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by: Jonathan Kirsch  List Price: $26.95 Amazon.com's Price: $18.72 You Save: $8.23 (31%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Binding: HardcoverDewey Decimal Number: 272.2 EAN: 9780060816995 Edition: 1 ISBN: 0060816996 Label: HarperOne Manufacturer: HarperOne Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 304 Publication Date: September 01, 2008 Publisher: HarperOne Release Date: September 09, 2008 Studio: HarperOne Related Items:
Editorial Review: Product Description:
The twelfth century birthed a new and sinister brand of sanctioned terror, an international network of secret police and courts, an army of inquisitors whose sworn duty was to seek out anyone regarded as an enemy, and a casualty list numbering in the tens of thousands. The original agents of the Inquisition—priests and monks, scribes and notaries, attorneys and accountants, torturers and executioners—were deputized by the Church and their worst excesses were excused as the pardonable sins of soldiers engaged in a holy war against heresy that became the obsession of Christendom. Yet the first rumblings of Western civilization's great engine of persecution provided no indication of the ultimate scope and influence of the inquisitorial toolkit and how the crimes of the first inquisitors were perpetrated again and again into the twentieth century and beyond. Despite the importance of this legacy, the history of the Inquisition remains a subject that has largely been overlooked by general historians. With The Grand Inquisitor's Manual, national bestselling author Jonathan Kirsch delivers a sweeping and provocative history that explores how the Inquisition was honed to perfection and brought to bear on an ever-widening circle of victims by authoritarians in both church and state for over six hundred years. Ranging from the Knights Templar to the first Protestants, from Joan of Arc to Galileo; from the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent women during the Witch Craze to its greatest power in Spain after 1492, when the secret tribunals and torture chambers were directed for the first time against Jews and Muslims to the modern war on terror—Kirsch shows us how the Inquisition stands as a universal and ineradicable symbol of the terror that results when absolute power works its corruptions. The history of the Inquisition is draped in myth and mystery, a favorite theme of both artists and propagandists throughout the six hundred years of its active operations. Yet when we pull aside the veil, what we see are the original blueprints for the machinery of persecution that was invented in the High Middle Ages and applied to human flesh ever since. The Grand Inquisitor's Manual exposes the dangerous circular logic of the Inquisition so that we do not perpetuate its brand of terror. Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Man's Inhumanity to ManJonathan Kirsch's writing is readable, well annotated, and reflects solid research, as usual. However, his organization of the material and his footnoting are not quite up to his usual high standards, however. The author traces the history of the Inquisition from its beginnings through its evolution into and final demise as the Spanish Inquisition, a span of some 650 years or so. This is a broad sweep, and Mr. Kirsch has chosen to provide samples from various points in time, but never really ... Read More Rating: - Sensationalist style oversells salient points in Kirsch's history of the inquisitions of the Catholic churchFirst, the salient points: Kirsch tells the history of inquisition as the establishment of a clerical bureaucracy, which included judges, prosecutors, police, secret agents, procedural manuals, and prescribed and preferred tools of punishment, and which paralleled the contemporary political courts and criminal proceedings in Western Europe. The difference is that the inquisitions targeted crimes of thought, not action, were not held to even the evidentiary standards of their time (the 12th through ... Read More Rating:  - Sanctioned terrorism in the Name of God.In the 12th century, early Christian heretics, the Cathars, are exquisitely tortured, their broken bodies a deterrent to those who would question the dictates of the True Faith. In the 15th century, the great Inquisitors don the solemn robes of office, casting impassive eyes on those who would commit heresy against a just and loving God, the accoutrements of torture designed in infinite detail for maximum effect. In Salem, Massachusetts, acolytes of the devil are tested, given opportunity ... Read More Rating: - Impassioned History of a Legendary Religious InstitutionIn "The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God", author Jonathan Kirsch makes no pretense of cool, detached objectivity. He very obviously loathes the very notion of the Catholic Church's Inquisition (which formally existed from the Thirteenth to the Nineteenth centuries), and he displays open disdain for those revisionist historians who have sought to excuse or minimize the actions of the Inquisition in rooting out and destroying heretics, Jews, and Muslims. "The ... Read More 
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