Edgar Allan Poe And Catholic Acquisition

Edgar Allan Poe got the idea to write about the inquisition from a book written by a Spanish scholar named Juan Antonio Llorente. The book said, “...some had been confined three years, some longer period, and not on knew perfectly nature of his crime.” This shows how unfairly people were treated, so badly that one did not know why he or she were being prosecuted for a crime. This relates back to the short-story because the narrator of the story has no idea why he was captured and brought into this imprisonment. The cultural elements of the Spanish and Catholic Inquisition help readers gain a better base knowledge for why and how the narrator ends ups how he does, and helps shape Poe’s plot of the short-story. “...there came thronging upon my
recollection a thousand vague rumors of the horrors of Toledo.” (Poe). Poe uses these words to refer to the nightmares and rumors that were spread during the Inquisition. When Poe says “horrors of Toledo”, he is describing that during the Inquisition, many “heretics” were persecuted in that region of Spain. Thus, hinting to the readers that the time period is during the Spanish and Catholic Inquisition. “The figures of friends in aspects of menace, with skeleton forms, and other more really fearful images, overspread and disfigured the walls.” (Poe). In the short-story, Poe refers to the skeletons scattered along the walls, this refers to the Inquisition because the Catholics persecuted many heretics, killing them, and hiding their corpses in scattered catacombs along underground walls in Europe. The cultural elements of the Spanish and Catholic Inquisition help readers get a better base knowledge for how and why the narrator ends ups how he does, and helps shape Poe’s plot of the short-story