The Rule of Faith over Reason: The Role of the Inquisition in Iberia and New Spain

Abstract

Inquisition has long been held over Spain's head as an indica tion of her barbarity. ecclesiastical use of garrotes and racks, par ticularly with respect to the indigenous population in the New World, constitutes a good part of the Black Legend, the anti-Hispanic, Eng lish-initiated propaganda which was circulated around the time of Henry VIII's divorce of Catherine of Aragon. But England had her own form of barbaric justice. While heretics were being burned in a public auto de fe in Sevilla and New Spain, poachers, found in the King's forest in England, and thus suspected of treason, were being drawn and quartered. Some of the men burned at the stake in Mexico under heresy charges of Calvinism would have qualified for the gallows in Elizabethan England under capital charges of piracy.1 Medieval justice as a rule came down with a heavy hand. Nor were inquisitorial practices limited to the Iberian peninsula. Peter Goodrich, in his essay, The Eucharist and English Law: A Gene alogy of Legal Presence in the Common Law Tradition, reports that Sir Thomas More advocated for ex officio suits under the Statute Det taretico Comburendo, whereby heretics could be summoned by the ordinances upon suspicion of heresy and without the need for indict ment or open accusation.2 William Tyndale, More's contemporary and translator of the Bible, was condemned in England for daring to make Scripture comprehensible to the common man. He was eventually ar rested in Flanders on charges of heresy and later strangled, and burned