As William Monter notes in his preface to Frontiers of Heresy, historians have too often equated Castile with Spain. Monter successfully corrects this misconception in a detailed, well-documented study of the Spanish Inquisition in Spain’s non-Castilian lands.
The book is divided into five sections. Part 1 describes the installation of the Inquisition in Ferdinand’s Aragonese possessions. Monter traces the establishment of inquisitorial tribunals in Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Navarre, and Sicily, regions that jealously guarded their customary rights and privileges. He then turns to the actual day-to-day operations of these tribunals, discussing the role of inquisitors as ecclesiastical bureaucrats” and exploring the use of familiars, visitations, strict juridical procedures, secrecy, and torture by the Holy Office.
In part 2, Monter examines each of the five major regional tribunals during the “Aragonese Century” of 1530-1630, when the greatest proportion of overall inquisitorial activity took place in these regions. Unlike the Castilian Inquisition, which involved itself first with ferreting out crypto-Jews and then with enforcing post-Tridentine codes of religious and sexual behavior, the Aragonese Inquisitions demonstrated very different patterns of persecution. Moreover, each of the five tribunals displayed its own unique features. The most entertaining part of the book is Monter’s analysis of inquisitorial cases in Spanish Sicily, where “blasphemy was an art” (p. 166). We can imagine the culture shock experienced by Spanish inquisitors as they confronted this land of creative obscenities, bizarre heretical propositions, freethinkers, free lovers, sorcerers, perjurers, and rogues of all stripes.
In parts 3 and 4, Monter examines in greater detail the types of people and crimes singled out for persecution by the Aragonese inquisitors: Moriscos, French Protestants, witchcraft, and sodomy. Part 5 traces the eclipse of Aragon as a center of inquisitorial activity after 1630. Monter concludes his study by noting that the Aragonese Inquisitions maintained their regimes of terror by staging elaborate “public shows of severity against various types of outsiders” (p. 325).
This is a book for specialists. Quotations are given in the original languages, and technical foreign terms are listed in a glossary, not explained in the text. There is no bibliography. This is also an institutional history of the Inquisition, not a history of ideas. A reader looking for the ideology of deviance, or for the social construction of homosexuality, or even for a precise definition of “heresy,” will be disappointed. However, the persistent reader will be rewarded with many penetrating insights and occasional flashes of the author’s wry sense of humor and keen eye for anecdote. Monter offers a thoughtful and thorough account of this most Spanish, but not exclusively Castilian, institution.
