The acclaimed author of "Are We Rome?" brings his highly praised blend of deep research, colorful travelogue, and insightful political analysis to a new history of the Inquisition. Exploring the Inquisition from its establishment in 1231 onwards, Murphy argues that not only did its offices survive into the twentieth century, its spirit lingers on in the modern world too.

Examines the culture of Spain during the centuries of the Inquisition by focusing on personal aspects of daily life at the time.

"The inquisitorial apparatus that was first invented in the Middle Ages remained in operation for the next six hundred years, and it has never been wholly dismantled. As we shall see, an unbroken thread links the friar-inquisitors who set up the rack and the pyre in southern France in the early thirteenth century to the torturers and executioners of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia in the mid-twentieth century. Nor does the thread stop at Auschwitz...

In mid-thirteenth century Provence, Dolssa de Stigata is a fervently religious girl who feels the call to preach, condemned by the Inquisition as an "unnatural woman," and hunted by the Dominican Friar Lucien who fears a resurgence of the Albigensian heresy; Botille is a matchmaker trying to protect her sisters from being branded as gypsies or witches--but when she finds the hunted Dolssa dying on a hillside, she feels compelled to protect her, a...

"Raquela yearns to celebrate a Passover seder, but Inquisition-era Spain is a time when Jews must hide their religion. Her clever papa, the best fisherman in town, creates a unique celebration for his family"--

"Cuba, April 1514. Fray Bartolomé De Las Casas tries to forget the atrocities he has witnessed against the Taino Indians. However, his retreat is disturbed by a group of Dominican monks. They send him an old Spaniard, Rodrigo, to convince him to act. But who really is this Rodrigo? Is he indeed Rodrigo de Triana, the first to spot land on Columbus's 1492 trip? Why had he been sent on that voyage, and why was he made an outlaw and a target of the...

From award-winning author G. Willow Wilson, The Bird King is an epic journey set during the reign of the last sultan in the Iberian peninsula at the height of the Spanish Inquisition. G. Willow Wilson's debut novel Alif the Unseen was an NPR and Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and it established her as a vital American Muslim literary voice. Now she delivers The Bird King , a stunning new novel that tells the story of Fatima, a concubine in...

From historian James Reston comes an account of the pivotal events of 1492, a year when towering political ambitions, horrific religious excesses, and a drive toward adventure and conquest changed the world forever. This book chronicles one of the most savage epochs in history, the years of the Spanish Inquisition. In an effort to consolidate their power on the Iberian Peninsula, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella turned to the priest Torquemada, a...

"In a shabby house, on a shabby street, in the new capital of Madrid, Luzia Cotado uses scraps of magic to get through her days of endless toil as a scullion. But when her scheming mistress discovers the lump of a servant cowering in the kitchen is actually hiding a talent for little miracles, she demands Luzia use those gifts to better the family's social position. What begins as simple amusement for the bored nobility takes a perilous turn when...

When the tolerant culture of Spain is shattered by the Inquisition, Isabel feels safe because of her Catholic upbringing and father's position as a respected doctor, until he is arrested for the family's secret Jewish heritage.