The Origins of the Inquisition in Comparative Perspective: An International Workshop

Recent work on the inquisition tribunals operating not only in Spain, Portugal and the Italian peninsula but also in the Habsburg Low Countries has made us appreciate as never before the degree to which they consciously wrote themselves into history as saviours of orthodoxy in the face of heresy. Some of the latest scholarship has shifted attention from focus on ‘the body count’, that is to say, the victims, to considering the ‘bodies that count’ – the inquisitors themselves, their careers and professional culture. This workshop intends to look at these themes in a truly comparative context: one, furthermore, that is not only synchronic – in which it will be asked to what degree can all four early modern inquisitions can be considered a single, transnational network - but also diachronic: how important is the history of the medieval inquisition to our understanding of its early modern successors?

The Origins of the Inquisition, May 2015 Programme (PDF , 267kb)