Inquisition

Edward Peters's Inquisition is a standard scholarly history distinguishing the actual medieval and early modern inquisitorial institutions, their legal procedures, jurisdictions and the several distinct bodies that used the name, from the much larger popular myth of a single continuous, uniquely cruel Inquisition that later polemic and fiction constructed. Its authority rests on Peters's close use of the actual institutional and legal records rather than the secondary polemical tradition. Because a central part of the book's project is correcting inflated popular claims, readers should note that Peters's account, while a corrective to exaggeration, does not minimize the real prosecutions and executions the various inquisitions conducted; it aims at historical precision about scale, procedure and jurisdiction rather than at rehabilitating the institution's record.