medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture At 10:29 AM 6/16/2004 -0500, you wrote:

medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Quite frankly I find the tone and content here offensive. The Vatican
conference presumably involved scholars working along the same lines as
those who have produced a body of revisionist studies on the various
inquisitions (Peters, Kamen, Tedeschi and others) over the last three
decades. The revisionism was long overdue because of the distorted and
exaggerated view of the inquisitions that had become conventional in the
18th and 19th centuries and is now endemic in popular culture. WIthout
having seen the papers, why mock the conference or its proceedings? If
a conference convoked by one of our professional societies or one of our
major universities had announced the publication of its proceedings with
similar generalizations, would you not at least have reserved judgment
until you had seen the volume? And what does contemporary geopolitics
(and ecclesial-politics) have to do with any of this? The joke works
only if one asumes that everyone on the list shares the same
geopolitical assumptions.

i think the point of the joking is that the results of the investigation are so painfully self-defensive, all aimed at "correcting" a widespread "popular idea" of the inquisition that, because it's so bad, can serve as a foil for the church to say, "we weren't that bad.".

what i think i personally wd have been much more comfortable with was a discussion of how, whatever the numbers of executed, they represent only the tip of the iceberg of a form of pervasive intimidation that injected whole new levels of mutual distrust and (justified) paranoia into european society, and violated (and corrupted) basic principles of Christian love and generosity. And that this is something that is inexcusable and well worth meditating on so that it doesn't happen again. Instead we get an allegedly scholarly conference of bean counters whose conclusions look suspiciously like the shabbiest kind of "damage control."

The inquisition has a bad reputation for good reason: it defies every aspect of our modern culture -- the one in which we get to write our free opinions in public. If the church wants to be part of the modern world, i.e., civil society (apparently a real matter of debate), then it needs to do real self-criticism. Until then, i don't think you can expect many independent scholars (precisely thekind of people the inquisition sought to silence) to treat this kind of stuff as anything more than a bad joke.

r
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