How Eye-Gouging, Lip-Lopping Inquisition Was Modernized: Books
“God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World”
isn’t exactly a history. As the subtitle suggests, the author,
Cullen Murphy, is really interested in examining the dread
institution’s relation to the world we live in now. His last
book was titled “Are We Rome?” His new one is short,
entertaining and formidably smart. “The late medieval world,”
Murphy writes, “experienced an information revolution of its
own. Haphazard approaches to organizational management were
wrestled into something recognizably modern.” In other words,
what made the Inquisition possible was the rise of bureaucracy.
If you wanted to catch out a heretic in a contradiction, you
needed to be able to quickly ascertain what he’d said the last
time he was questioned, even if that was 20 years ago. “Collect,
preserve, retrieve: inquisitions depend on data storage.” But an
effective inquisition requires more than capable administration.
The other “indispensable ingredi