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Historia de la Inquisicion en Espana y America, Volume III: Temas y problemas. Edited by Joaquin Perez Villanueva and Bartolome Escandell Bonet. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos. 2000. Pp. xlii, 1256. 10096 pesetas.)
Crypto-Judaism and the Spanish Inquisition. By Michael Alpert. (Basingstoke and NewYork: Palgrave. 2001. Pp. x, 246.)
The nineteen chapters included in the third and final volume of this ambitious series make a valuable contribution to Inquisition studies, although, as often happens in collective volumes of such size, not all chapters fit smoothly into the editors' organizational framework. In spite of the title, the book focuses on the Inquisition in Spain rather than on its role in the Spanish dominions in the New World with the exception of a chapter on the establishment of the tribunal in Cartagena de Indias. A long and informative chapter on the Inquisition in Sicily by Manuel Rivero Rodriguez provides another exception to the book's Spanish emphasis. It is also worth noting that most of the contributors are Spanish academics, many young professors influenced by the new currents of Inquisition historiography, although senior figures in the field are also represented. The generally high quality of the individual chapters and, in many cases, their sophisticated treatment of difficult questions, such as those revolving around the "New Christians" or conversos of Jewish descent and their Islamic counterparts, the moriscos, reflect the conclusions of recent scholarship by Spanish and non-Spanish historians alike that the role of the Inquisition and its effects on society were far more complex and less straightforward than once was thought.
The subjects discussed by the contributors cover a wide range touching important aspects of current debate about the Inquisition and its victims. Roberto Lopez Vila provides a survey of Spanish historiography on the Inquisition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the institution's history in itself was less important to those writing about it than the ideological debate between liberals, intellectuals, and conservative Catholics. All were more concerned with the kind of Spain existing in their own day than with rigorous examination of the Inquisition's history. Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, author of a pioneering study of the conversos, offers a perceptive overview of the institution that emphasizes its role as a political instrument used by successive monarchs,...