
For the past five hundred years, the specter of the Inquisition has haunted the Western imagination. In a superb interpretive history, Peters traces the origins and development of inquisitorial procedure from its secular roots in ancient Roman law to its most famous incarnation...

This impressive volume is actually three histories in one: of the legal procedures, personnel, and institutions that shaped the inquisitorial tribunals from Rome to early modern Europe; of the myth of The Inquisition, from its origins with the anti-Hispanists and religious...