The ignorant bigotry of the SJW.

Tor.com​ has someone offering tips on writing a fantasy seriesn into historical times.  Tor has been staking a position on the SJW left, I believe, and this bit is very congenial about showing acceptance/respect for, inter alia, Islam or the Bronze Age.

There is is, of course, one time period that doesn't get that treatment:

//"The Catholic Church Makes Torture a Law (1252 CE)

Iron Chair torture chairThe history of Europe in the Middle Ages is constantly influenced by the actions of the Catholic Church, for good and for ill. During the 12th and 13th centuries, the Church faced a variety of challenges to its dominance, from internal power struggles over who should be Pope, to external land-grabs by nobility and neighboring kingdoms. The leadership of the Church during this time was often tempestuous, which is as close as I feel like getting to justifying the actions of Pope Innocent IV (I know, right?) in 1252, when he decreed the Ad extirpanda, a papal bull that demanded the torture of heretics.

This Church law stood for over three hundred years and allowed for the torture of thousands, if not millions, of people. One of devices used for confessional torture was the “Iron Chair,” a chair covered in small spikes that a person was then pushed into by a series of straps. (Pictured here.) If the torturer didn’t like your answer to their question, the straps were tightened, and you were sunk further into the beds of spikes.//

For the claim that "a papal bull demanded the torture of heretics," the author cites Wiki, which advises:

//"The following parameters were placed on the use of torture:[3]

that it did not cause loss of life or limb (citra membri diminutionem et mortis periculum)
that it was used only once
that the Inquisitor deemed the evidence against the accused to be virtually certain."//

In other words, unlike secular law, Ad extirpanda was a radical limitation of torture - in fact, the proof required for the use of torture was higher than what was required in English common law to execute.

That doesn't make torture acceptable, particularly where we have a system of evidence and the ability to compel attendance at trial, but it doesn't justify this kind of ignorant calumny. .

Science lesson for the day from the good people at Cosmos - 

"Magic is good and licit."

On Giordano Bruno - From the definitive text on Bruno:

These seem to be mainly philosophical points , but, as Mercati has pointed out, the interrogations very rarely raise philosophical or scientific points and are concerned mainly with theological queries, matters of discipline, his contacts with heretics and heretic countries, and the like. 3

Since Bruno in his final refusal to recant anything included all that he had ever said or written, the final sentence may have included the many and various points in all the interrogations over the years of imprisonment, as well as the eight points, whatever these were exactly. Caspar Scioppius who witnessed the death of Bruno and may have heard the sentence read out at the time, gives a very mixed list of points for which he was condemned; that there are innumerable worlds; that magic is a good and licit thing; that the Holy Spirit is the anima mundi; that Moses did his miracles by magic in which he was more proficient than the Egyptians; that Christ was a Magus. 4 There are others, equally incoherent. The fact is that we do not have enough evidence (the processo being lost) from which to reconstruct Bruno's trial and condemnation. 1

If the movement of the earth was one of the points for which Bruno was condemned, his case in this respect is not at all the same as that of Galileo who was made to retract his statement that the earth moves. Galileo's views were based on genuine mathematics and mechanics; he lived in a different mental world from Giordano Bruno, a world in which “Pythagorean intentions” and “Hermetic seals” played no part, and the scientist reached his conclusions on genuinely scientific grounds. Bruno's philosophy cannot be separated from his religion. It was his religion, the “religion of the world”, which he saw in this expanded form of the infinite universe and the innumerable worlds as an expanded gnosis, a new revelation of the divinity from the “vestiges”. Copernicanism was a symbol of the new revelation, which was to mean a return to the natural religion of the Egyptians, and its magic, within a framework which he so strangely supposed could be a Catholic framework. 2

Thus, the legend that Bruno was prosecuted as a philosophical thinker, was burned for his daring views on innumerable worlds or on the movement of the earth, can no longer stand. That legend has already been undermined by the publication of the Sommario, which shows how little attention was paid to philosophical or scientific questions in the interrogations, and by the writings of Corsano and Firpo, laying stress on Bruno's religious mission. The present study has, I hope, brought out even more clearly the fact of the mission and its nature, and has also emphasised that the philosophy , including the supposedly Copernican heliocentricity, belonged to the mission. Completely involved as he was in Hermetism, Bruno could not conceive of a philosophy of nature, of number, of geometry, of a diagram, without infusing into these divine meanings. He is thus really the last person in the world to take as representative of a philosophy divorced from divinity.

YATES, FRANCES A. (2014-01-14). Giordano Bruno & Hermetic Trad (Selections) (Kindle Locations 8864-8882). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

So, why did Cosmos spend such time on a person who taught that "magic is a good and licit thing"?

By the way, Bruno may have "set up" Galileo. Yates observes:

Galileo accepted the movement of the earth on entirely different grounds from Bruno, yet it is rather curious to notice that the Dialogo dei due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632) is, in its literary form , not unlike the Cena de le ceneri. The hide -bound Aristotelian in Galileo's dialogue is represented by Simplicius, called after one of Aristotle's commentators, the name also being chosen for its suggestion of “simpleton”, and the argument takes place in the presence of two noblemen, Francesco Sagrado and Filippo Salviati, in Sagrado's palace in Venice. If for Francesco Sagrado is substituted Fulke Greville, at whose house in London the Copernican debate described by Bruno is supposed to have taken place, and for Filippo Salviati is substituted Philip Sidney, the Venetian gathering corresponds quite closely to the London gathering, with its knights, its pedants, and its philosopher— the latter now not Bruno but Galileo. Galileo is transposing the great debate on the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems of the universe to a rational and scientific level, but the setting in which he places it is strangely reminiscent of that earlier debate on a Pythagorean and Hermetic level. 2 Had Galileo read the Cena de le ceneri?

Galileo was in Padua from 1592 onwards (very soon after the time that Bruno was there) and he was on intimate terms with Pinelli and used his collections. 1

One wonders whether the use which Bruno had made of Copernicanism might have raised in the inquisitorial mind the idea that there might be something else behind Galileo's support of the movement of the earth.

YATES, FRANCES A. (2014-01-14). Giordano Bruno & Hermetic Trad (Selections) (Kindle Locations 8929-8943). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

Heresy Hunting.

The Anchoress has a great post on Maureen Dowd's latest demonstration of arrested adolescence. You should read the whole thing, but this is the part that particularly caught my attention:

Dowd, emboldened by her chat with Cuomo, tries for her own smackdown, and to read it is to laugh until one’s sides hurt:

Absolute intolerance is always a sign of uncertainty and panic. Why do you have to hunt down everyone unless you’re weak? The church doesn’t seem to care if its members’ beliefs are based on faith or fear, conviction or coercion. But what is the quality of a belief that exists simply because it’s enforced?

The last part is simply banal sophistry — of course the church cares that its members beliefs are based on faith, but in a faith that is understood in its fullness; whether the church succeeds in teaching its fullness is a very valid question — if Dowd is an example, the answer must be “no” — but on the other hand, in order to be taught anything in its fullness, one must be willing to actually hear a lesson, and absorb it enough to repeat it back with some accuracy; that cannot be done if one is inclined to a kneejerk “la-la-la, I can’t year you” over its often subtle points. But it’s the first part of that quote that killed me: “Absolute intolerance is always a sign of uncertainty and panic. Why do you have to hunt down everyone, unless you’re weak?”

Gosh, Maureen, I agree with you! that intolerance is sign of weakness, and that hunting down part — that’s a question I’ve wondered myself. Since you’re so well connected, perhaps you could ask it for me? Ask Ms. Steinem and Ms. Fonda, please, why free speech should not be tolerated by some; ask some college groups why a free expression of opinion is so unendurable to them that they will steal newspapers rather than allow others to read it; ask this teacher why her students are not allowed to criticize “this” president.; ask Bev Perdue why “some” elections should be suspended; ask Eric Holder why governments should force churches to give up their right to define ministers or ministry; ask President Obama why churches should be coerced into betraying their own consciences; ask why churches must conform to the lights of mere men or face consequences. Ask the people who know everything how come they can’t “tolerate” hearing someone refer to their spouse as a “husband” or a “wife”.

The Anchoress studs her observation with all the narrow-minded heresy hunting that the Left engages in, and, yet, the Left is, apparently, oblivious to its own orthodoxy and heresy-hunting tendencies and inquisitions.

This is a piece with Cullen Murphy's thoroughly tendentious "God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World." Murphy is Dowdish tribal Catholic who explicitly admits that the reason he was induced to write a book on the Inquisition was the fact that Pope John Paul II's had taken away the right of certain theologians to label their teaching as being "Catholic" because those teachings were not Catholic. Like Dowd, Murphy wants to read the Inquisition into modernity, but it's always the other guy's modernity that he finds the reverberations of the Inquisition.

In my book review - go here and give me a helpful vote if you haven't already - I wrote:

Another amusing bit of irony occurs when Murphy points out that notwithstanding the fact that Catholics in England were subjected to an Inquisition after Henry VIII, no Englishman could recognize anything that an Englishman might do as ever imaginably being considered an Inquisition. (p. 195.) But Murphy demonstrates that same mentality throughout the book! So, when he looks at bad special prosecutors harassing Presidents, he doesn't come up with Fitzpatrick's pursuit of information on the silly Plame affair that resulted in the conviction of "Scooter" Libby, instead he goes to Ken Starr and Bill Clinton. Since Clinton was disbarred for his actual perjury, but Fitzpatrick came nowhere near Bush, one might think that it would be Fitzpatrick who would get the "grand Inquisitor" label, but to anyone aware of conservative-liberal politics, Murphy's choice is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that every single example of "modernity looked at through the lens of the Inquisition" involves something done by the American Right that the American Left objects to. Like the Englishmen, who couldn't recognize "the Inquisition" in their own country, Murphy can't recognize "the Inquisition" when it is done by the Left, and for all his sighing about the "war on terror" and the Bush administration, he finds little time to mention Obama's use of drones to kill Americans as a "disturbing example" the Inquisition's "legacy to modernity."

If you are going to read only one book on the Inquisition...

...do not make it "God's Jury."

As always, please go here and give me a helpful vote.

God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World by Cullen Murphy



If you are going to read only one book on the Inquisition...

...do not make it "God's Jury."

If you want to learn about real history, there are a number of recent books by recognized scholars on the Inquisition. Henry Kamen's The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision and Edward Peters' Inquisition, for example, stress that there was no "The Inquisition," rather there were a number of local inquisitions that began as a response to different local reasons and developed over time in an ad hoc fashion. Ironically, recognized scholars agree that the various inquisitions were generally more "advanced" in terms of legal procedure and protection of the accused, and as impossible as it is for those who are raised on the "myth of the inquisition" to believe, sentences were more lenient than those handed out by secular powers. Nonetheless, the "myth of the Inquisition" lives on despite the fact, and scholars like Peters and Kamen spend substantial ink exploring and correcting that myth.

Murphy's book attempts to set this project back by a century. Murphy admits that his principle interest is not in the actual history of the Inquisition. He admits up-front that most books on the Inquisition grow out of a polemical purpose, and for Murphy that polemical agenda grows out of the "the Vatican's attempt to silence or censor a significant number of prominent theologians." (p. 24.) From this starting point, Murphy proposes to use the Inquisition as a lens for looking at the dysfunctions of the "modern world" and the dysfunctions of the modern world to examine "the Inquisition," and, rest assured, it is "the Inquisition" for Murphy. Notwithstanding the fact that he interviewed Peters and Kamen, and occasionally cherry-picks their books for quotes, he seems not to have noticed that there was no "the Inquisition." See p. 24 ("The advent of the Inquisition offers a lense.")

Murphy's project is an exercise in all kinds of rhetorical fallacies that ought to insult an attentive reader. The book is replete with appeals to "guilt by association" based merely on placing Bad Things next to each other in adjacent sentences. Thus, we have a reference to the 1252 papal bull Ad extirpanda which "justified and encouraged the use of torture in the Inquisition" (Bad Inquisition!) welded in the same sentence to a Department of Justice memo during the Bush administration permitting "enhanced interrogation. (Bad George W. Bush!) So, Murphy gets the benefit of smearing the Bush administration with the Inquisition and smearing the Inquisition with the Bush Administration, depending on which is viewed as being more odious at any particular moment. These kinds of "guilt by association" constructs continue throughout the book with nary an effort ever being made by Murphy to provide context for any of the things that are just known to be bad based on his ideological first principles.

But along the way, Murphy just butchers history. As a real historian, Robert Louis Wilken, observes, "every act of historical understanding is an act of empathy." Murphy doesn't want people to understand because he most definitely doesn't want empathy; he wants people to hate the things he hates. So, he doesn't provide context; things just happen because the actors are evil or ignorant or venal or corrupt, all of which could be true, but hardly exhausts the sum total of historical experience.

Let's go back to that juxtaposition of the Ad extirpanda with the Bush memo on "enhanced interrogation." Murphy tells us that Ad extirpanda "justified and encouraged the use of torture." But this was the 13th Century, for heaven's sake! It wasn't the 21st, where torture has to be covered up with evasive language about "enhanced interrogation." In the 13th Century, torture didn't need to be "justified and encouraged"; it was a commonplace feature of every judicial system in the world! With that kind of context one might wonder suspect - with a little empathy providing a motive for ...what's that word?...curiosity! - that Ad extirpanda was doing something more than "justifying and encouraging" the use of torture, and, by golly, one would find out that Ad extirpanda did something unusual for the world before modernity - it limited the use of torture!

It isn't in Murphy's polemical interest to point this out - without sneering at such efforts as ineffectual and hypocritical - but he ought to know better. He ought to know better because he spends pages talking about the 19th Century historian of the Inquisition, Henry Charles Lea. If he had read Lea's work with a certain amount of empathy, he would have read the following from Lea's History of the Spanis Inquisition, vol. 3, Book 6, Chapter 7:

"We shall see that occasionally tribunals abused the use of torture, but the popular impression that the inquisitorial torture-chamber was the scene of exceptional refinement in cruelty, of specially ingenious modes of inflicting agony, and of peculiar, persistence in extorting confessions, is an error due to sensational writers who have exploited credulity. The system was evil in conception and in execution, but the Spanish Inquisition, at least, was not responsible for its introduction and, as a rule, was less cruel."

Jeepers! Scenes of torture being used by "sensational writers" who want to "exploit credulity" in readers for polemical purposes. Who would do that? Well, Murphy for one, with his listing of unusual names for instruments of torture - Brazen Bull, Iron Maiden, Pear of Anguish (p. 86) - virtually all of which were invented in the 18th Century to satisfy the curiosity of credulous museum visitors for sensationalism. (If you are curious about this point - Murphy wasn't - search for "Five Common Misconceptions about the Middle Ages".)

And:

"No torture-chamber in the Inquisition possessed the resources of the corregidor who labored for three hours, in 1612, to obtain from Diego Duke of Estrada confession of a homicide--the water torture, the mancuerda, the potro, hot irons for the feet, hot bricks for the stomach and buttocks, garrotillos known as bone-breakers, the trampa to tear the legs and the bostezo to distend the mouth--and all this was an every-day matter of criminal justice."

We await the book on how it was secular power, and its use of torture, which was somehow, mysteriously involved in ...you know.."making the modern secular world."

At times, Murphy's approach to history makes for silly anachronism; at other times, it makes for questions as to his sincerity. For example, Murphy tells us that notwithstanding "older estimates of the number of people put to death by the Inquisition range to upwards of a million; the true figure may be closer to several tens of thousands," before launching on a story about how arguments about body count quickly become pointless and distasteful because the commandant of Auschwitz insisted that he had killed "two million," not "three million," and thereby adding yet another example of "guilt by grammatical juxtaposition."

So, apparently, we aren't supposed to question this number "tens of thousands of deaths" because we certainly don't want to look like a Nazi. The problem, though, is that "tens of thousands" is high by several magnitudes of error. Murphy does not offer a citation for his "tens of thousands" figure, but Edward Peters says that the "body count" in Spain for the period between 1550 and 1800 was around 3,000. (Inquisition, p. 86.) If we add the approximate 3,000 deaths estimated by Murphy for the earlier, more active period when the Inquisition was founded in Spain , over the course of over 300 years, Spain - the most reviled Inquisition - comes nowhere near to the "tens of thousands" of deaths claimed by Murphy, who doesn't offer a citation to back his claim. Also, Peters - a real scholar as Murphy concedes - points out that the Inquisition handed out a far smaller number of death sentences than comparable secular institutions. (Id.)

Murphy has every reason to desire vagueness on this subject. The most notable finding of Inquisition Revisionists is how few people actually fell within the purview of any Inquisition. Approximately 6,0000 deaths over nearly 400 years is hardly working up a sweat; heck, more Catholics were killed by the Spanish Communists during the Spanish Civil War, or the French Revolution, during a busy summer. Given Murphy's desire to make the Catholic Church - particularly conservative, ultramontane Catholics - the villain of the book, he definitely doesn't want anyone to start doing the math and making that kind of comparison.

Murphy cites to Peters' book, and even offers a brief interview with Peters, which is one of the most interesting portions of Murphy's book, but, apparently, what Peters actually wrote made no impression on Murphy because - let's repeat it - "every act of historical understanding is an act of empathy," and Murphy's book is the opposite of empathetic.

Another amusing bit of irony occurs when Murphy points out that notwithstanding the fact that Catholics were subjected to an Inquisition, no Englishman could recognize anything that an Englishman might do as ever imaginably being considered an Inquisition. (p. 195.) But Murphy demonstrates that same mentality throughout the book! So, when he looks at bad special prosecutors harassing Presidents, he doesn't come up with Fitzpatrick's pursuit of information on the silly Plame affair that resulted in the conviction of "Scooter" Libby, instead he goes to Ken Starr and Bill Clinton. Since Clinton was disbarred for his perjury, but Fitzpatrick came nowhere near Bush, one might think that it would be Fitzpatrick who would get the "grand Inquisitor" label, but to anyone aware of conservative-liberal politics, Murphy's choice is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that every single example of "modernity looked at through the lens of the Inquisition" involves something done by the American Right that the American Left objects to. Like the Englishmen, who couldn't recognize "the Inquisition" in their own country, Murphy can't recognize "the Inquisition" when it is done by the Left, and for all his sighing about the "war on terror" and the Bush administration - like the little bits of information that might have put the history of the inquisitions in to context - he finds little time to mention Obama's use of drones to kill Americans as a "disturbing example" the Inquisition's "legacy to modernity."

I was torn about how to rate this book. Murphy writes well. Some of the stories he tells are interesting. I thought his point about the use of torture as presaging a more rational approach to fact-finding was an idea worth the price of admission. But what finally tore it for me was the sense that he was deliberately trying to dupe me. What kicked off that sense was when I realized the reason that Murphy had dwelt on the mob who tore down the original building that had housed the Roman Inquisition. Normally, the Roman Inquisition doesn't get featured as the villain of the Inquisitions; that honor goes to the Spanish Inquisition. The Roman Inquisition famously had its run in with Galileo, who lived, and Bruno, who didn't, but, in general, the Roman Inquisition doesn't get hit with the anti-semitism and death tolls associated with the Spanish Inquisition. And, yet, Murphy mentions several times that a mob tore down the original Inquisition building.

Searching for an answer, I ran across this statement in Henry Kamen's work, "In ancient regime Spain, no popular movement attacked the Inquisition and no rioters laid a finger on its property." This is consistent with other author's statement about the popular support the Spanish Inquisition enjoyed, and how frequently, the Spanish Inquisition damped popular resentment against minorities.

Murphy interviewed Kamen. He cites this work, but he never mentions this point. Instead he dwells on the burning of the Roman Inquisition's building. At some point, one has to conclude that Murphy is deliberately cherry-picking the sources, and that his work is worse than incidentally and anachronistically biased; it's actually a piece of disinformation that can't be trusted.

That was the straw that broke the camels' back. I cannot recommend this book. I had thought I could so long as I gave the caveat that one should read Kamen and Peters and Lea. I understand that by posting this review, and more importantly, the one star rating, I will receive more unhelpful ratings, but the purpose of reviews is to suggest to objective readers whether they should invest their money, and, more importantly, their limited time in a book-reading project. This book does not deserve that investment. Read Peters and Kamen. After you have done that, and if you have a lot of free time, then read this book if you must.

Torture is horribly corrupting. The power and desire of secular governments to control and categorize people is fearsome. The prospect that we Americans might be trading freedom for security is real and should be a concern, but trying to make it all more awful because somehow it fits into the prejudices of American liberals about religion or Catholicism or the Papacy or whatever amorphous target Murphy defines as the snake that deprived modernity of its original innocence is really, really silly, and, insofar as this project is based on distortion, Murphy's book undermines whatever real lesson we could learn about the evil of torture, or of power, or of spying, or whatever it is that pulls Murphy's alarm bell.

Long story short, this is a political hatchet-job. Worse still, it insults the hard work done by true scholars who have tried to wrest the actual history of the Inquisition from the grip of dishonest polemicists.

The Inquisition, again.

Over at Religious Dispatches, Gordon Haber reviews "God's Jury," which appears to be a book by a modern secularist that tries to make the Inquisition the ur-source of evil in the modern world.

Haber begins his review with a lengthy description of a travesty of humanity and mercy in the form of the judicial torture of a woman named Elvira del Campos for being a suspected "secret Jew" on account of her dislike of pork and unwillingness to change the linen on any day but Sunday.

The description of the torture sessions is not for the weak of stomach, and, frankly, sounds like the Protestant and Anti-Spanish accounts that supplied a demand for crypto-pornography as described in Edward Peters book on the Inquisition.

A problem with Haber's account is that he actually cites to a 19th Century text on the Inquisition by Henry Charles Lea, who starts by pointing out that torture was used less by the Inquisition than by secular authorities, and that abuses of torture by the Inquisition were rare.

That doesn't restrain his readers from indulging in a "two minute hate" against Catholicism, particularly since Haber doesn't mention that part.

So, I wrote the following - thereby opening myself up to a "two minute hate":

First, kudos on the author for citing to some authority in support of his contentions. This area in particular is fraught with legend and misinformation.

Second, nonetheless it seems that the author let the lurid get the better of him. The story he tells about Elvira del Campo is awful, but if we are going to have an intelligent discussion about whether the Inquisition was the cause of the woes of the modern world, oughtn't we be interested in finding out whether the Inquisition represented something new and worse in the annals of humanity's bad behavior? Otherwise, it will look like, maybe, the Inquisition wasn't the source of bad things in the modern world, that the source might be something else that remains with us, such as the state or politics or ideology.

When we look at the source for the author's comments at footnote 2 we are directed to a book written by Henry Charles Lea in the 19th Century. That's something of a bad start since there was a history of the "Black Legend" and anti-catholic know-nothingism that permeated the English-speaking world.

But, surprisingly, with all that baggage, here's what Lea writes:

"We shall see that occasionally tribunals abused the use of torture, but the popular impression that the inquisitorial torture-chamber was the scene of exceptional refinement in cruelty, of specially ingenious modes of inflicting agony, and of peculiar, persistence in extorting confessions, is an error due to sensational writers who have exploited credulity. The system was evil in conception and in execution, but the Spanish Inquisition, at least, was not responsible for its introduction and, as a rule, was less cruel than the secular courts in its application, and confined itself more strictly to a few well-known methods. In fact, we may reasonably assume that its use of torture was less frequent, for its scientific system of breaking down resistance, in its long-drawn procedure, was more effective than the ruder and speedier practice of the secular courts where, as we are told by [3] Archbishop Pedro de Castro of Granada, it was notorious that no one confessed except when overcome by torture. (6)

Lea continues:

"In this respect, the comparison between the Spanish and the Roman Inquisition is also eminently in favor of the former. We shall have occasion presently to see the limitations which it placed on the use of torture, while in Rome it was the rule that all who confessed or were convicted in matters of faith were tortured for the further discovery of the truth and the revelation of accomplices. In addition to this there were many classes of cases in which torture was employed by Rome to extort confession and in which it was forbidden in Spain--those involving mere presumption of heresy, such as solicitation, sorcery, blasphemy etc. Moreover in Rome the in arbitrio judicum applied not only to the kind and duration of the torture but also to its repetition. (7) Spanish writers on practice, therefore, were justified in claiming for their own tribunals a sparing use of torture unknown in Italy, while, as regards its severity, the frequency with which in the trials we find that the accused overcame the torture would indicate that habitually it was not carried to extremity, as it so frequently was in the secular courts. No torture-chamber in the Inquisition possessed the resources of the corregidor who labored for three hours, in 1612, to obtain from Diego Duke of Estrada confession of a homicide--the water torture, the mancuerda, the potro, hot irons for the feet, hot bricks for the stomach and buttocks, garrotillos known as bone-breakers, the trampa to tear the legs and the bostezo to distend the mouth--and all this was an every-day matter of criminal justice. (8)"

So, the "popular impression" of inquisitorial torture is wrong, even though there were "occasional" abuses, but nothing like the use of torture that was institutionalized in contemporary "every-day" matters of criminal justice.

OK...yes...that was certainly the impression that I was left with when I read the article.

Also, given the prior comments, I certainly sense that other readers also formed the understanding that the "popular impression" of inquisitorial torture is wrong, even though there were "occasional" abuses, but nothing like the use of torture that was institutionalized in contemporary "every-day" matters of criminal justice.

But, of course, if people were, you know, restrained from the lurid details and had to focus on the more nuanced reality of the facts, then they wouldn't be able to indulge in that soul-satisfying "two-minute hate" against Catholicism.

The case of Elvira del Campos is awful, and you have to wonder how the Spanish Inquisition would have proceeded in that context when it refused to prosecute witchcraft.

Unlike the Protestant countries that burned witches, there was no burning of witches in Spain because the Spanish Inquisition thought that those claims were nonsense.

As with most things, the answer is probably (a) Elvira del Campos may have been a secret Jew (not that I think there is anything wrong with that) and (b) paranoia and irrationality fluctuates from age to age and culture to culture.

That ought to be the take-away from history, not that there is some particular virus of irrationality in Spanish or Catholic culture.

Here is the Henry Charles Lea source.

I can write the posts, I am going to get - I'm excusing torture, I'm biased, I'm ignoring all the evil that the Catholic Church has done, the Crusades, pedophilia, etc., etc.

*Sigh*

But what about, you know, historical accuracy in this one area?

A Beautiful Example of "Liberal Tolerance" - Liberal justifies oppression of religious beliefs by playing on derogatory myth of the "Inquisition."

Wendy Kaminer pens an essay on "In Birth Control Debate, Religious Beliefs Don't Trump Rights."

Because, obviously, religious beliefs are not a "right" and, as a Constitutional scholar, she knows that the Constitution is really all about "abortion" and has nothing at all to say about the free exercise of religion.

But she really tosses the red-meat out for anti-Catholic bigots with her first paragraph:

You might expect the Catholic Bishops to recognize an Inquisition when they see one. But listening to their laments about the administration's "unprecedented assaults" on religious liberty, you'd think Barack Obama was the second coming of Torquemada.

Because, you know, Catholics are evil, evil people who were always launching Inquisitions and what-not.

Except that the "Inquisition" that Kaminer is an anti-Catholic myth. The reality is that the actual Inquisition provided procedural protections unheard of in secular courts, and the reach of the Inquisition never extended as far as Kaminer suggests. Moreover, in terms of death tolls, the Inquisition was a "piker" compared to liberals and "liberals in a hurry." Over its 450 year history only around 3,000 individual were executed as a result of the Inquisition; the French Revolution and Russian and Chinese Communists would exceed that number in a busy afternoon.