How Did The Acquisition Of Power Affect The Inquisition

Stuart B. Schwartz unravels cases of the Inquisition while uncovering the tolerant religious attitudes of Spain, Portugal, and the New World colonies. The era of the Inquisition was a time when the enforcement of Catholic orthodoxy was brutal and widespread. Using many historical works as evidence, especially records from the Inquisition, Schwartz follows the “evolution” of the idea of religious tolerance through the Iberian Peninsula and the colonies of the New World. He focuses on the common people’s attitudes and beliefs rather than those of the elites. The elite, though probably influencing a majority of surviving documentation of the era, only made up a small portion of those affected by the Inquisition and the power of tolerance. Irene
Silverblatt’s interpretation is influenced by the power of the Inquisitors who documented the events of the time. The trials of the 1630s show the power of the Inquisitorial persons in great detail. Her first example, that of Doña Mencia, alludes to such power. Dona Mencia cries out “[w]rite down whatever you want to” and even after her death, the Inquisitors continued to examine her life and previous statements to prove that she was a heretic and a threat to the Spanish state. More than simply using the documents of the Spanish, though, Silverblatt uses ideas from different power theories, mainly those of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, to further support her
Were they supposed to be the same as those on the Iberian Peninsula, or should they allow the New World to shape and remake them into a similar, but unique, people? Silverblatt says, “colonial relations, facilitated by merchant capitalism’s untold wealth and promise, had turned the Peruvian Spaniard into an upside-down version of his European cousin.” In this sense, a New World Spaniard was the opposite of the European “version,” yet even in this New World, the people in power regarded the rules of the Old World in highest regard. Over time, the importance of protocol during the Inquisition seemed to slip into grey territory, falling into the “reason of state” or risk for the sanctity of Peru. “The Inquisition, that most Spanish of institution, was concocted in the cauldron of modern global politics.” The definition of a Spaniard, clear in Schwartz, became more and more confusing through the work of