As editors for Hackett Publishing’s Myths of History Series, Alfred J. Andrea and I were quite pleased to have recruited scholar Gretchen Starr-Lebeau to write Seven Myths of the Spanish Inquisition (2023) for the series. Like all of the historical topics covered in the series, many popular myths about the Spanish Inquisition are emphasized in modern literature, film, and the broader popular culture, and have become so imbued in the public consciousness that the efforts of professors to push back against them can seem almost futile. This is why Al and I, as series editors, emphasized the importance of recruiting major scholars, with impeccable credentials, and experienced teachers, with the ability to communicate well with students and general readers, as authors or editors of books in our series. It is for this reason that Al and I were so pleased to have Gretchen, a respected scholar with considerable experience in the college classroom, agree to tackle the challenging topic of the Spanish Inquisition.

Image: Gretchen with her husband, Dr. Ray LeBeau, at her PhD graduation in Ann Arbor MI, May 1997.

After earning her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, Gretchen Starr-LeBeau taught history for several years at the University of Kentucky before joining the Religious Studies Program at Principia College. At both institutions, she won major teaching awards over the course of her lengthy career, to include the Chancellor’s Outstanding Teaching Award at the University of Kentucky in 2001 and, more recently, the Horace Edwin Harper Jr. and Evelyn Wright Harper Award for Teaching Excellence at Principia College in 2020. Yet, it is her contributions as a scholar of inquisitorial history that are most noteworthy. Her first book, In the Shadow of the Virgin (Princeton University Press, 2003), was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in history in 2004. She has also co-edited Judging Faith, Punishing Sin: Inquisitions and Consistories in the Early Modern World with Charles H. Parker (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which appeared in Spanish translation in 2020. Most recently, of course, Gretchen has published Seven Myths of the Spanish Inquisition for our series with Hackett, a book that all involved think will be ideal for use in the classroom for many years to come.  

Like all of the books in the Myths series, Gretchen wrote Seven Myths of the Spanish Inquisition primarily for undergraduates and general readers, with the goal of highlighting the divide between current scholarship and modern popular thinking about the topic. Gretchen has chosen seven especially common popular myths to dispel:

Myth 1: From the Beginning, the Spanish Inquisition Was a Centralized Vatican Institution

Myth 2: The Inquisition Only Tried Jews

Myth 3: The Inquisition Only Existed in Spain

Myth 4: The Inquisition Did Not Follow the Rule of Law, Procedure, or Evidence

Myth 5: The Inquisition Was Notorious for its Use of Torture

Myth 6: The Inquisition Was Always a Death Sentence

Myth 7: Fear of the Inquisition Stifled Thought and Inquiry

Gretchen carefully establishes the background of each myth, how it originated and spread, and its continued modern influence, before carefully demonstrating why scholars reject it. She has produced an extraordinary book and I am happy to note that Gretchen has also kindly agreed to respond to some questions about these issues for this blog.

Question 1: Why should professors consider assigning this book to their students? Why is it different from other works on the Spanish Inquisition?

Part of the reason why I was eager to contribute to your “Myths of History” series is because, for all the great research that’s been done over the last 40 or 50 years on the Spanish Inquisition, there still isn’t a great default text for students. There is plenty of good scholarship in monographs and articles, but some of the overviews of the institution remain polemical and not very good for a classroom. The standard one-volume reference is not very accessible for students, and is, in some ways, problematic. It’s also too long for many students.

In contrast, I wanted to write a book that was designed for students and general readers today. My goal was for the book to be highly readable while also incorporating the latest scholarly findings. I also thought it was important to cover, albeit briefly, the great extent of the Spanish Inquisition. After all, it operated tribunals on three continents for over three centuries! At the same time, I wanted to keep the big picture in focus and not have the book be overly long. To do that, I organized the chapters so that the reader could see the general chronological framework (especially in chapters 1-3 and the Epilogue) and then made use of memorable examples from Spanish as well as North and South American tribunals. There were many things I had to cut to keep the book focused—but I point readers to printed and online sources of Inquisition trial records in translation that people can read for themselves.

Finally, it was important to me to remember the humanity of everyone involved. I don’t think there are often clear villains in Spanish Inquisition records, and usually not simple heroes, either. The people involved in trials have recognizably human motives—fear, greed, faith, pride, a desire for community, a will to survive. And like most of us, people’s motivations can be complex and opaque, even to themselves. My hope is that by keeping that in mind as I wrote, I could help unwind some of the most persistent myths about the Spanish Inquisition.

Question 2: How did you come to have an interest, if not passion, for studying inquisitorial history? Is there something in your background that led you to this topic?

It’s a funny story. As an undergrad I loved Roman history, but the Roman historian had been denied tenure, so before he left I asked him who I should work with. He told me to work with William Taylor, a colonial Latin Americanist. So I did, and that was incredibly fortunate, because Bill Taylor is a wonderful human being, and an extraordinary scholar. I wrote an undergraduate thesis for him on Maya-Spanish relations in colonial Yucatan. That has been a major theme throughout my scholarly career: studying cultural and religious conflict among different groups.

As I finished up my undergraduate degree, I asked Bill Taylor who I should work with in grad school, and he gave me a few names, but he urged me to read Sabine MacCormack’s work, and to apply to work with her. And that was wise advice, because Sabine was a remarkable scholar and thinker, and a generous mentor. She also was well equipped to continue working with me when my interests shifted back in time to fifteenth-century Spain and Jewish-Christian relations. She was the one who suggested I look at inquisition records in the first place, for which I’m very grateful. I also was lucky enough to work with Miriam Bodian, who provided enormously helpful guidance in thinking through questions of Jewish converts, or conversos.

So, it was a roundabout path, but that interest in cultural and religious conflict led me to Inquisition studies, which has allowed me to think about Spain, and colonial Latin America, and even Roman law! And I’ve continued to meet wonderful people working in this field.

Question 3: As a series editor, I was fortunate to have a front row seat to the development of your book, as you submitted various chapter drafts and so on. I found chapters 4 and 7 to be the most interesting in highlighting the great disparity between popular assumptions and scholarly assessments of the Spanish Inquisition. For the benefit of our readers here, could you briefly summarize your goals in writing each of these chapters?

Both those chapters were fascinating to write, in different ways. For Chapter Four, on legal procedure in Spanish Inquisition trials, I knew that there were a few key points to get across. First, I wanted readers to have some basic legal concepts. For example, a person’s reputation (fama) was an important legal category in a trial. Understanding some key ideas like that could help readers understand that these weren’t just “show trials.” They were genuine legal encounters, even if it was hard to be acquitted. Second, readers needed to know who the main actors were in a trial—judges, lawyers, etc. Third, I wanted to tell the stories of a few different trials, so people could see how a trial worked in practice. I know from teaching students that trial material can be confusing at first, but people’s stories are compelling, so I wanted to use those stories to explain the trials. I enjoyed reading through my decades of notes to pick a few to share as examples.

As for Chapter Seven, on intellectual life during the time of the Inquisition, my goals were different. I wanted to take apart the idea that people were hopelessly afraid of the Spanish Inquisition and cut off from intellectual life or scientific advancement. To do that, I first considered an older scholarly idea that the Spanish Inquisition taught people to fear it, that it had a “pedagogy of fear.” Some people certainly were terrified of the Inquisition—but other people saw it as a convenient tool for harassing their enemies and rivals. And some people seem to have mostly ignored it. The Inquisition also wasn’t always good at enforcing its demands. They punished people who were found guilty, but they were less effective at censoring books, for example.

I think what might surprise people most about Chapter Seven is that the Inquisition had NO interest in suppressing scientific investigation. The Spanish empire was deeply invested in practical scientific knowledge, like medicine and metallurgy. They also wanted to understand and use natural resources from the Americas—but they considered that knowledge to be a state secret, so the Inquisitors didn’t know anything about it, and probably wouldn’t have seen it as religiously threatening even if they had.

Question 4: What is the current state of inquisitorial studies? What are the current trends? What have been the most notable historiographical changes in recent decades?

Inquisitorial studies is at an exciting moment. An important generation of scholars began writing at the end of the Franco dictatorship in the 1970s. Some scholars wrote deeply researched books about the institution of the Inquisition and people caught up in it. Others used newly developed computer technology to analyze statistical trends across the history of the institution. Collectively, these scholars laid the foundations of modern inquisitorial studies.

Since that time, subsequent generations of scholars have turned their attention to a wider range of victims—Jewish converts and their descendants (conversos), Muslim converts and their descendants (moriscos), and Protestants. Others have examined trials through the lens of gender and race, and looked at less serious heresies such as blasphemy, witchcraft, and different gender and sexuality practices.

I think some of the most interesting work going on now is examining less-studied aspects of the Spanish Inquisition. That includes later centuries of the Inquisition’s existence (rather than the much-examined sixteenth century) and other tribunals besides Toledo in central Spain. Individual stories remain compelling, but scholars are also paying closer attention to legal practices (and legal malpractice), administrators, and the cultural practices of inquisitorial functionaries. I also think there’s more interest in looking comparatively across inquisitorial districts, or tribunals, and even looking comparatively at the inquisitorial tribunals that operated in the Portuguese empire and on the Italian peninsula.

Question 5: What advice would you give to any young graduate students who wish to pursue the study of the Spanish Inquisition? How can they best prepare to make a meaningful impact on the field and secure employment as a professor?

It’s a tough market for faculty jobs right now; I wouldn’t want to minimize that. But I think successful students are deeply committed to intellectual engagement and to the academic life. And I continue to see good young scholars find work in the field.

One advantage of studying the Spanish Inquisition is that the subject remains compelling to people today. It is transnational in that it incorporates Europe, Latin America, and even the Philippines in Asia. And it benefits from a focus on questions about identity issues like the impact of race, gender, and migration status, among other issues, on trials. It incorporates intellectual, religious, administrative, and legal history, too. For all those reasons, the Spanish Inquisition will continue to hold interest for students and for faculty hiring committees alike.

As for making an impact on this or any research field, my answer has two parts. First, you should pursue a topic that is so important and profoundly interesting to you that it will sustain your interest for years. It needs to, if you’re going to write a dissertation about it! Second, your topic should be profoundly interesting to other people, too. When I teach our capstone preparation course for my department, I talk to undergraduates about the importance of identifying and participating in the academic conversation. It’s a slow-moving conversation, and it happens mostly in print, but it’s there. And when new researchers find a topic that engages them and the academic conversation—and they sustain that interest through hard work and focused study—then they can make a significant impact on the field overall.