Alan Singer’s riveting new novel, The Inquisitor’s Tongue, reimagines the Spanish Inquisition as a world in which spiritual horrors and acts of violence are the birth pangs of otherwise unimaginable identities. The novel is the intersection of two narratives. The confession of Osvaldo Alonzo de Zamora, a miraculously gifted converso wine taster, is read aloud by a duplicitous priest of the Inquisition as an admonitory lesson to a suspected sinner. The competing narrative is the story of that sinner, another guilt-driven character, referred to only as the “Samaritan,” who curiously is held in the thrall of Osvaldo’s confession. The Samaritan bears the scars of his own history of violence and hidden identity. In the wake of a final apocalypse the two narratives converge, bringing all of the characters together and eliciting the most damning revelation about the identity of the Inquisitor. Set amidst the religious and courtly spectacles of sixteenth-century Spain, The Inquisitor’s Tongue is linguistically adventurous, richly philosophical, deeply visceral, tantalizingly sensuous, and wickedly comic. It is a Goyaesque capricho on the follies of the will to identity.

Essays considering how information could be used and abused in the service of heresy and inquisition. The collection, curation, and manipulation of knowledge were fundamental to the operation of inquisition. Its coercive power rested on its ability to control information and to produce authoritative discourses from it - a fact not lost on contemporaries, or on later commentators. Understanding that relationship between inquisition and knowledge has been one of the principal drivers of its long historiography. Inquisitors and their historians have always been preoccupied with the process by which information was gathered and recirculated as knowledge. The tenor of that question has changed over time, but we are still asking how knowledge was made and handed down - to them and to us - and how their sense of what was interesting or useful affected their selection. This volume approaches the theme by looking at heresy and inquisition in the Middle Ages, and also at how they were seen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The contributors consider a wide range of medieval texts, including papal bulls, sermons, polemical treatises and records of interrogations, both increasing our knowledge of medieval heresy and inquisition, and at the same time delineating the twisting of knowledge. This polarity continues in the early modern period, when scholars appeared to advance learning by hunting for medieval manuscripts and publishing them, or ensuring their preservation through copying them; but at the same time, as some of the chapters here show, these were proof texts in the service of Catholic or Protestant polemic. As a whole, the collection provides a clear view of - and invites readers' reflection on - the shading of truth and untruth in medieval and early modern "knowledge" of heresy and inquisition. Contributors: Jessalynn Lea Bird, Harald Bollbuck, Irene Bueno, Jörg Feuchter, Richard Kieckhefer, Pawel Kras, Adam Poznanski, Luc Racaut, Alessandro Sala, Shelagh Sneddon, Michaela Valente, Reima Välimäki

“Drunken with the blood of the Saints, and with the blood of the Martyrs of Jesus.”—Rev. XVII. 6. “They shed innocent blood. This single circumstance shall, God willing, ever separate me from the Papacy. For this crime of cruelty I would fly from her communion as from a den of thieves and murderers!”—Luther. The Inquisition Revealed in its origin, policy, cruelties and history with Memoirs of its Victims in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, England, India, and other countries. Dedicated to Cardinal Wiseman by Rev. Thomas Timpson, author of the COMPANION TO THE BIBLE.

Truth in Many Tongues examines how the Spanish monarchy managed an empire of unprecedented linguistic diversity. Considering policies and strategies exerted within the Iberian Peninsula and the New World during the sixteenth century, this book challenges the assumption that the pervasiveness of the Spanish language resulted from deliberate linguistic colonization. Daniel I. Wasserman-Soler investigates the subtle and surprising ways that Spanish monarchs and churchmen thought about language. Drawing from inquisition reports and letters; royal and ecclesiastical correspondence; records of church assemblies, councils, and synods; and printed books in a variety of genres and languages, he shows that Church and Crown officials had no single, unified policy either for Castilian or for other languages. They restricted Arabic in some contexts but not in others. They advocated using Amerindian languages, though not in all cases. And they thought about language in ways that modern categories cannot explain: they were neither liberal nor conservative, neither tolerant nor intolerant. In fact, Wasserman-Soler argues, they did not think predominantly in terms of accommodation or assimilation, categories that are common in contemporary scholarship on religious missions. Rather, their actions reveal a highly practical mentality, as they considered each context carefully before deciding what would bring more souls into the Catholic Church. Based upon original sources from more than thirty libraries and archives in Spain, Italy, the United States, England, and Mexico, Truth in Many Tongues will fascinate students and scholars who specialize in early modern Spain, colonial Latin America, Christian-Muslim relations, and early modern Catholicism.

A cultural history of speech in medieval Italy The Unruly Tongue, a cultural history of speech in medieval Italy, offers a new account of how the power of words changed in Western thought. Despite the association of freedom of speech with the political revolutions of the eighteenth century that ushered in the era of modern democracies, historian Melissa Vise locates the history of the repression of speech not in Europe’s monarchies but rather in Italy’s republics. Exploring the cultural process through which science and medicine, politics, law, literature, and theology together informed a new political ethics of speech, Vise uncovers the formation of a moral code where the regulation of the tongue became an integral component of republican values in medieval Europe. The medieval citizens of Italy’s republics understood themselves to be wholly subject to the power of words not because they lived in an age of persecution or doctrinal rigidity, but because words had furnished the grounds for their political freedom. Speech-making was the means for speaking the republic itself into existence against the opposition of aristocracy, empire, and papacy. But because words had power, they could also be deployed as weapons. Speech contained the potential for violence and presented a threat to political and social order, and thus needed to be controlled. Vise shows how the laws that governed and curtailed speech in medieval Italy represented broader cultural understandings of human susceptibility to speech. Tracing anthropologies of speech from religious to political discourse, from civic courts to ecclesiastical courts, from medical texts to the works of Dante and Boccaccio, The Unruly Tongue demonstrates that the thirteenth century marked a major shift in how people perceived the power, and the threat, of speech: a change in thinking about “what words do.”

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.

This book looks at the poetry of Fray Luis de León together with other works in both Latin and Spanish of biblical and classical texts.

This fourth and final volume mainly continues where Volume III left off. This book continues to explore the areas the inquisition had influence and the way it found out how heretics emerged and worked in the respective fields the inquisition caught them in. Although the methods were brutal and the victims often innocent, the inquisition shows how thorough it was when dealing with these "sins." And then finally, Lea shows us the steady decline of the inquisition after the wars of Napoleon and how they tried to survive but failed.