-
tion exemplified the horrors of the institution; its
notorious practices and loathsome image pervaded
subsequent myths and legends. Leading scores of
"heretics" to death in town squares—where their
fiery ends drew large crowds and proclamations of
faith—the inquisitors solidified their sinister and
terrifying authority in the name of the Church.
As Peters demonstrates, that authority was chal-
lenged by the nascent swells of Protestant reform
and opposition to Spanish imperial power which
used the inquisitorial practices to blacken the name
(Continuedon backflap)
INQUISITION
Edward Peters
THE FREE PRESS
A Division ofMacmillan, Inc.
NEW YORK
Collier Macmillan Publishers
LONDON
2
Copyright © 1988 by The Free Press
A Division of Macmillan, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part ofthis book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by
any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
Publisher.
The Free Press
A Division of Macmillan, Inc.
866 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022
Collier Macmillan Canada, Inc.
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
printing number
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Peters, Edward
Inquisition.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Inquisition. 2. Inquisition in art.
3. Inquisition in literature. I. Title.
BX1712. P48 1988 272'. 87-33194
ISBN 0-02-924980-5
Illustration Credits
Map: Gustav Henningsen
Plates 1-14, 16-27: HenryCharles Lea Libraryand SpecialCollections, Van PeltLibrary,
University of Pennsylvania
Plate 15: Trustees ofthe British Museum
. 1
Contents
Acknowledgments v
Introduction 1
1 The Law of Rome and the Latin Christian Church 1
2. Dissent, Heterodoxy, and the Medieval Inquisitorial Office 40
3. The Inquisitions in Iberia and the New World 75
4. The Roman and Italian Inquisitions 105
5. The Invention of The Inquisition 122
6. The Inquisition, the Toleration Debates, and the
Enlightenment 155
7. The Inquisition in Literature and Art 189
8. The Power of Art and the Transformation of Myth: Four
Nineteenth-Century Studies 231
9. From Myth to History 263
10. Materials for a Meditation 296
Literary Inquisition: A Bibliographical Essay 316
Index 348
III
Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive
2011
in
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Acknowledgments
All books owe many debts, and this book owes two in particular. The
first is to those scholars upon whose original research so much of it
depends, and the second is to the Van Pelt Library of the University of
Pennsylvania and to its generous staff, particularly that of the Rare Book
Collection, and also to its Curator of Special Collections, Dr. Daniel
H. Traister, all of whom have been unfailingly and characteristically
cooperative in my research.
Years ago, Professor Antonio Marquez extended to me the courtesy
of considering me an inquisition historian long before I became one
and provided mewith manyvaluablebibliographical references. Professors
Angel Alcala, Stephen Haliczer, and John Tedeschi have invited me
to scholarly conferences at which I was able to speak with other historians
and learn the results of their research. Gustav Henningsen, Research
Director of the Danish Folklore Archives, has always been extremely
helpful with bibliographical and other scholarly advice.
Several colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have also been
extremely helpful. John Ahtes very generously read the early drafts of
several chapters and provided extensive bibliographical assistance. Alan
Kors gready improved the present Chapter 6 with a critical reading.
Elliott Mossman has kindly advised me concerning Dostoievsky's library.
Jeffrey Sturcio kindly read and advised me on the material concerning
Bruno and Galileo in Chapter 8. A generous grant from the History
Department's Rosengarten Fund greatly assisted with the preparation of
the illustrations. I am grateful to my chair, Alfred J. Richer, for this
Acknowledgments
vi
assistance. Ethel Cooley and Joan Plonski combined to produce an orderly
and readable manuscript on a variety ofelectric and electronic machines.
Over the years, conversations and exchanges with many colleagues
here and in Europe have gone into this book. Joyce Seltzer deftly and
patiendy edited a large and vagrant manuscript into the present volume.
Introduction
"A thing burdenous to the world'
. . .
/
Between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries in western Europe, the
Latin Christian Church adapted certain elements of Roman legal proce-
dure and charged papally appointed clergy to employ them in order to
preserve orthodox religious beliefs from the attacks of heretics. Between
the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, chiefly in Mediterranean
Europe, these procedures and personnel were transformed into institu-
tional tribunals called inquisitions charged with the protection oforthodox
beliefs and the maintenance ofecclesiastical discipline in the Latin Chris-
tian community. Between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries,
largely as a result of the division within the Latin Church into Roman
Catholic and Reformed (or Protestant) confessions, these procedures,
personnel, and institutions were transformed by polemic and fiction
into a myth, the myth of The Inquisition. The institutions and the
— —
myth lived and developed in western Europe and the New World
until the early nineteenth century, when most of the inquisitions were
abolished, and the myth itself was universalized in a series of great
artistic works into an indictment, by a modern world, of an earlier
Europe for its crushing of the human spirit.
Although the inquisitions disappeared, The Inquisition did not. The
myth was originally devised to serve variously the political purposes of
a number ofearly modern political regimes, as well as Protestant Reform-
ers, proponents of religious and civil toleration, philosophical enemies
of the civil power of organized religions, and progressive modernists;
but the myth remained durable, widely adaptable, and useful, so that
J
2 Inquisition
in time it came to be woven tightly into the fabric of modem conscious-
ness. So tight is its place in that weave that the myth has been revived
in the twentieth century and applied, not chiefly to religious institutions
or disciplinary techniques, but to the perceived excesses of some secular
governments, and to those twentieth-century states that appear to seek
endless, detailed information aboutthe lives and thoughts oftheir citizens.
There has never been an account of this history and this myth. Yet
an account of both provides an illuminating perspective on much early
and recent history, not least as an account of the ways by which the
changing value systems of a historical culture have perceived, defined,
and acted upon the problem ofdissent. The problem ofthe self-definition
of societies in history is central to historical understanding; one way of
measuring such self-definition is to consider both the history ofa culture
and the myths by which a culture perceives its own movement through
time. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries it has become possible
to do this for a great many cultures over long periods of the past. All
cultures have immediate uses for the past, but until recendy few cultures
— —
have distinguished between and lived with a mythical and a historical
past. Side by side with the myth ofThe Inquisition, there has also grown
up a history of inquisitorial procedures, personnel, and institutions, one
that can illuminate important aspects of the past and measure the myth
as well. Although myths compete with histories, myths themselves have
histories, and the history of myth is a valid part of history.
Any history that deals with a part of the past once preempted by
myth ought to be an account of both the history and the myth, and it
should also explain how the history emerged from a past preempted by
—
myth, how that history became possible and how it displaced or at-
—
tempted to displace the myth.
This book proposes to tell three such histories. The first is that of
the legal procedures, personnel, and institutions that shaped the inquisito-
rial tribunals of early modern Europe. The second is the history of the
myth ofThe Inquisition, from its shaping in the hands ofanti-Hispanists
and religious reformers in the sixteenth century to its universalization
in a series of great artistic works in the nineteenth century. The third
is the history of how a history of the inquisitions emerged out of myths
of The Inquisition.
The ecclesiastical courts that were technically called inquisitions, and
were later mythologized into The Inquisition, had their origins in several
procedural changes in Roman law that occurred no later than the late
first century B.C. Inquisitorial procedure existed first in Roman and then
in canon law, long before there were inquisitors. From the thirteenth