Product Description: The Inquisition conducted its last execution in 1826—the victim was a Spanish schoolmaster convicted of heresy. But as Cullen Murphy shows in this provocative new work, not only did its offices survive into the twentieth century, in the modern world its spirit is more influential than ever...read more

The Inquisition conducted its last execution in 1826—the victim was a Spanish schoolmaster convicted of heresy. But as Cullen Murphy shows in this provocative new work, not only did its offices survive into the twentieth century, in the modern world its spirit is more influential than ever.God's Jury encompasses the diverse stories of the Knights Templar, Torquemada, Galileo, and Graham Greene. Established by the Catholic Church in 1231, the Inquisition continued in one form or another for almost seven hundred years. Though associated with the persecution of heretics and Jews—and with burning at the stake—its targets were more numerous and its techniques more ambitious. The Inquisition pioneered surveillance and censorship and "scientific" interrogation. As time went on, its methods and mindset spread far beyond the Church to become tools of secular persecution. Traveling from freshly opened Vatican archives to the detention camps of Guantánamo to the filing cabinets of the Third Reich, Murphy traces the Inquisition and its legacy.With the combination of vivid immediacy and learned analysis that characterized his acclaimed Are We Rome?, Murphy puts a human face on a familiar but little-known piece of our past, and argues that only by understanding the Inquisition can we hope to explain the making of the present.

Although the Catholic Church today tolerates beliefs and religious practices at odds with its own, for several centuries it enforced its doctrine with threats, excommunication, banishment, imprisonment, seizure of lands, torture, and death. This book explains the origins of the Roman Catholic Inquisition in the 13th century, the expansion of the movement, its campaign against Jews in Spain, its response to the Reformation, and its eventual relaxation as a brutal instrument of the Church against perceived heresy.

Product Description: When Rainer Decker was researching a sensational seventeenth-century German witchcraft trial, he discovered, much to his surprise, that in this case the papacy functioned as a force of skepticism and restraint. His curiosity piqued, he tried unsuccessfully to gain access to a secret Vatican archive housing the records of the Roman Inquisition that had been sealed to outsiders from its sixteenth-century beginnings...read more