The Spanish Inquisition: A History (review)

After writing on political rebellions, monarchy, humanism, and the Jewish expulsion in early modern Spain, noted Hispanist Joseph Pérez has now turned his attention to the Spanish Inquisition. His objective is to "set the record straight on the form taken by the Inquisition in Spain" (Preface) by evaluating it within the peninsular kingdoms of Castile and Aragón. His assessment is arranged along traditional lines: the first two chapters examine the Inquisition's victims, the next two describe administrative and legal processes, and the final pair question the Inquisition's impact on Spanish society and the ways in which its operations were affected by political authorities. For Pérez, the Spanish Inquisition was founded to persecute racial difference as part of a larger quest toward uniformity: Ferdinand and Isabella wanted a modern state (p. 35); modernity was at odds with heterogeneity, and hence any "Semites" in Castile and Aragón had to be converted or expelled. Much time consequently is spent charting the development of anti-Semitism in Castile, explaining the connections between the Inquisition and the 1492 Expulsion, and linking the Inquisition's prosecutions of Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity. Once trials of Jewish converts or conversos began to decline about 1520, the Inquisition had to find other targets. Its officials subsequently turned on Lutherans, followers of Erasmus, witches, and especially illuminists who favored an interiorized, free-thinking sort of piety.

Pérez then enumerates the powers and procedures that sustained the Inquisition's operations. His vision of the institution's structure is profoundly hierarchical, whereby the king, who named the inquisitor-general, indirectly controlled the Inquisition, and the inquisitor-general in turn controlled the workings of the district tribunals. His portrait of the inquisition trial is equally cohesive: here, what mattered most were the edicts of grace and the autos de fe, the public acts that bookended a prosecution. As for the trials, their outcome was basically inevitable, since defendents were presumed guilty, torture was designed to elicit a confession, and no one was allowed to dispute the ideology that put the Inquisition in place (pp. 167-168). Finally, though Pérez expresses some caution about the Inquisition's larger effects, his conclusions are dire. If the Jewish Expulsion of 1492 produced only an economic slump, not a catastrophe, indices of prohibited books "eventually put [Spaniards] off reading altogether" (p. 187), Spaniards were shut out of the Scientific Revolution because they were unprepared for theoretical thinking (p. 189), and "research and thought . . . were eventually sterilised" (p. 195). Such consequences demonstrate that the Spanish Inquisition was not just another example of religious intolerance in early modern Europe. The sheer scope and power of its bureaucratic, policing, and judicial apparatus made it extraordinary (p. 174).

For this reviewer, at least, this is a puzzling book. Pérez makes some suggestive points about the implications of legal training for inquisitorial procedure, and the "levelling" effects of the Inquisition on Spanish society (p. 169). He also writes persuasively about the financial, social, and legal privileges that came with being part of the staff of an inquisition tribunal. But by and large, his theses are outdated or unsubstantiated: calling the Inquisition a mixed political-religious institution is not new, while arguing that the crisis of 1558-59 owed more to anti-mysticism than fear of Protestantism is perplexing. Though Pérez stresses the efficiency of the Inquisition's top-down administration, scholars of individual tribunals have demonstrated repeatedly that inquisitors functioned in a local environment and were prone to misadventures; while Pérez prefers to make Tomás de Torquemada the guiding force of this institution, most historians would highlight instead Fernando de Valdés. Other gaps are perhaps even more troubling: recent works on moriscos, Portuguese conversos and Count-Duke Olivares, literacy, the effects of the Council of Trent, scientific culture in Catholic countries, and Spanish Erasmianism appear not to have been consulted. Reading seminal studies by Edward Peters would have prevented a number of...