Kimberly Lynn,Between Court and Confessional: The Politics of Spanish Inquisitors

Reviewed by: Jan Machielsen, New College, Oxford, UK

Ever since the early Enlightenment, as Kimberly Lynn shows in this marvellous book, the Spanish inquisitor has mattered as an abstract figure – ‘a thought experiment, summoned to make a variety of arguments’ (335) – and an antithesis against which the forces of reason could unite. Decades of revisionist studies have dispelled the traditional view of the Inquisition as a faceless and secretive institution bent on preserving Spain in some sort of religious stasis. And yet, we know remarkably little about the lives of individual inquisitors. Perhaps as a result of traditional stereotypes, the Inquisition remains most often approached as an elite bureaucracy, a piece of machinery with its members reduced to ‘essential cog[s]’ (5). In her study, Lynn picks up a question first raised by Julio Caro Baroja in 1968 – what does an Inquisition with inquisitors look like?

Lynn draws extremely rich portraits of five members of the Inquisition. Her first two inquisitors were brought together by perhaps the most famous trial in the history of the Inquisition, that of Bartolomé Carranza, the Archbishop of Toledo. Lynn shows that the two men were nevertheless very different. Cristóbal Fernández de Valtodano (c. 1500–72) took a pastoral approach to his work. First as an inquisitor and later as a bishop and archbishop, Valtodano attached great importance to visitations. His elevation to the episcopacy allowed him to escape the Carranza trial, mired in jurisdictional disputes between Spain and Rome, and to fashion himself into a model Tridentine bishop. By contrast, his fellow judge, Diego de Simancas (1513–83), was dispatched to the Eternal City when Pius V revoked the case to Rome in 1567. Where Valtodano had adopted a pastoral approach to his office, Simancas – stuck in Rome with little to do – turned to print, producing not only a series of inquisitorial handbooks but also an autobiographical Vida. Frustrated both in his ambitions and with the outcome of the Carranza trial, Simancas resorted to print to ‘put his case before posterity as much as before his contemporaries’ (137).

Lynn’s third case study moves us to a distant corner of the Habsburg monarchy, Sicily, and another inquisitor who turned to the printing press when his ambitions were repeatedly dashed. When Luis de Páramo (c. 1545–1608) was sent to the island in 1586 he had high hopes of a bright future – several of his predecessors had been promoted to the episcopate there – but these were dashed, in part because of his on-going disputes with the secular authorities there. Despite personal remonstrations in Madrid, Palermo’s inquisitorial office remained (at times literally) under siege. Páramo, however, asserted the authority of the Inquisition not only in person but also, much more successfully, in print. His De origine et progressu Sanctae Inquisitionis (1598) traced the origins of the Inquisition back to the Fall of Man. As Lynn acutely observes, the paradox of this successful composition was ‘that it was compiled as part of a relatively unsuccessful attempt to advocate for embattled inquisitorial privileges in Sicily and to advance a stalled judicial career’ (188).

Two generations later, the career of Juan Adam de la Parra (c. 1596–1644) provides an example of an inquisitor falling from grace. La Parra’s very effective use of print, defending among other things purity of blood laws, brought him eventually into the orbit of the Count-Duke of Olivares, who employed him as a ‘hired pen’ (225). During the tumult of the early 1640s, La Parra wrote against both the Catalan revolutionaries and the new king of Portugal. Like other arbitristas, he exploited conspiratorial arguments which blamed the cause of Spain’s perceived decline on its Judaizing opponents. Ironically, it was his pen that also proved his downfall. A scurrilous poem aimed at a number of leading royal councillors led to La Parra being imprisoned and then reassigned to the tribunal in Logroño, far from court.

The last of Lynn’s case studies offers a truly transatlantic tale. Juan de Mañozca y Zamora (c. 1577–1650) began his career as an inquisitor in Cartagena de Indias. Later he was elected to the Suprema (the Council of the Inquisition) and he ended his life as Archbishop of Mexico City. Mañozca was thus a success story, unlike the previous three inquisitors studied, and Lynn pays particular attention to the causes of this achievement. A number of factors are of particular importance: the devotion Mañozca inspired in his clients (and family), his courting of local elites, and a particular aptitude for religious display. It was the latter, in the form of a series of spectacular trials of Portuguese merchants accused of Judaizing (the so-called ‘Great Complicity’) that drew the Suprema’s favourable attention to the senior inquisitor of Lima.

As should be evident, the points of comparison and contrast between these five men are legion, as are the observations concerning their lives, ambitions and attitudes. It is a testament to Lynn’s skill as a writer that she ties together these stories – all different, yet similar – so well. At all times she remains acutely aware of the limits of a biographical approach. And yet the identities fashioned by the men studied remain striking; they are built on pagan and Christian role models and are constructed against a range of criminal archetypes. Lynn also points to the importance of extra-judicial tools employed (such as print), as well as the importance of human relationships (ties of family and patronage included). Inquisitors, she concludes, must be understood as members of Spain’s intellectual elite, who had to make their actions and aspirations intelligible to their contemporaries. Lynn’s masterful book merits a place alongside the work of other well-respected scholars, such as James Amelang and Francisco Bethencourt. It deserves to be read by anyone with an interest in early modern Spain or early modern Catholicism.