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University of California Press

About the Book

This impressive volume is actually three histories in one: of the legal procedures, personnel, and institutions 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 of the nineteenth century; and of how the myth itself became the foundation for a "history" of the inquisitions.

About the Author

Edward Peters, author of the highly acclaimed Torture, is Henry Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History at the University of Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
l. The Law of Rome and the Latin Christian Church
2. Dissent, Heterodoxy, and the Medieval Inquisitorial Office
3. The Inquisitions in Iberia and the New World
4. The Roman and Italian Inquisitions 1
5. The Invention of The Inquisition
6. The Inquisition, the Toleration Debates, and the
Enlightenment
7. The Inquisition in Literature and Art
8. The Power of Art and the Transformation of Myth: Four
Nineteenth-Century Studies
9. From Myth to History
10. Materials for a Meditation
Literary Inquisition: A Bibliographical Essay
Index