The Inquisition of the Middle Ages

The Inquisition of the Middle Ages by Henry Charles Lea. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781566192231.

The word "Inquisition" immediately brings to mind images of the rack, the thumbscrews, and the stake. It also brings to mind the cruel efforts made to stamp out freedom of though, of speech, and religion. Yet the Inquisition as we have come to know it did not spring full-blown from the imaginations of fifteenth-century popes, monarchs, and witch-hunters. Nor was it an exclusive product of Spain. It was the result of centuries of evolution of church law, secular authority, and the concept of heresy itself. Starting in the thirteenth-century, scattered inquisitorial episodes slowly began to take on a particular shape and to become a terrifying and powerful system. How did this system originate and function? What means were used to force victims to confess? What was the nature of the punishment? The eight chapters in this book, taken without abridgment from Henry Charles Leas masterful three volume A History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, form one of the fullest accounts yet published on the origin and development of the inquisitorial process in western Europe. They offer a complete picture of the mechanism of the Inquisition: its structure, its methods of interrogation and the trial, and its treatment of evidence. They also capture the relentless spirit of the Inquisition all its variety of sentence and punishment: penance, excommunication, confiscation of property, torture and, sometimes death. From these pages emerges a comprehensive and vivid portrait of a system which, as Lea says, "might well seem the invention of demons, and was fitly characterized...as the Road to Hell."