INQUISITION

A form of legal procedure best known for its adoption by papally appointed inquisitors "of heretical depravity" in the thirteenth century and institutionalized in Spain and elsewhere in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Much caricatured and misrepresented between the sixteenth and the twenty-first centuries.

The Origins: The Problem of Clerical Discipline. Originally inquisitio was a form of legal procedure in classical Roman law in which a single magistrate supervised an entire case, from investigation to judgment. The procedure increased in use during the later Roman empire, when the law, both civil and criminal, became largely administrative, although it fell into disuse in the early folk-kingdoms and the Carolingian empire between the fourth and ninth centuries, when other legal procedures, notably those of accusation, denunciation, and ordeal, were more commonly used, except for some matters that touched directly the ruler's person and property.

In a decretal letter, Licet Heli, of Dec. 10, 1199, however, innocent iii (1198–1216) addressed the problems of both clerical misbehavior and prelatal negligence in imposing discipline on criminous clerks, "against whom, so that notorious excesses shall cease, there are three kinds of procedure possible: accusation, denunciation, and inquisition about them." Accusation was the older procedure, also grounded in Roman law and therefore ancient, but it required that an accuser willing to lay a formal charge, pay the court expenses, and risk a penalty if the accusation failed. Denunciation was justified by the exegesis of Mt 18:15–17, which required first, fraternal admonition and was aimed primarily at the rehabilitation of the offender rather than punishment. Inquisition, initially only into the reputation of the suspect and the degree of notoriety of the offense, proved to be more efficient and controllable than either of these procedures and was now added to denunciation when the offense was so notorious that it created a scandal in the Christian community.

Notoriety of the offense and the reputation of the accused were widely discussed by twelfth-century jurists, and several argued that under such circumstances ecclesiastical judges might dispense with formal procedural rules of written charges and taking evidence, although jurists also tended to restrict the number of offenses that could be classed as notorious. In identifying inquisition as a legitimate procedure in cases of notoriety, Innocent III cited God's response to the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah in Gn 18:21: "I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me; and if not, I will know, " and Lk 16:1–7, the case of the rich man who heard that his steward had squandered his property and demanded an accounting. Any prelate, Innocent says, who hears a public outcry or repeated complaints about a clerical offender, "ought to go and see, that is, send and inquire, whether the outcry indicates the truth. " That is, all prelates have the right and responsibility to conduct an inquiry into charges of clerical misconduct within their jurisdictions that come to their attention.

Innocent III was acutely sensitive to the responsibilities of prelates, and in a slightly earlier letter to the archbishop of Naples and the papal legate Cinthio he had also cited the biblical case of the priest Eli (1 Sm 1, 3–4, 18) who refused to restrain his sons from wrongdoing and suffered the wrath of God because of it. Episcopal responsibilities included formal visitations of institutions within their dioceses, and Innocent reminded them that they could use inquisition ex officio. In canon 8, Qualiter et quando, of the Fourth lateran council of 1215, Innocent went further. He identified inquisitio as the standard procedure for use in ecclesiastical courts. He supported canon 8 with two further canons. In canon 18, Innocent prohibited clergy from participating in ordeals, and in canon 38 he required ecclesiastical judges to keep a scribe whose written record of every trial could be accurately reviewed upon appeal. In effect, by introducing, then standardizing inquisitorial procedure in criminal cases involving clergy, Innocent III had begun a revolution in criminal legal procedure that later went far beyond the disciplining of criminous clergy.

The problem of clerical misconduct was one of the main themes of the vast movement for ecclesiastical reform associated with the name of gregory vii in the late eleventh century. In an attempt to distinguish clerical from lay status and prevent the pollution of clerical status, the reformers prohibited clergy from marrying or engaging in sexual activity (Nicolaitism) and from accepting any ecclesiastical office from a layman (Simony). Through the twelfth century, clerical discipline for these and other offenses remained prominent on the agenda of popes, reform-minded prelates, and church councils. Innocent's rulings between 1199 and 1215 offered an efficient and authoritative legal procedure that could be controlled by appellate review and thus reflect juridically the ecclesiological hierarchy in the Church.

Inquisitorial Procedure in Canon Law. Innocent's rulings in these matters extended far beyond the immediate recipients of his letters and judicial decisions. In 1210 Innocent instructed petrus beneventanus to make a selection of the decretal letters of the first 12 years of his pontificate, the Compilatio Tertia, which was to be sent to the masters and students of the law school at bologna and taught as canon law for all of Christendom.

The classical age of canon law had begun (as is now known) with the two successive versions of the Concordance of discordant canons, or Decretum, attributed to Master gratian and taught and commented on at Bologna, then in Paris, the Rhineland, and England since shortly after the middle of the twelfth century. The Decretum was supplemented by two informal collections of papal letters subsequent to Gratian, the Brevarium extravagantium, or Compilatio prima, by bernard of pavia, topically divided into five books and each book subdivided into titles and chapters—the standard form for subsequent collections of canon law—and a later collection called the Compilatio secunda.

After the Compilatio tertia two later informal collections circulated until the authoritative Liber Extra issued by gregory ix (1227–1241) in 1234 made obsolete all five collections subsequent to Gratian. Book V of the Liber Extra was devoted to crimes and procedures against their perpetrators, and it is from there that Innocent III's reforms were taught, commented upon, and learned by canon lawyers.

The Problem of Heterodoxy. By the early twelfth century the Latin Christian Church had constructed a firm basis for the definition of orthodox belief, based on an increasingly standardized interpretation of scripture, the concept of authoritative apostolic tradition handed down through bishops, councils, and popes, and a standardized creed. The laws of the Christian Roman emperors included sanctions against heterodox beliefs and those who held them. Writings by the Church Fathers, particularly St. Augustine and Isidore of Seville, described and catalogued early heretical movements, and these were read for centuries and recapitulated in the popular Sermons on the Song of Songs by St. Bernard of Clairvaux in the early twelfth century. Until the eleventh century, however, debates concerning heretical beliefs were usually conducted among the learned.

Ecclesiastical reformers in the later eleventh century defined simony as a heresy, and twelfth-century churchmen used the term to designate other dissenting movements as well, followers of popular teachers whose doctrines were perceived to deviate from the more and more sharply defined content of orthodoxy. By the early thirteenth century the definition attributed to robert grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, may serve as a working definition: "Heresy is an opinion chosen by human faculties, contrary to Holy Scripture, openly taught, and pertinaciously defended." That is, heresy was heteodox religious doctrine discovered by purely human error, contrary to orthodox authoritative teaching, but also openly taught (not secretly held) and persisted in after authoritative correction (and therefore pertinacious, a willful and public denial of the teaching authority of the Church). In the thirteenth century heresy was also described by churchmen as contumacious—openly contemptuous of ecclesiastical authority.

Responses to Heresy: Persuasio and Coercitio. Some eleventh and twelfth-century churchmen advocated patient, instructive toleration of heterodox belief. Others urged extensive magisterial preaching to teach people true doctrine. This pastoral effort continued during the pontificate of Innocent III and led to Innocent's approval of a number of formerly dissenting evangelical groups, notably the humiliati, and his approval of the new mendicant orders, the dominicans and franciscans. Individual twelfth-century bishops, lacking a reliable, authoritiative guide in law, usually resorted to the excommunication and exile of convicted heretics. In some eleventh-and twelfth-century instances local mob rule, possibly influenced by local authorities, took justice into its own hands. Gratian included a number of authoritative earlier texts on heresy in the second part of his Decretum, but it took several decades for a consistent corpus of teaching doctrine to be assembled and deployed throughout Europe.

Several twelfth-century church councils also issued legislation concerning heresy. The Second lateran council of 1139 required secular rulers to prosecute heresy. Pope alexander iii (1159–1181) was also vigorous in his attempts to impose suitable penalties for heresy. The Third Lateran Council of 1179 identified several heretical groups by name and urged the use of excommunication and denial of Christian burial to those found to be heretics. At the same time, bishops were also urged to use synodal witnesses, men of good local reputation who could issue a denunciatio of suspected heretics without incurring the liabilities of formal accusers. In 1184 Pope lucius iii (1181–1185) issued the decretal letter Ad abolendam, which condemned the "insolence" of heretics and "their attempts to promote falsehood." Here are the grounds for the second part of Grosseteste's definition—public teaching and contumacious refusal to be taught and corrected. Lucius also insisted upon two annual episcopal visitations to any part of a diocese where heresy has been reported and that lay authorities are required to cooperate with ecclesiastical authorities.

In 1199 Innocent III issued the decretal Vergentis in senium, which incorporated much of Ad abolendam, but also identified heresy with the doctrine of treason in Roman law. If treason against the Roman emperor were such a great crime, argued Innocent, how much greater a crime was treason to God? In the decretal Cum ex officii nostri of 1207, Innocent stated that convicted heretics should be turned over to secular authority for punishment, that their property should be confiscated and sold, their houses should be levelled to the ground, and that even sympathizers of heretics should be fined one-fourth of their property.

In 1208, following the murder of the papal legate peter of castelnau, Innocent launched his next response to the dangers of heresy in a local population, when he invoked the recently-formulated doctrine of crusade privileges and commissioned an army to extirpate heresy in southern France—the so-called Albigensian Crusade (1208–1229).

The Council of Toulouse in 1229 and the rulers of France and Sicily in the next few years urged the active seeking out and punishing of heretics by royal officials. Roffredus Beneventanus, a jurist in the service of Frederick II of Sicily, argued that inquisitorial procedure had been invented in classical Roman law and therefore could be employed by secular, especially imperial, courts. The Constitutions of Melfi, issued by Frederick II in 1231, also vigorously attacked the treason of heretics and established inquisition as an extraordinary procedure to be used in the detection of serious crimes, although for heresy the judges must be churchmen. From here, such doctrines also were adopted by the increasingly independent city-republics of northern Italy and in other territories and eventually established as part of the Romano-Canonical procedures of ius commune throughout continental Europe.

In inquisitorial procedure, jurists stated that the bad reputation of the accused acted in place of the formal accuser, that the accused could be legally summoned and questioned under oath, and the testimony of sworn witnesses as to both reputation and fact was acceptable against him. Normally the accused had the right to know the names of witnesses against him, but as early as 1229 the fear of local reprisals led a judge to conceal the names of witnesses, a procedure that survived in many inquisitorial courts that tried heresy.

The system of acceptable proofs in the ius commune procedure required either the identical testimony of two eyewitnesses or confession in order to convict. Without either of these, the judge had only partial evidence, no amount of which was sufficient to convict. Such evidence, however, could be weighed as indicia of different degrees of value, and when the judge was convinced that the indicia indicated guilt, he could order that the accused be tortured, but only to secure a confession. With the adoption of inquisitorial procedure in secular courts, torture also was adopted, along with rules of evidence and due process. In 1252 Pope innocent iv (1243–1254) issued the decretal Ad extirpanda, which classified heretics as thieves of spiritual things and murderers of the soul, and he authorized secular courts in Italy to employ judicial torture in order to secure confessions in heresy trials, just as they already could in other criminal cases.

Inquisitors of Heretical Depravity. One of the most important institutional products of the late eleventh-century movement of ecclesiastical reform was the increasing office of the papal judge-delegate, a clerical official who was given papal authority to decide a particular case, work for a particular period of time, or in a specific area. Papal judges-delegate might also in some cases commission judges sub-delegate. The institution took some of the burdens of litigation off the shoulders of the Pope, while making it clear that the judge-delegate's jurisdiction was papally authorized. Between 1227 and 1233 gregory ix (1227–1241) appointed judges-delegate the Rhineland and in Burgundy whose irregular and uncontrolled activities brought heavy criticism. In 1231 Gregory reissued much earlier legislation against heretics and laid down the rule that repentant heretics were to be imprisoned for life, while unrepentant heretics were to be turned over to the secular arm for capital punishment. Gregory also charged specific judges-delegate to preach in areas where heresy was known to exist, inquire and discover heretics, their helpers, and defenders, and either reconcile them with the Church or turn them over to the secular arm for secular punishment. Gregory also indicated that other members of the mendicant orders were not to participate in these activities, since they were specialized and required particular skills.

In 1233 Gregory took a further step. He established papal judges-delegate in southern France in the wake of the recent crusade, pointing out to local bishops that the Dominicans appointed were to supplement the bishops' own inquiries. Eventually, inquisitors in particular places assumed more and more of this formerly episcopal function. By 1235 the procedures in inquisitions of heretical depravity in southern France began to be regularized: inquisitors delivered a public sermon and call for confessions, established a "period of grace" in which voluntary confessions would receive lighter penalties, and the names of suspected heretics would be gathered. Testimony, confessions, and sentences were recorded in special registers. Although local resistance to these procedures delayed the development of the process, the growing papal concerns and increasing cooperation of secular authorities continued to develop what has been called a unique "technology of power."

The most extensive inquisitorial investigation of heretical depravity occurred in the area around Toulouse during two hundred and one days between May 1245 and August 1246, when two inquisitors interrogated 5471 men and women and issued two hundred and seven sentences against convicted heretics, of which 23 consisted of perpetual imprisonment and 184 required the convicted to wear distinctive yellow crosses on their clothing. The sentences included no confiscation of property, nor was anyone sentenced to death. The inquisitors at Toulouse also produced a specialized manual of instruction for other inquisitors in 1248 or 1249, the first example of what became an important genre of legal literature. The manual gave sample forms of the citation of witnesses, the period of grace, formulas for interrogation, forms of summons, and instructions for reconciliation and punishment. By 1250 the office of inquisitor of heretical depravity was becoming a specialized function, especially among trained members of the mendicant Orders whose work distinguished them from other members of the Orders. The development of punitive and penitential imprisonment was an innovation of the inquisitors, the ancestor of the modern prison system, since it was taken up at the end of the thirteenth century by a number of Italian city-republics and later spread to northern Europe.

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, both the inquisitorial judicial procedure and the appointment of inquisitors of heretical depravity spread rapidly, as learned Romano-canon law, the ius commune, spread northward in Europe, and popes (and occasionally bishops) undertook inquisitions against heresy in different parts of Christendom. One of the best-known instances was the episcopal inquisition carried out by Jacques Fournier, bishop of Pamiers (1318–1325). Inquisitorial archives provided a record and a history of heresy in particular places; manuals for inquisitors grew more specialized and longer, from the manual by Bernard Gui in 1324 to the immense manual, the Directorium Inquisitorum of Nicholau Eymeric in 1376, the first manual to be printed and the most influential inquisitor's manual in history. Popes and other authorities insisted that inquisitors of heretical depravity observe due process, allow all legal defenses, withhold the names of witnesses only when revealing them would place the witnesses in real danger, and permit legal counsel except in the cases of convicted heretics. Appeals were allowed. But testimony was also accepted from witnesses who would be otherwise disqualified, a practice that was also followed in secular courts for so-called excepted crimes, particularly treason. And a number of inquisitorial tribunals dealing with heresy tended increasingly to require that the defendant know something about the law, because the judge recognized no obligation to inform defendants of their rights. The trial of Joan of Arc in 1431 is the best known example of a (in this case highly irregular and politically dominated) court violating generally recognized inquisitorial procedures. In Joan's second inquisitorial trial, that of 1456, which followed proper inquisitorial procedures, the earlier verdict was reversed.

The Inquisitions of Spain and Portugal. Inquisitors of heretical depravity technically had little jurisdiction over Jews and Muslims, except in cases where members of these groups had converted to Christianity and then returned to their original faiths and in a few other instances, mostly concerning their relations with Christians. In the Iberian Peninsula, however, a series of pogroms beginning in 1391 had led to an extraordinary number of Jewish conversions to Christianity and to the creation of a group of converted Jews known as conversos or New Christians, nuevos cristianos. The prominence of conversos in fifteenth-century Iberian society, with increasing anti-semitism, led Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon to request from the Pope the establishment of an inquisitorial tribunal in Spain. The bull of Sixtus IV (1471–1484), issued in November 1478, permitted the Crown to appoint two inquisitors, primarily to deal with the problem of relapsed conversos. In 1482 another bull permitted the appointment of a further seven inquisitors, among whom was Tomás de torquemada, a diligent, but hardly fanatic inquisitor. Ferdinand and Isabella had already established four Councils of State as institutional branches of royal government, and in 1483 they established a fifth: Consejo de la Suprema y General Inquisición, "The Council of the Supreme and General Inquisition," the first institutional inquisition, with Torquemada as President, and later with the title Inquisitor-General.

From 1478 to 1530, and again from 1650 to 1720, the Spanish Inquisition concentrated on the problem of Judaizing. Between 1530 to 1650, however, it focused more on other problems: some aspects of Erasmian humanism in religious matters, deviations in piety among the alumbrados, and protestantism, which it and others characterized as a form of heresy, in this case, Luteranismo. It also dealt with other issues of disciplining the clergy, particularly that of sexual solicitation in the confessional.

The Council of the Supreme and General Inquisition developed its institutional form and its procedures early and maintained them until its abolition in 1834. It consisted of an Inquisitor-General and an unspecified number of other members. By the mid-sixteenth century it assumed operational and jurisdictional authority over all inquisitorial tribunals, requiring regular reports from them and periodically inspecting and supervising their activities. By the early seventeenth century there were nearly 20 regional tribunals directed by the Suprema as well as a group of tribunals in the Spanish Americas. Each of these operated according to the written instructions, Instrucciones, issued by the Suprema, the first of which was issued by Torquemada in 1484 and later supplemented by his successors. Each tribunal was to consist of two inquisitors, a legal adviser, a constable, and a fiscal, or prosecutor. Tribunals also had a network of familiars, privileged lay assistants who provided general staff support.

The bureaucratic features of the system governed by the Suprema were the systematic recruitment, appointment, and replacement of officials, the powerful and regular structure of command and supervision, the issuing of operational instructions enhanced by periodic visitations and reports from below, the preservation, use, and continuous supplementation of archives, the establishment of clearly defined rank and status, and internal financial management.

The procedures followed by the tribunals were essentially continuations of those developed from the late thirteenth century on. The general sermon, the period of grace, the collection of names and evidence during the period of grace, and the recording and summarizing of information. Such evidence was then assessed by one or more theological consultants. When an indictment was forthcoming, the prosecutor drew up charges, issued an arrest warrant, and took the accused into custody. At that moment, the accused's goods were sequestered, inventoried, and from that point until conviction or acquittal maintained by officers of the Inquisition. The accused was imprisoned until the hearing was completed. Inquisition officials were permitted to use most of the criminal procedures of the ius commune, including torture, although records indicate that torture was used far less than in comparable secular jurisdictions. Meticulous records were kept of all procedures, and these vast archives constitute a remarkable body of sources for both inquisitorial and social history.

At the end of all hearings, the local tribunal, with theological advisers and a representative of the bishop, decided upon guilt or innocence in a group of cases. During the seventeenth century the Suprema itself took over this task. The sentences were read publicly at a ceremony known as the auto-de-fé, "the Act of Faith," which consisted of processions of penitents, including the names of those posthumously condemned, public prayers, and sermons. These elaborate ceremonies were intended to serve as a means of reinforcing the faith of the public as much as a means of celebrating the repentance of those who had confessed and the condemnation of those who had not. The auto-de-fé is comparable to other manifestations of public ritual in early modern Europe. In the case of those convicted of capital offenses, the Suprema was obliged to turn them over to the secular arm for execution.

Antisemitic sentiments increased in Portugal during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, particularly following the large influx of Spanish conversos who left Spain after 1478 to 1483 and after the expulsion of all unbaptized Jews from Spain in 1492. In 1496 King João II ordered the expulsion of all Jews from Portugal and a year later commanded the forced conversion of all who remained. Thus, the absence of an unconverted Jewish community living side by side with cristãos novos made the Portuguese situation different from that of Spain between 1391 and 1492. But the rulers of Portugal eventually did request a local inquisition, and between 1534 and 1540 an Inquisition similar to that of Spain was established, although the Portuguese Inquisition continued to concern itself more with Judaizing than did the Spanish. In 1561 the Portuguese Inquisition established a tribunal at Goa, in India, parallel to the Spanish tribunals in Mexico, Lima, Cartagena, and Manila.

The Inquisitions of Spain and Portugal survived, but in much weakened form, until the nineteenth century. The Spanish Inquisition was finally abolished by the regent Maria Cristina, acting in the name of the Infanta Isabella II in July 1834. The Portuguese Inquisition was abolished in 1821.

The Inquisitions in Italy and Northern Europe. In 1542 Pope Paul III (1534–1549) established an institutional Inquisition in Rome with six inquisitors general for the Papal States and other parts of Italy, but claiming powers over all of Europe. When Sixtus V (1585–1590) restructured papal government into 15 secretariats, or congregations, in 1588, the Roman Inquisition was erected into one of these, the Congregation of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition, or Holy Office. The Roman Inquisition also established bodies of instructions for subordinate tribunals and extensive archives, most of which have been scattered or lost. The chief focus for the Roman Inquisition was originally Protestantism, although by the seventeenth century most trials were held for problems of clerical discipline and superstitious magic. Both the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions were the first institutional tribunals to express great scepticism about the problem of diabolical witchcraft, which troubled many other tribunals, ecclesiastical and lay, during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The occasions for sentencing in the procedure of the Roman Inquisition were secret—there were no Roman equivalents of the Spanish auto-de-fé. The powers of the Roman Inquisition were also limited by local control and resistance. The city of Lucca never admitted its officials, and in other territories, notably Genoa, Savoy, and Tuscany, city and territorial governments insisted on some degree of lay intervention. In 1908, Pius X changed the name of the institution to the Congregation of the Holy Office, merging its function with that of the Congregation of the Index, which had been established in 1571. In 1965 Paul VI changed the name once again to The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, its present name, and in 1966 abolished the Index entirely.

In 1547 the government of Venice, which had included very stringent laws against heresy in its municipal legal code, instituted a tribunal, initially composed entirely of laymen, the Tre Savii sopra eresia, "The Three Wise Magistrates Concerned with Heresy," although by 1551 these lay officials were reduced to the role of consulting officials and witnesses, while the real work was done under a clerical Inquisitor-General. By the mid-sixteenth century the once-independent Venetian Inquisition was consulting regularly and cooperatively with the Roman Inquisition, as the trial records of Giordano bruno in 1600 and Galileo galilei in 1633 indicate. The Inquisition of Venice was abolished when Napoleon conquered the city in 1797. As governments became increasingly secularized and nonconfessionally based in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the various surviving inquisitorial tribunals lost public power and legitimacy and functioned only internally in Roman Catholic affairs.

Myths of the Inquisition. The secrecy and power of inquisitorial tribunals had always generated criticism and opposition since the thirteenth century, most spectacularly in the case of the fourteenth-century Franciscan, Bernard Délicieux. But the great confessional divisions of the sixteenth century and later generated for the first time a mythology of the Inquisition, initially in Protestant histories of the Church and Protestant martyrologies, and then in the Low Countries, in the sixteenth century ruled by Spain, which resisted the importing of the Spanish Inquisition into their region. As Low Country political resistance to Spain was drawn during the Dutch Revolt after 1566 to the general conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism, anti-Spanish propaganda promulgated what was later called "The Black Legend," a polemical demonization of Spain that identified the Inquisition with the most hated features of Roman Catholicism and Spanish autocracy.

During the debates on religious toleration of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the inquisitions became popular targets as examples of religious fanaticism, most impressively in the great History of the Inquisition by the Dutch theologian Philip van Limborch (1633–1712), the original recipient of John Locke's Letter on Toleration. In the eighteenth century, enlightenment critics, most conspicuously Voltaire, satirized the inquisitions, and the Italian penal reformer Cesare Beccaria denounced them in his widely circulating treatise On Crimes and Punishments. The Gothic novel in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often used on imaginary inquisitorial settings and characters like the fantastic institution described in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," and by other writers of imaginative and polemical fiction. With the proliferation of illustrated books, both official and imaginary pictorial representations of scenes of inquisitorial torture, imprisonment, and executions appeared more and more frequently, sometimes in great art like that of Goya, but more often in crude or satirical book-illustrations. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the topic attracted great a number of great musical and literary artists—Schiller, Verdi, Dostoievsky, and Stefan Andres. Only in the late nineteenth century, with the imposition of modern standards of scholarship, did a reliable and document-based history of the Inquisition become possible. It has attracted historians ever since.

The modern historian John Lukacs once observed that "The purpose of history is the reduction of untruth." The problem of dismantling the long and often firmly-held mythology of the Inquisition is a case in point.

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[e. peters]