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The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World
Houghton Mifflin Company
January 2012
On Sale: January 17, 2012
320 pages ISBN: 0618091564 EAN: 9780618091560 Kindle: B005LVR66E Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Religion
We think of the Inquisition as a holy war fought in the
Middle Ages. But, as Cullen Murphy shows in this provocative
new book, not only did its offices survive into the
twentieth century, in the modern world its spirit is more
influential than ever. Traveling from freshly opened Vatican
archives to the detention camps of Guantánamo to the filing
cabinets of the Third Reich, he traces the Inquisition and
its legacy. God’s Jury encompasses the diverse stories of the Knights
Templar, Torquemada, Galileo, and Graham Greene. Established
by the Catholic Church in 1231, the Inquisition continued in
one form or another for almost seven hundred years. Though
associated with the persecution of heretics and Jews—and
with burning at the stake—its targets were more numerous and
its techniques more ambitious. The Inquisition pioneered
surveillance and censorship and “scientific” interrogation.
As time went on, its methods and mindset spread far beyond
the Church to become tools of secular persecution. With vivid immediacy and authority, Murphy puts a human face
on a familiar but little-known piece of our past, and argues
that only by understanding the Inquisition can we hope to
explain the making of the present.
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