The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision

Henry Kamen's The Spanish Inquisition, A Historical Revision, published by Yale University Press in its revised 1997 edition, is a scholarly history arguing that the Spanish Inquisition's popular reputation for exceptional cruelty and killing on a massive scale substantially exceeds what the Inquisition's own surviving trial records actually support, a deliberately revisionist position against older, more sensational accounts. Kamen is a historian of early modern Spain who bases the argument on statistical analysis of the tribunal's own case records rather than on the polemical accounts, largely Protestant and Enlightenment in origin, that shaped the popular Black Legend image. Its strength is that direct archival grounding in the Inquisition's own documented case outcomes. Its limit is that Kamen's revisionism, while now broadly accepted among specialists on the numbers, remains debated on questions of the Inquisition's psychological and social terror beyond its recorded execution counts, so a claim about its wider climate of fear needs sources engaging that separate question.