The Spanish Inquisition, 1478-1614: An Anthology of Sources (review)

Those of us who teach the history of early modern Spain to undergraduates have long lamented the lack of primary sources in English translation. Lu Ann Homza has gone a long way toward filling that gap with this excellent anthology of sources. Homza provides a judicious selection of documents that chronicle the Spanish Inquisition from its establishment by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1478 to root out crypto-Jews to the expulsion of the Moriscos carried out under Phillip III between 1611 and 1614. She recovers many voices from late fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and early seventeenth-century Spain, of defendants, witnesses, politicians, and the ecclesiastical judges whose zeal for religious orthodoxy and correct legal procedure rendered this one of the most famous, if often misunderstood, judicial institutions in European history.

Homza begins the volume with a helpful, clearly written introduction that explains the inner workings of the Inquisition and traces its Roman and medieval antecedents. The idea of an ecclesiastical court of inquiry was hardly new to late fifteenth-century Spain, she rightly points out. What was unique to the Iberian context was the imperative toward religious and ethnic uniformity after many centuries of continuous, if often fraught, coexistence between Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Moreover, the Catholic Monarchs were highly effective at utilizing religious orthodoxy in their efforts to consolidate power in the crowns of Castile and Aragon. Thus, as Homza notes, the Spanish Inquisition was an instrument of monarchical power and state-building, as well as of religious instruction and correction, right from its inception.

It is too bad that limitations of space and chronological range prevent Homza from exploring further this complicated interplay between religion and politics. She does not discuss how political authorities could deploy the Holy Office for blatantly political purposes, as Philip II attempted to do against his former minister Antonio Pérez in 1590-91. Tracing the Inquisition's later history, up to its abolition in 1834, would have enabled Homza to include the prosecution of Pablo de Olavide, condemned in 1778, for what scholars generally regard as reasons of political and intellectual censorship, not doctrinal error. Cases such as these, that lay bare the potential for corruption and politicization, led many contemporaries, not just modern-day historians, to doubt that inquisitors' motives were always purely religious in nature.

Nevertheless, Lu Ann Homza has succeeded in compiling an anthology that is both erudite and accessible, and available at a refreshingly low price. Thus, students as well as teachers and scholars will welcome this significant contribution to the religious and legal history of early modern Spain.