THE MEDIEVAL INQUISITION

FOUNDATIONS OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY
General Editor M. T Clanchy
Any discussion of the controversial subject of heresy and its prosecu
tion by the Inquisition is fraught with problems. How is heresy to be
defined? Was it different from religious doubt or anti-clericalism? Why
did heresy increase and what rules governed the inquisitors, making
them different from other enforcers of orthodoxy? In tracing the evolu-
tion of the Inquisition in the centuries before the Reformation,
Dr. Hamilton shows that the inquisitors intended to convert heretics
through spiritual penances rather than to burn or torture them
indiscriminately as lay society often demanded. Nevertheless, the
Inquisition, founded by the papacy at the height of its power in the
first half of the thirteenth century, was, despite its high religious
purpose, responsible for a great deal of inhumanity. In later centuries
indeed, it was sometimes subverted to serve the ends of secular rulers:
Philip IV's cynical use of it to destroy the Knights Templar, the élit
of crusading chivalry, is an indication of how far the Inquisition had
become, in much of Western Europe, an established part of the
of government.

The Protestant Reformation broke with much of the medieval past
but not with the fundamental aim of the Inquisition-religious con-
formity. The Protestants, too, like their Catholic contemporaries
accepted coercion as a means to this end.

The author: Dr. Bernard Hamilton is a Senior Lecturer in History
at the University of Nottingham. His most recent publications are
Monastic Reform, Catharism and the Crusades (900 -1300) (London
1979) and The Latin Church in the Crusader States: The Secular Church
London, 1980).

Cover: St. Peter Martyr disputing with heretics, from the fresco of
The Church Militant and Triumphant' by Andrea Bonaiuti in the
Spanish Chapel of the Dominican convent of Sta Maria Novella,
Florence. Peter Martyr, papal inquisitor in Lombardy, was
ssassinated by Cathar supporters in 1252, thus supplying the
Inquisition with its first canonized saint. The dogs shown here rend-
ing the wolf of heresy in defence of the sheep (the faithful believers)
on a pun: The Domini canes are the hounds of the Lord, and also
the Dominicans

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