The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision.

Henry Kamen. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. xii + 369 pp. illus. $35. ISBN: 0-300-07522-7.

The author's 1965 synthesis of scholarship on the inquisition provided a vigorous update of H. C. Lea's classic 1906 study, and he has returned to the subject again and again to incorporate later research by himself and others into the mix. His major 1985 revision provided the form and much of the content for the volume under review. Here Kamen adds a wealth of recent scholarship and presents a forceful and gracefully written narrative that is consciously aimed at the general reader. One of the book's greatest strengths is his skillful use of contemporary quotations, which effectively capture the human dimension of the drama.

Kamen reminds his readers that medieval Spanish Christians held a range of opinions about their faith and that of their Jewish and Muslim neighbors, but religious loyalties on all sides became more rigid by the end of the Christian re-conquest of the peninsula from the Muslims. Ferdinand and Isabella institutionalized the religious exclusivity already favored by the Christian majority; they did not impose it on an unwilling populace. The religious inquisition they established in 1478 had jurisdiction only over Christians, but, persuaded that the Jewish community set a bad example for Jews who had converted to Christianity, the monarchs gave Spanish Jews the hard choice of conversion or exile in 1492. Converted Jews (conversos) were the primary target of the early inquisitors, who ordered the execution of those whose non-conformity, real or imagined, was deemed too offensive to God to overlook. Kamen argues that there is little evidence that many conversos were really secret Jews until after 1492, when widespread charges of false conversions were relentlessly pursued and documented. Conversos who escaped exile or execution were forced to conform to Christian orthodoxy.

During the sixteenth century, the attention of the inquisitors turned to Christians influenced by the Protestant Reformation, including a small number of hapless foreigners arrested in Spain. Their persecution inspired a succession of lurid publications that largely defined views of the inquisition ever after. In the late sixteenth century, the inquisitors focused on a wide range of unorthodox behavior and belief among Spanish Christians, including deviant sexual behavior and witchcraft. The latter charge rarely had enough evidence to merit the inquisitors' serious attention, however. From the late sixteenth century, converted Muslims (moriscos) came under more scrutiny, but the state eventually abandoned attempts to assimilate them into Christian society. The moriscos were officially expelled in 1609-14; those who remained, or who secretly returned from exile, blended into the dominant culture. In the late seventeenth century, the inquisition again focused on conversos, this time immigrants from Portugal who had been welcomed during earlier decades and generally left alone. By the early 1700s the importance of the inquisition was largely past, though it would remain in existence for another century.

Basing his analysis on wide-ranging scholarship inside and outside Spain, Kamen challenges many traditional notions about the structure, functions, and importance of the inquisition. Though few of his conclusions will be new to scholars specializing in Spain, they will probably surprise many other readers. For a start, he argues that the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 had little impact on Spanish economic or political history; its main result was simply to entrench the inquisition in power and therefore to perpetuate the quest for religious conformity. Despite the inquisition's legal authority, however, Kamen would reduce its importance overall. Throughout its long history, he argues, the inquisition's bureaucracy was too small, its reach and resources too limited, its internal critics too vocal, its decrees too ignored, and the number of its victims too small, to have had the far-reaching consequences claimed by traditional historiography.

Much, though not all, of Kamen's argument has been well documented by generations of scholars, and he does not always indicate where controversy remains. Moreover, he has an unfortunate habit of occasionally making eccentric and provocative statements that have no support whatsoever. Only specialists are likely to notice these lapses in judgment; general readers may be misled. Overall, however, this volume, like the two earlier versions, is a valuable synthesis of the vast scholarship on the Spanish inquisition, a topic of enduring fascination for scholars and generalists alike.

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities