Academic literature on the topic 'Great inquisitor'

Em Pernambuco, ao final do século XVI, muitas mulheres se dirigiram ao inquisidor para denunciar amigos, familiares, conhecidos ou desconhecidos. Apesar das inúmeras possibilidades para explicar essas ações, o ato de procurar o Santo Ofício no intuito de prestar seu depoimento denota a essas fontes grande relevância, pois as vozes femininas emergem nos registros inquisitoriais. Entretanto, as denúncias e seus protagonistas, ou seja, as denunciadoras, suas motivações e o conteúdo das acusações ainda carecem de estudos pormenorizados na historiografia brasileira. Nesse sentido, esta pesquisa consiste na análise das denunciantes, ou seja, seu perfil sócio-ocupacional, bem como das relações de conflito que as envolviam e também aquelas suscitadas ou reforçadas pela presença do inquisidor. Constata-se que o esforço pela sobrevivência e as dificuldades do dia-a-dia emergem nas denúncias das mulheres, revelando que a inquisição contribuiu para aflorar lembranças, despertar temores e favorecer o rompimento de relações afetivas ou familiares. Relationships and Conflicts in the Feminine Universe: the Denouncers in the Tribunal of the Holy Office in Portuguese America (16th Century) In Pernambuco, at the end of the sixteenth century, many women went to the inquisitor to denounce friends, relatives, acquaintances or strangers. Despite the innumerable possibilities to explain these actions, the act of seeking the Holy Office in order to give their testimony denotes to these sources a great relevance, since the female voices emerge in the inquisitorial registers. However, the denunciations and their protagonists, that is, the denouncers, their motivations and the content of the accusations still lack detailed studies in the Brazilian historiography. In this sense, this research consists of the analysis of the denouncers, that is, their socio-occupational profile, as well as the conflict relations that involved them, as well as those raised or reinforced by the presence of the inquisitor. It is noted that the struggle for survival and the difficulties of daily life emerge in women's denunciations, revealing that the inquisition contributed to the emergence of memories, to the arousing of fears and to favor the rupture of affective or family relations.

Between 1 June and 1 August 1508, the newly refounded tribunal, known to history as the Spanish Inquisition, was subjected tojudicial investigation by a ‘General Congregation’ at Burgos, in Old Castile. The process resulted from the activities of Diego Rodriguez Lucero. As inquisitor of Córdoba, he was accused of making false charges of ‘judaising’ against conversos, or converts from Judaism and/or their descendants, and ‘Old Christians’ alike. During the Congregation's examination of his work, many of the tensions and difficulties which had arisen in Spanish society as a result of the Inquisition's work were exposed. To date, the only detailed consideration in English of Lucero's rise and fall - published in 1897-has been that of the great liberal Protestant historian of the Inquisition, H. C. Lea. As ever, his work was solidly based on the best early printed sources, but also on documents from the Castilian national archives at Simancas and the cathedral archives in Cordoba itself, as well as other places. In recent years, however, many more documents have come to light, which make possible a more profound and thorough investigation of the Lucero affair. Progress towards increased knowledge has not, however, been uninterrupted. Many of the manuscript sources in the Cordoba Cathedral archives to which Lea refers are no longer traceable, having, in some cases, been torn from their bindings; others have simply vanished. Such, it appears, is the degree of passion which the name of Lucero still inspires.

/ In this paper, we observe the chapter “The Great Inquisitor” in the novel The Brothers Karamazov as a literary field in which the dominant discourse of Power, the Church elite, represented by the Grand Inquisitor, is confronted by the subversive aspirations of marginalized social groups, embodied in the figure of Christ. Initially considering that the “poem” is an eminent text of culture, in which a vast number of textual clues have been absorbed, primarily the Holy Bible, we discover how the character of the Grand Inquisitor was constructed from the generic-hermeneutic angle. This implies a contextual theological, (inter)textual and semantic framework. In the central part of the paper, the focus of our analysis is the mechanisms by which institutions of power control subversive elements and aspects of their rebellion from the perspective of New Historicism. At the end of the paper, we point to the histori- cal and civilizational implications of an antagonistically conceived narrative on the problems of human freedom, action, and the implementation of power in history and, consequently, the organization of the (contemporary) world.

Perhaps our most learned and knowledgeable informant concerning both the heretics and their persecutors is the great inquisitor, hagiographer and Dominican historian Bernard Gui (1261–1331), who has been immortalized as the personification of evil by Umberto Eco inThe Name of the Rose. In his manual for inquisitors, Gui issued the following caveat concerning the conduct of inquiries into heresy:It is worthwhile noting that if too many questions and answers are raised, the truth is distorted and destroyed as a result of the diversity of persons and events. Rather, it is suitable not to write down all the questions and answers, but only those which touch directly on the substance and character of the event and which more closely appear to express the truth. If in one deposition too many questions and answers are found, another deposition will appear thereby diminished since too little is recorded. When so many questions and answers are written down in a trial, agreement can scarcely be found in the depositions of the witnesses, which should be both considered and avoided.

PurposeThe study investigates the use of accounting information in the form of a confession as a tool for telling the truth about oneself and reinforcing power relations in the context of the Roman Inquisition.Design/methodology/approachThe study adopts Foucault's understanding of pastoral power, confession and truth-telling to analyse the accounting practices of the Tribunal of the Inquisition in the 16th century Dukedom of Ferrara.FindingsDetailed accounting books were not simply a means for pursuing an efficient use of resources, but a tool to force the Inquisitor to open his conscience and provide an account of his actions to his superiors. Accounting practices were an identifying and subjectifying practice which helped the Inquisitor to shape his Christian identity and internalise self-discipline. This in turn reinforced the centralisation of the power of the Church at a time of great crisis.Research limitations/implicationsThe use of accounting for forcing individuals to tell the truth about themselves can inform investigations into the use of accounting records as confessional tools in different contexts, especially when a religious institution seeks to reinforce its power.Social implicationsThe study documents the important but less discernible contributions of accounting to the formation of Western subjectivity at a time which Foucault considers critical in the development of modern governmental practices.Originality/valueThe study considers a critical but unexplored episode in Western religious history. It offers an investigation of the macro impact of religion on accounting practices. It also adds to the literature recognising the confessional properties of written information by explicitly focusing on the use of financial information as a form of confession that has profound power implications.

On November 22, 1923, Emmy Hennings received an ecstatic letter from Hugo Ball, her husband and fellow founder of Zurich Dada, describing his “constant immersion in jurisprudence”: For months, I have studied the writings of Professor Schmitt, of Bonn. He is more important for Germany than the entirety of the Rhineland, with its carbon mines included. Rarely have I read a philosophy with as much passion as his, and a philosophy of law at that! A great triumph for the German language and for legality. He seems to me even more precise than Kant, and rigorous like a Great Spanish Inquisitor when it comes to ideas.

Is scientific knowledge the domain of the intellectual elite or is it everyman’s concern, thus making the popularization of science a democratic activity integrally required of science itself? This is a question whose history extends back even longer than the enlightenment period. As technology starts to permeate every inch of daily life, the issues involved for our future development become more pressing and a matter of socio-political development. Dostoyevsky brought this to the point in a fictional dispute between a Great Inquisitor and Christ. This was also the subject of fierce scientific debates, the most prominent of which was probably the debate between Ernst Mach and Max Planck at the turn of the century, before the first world war, when the new Physics (quantum theory and relativity) was discovered and its relevance for our view of the world and our place in it was hotly discussed. For Mach, the job of popularization should rest with science - an informed public cannot be manipulated as easily by ‘pop science’. This article focuses on the mostly neglected political epistemological level of the debate, its sporadic later flare-ups in different places with different protagonists (Wagenschein, Wittenberg), and its relevance for the popularization of science today.

Mexico's Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition founded by Philip II in January 1569 had developed its bureacratic structure by the first decade of the seventeenth century. Spectacular autos de fé between 1574 and 1601 allowed the Tribunal to establish its reputation in the colony and to augment its financial base beyond the yearly 10,000 peso subvention provided by the Spanish monarchy. Trials of crypto-Jews in the 1590s netted considerable income and caused the king to cease his payment of inquisitional salaries for a time. During the first decade of the seventeenth century the Tribunal petitioned the crown to assign the income from a series of cathedral canonries for support of the Inquisition bureaucracy. Between 1629 and 1636 “reserved” canonries were established for Holy Office income and by 1650 nine of these were generating the Inquisition's salary budget. It was always understood that royal subsidies were to decrease as canonry income paid salaries. All other expenses had to come from judicial fines.

The paper presents a series of arguments which indicate that significant historiographic works describing and analyzing bygone political phenomena as well the literary works which picturesquely depict political situations and human destinies - with their specific approaches and methods - contribute to the better insight and understanding of the phenomena in the political life which philosophy and social sciences express by notions. Social and political life have their bright and dark sides. It is less arguable that political sciences - in the study of phenomena included in their topic -find great help in history, if it is - as Leopold von Ranke advised - oriented only to "show what really happened". Historical studies, specially the ones of the socalled great historians, present to us the images of the situation in a certain period or event with all significant details and contribute to the understanding of that phenomenon, helping to clarify its essence. Thus for example, Appian's Roman Civil Wars or Tacitus' descriptions in The Annals of the suffering of the innocent victims in the power struggle during civil wars and during the ferocious persecution of Christians -innocent, but accused of all possible crimes. What astonishes the reader is the grea similarity between the phenomena, processes, actions happening two millennia ago and in the 20th century. Philosopher and political thinkers (like Aristotle), but also some historians (like Thucydides) offer explanations why some patterns repeat and why they would "keep repeating". In Khalil Inalcik's work, we find detailed descriptions of brutal mutual killings among the sons of the majority of the Turkish sultans in the power struggle after their fathers' death. Generalizing on the basis of the material provided by history, we reach an entire string of general notions in political and social sciences. Great thinkers and writers, from the oldest Eastern and the greatest antique philosophers till the ones from the 20th century, used found inspiration and drew ideas and incentives or material from the sources with which they supplemented their theoretical categories, notions and explanations, including the images of political life. These sources are represented in the great literary works. Contradictory opinions about the character and significance of ail and literature are found in Plato's and Aristotle's writings. Aristotle, who analyzed this problem, presented arguments why literary insights - precisely because of the character of insights they offer - deserve to stand in the same pedestal with philosophy. He used the expression he himself introduced to mark one aspect of the effect of art and literature - and that is catharsis. Psychology facilitates our insights into the motives and consequences of the participants' behavior social psychology being particularly important, but also ethics. The means used to convey a certain truth is less important, its essence is more important. Several Greek philosophers (Parmenides, Empedocles, Xenophon) even the Roman ones (for example, Lucretius Cains) wrote their philosophical treatises in verse. Kant's famous words Sapere aude! with which he asks people to have courage to use their own mind and thus become enlightened originate from the Roman poet Horace, and Michel de Montaigne also used them. Plato and Aristotle referred not only to the available sources about preceding philosophical ideas and political systems, including the first Greek historians, but also to the tragedians, primarily Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, to the comedy writers (like Aristophanes), to the lyricists (Solon, Simonides, Archilochus). When Aristotle expounds one of the key categories of his political theory about man as a political animal (zoon politikon), he refers to Homer to confirm what he himself believes. Anica Savic-Rebac quotes Strabo's formulations about poetry as "the first philosophy", as well as about Homer's work as "poetic philosophy" and as a source of every kind of wisdom, even every kind of knowledge. With his ideas and images he presented in his literary works, Dostoyevsky influenced several philosophers (Nietzsche, Camus and others) and scientists (Freud, Adler and others). "The philosophy of existence" and its ethical orientation were presented not only in the philosophical, but also in the literary works (Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus). The so called philosophy of the absurd and "the literature of the absurd" mutually merge and supplement. Not even the best 20th century theoretical treatise about the nature of power - like those by Charles Merriam, Bertrand Russell, Bertrand de Jouvenel or Harold Lass well can depict what man gets to know through the tragedies of Marlowe Shakespeare, Goethe, in which main participants are driven and urged by the yearning to achieve absolute power. "The Great Inquisitor", "The Iron Heel" "Dark at Noon", but also the personalities like Raskolnikov or Verhovensky from the novel The Possessed help us to understand many things. "Gulag" became a political notion because of the title of the novel Gulag. Literature-antiutopia pointed to the dangers of the closed mind and of the technological society before scientific studies had done that.

The dream about an earthly paradise, rediscovery of an original, absolutely harmonic paradisal life is, in Dostoevskij's opinion, one of the deepest and the most valuable dreams of the human heart. The spiritual course of any human being has its own history, it is born from thesis (babtism), goes through antithesis (crises) and finishes in synthesis (beauty). A man comes from the Eden Paradise and aims at heaven. So, a man in course of his spiritual life is in a real split into two paradises: the Eden Paradise from which he is coming from and the Kingdom of God where he is aiming at. The midpoint of the life course is accompanied by a crisis, that can also be described as separation from the the paradise. The characters of novels by Dostoevskij failed due to the fact, that they were not able to admit their presence between two "paradise states" and so their ideas about earthly paradise establishment were being corrupted. In our piece of work we are going to follow four trends: 1. Time corruption, incorrectly understood sense of history. The tendency to return back where a man came from, in an origenestic, cyclic interpretation of a comeback is apparent in a story The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. Another extreme shows marxism ideas going around Europe which deny both the importance and the sense of...

American jurisprudence currently applies two incompatible validity standards to determine which laws are enforceable. The natural law tradition evaluates validity by an uncertain standard of divine law, and its methodology relies on contradictory views of human reason. Legal positivism, on the other hand, relies on a methodology that commits the analytic fallacy, separates law from its application, and produces an incomplete model of law. These incompatible standards have created a schism in American jurisprudence that impairs the delivery of justice. This dissertation therefore formulates a new standard for legal validity. This new standard rejects the uncertainties and inconsistencies inherent in natural law theory. It also rejects the narrow linguistic methodology of legal positivism. In their stead, this dissertation adopts a pragmatic methodology that develops a standard for legal validity based on actual legal experience. This approach focuses on the operations of law and its effects upon ongoing human activities, and it evaluates legal principles by applying the experimental method to the social consequences they produce. Because legal history provides a long record of past experimentation with legal principles, legal history is an essential feature of this method. This new validity standard contains three principles. The principle of reason requires legal systems to respect every subject as a rational creature with a free will. The principle of reason also requires procedural due process to protect against the punishment of the innocent and the tyranny of the majority. Legal systems that respect their subjects' status as rational creatures with free wills permit their subjects to orient their own behavior. The principle of reason therefore requires substantive due process to ensure that laws provide dependable guideposts to individuals in orienting their behavior. The principle of consent recognizes that the legitimacy of law derives from the consent of those subject to its power. Common law custom, the doctrine of stare decisis, and legislation sanctioned by the subjects' legitimate representatives all evidence consent. The principle of autonomy establishes the authority of law. Laws must wield supremacy over political rulers, and political rulers must be subject to the same laws as other citizens. Political rulers may not arbitrarily alter the law to accord to their will. Legal history demonstrates that, in the absence of a validity standard based on these principles, legal systems will not treat their subjects as ends in themselves. They will inevitably treat their subjects as mere means to other ends. Once laws do this, men have no rest from evil.

Ottoman sultans and Spanish kings, along with their tax officials, took a strong interest in the religious identity of those who crossed the areas of the Mediterranean under their control. Sometimes, in an era marked by the clash of Christian and Muslim empires, the Mediterranean seems to be sharply divided between the two faiths. Yet the Ottomans had long accepted the existence of Christian majorities in many of the lands they ruled, while other groups navigated (metaphorically) between religious identities. The Sephardic Jews have already been encountered, with their astonishing ability to mutate into notionally Christian ‘Portuguese’ when they entered the ports of Mediterranean Spain. This existence suspended between worlds set off its own tensions in the seventeenth century, when many Sephardim acclaimed a deluded Jew of Smyrna as the Messiah. Similar tensions could also be found among the remnants of the Muslim population of Spain. The tragic history of the Moriscos was played out largely away from the Mediterranean Sea between the conversion of the last openly practising Muslims, in 1525, and the final act of their expulsion in 1609; it was their very isolation from the Islamic world that gave these people their distinctive identity, once again suspended between religions. The world inhabited by these Moriscos differed in important respects from that inhabited by the other group of conversos, those of Jewish descent. Although some Moriscos were hauled before the Inquisition, the Spanish authorities at first turned a blind eye to the continued practice of Islam; it was sometimes possible to pay the Crown a ‘service’ that bought exemption from interference by the Inquisition, which was mortified to discover that it could not boost its income by seizing the property of exempt suspects. Many Morisco communities lacked a Christian priest, so the continued practice of the old religion is no great surprise; even in areas where christianization took place, what sometimes emerged was an islamized Christianity, evinced in the remarkable lead tablets of Sacromonte, outside Granada, with their prophecies that ‘the Arabs will be those who aid religion in the last days’ and their mysterious references to a Christian caliph, or successor (to Jesus, not Muhammad).

After decades as a French outback, New Orleans was reborn in the 1770s as a transhipment point for the American Revolution. Lt. Gen. Bernardo de Gálvez became acting governor in 1777. Gálvez recruited black soldiers and Native Americans to fight against the British in a successful campaign. Black militia leaders were awarded medals for their service and promoted, and New Orleanians of color began playing in a military band. The Cabildo functioned as both town council and judiciary, where members fought for political control. Conflicts arose between philanthropist Andres Almonaster y Roxas, provincial vicar Cirilo Sieni de Barcelona, acting governor Esteban Miró, and Spanish missionary priest (and commissioner of the Inquisition) Antonio de Sedella, ending with Sedella being exiled back to Spain. The Good Friday fire of 1788 destroyed much of the city, killing one and displacing thousands. Illness spread in the aftermath. The Spanish rebuilding efforts, led by Miró, preserved the layout of the original French city. Carlos III died in Madrid in 1788. Cabildo members in New Orleans planned a lavish state funeral that included the first account of musicians parading to honor the dead in New Orleans, a tradition that would eventually grow.

It is very difficult to find, in the historical records, the voices of ordinary Albanians from the early modern period; the only rich body of material suitable for this purpose consists of the records of the Inquisition, where individual testimonies are preserved. This essay presents evidence from the Inquisition archives of Venice, Udine, Naples and Malta, plus documents from Palermo (preserved in Madrid), and cases from Barcelona, Majorca and Lisbon. In the great majority of cases, people appeared before the Inquisition because they had converted from Christianity to Islam—mostly while they were living in the Albanian lands, but in some cases when they were elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire. Sometimes conversion was a deliberate choice on economic grounds (to avoid taxation), but often the change took place when the person was below the age (early- to mid-teens) when Muslim practice required consent. In several cases the life-story revealed by this evidence involves casual enslavement of young Albanians within the Ottoman Empire by others who were, like them, Ottoman subjects; it is argued that this was a more common phenomenon than standard accounts of Ottoman slavery have suggested. And in a few cases we hear the voices of Albanian women; for two of these, conversion to Islam was an opportunistic act to evade an unwanted marriage.

This chapter presents prophecy as a broader political discourse deployed outside the Morisco community for strategic purposes. In this sense, prophecy reveals itself as a language of negotiation and diplomacy. This chapter also centers on the career of a man by the name of Gil Perez, a Morisco double agent who acted as informant of the inquisitors of Zaragoza and spy for the Morisco communities of Aragon and Valencia. His story reveals a great deal about the socioreligious functions of prophecy among the Moriscos who identified as Muslims, and the ways in which prophecies were deployed as political discourses. The Gil Perez affair often has been discussed as a curious case of a Morisco rogue.

This chapter traces the life and career of Alamán’s half-brother, his elder by twenty years, the child of his mother’s first marriage. This was the priest Juan Bautista Arechederreta (1771-1836), who rose to occupy several high posts in the Mexican Catholic Church, including a canonry in the Mexico City cathedral. The brothers were reasonably close (if never intimates) after an 1804 family reconciliation over inheritance issues. Arechederreta probably helped his younger half-brother along professionally, almost certainly quashing an Inquisition inquiry about the young Alamán’s heterodox reading habits. The priest kept a journal during much of the insurgency, a major source of material for his younger brother’s great historical work of 1848-1852, and was something of a scholar in his own right.

Alexander Dallas, ex-combatant in the Peninsular War, wrote books on Spanish-related themes with great affection for Spanish life and culture. However, there was one limit to this admiration: the rivalry between the Protestants and Catholics. Dallas’s move into the Anglican clergy goes some way to explaining why in his last novel, Vargas, a Tale of Spain, published anonymously in 1822, his Hispanophilia gave way to immersion in the attitudes, opinions and central themes related to the so-called Black Legend. The evocation of customs and landscapes is thus wrapped in an argument from the sixteenth century, the Inquisition and religious superstitions assuming a protagonist role and flipping the way he approaches Spanish reality. This complex dialogue between Hispanophilia and Hispanophobia reveals their strong common foundation: condescension.

This chapter examines colonial modes of prediction, especially astrology and popular forms of divination. While most people in New Spain believed that heavenly objects could influence conditions on earth, there was great disagreement on the relative strength and importance of such forces and whether or not humans could or should discern them. Colonial consumers of prediction understood the twin notions of free will and divine intervention and used a vernacular theology to evaluate diviners and their accuracy. As a result, by the eighteenth century, many subjects in New Spain had adopted a more critical attitude toward the information produced by astrology and divination. As colonial subjects employed these tools of tradition, often in conversation with the Inquisition and its investigations, they helped to create a new culture of knowledge that championed a more precise and empirically grounded telling of the future.