Inquisition Retold

Inquisition is a word that, to the modern mind, conjures images of a sinister tribunal, whether those of Goya’s terrifying inquisition pictures or the farcical rendering of the Monty Python sketch, ‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!’ But it was in text that its power lay, as a tool of repression, and as a symbol for later commentators. This exhibition explores the different ways in which medieval inquisition has been made through text, from the creation of the original witness statements in the middle ages, to the competition over its meaning in the early modern period, to the modern narratives that surround it, both historical and fictional.

A collaboration between the Doat Project and York Minster Library, Inquisition Retold was an exhibition about the making and remaking of inquisition through text, using material held in the library’s collection. It was held at the The Old Palace, York Minster, which houses the Minster Library, and ran from the 9th April to the 8th May. A summary version of the exhibition is given below - the full text of the exhibition guide and the case captions can be found here

Medieval Construction

In a tale from the 1230s an inquisitor puts a text on the head of a woman, and by magic can make her confess anything. In the high middle ages the Church’s ‘inquisition into heresy’ (Latin ‘inquisitio’ = ‘enquiry’) became a specialised affair and one shot through with texts.

Collections of canon law provided the legal basis. There were portable instruction manuals, where inquisitors could find templates of oaths, interrogations, abjurations and sentences. The answers they extracted generated further texts, for they were taken down in Latin by a notary and written up as ‘depositions’. Depositions and sentences were re-copied into ‘books of inquisition’. In Languedoc these were stored in inquisition archives in Toulouse and Carcassonne - carefully guarded, for they were feared by locals! Thinking about how they were produced, we can see that the few texts that do survive do not give us simple and unproblematic glimpses of the past’

Early Modern Remaking

Early modern texts witnessed both myth and history. On the one hand the union of a medieval past and a contemporary Spanish institution gave birth to a The Inquisition, symbol of popery to Protestants and object of detestation to proponents of religious toleration. Through their vast diffusion and lavish illustrations, printed books detailing inquisitors’ interrogations, tricks and tortures planted the black legend that still endures.

At the same time theological conflict was historical, and history led to research. Seeing modern Protestants as ‘heretics of old’, Catholic writers turned back to evidence about heretics in inquisition trial records and treatises. Seeing heretics of old as ‘witnesses to truth’ - a precious line of martyrs linking the early Church and the reformers, thereby fulfilling Christ’s prophecy of the perpetuity of the true Church - Protestant writers turned to the same texts.

Both Protestant and Catholic scholars searched for old inquisition manuscripts and edited them. The massive folio volumes they produced became the foundations of the serious history of the inquisition.

Popular and Academic Inquisition

Modern views of inquisition are in many ways the heirs of the early modern tradition. 19th and early 20th century histories told the story of Protestant ‘witnesses’, and made inquisition texts, such as the sentences of Bernard Gui, available to the reading public.

Recent scholarship continues the concern with inquisition texts, not least through edition and translation enterprises (like the Doat Project). That concern is also informed, though, by awareness of the layers of retelling laid down over the intervening years. All of this was sober and serious.

Alongside it, however, inquisition was recast as a chamber of horrors. 18th-century gothic novels, and 19th-century works lavishly illustrated with pictures of inquisitors at their grim work catered for the public’s more ghoulish tastes. Now, heretics and inquisitors go into a heady mix with the Holy Grail and Templars, producing novels such as Kate Mosse’s The Labyrinth, and fictional retellings in film and television. The ‘black legend’ of the inquisition, satirized so neatly by Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition, now occupies the forefront of the public imagination.