| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Henry Kamen. The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 369. $35.00.

This is the third edition of Henry Kamen's classic history of the Inquisition. The principal conclusion of the first edition (The Spanish Inquisition [1965]) was that the Inquisition was a weapon of social warfare used mainly to obliterate the conversos—converted Jews—as a distinct class capable of offering social and economic competition to "Old Christians." This was a compelling hypothesis, powerfully stated, and it influenced an entire generation of historians. I found the second version (Inquisition and Society in Spain, [1985]) perplexing: inasmuch as I was one of those convinced by the original statement, I perceived it as a whitewash that sought to exculpate the Inquisition, and I could not understand what motivated the apparent moral flip-flop between the first and second versions. On that score, the present, third version is more clearly articulated and also more successful, I think, in assessing and integrating the vast corpus of Inquisition historiography that has appeared over the past thirty years. The most important finding of the portion of research that can justly be labeled "revisionist" is that the Inquisition, as an bureaucratic institution, was not the intrusive, all-powerful behemoth as typically it had been portrayed but was institutionally flawed, only sporadically effective both temporally and geographically, and not ideologically monolithic. . . .

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