The Spanish Inquisition.

A Historical Revision

Henry Kamen

Yale University Press, $35,351 pp.

Of all the black legends about Spain, the legend of the Spanish Inquisition may well be the blackest. In popular imagination, the Inquisition was a sort of all-powerful Gestapo of black-hooded monks dedicated to eradicating freedom of thought by an insidious program of torture and burning. This image, according to Henry Kamen, is a result of the fact that most of the early accounts of the Holy Office were written by its enemies. Protestants, especially English and Dutch Protestants, were predisposed to see a Spain in the grip of a fanatical Catholic institution. Italians, many of whom were in Spanish-occupied provinces during the sixteenth century, distrusted and disliked Spain and its customs. Because the inquisitors were silent about their own activities and Europe's most active printing presses were English and Dutch, the propaganda of foreign enemies became the conventional view of the Inquisition.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians continued to be influenced by this conventional view, adapting it to documentary evidence in a variety of ways. The definitive history written by the American Henry Charles Lea in 1890 took the Inquisition out of the realm of myth and placed it in the realm of historical fact, but Lea still saw the Holy Office as a huge totalitarian engine of repression and terror. Modern Jewish historians, recognizing that the Inquisition was initially directed specifically at converted Jews, have maintained that the totalitarian repression was largely anti-Semitic. Many scholars have argued that the Inquisition strangled the intellectual, cultural, and political life of Spain.

In the mid-1960s, Henry Kamen, then a graduate student, published a major revision of these common interpretations of the Holy Office. His careful scrutiny of available documents suggested that the Inquisition was much more modest in scope, much less malevolent, and much less destructive than commonly believed. Even its notorious torture chambers were actually less brutal than the methods of most other judicial systems of the time, including those of England and the Netherlands. Kamen's ground-breaking study stimulated a stream of studies on the Inquisition, many making fruitful use of statistical approaches. Kamen's new book is a rewriting and extension of his original one that incorporates the findings of three-and-a-half decades of research.

Kamen effectively debunks the myth of the Inquisition as a single, powerful, centrally controlled police mechanism. Spain's regional diversity meant that its authority varied greatly from one place to another, hardly touching the lives of people in many areas. It also varied over time. Using the tribunal's prosecution records, he provides statistical evidence that there were five major phases. It began, in the 1480s, as a result of fear that converted Jews were retaining their old faith. As concern over the conversos calmed down, in the early sixteenth century, so did the Inquisition. In the late sixteenth century, the inquisitors turned their attention to Protestants and Moriscos, converted Muslims. During the seventeenth century, the regulation of the faith of ordinary Spaniards became the focus. By the eighteenth century, there was little heresy left to root out and the Inquisition quieted down once again. In effect, then, there were different Inquisitions at different times.

In response to those who claim that the Inquisition stifled literature and culture in Spain, Kamen provides impressive evidence that the Holy Office had little impact on literary production or on the circulation of books and ideas. One need only reflect on the fact that Spain's greatest cultural epoch, the Siglo del Oro, flowered in the midst of the Inquisition to see that Kamen is probably right on this point. He points out that Lope de Vega, the greatest playwright of the Siglo del Oro, did not appear on Spain's Index of prohibited books until a century after his death. Even those books that did appear on the Index, moreover, were available to readers who wanted to find them.

Kamen disputes the view that the Inquisition was an expression of fanaticism among the Spanish populace. The institution was neither popular nor widely opposed. Like the contemporary income tax, it was generally disliked but accepted. Many people also saw denunciations to the Inquisition as a good way to get at enemies.

Because the Inquisition was directed against converted Jews or Muslims for much of its history, Kamen maintains that it did appeal to xenophobic and anti-Semitic strains in Spanish thinking. However, it was never reducible to xenophobia or anti-Semitism. The debate over "blood purity," over whether those with Jewish ancestry should be excluded from public life, took place among inquisitors as well as among other Spaniards.

Although The Spanish Inquisition is an impressive achievement, critical readers may find several weaknesses in it. Kamen often seems too willing to make arguments based on the absence of evidence. He believes that there was relatively little secret Judaism among the conversos, since secret Jews left little documentation. Underground movements that hide from officialdom, though, may also hide from the prying eyes of historians.

The organization of the book is sometimes perplexing. Why, for example, does Kamen place his discussion of the creation of the Inquisition myth in the final chapter rather than at the beginning? Why does he examine the expulsion and dispersion of Spain's Jews in the second chapter and then look at Spanish anti-Semitic racialism in the eleventh chapter, separating these closely related topics with chapters devoted to a variety of other themes? The chapter devoted to the structure and politics of the Inquisition and the chapter devoted to its operation provide an excellent description of the Holy Office as a functioning bureaucracy, but it is difficult to understand why these two chapters should be placed in the middle of the book.

Despite these problems, Henry Kamen's new version of his classic work is a major contribution to the history of religion and the history of Spain. The clarity of the writing will make it appealing to interested general readers, as well as to specialists. Even when Kamen's conclusions are debatable, he asks the right questions. Most important, he succeeds in reinterpreting a dark legend of torture and persecution as a series of human attempts to deal with issues of belief and social conflict.

Carl L. Bankston III teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.