A survey of Matthew Paris’ maps and their significance in the development of medieval cartography.

An account of Matthew Paris’ representation of kingship, government and political culture in his own day.

Catholics continued to make pilgrimages, near and far, during the early modern period, despite the challenges of the Reformation. Drawing on examples from Western Europe and beyond, this chapter follows pilgrims on their quests for healing, penitence, and spiritual growth and demonstrates that shrines and saints continued to act as focal points for devotion.

This chapter explores the Spanish Inquisition’s interest in and attempts at censorship of printed texts with an eye to the steps and nuances of that process. It might appear as if the Spanish Inquisition was a formidable and relentless means of ideological control. Yet inquisitors’ implementation of censorship mandates was inevitably piecemeal because the institution’s personnel and authority were limited. Despite inquisitorial efforts, prohibited texts circulated through the Spanish empire, and bans did not apply equally to all the residents of Spanish territories. Some readers were licensed to consume prohibited texts; some banned texts escaped the libraries of those authorized to own them and circulated among the general reading public; the degree to which Spaniards were affected by the Inquisition’s textual regulations depended on their status. Scholars do not agree on the effects of inquisitorial censorship on Spanish intellectual and cultural life, and it remains a fruitful topic for investigation.

This essay examines the remarkable phenomenon of “life stories,” which the Spanish Inquisition required of its defendants after 1561. The narratives offered by defendants fit into a wider cultural context in two ways. First, they match a rise in autobiographical consciousness which was increasingly present in all sorts of Spanish literature in the sixteenth century. Second, the life stories demanded by Spanish inquisitors also.

This essay explores the Inquisition’s persistent interest in converts, and descendants of converts, from Judaism to Catholicism. Spanish inquisitors believed those converts, called conversos, were prone to the heresy of Judaizing, which was continuing to follow Mosaic Law despite Christian baptism. The essay addresses the ambiguity of defining who exactly was a converso, and examines the kinds of accusations made against Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants in the first four decades of the Spanish Inquisition’s activity, from approximately 1484 to 1525. It considers the gendered nature of those accusations as well as the potential motivations of accusers. After weighing the veracity of inquisition records about Judaizing, the essay moves to a comparison of trials from earlier and later periods of inquisition history, from the mid sixteenth century onward. These trials demonstrate the complicated, ongoing interactions among Jews, New Christians, and so-called “Old Christians” throughout the Spanish empire and around the world.

This chapter considers Christian converts from Islam who were converted forcibly in the early sixteenth century and known as moriscos. Once Catholic, the moriscos came under the jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition. For more than a century, Spanish authorities worried about Moriscos adhering to their former religion and being Christian in name only; Spanish inquisitors investigated and prosecuted them for practicing Islam. The number of trials reached a high point in the second half of the sixteenth century, and only dropped when the monarchy expelled the Moriscos from the Spanish kingdoms between 1609 and 1614. This essay examines how the Spanish Inquisition constructed a model of Islamic heresy that encompassed Morisco cultural traditions. It surveys the rise in inquisitorial prosecution of this population across multiple Spanish regions. It also considers Morisco responses to the Inquisition, including strategies of petitioning and financial negotiation. This chapter assesses what Inquisition records can reveal about Morisco histories, as well as methods for reading beyond inquisitorial perspectives.

This essay explores the Spanish Inquisition’s attention to individuals who identified with Protestant Christianity. In the 1520s, inquisitors first attempted to prohibit the smuggling of books. By the 1530s, they were also willing track Spanish Protestant sympathizers abroad, via family members of the suspects as well as networks of spies, and have them repatriated for punishment. The discovery of Spanish Protestant cells in Seville and Valladolid in the late 1550s -- whose members often intellectual and socioeconomic elites -- stunned the inquisitorial establishment, which did not succeed in catching all the suspects. Exceptional punishments even for the penitent were allowed by Pope Paul IV; dozens of individuals were burned at the stake in autos de fe between 1559 and 1562. The discovery of Protestants in the heart of Spain also facilitated the arrest of the archbishop of Toledo, Bartolomé de Carranza, whose seventeen-year trial became notorious. Eventually, Spanish monarchs had to make concessions to foreign Protestants for political and economic reasons, and Spanish inquisitors only encountered scattered, small groups of native believers.

The essay reviews the ebb and flow of Jewish conversions to Catholicism, as well as the ambiguous process of categorizing religious identity. It examines the types of accusations launched against conversos, as well as the motivations for such accusals and their gendered nature. The essays discusses the truthfulness of surviving Inquisition records. It compares trials from the Spanish Inquisition’s first decades to those of later years, with particular attention to the presence of Jewish converts from Portugal. These trials demonstrate the complicated, ongoing interactions among Jews, New Christians, and so-called “Old Christians” throughout the Spanish Empire and around the world. The end of the chapter notes the decline of trials for Judaizing in the eighteenth century.

The Spanish Inquisition developed the heresy known as alumbradismo out of disparate evidence: the heresy existed only in documents by, for, or about the Inquisition. Defendants charged as alumbrados were often acted in ways incommensurate with orthodox Spanish Catholicism; their defining characteristic across time was an emphasis on interior religious experience, especially mental prayer, which would lead toward the abandonment of one’s soul in God. However, the idea that they were members of an organized group—despite lacking any self-formulated doctrine or teachings, much less a means for global communication or dissemination of their ideas—was a stretch of logic that validated inquisitorial persecution but fails to adhere to modern historians’ concepts of proof. It was the Inquisition’s persecutorial discourse and bureaucracy that provided the connective threads for this “sect” when the alumbrados themselves failed to do so.

This chapter provides an examination of the complex beginning and ending of the Spanish Inquisition, with attention to the forced conversion of Jews to Christianity in 1391, the ambiguous religious status of those converts in the fifteenth century, and the creation of yet another new generation of converts after the Jewish Expulsion of 1492. The aims of Ferdinand and Isabella are explored, as is the resistance to the Inquisition’s creation. The essay explores the attempted abolition of the Spanish Inquisition in 1808, with Napoleon’s invasion, as well as the contested legal relevance of the Inquisition in the 1812 Cortes of Cádiz, and the institution’s gradual extinction from 1814 to 1834.

This chapter examines the historical development of the Spanish Inquisition in New Spain (Mexico), investigating its processes, targets, and ambitions. It surveys the first inquisition prosecutions there, which were carried out not by inquisitors per se, but by mendicant friars as well as the episcopal court. After King Philip II authorized an inquisition tribunal for New Spain in 1569, inquisitors quickly began to operate in Mexico City. At the same time, Spanish inquisitors in New Spain had no investigative or coercive powers over New Spain’s Indigenous populations, whose religious beliefs and practices were monitored by the episcopal legal jurisdiction. New Spain’s inquisitors prosecuted far fewer serious heretics than their counterparts in Spain itself, though the tribunal was interested in Portuguese conversos, especially when it was encountering financial difficulties.

This chapter addresses the profound indebtedness of the Spanish Inquisition to its medieval predecessor. Both were grounded in the procedures and priorities of ancient Roman law. The text explains the concept of “heresy” within Christianity, as well as the ways in which medieval European rulers -- popes and monarchs -- worked together in an attempt to stamp out public, persistent, and intentional religious dissent. The essay charts the structural formation of the Spanish Inquisition after 1478, and examines the processes that were eventually standardized. It addresses questions of proof and legal discretion, as well as potential defense maneuvers by suspects. It raises the frequency of torture and describes more and less typical punishments, which Spanish inquisitors called “penances” in accordance with their overarching pastoral goals. Finally, this essay addresses the pivotal question of support for the Inquisition from below, namely, from ordinary Spaniards.