The Inquisition in Colonial Latin America: Selected Writings of Richard E. Greenleaf

The Inquisition in Colonial Latin America: Selected Writings of Richard E. Greenleaf. By James Riley. Berkeley: Academy of American Franciscan History, 2010. Pp. 247. Appendices. $25.00 cloth.

Richard Greenleaf developed pioneering studies of the Mexican Inquisition in the 1960s and 1970s, setting a high standard of intellectual quality and demonstrating a fierce commitment to the craftof archival research. He was, in short, the quintessential historian's historian, a scholar who defended above all the value of documentation, and who saw theoretical interpretations as unnecessary accretions-even as imaginary impositions of ahistorical views. This book is a collection of various essays Greenleaf published in professional journals from the 1960s through the 1990s; it showcases his dedication to deep archival research, dispassionate analysis of the Inquisition, and appreciation for the ways the administrative apparatus of the Inquisition defied easy stereotypes of the Black Legend.

The collected essays offer a unique opportunity for students of colonial Mexico and the Mexican Inquisition. Greenleaf produced, during his lifetime, two major monographs on the Mexican Church and Inquisition in the sixteenth century. Yet...