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A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
"Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . A great book, in a great historical tradition." Commentary The 14th century gives us back two contradictory images: a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry, and a dark time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world plunged into a chaos of war, fear and the Plague. Barbara Tuchman anatomizes the century, revealing both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived..
Price: $7.91
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The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God
"The inquisitorial apparatus that was first invented in the Middle Ages remained in operation for the next six-hundred years, and it has never been wholly dismantled As we shall see, an unbroken thread links the friar-inquisitors who set up the rack and the pyre in southern France in the early thirteenth century to the torturers and executioners of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia in the mid-twentieth century. Nor does the thread stop at Auschwitz or the Gulag; it can be traced through the Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the Hollywood blacklists of the McCarthy era, and even the interrogation cells at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo."
The twelfth century birthed a new and sinister brand of sanctioned terror, an international network of secret police and courts, an army of inquisitors whose sworn duty was to seek out anyone regarded as an enemy, and a casualty list numbering in the tens of thousands. The original agents of the Inquisition—priests and monks, scribes and notaries, attorneys and accountants, torturers and executioners—were deputized by the Church and their worst excesses were excused as the pardonable sins of soldiers engaged in a holy war against heresy that became the obsession of Christendom. Yet the first rumblings of Western civilization's great engine of persecution provided no indication of the ultimate scope and influence of the inquisitorial toolkit and how the crimes of the first inquisitors were perpetrated again and again into the twentieth century and beyond. Despite the importance of this legacy, the history of the Inquisition remains a subject that has largely been overlooked by general historians. With The Grand Inquisitor's Manual, national bestselling author Jonathan Kirsch delivers a sweeping and provocative history that explores how the Inquisition was honed to perfection and brought to bear on an ever-widening circle of victims by authoritarians in both church and state for over six hundred years. Ranging from the Knights Templar to the first Protestants, from Joan of Arc to Galileo; from the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent women during the Witch Craze to its greatest power in Spain after 1492, when the secret tribunals and torture chambers were directed for the first time against Jews and Muslims to the modern war on terror—Kirsch shows us how the Inquisition stands as a universal and ineradicable symbol of the terror that results when absolute power works its corruptions. The history of the Inquisition is draped in myth and mystery, a favorite theme of both artists and propagandists throughout the six hundred years of its active operations. Yet when we pull aside the veil, what we see are the original blueprints for the machinery of persecution that was invented in the High Middle Ages and applied to human flesh ever since. The Grand Inquisitor's Manual exposes the dangerous circular logic of the Inquisition so that we do not perpetuate its brand of terror. .
Price: $14.53
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The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision
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Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors
From the acclaimed author of Warriors of God comes a riveting account of the pivotal events of 1492, when towering political ambitions, horrific religious excesses, and a drive toward international conquest changed the world forever. James Reston, Jr., brings to life the epic story of Spain’s effort to consolidate its own burgeoning power by throwing off the yoke of the Vatican. By waging war on the remaining Moors in Granada and unleashing the Inquisitor Torquemada on Spain’s Jewish and converso population, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella attained enough power and wealth to fund Columbus’ expedition to America and to chart a Spanish destiny separate from that of Italy. With rich characterizations of the central players, this engrossing narrative captures all the political and religious ferment of this crucial moment on the eve of the discovery of the New World..
Price: $3.99
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The Spanish Inquisition: A History
This is the story of 350 years of terror. Established by papal bull in 1478, the first task of the Spanish Inquisition was to question Jewish converts to Christianity and to expose and execute those found guilty of reversion. Authorities then turned on Spanish Jews in general, sending 300,000 into exile. Next in line were humanists and Lutherans. No rank was exempt. Children informed on their parents, merchants on their rivals, and priests upon their bishops. Those denounced were guilty unless they could prove their innocence. Nearly 32,000 people were publicly burned at the stake; the “fortunate” ones were flogged, fined, or imprisoned. Joseph Pérez tells the history of the Spanish Inquisition from its medieval beginnings to its nineteenth-century ending. He discovers its origins in fear and jealousy and its longevity in usefulness to the state. He explores the inner workings of its councils, and shows how its officers, inquisitors, and leaders lived and worked. He describes its techniques of interrogation and torture, and shows how it refined displays of punishment as instruments of social control. The author ends his fascinating account by assessing the impact of the Inquisition over three and a half centuries on Spain’s culture, economy, and intellectual life. .
Price: $11.77
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São Tome: Journey to the Abyss--Portugal's Stolen Children
In 1485 the Portuguese Crown and Catholic Church began to kidnap Jewish children, forcibly convert the young conscripts, and ship them to Sao Tome Island off the African equator to work the government sugar plantations The collision of slavery, sugar agriculture, and discovery of The Americas transformed this island colony into the nidus of the wholesale black slave trade that infected Africa and Western commerce for the next 350 years. Sao Tome reveals the Medieval Churchs complicity in the business of human bondage. This little-known chapter of the Diaspora tells the story of young Marcel Saulo and his sister Leah abducted with other children from their synagogue in Lisbon and shipped by caravel 4,000 miles to the West-African island where they bear witness to the holocaust of African slavery. This is a historical novel that chronicles one mans courageous struggle against religious and racial persecution, torture, and disease, and explores the abyss of Inquisition, Portuguese and Spanish world expansion, and the blight of slavery fueled by the calamitous growth of sugar commerce..
Price: $9.99
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The Italian (Penguin Classics)
The haughty, manipulative Marchesa, determined to thwart the romance between her son, the young Neapolitan nobleman Vincentio di Vivaldi, and Elena di Rosalba, has enlisted the help of the villainous, scheming monk, Schedoni. With a livid paleness of face and a melancholy eye, whose brooding presence dominates the novel, Schedoni has become an archetype of Romantic literature. Set in the mid-eighteenth century against the dramatic, lush backdrop of the Bay of Naples, The Italian is a tale of passion, deceit, abduction, and the horrors of the Inquisition. In one of the most powerful Gothic tales ever written, Mrs. Radcliffe, the unrivalled master of the genre, skillfully combines traditional elements of danger, romance, and the supernatural with her abiding interest in history and considerable ability to paint poetic images of sublime landscape. In the introduction, Robert Miles examines the novel's literary and historical context..
Price: $6.79
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The Yellow Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars' Rebellion Against the Inquisition, 1290-1329
The Yellow Crossis a harrowing tale of a desperate people in a small corner of France who defied the kings of Europe and the Pope. The Cathars, whose religion was based on the Gospels but contradicted the tenets set forth by Rome, found themselves the focus of ruthless repression. In systematic waves of brutal persecution, thousands of Cathars were captured, summarily tried, and burned at the stake as heretics. Yet so ardent was their faith that during the years 1290 to 1329, the Cathars rose up one last time. René Weis tells the dramatic and moving story of these thirty years, offering a rich medieval tale of faith, adventure, sex, and courage. Having spent years exploring a rich trove of untouched information, including trial records and interrogation transcripts, Weis creates a remarkably detailed portrait of the last great gasp of the movement and the day-to-day life of the individual Cathars in their villages. This is an exceptionally vivid re-creation of a fascinating, and otherwise lost, world..
Price: $9.52
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The Spanish Inquisition, 1478-1614: An Anthology of Sources
This collection of previously untranslated court documents, testimonials, and letters portrays the Spanish Inquisition in vivid detail, offering fresh perspectives on such topics as the Inquisition's persecution of Jews and Muslims, the role of women in Spanish religious culture, the Inquisition's construction and persecution of witchcraft, daily life inside an Inquisition prison, and the relationship between the Inquisition and the Spanish monarchy. Headnotes introduce the selections, and a general introduction provides historical, political, and legal context. A map and index are included..
Price: $7.49
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