Over the preceding year or so a nasty, convoluted debate between some friars and members of what passed for the civil authority had raged. Each faction made accusations of witchcraft and blasphemy, and in a sudden eruption of violence a group of renegade church partisans attacked and slaughtered Luis de Rosas, a former governor. On this July day the newly installed governor apprehended eight men he divined were responsible for the killing of Rosas and, with the authority granted by the Inquisition, had the conspirators beheaded. In “God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World,’’ journalist Cullen Murphy quotes a tourist guide’s description of this town’s plaza as site of “the largest mass beheading of Europeans by Europeans in a continental American town.’’


The town in question? Santa Fe, N.M.

We rarely think of the Spanish imperial presence in North America, but that the Inquisition raged with such ferocity in what was to become US territory feels doubly strange. Like much of the world, New Mexico, Texas, and California all saw spasms of inquisitorial rage. What the world hasn’t seen, “God’s Jury’’ argues, is the Inquisition’s end. “Modernity . . . is not a time - it’s a place,’’ Murphy writes, quoting geographer David Harvey. Likewise, the Inquisition isn’t an institution so much as an instinct, one that persists.

Richly detailed and exquisitely told, “God’s Jury’’ dissects the ”inquisitorial impulse,’’ juxtaposing historical accounts with contemporary political affairs showing how the latter are often conducted in the spirit and with the brutal bureaucracies of the Inquisition.

In our imaginations,’’ Murphy writes, “we offhandedly associate the term ‘inquisition’ with the term ‘Dark Ages.’ But consider what an inquisition really is: a set of disciplinary procedures targeting specific groups, codified in law, enforced by surveillance, exemplified by severity, sustained over time, backed by institutional power, and justified by a vision of the one truth path. Considered that way, the Inquisition is more accurately viewed not as a relic but as a harbinger.’’


The “Inquisition’’ as it’s deployed in the popular imagination is a convenient condensation of more than 700 years and at least three distinct movements.

The first “inquisitors of heretical depravity’’ were appointed in 1231, inaugurating the Medieval Inquisition. During this century-long plague of violence the Roman Catholic Church exterminated Christians whose sectarian peculiarities placed them outside the grace of the universal church. Murphy describes in vivid, gripping prose both the doctrinal differences and the outcomes of these differences, most notably in relation to the Cathars, a Christian sect once located in southern France.

The Spanish Inquisition commenced in the late 15th century and reigned in blood for 350 years, killing tens of thousands. This inquisition was administered by royal, rather than clerical, authority, and the Spanish crown expanded the object of interest to “classes of people rather than just categories of belief.’’ On the Iberian Peninsula, in particular, Jewish converts to Catholicism suffered from lethal skepticism.

Heretics and “judaizers’’ often were burned at the stake, and Murphy offers a ghoulishly readable account of the mechanics and gallows etiquette of torching heretics. Nearly as undesirable was a sentence of oarsmanship on Spanish ships; the ships “consumed [men] like fuel,’’ often transforming brief sentences into capital punishments. This transition from a theoretically penitential punishment to mercantile slavery offers another glimpse into the inquisitorial evolution. The demands of God were allowed to serve the interests of a king.


Starting in 1542, and overlapping with its Spanish counterpart, the Roman Inquisition relied on brutal precedent while adjusting for technological advances. “The Medieval Inquisition and, in its earliest stages, the Spanish Inquisition were directed chiefly at people - that is, at the physical corpora of sentient beings. They were directed at heretics who inhabited a mainly oral culture . . . . The Roman Inquisition went after people too . . . [b]ut it was just as much about the written word.’’

The Roman Inquisition counts among its notable accomplishments the trials of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, as well as the Index of Forbidden Books. Even rogue Catholic novelist Graham Greene fell under its reproachful gaze. Much like Santa Fe, that a mid-20th century writer would run afoul of the Inquisition seems anachronistic, but as Murphy points out, the Inquisition is organizationally and spiritually with us today. A key portion of the Vatican’s administrative apparatus is the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, or CDF, which finds its roots in the centuries-old Sacred Congregation of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition. The CDF doesn’t burn people these days, but the office maintains responsibility for priestly good behavior. According to Murphy, the CDF, also demonstrates a hallmark characteristic of inquisitions and modernity: bureaucracy.


Like all administrative entities, inquisitions are “inertial’’ forces requiring guidelines, institutional memory, and efficient ways to communicate this memory. Murphy argues persuasively that all inquisitions are ignited by the collision of panic and certainty, but that they are sustained through banalities like bureaucracy and communication technology, which make our contemporary world so vulnerable to the inquisitorial instinct.

“God’s Jury’’ is beautifully written, very smart, and devilishly engaging. Murphy’s ghastly tale even manages charm at moments. What “God’s Jury’’ is not is straightforward history. Rather, Murphy offers a historically grounded, elegant rumination on humanity’s aggressive certainty and aptitude for moral hysteria and violent overreaction

As Murphy writes, “Shift perspective slightly - turn the object in the light - and you can see that the Inquisition was enabled by some of the broader forces that brought the modern world into existence, and that make inquisitions of various kinds a recurring and inescapable feature of modern life.’’ Murphy is speaking of Guantanamo, of course, and of the Stasi, as well as the South American dirty wars, all of which he discusses in passages that sometimes show the limits of inquisition as metaphor. But the broader contours of his argument get to the fabric of modernity - our bureaucracy, our surveillance, our penchant for feckless cruelty.

Murphy has a keen ear for the pitch-perfect quote, but Kurt Vonnegut once wrote something that predicted the contents of this fascinating book. “You want to know something?’’ Vonnegut wrote. “We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages - they haven’t ended yet.’’


Michael Washburn is a research associate at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York. He can be reached at mwashburn.wordpress.com.