More wisdom from Matthew Arnold

The basic myth surrounding the Inquisition is that it was a distinct organization maintained by the Catholic Church. This is an absolute fiction. There simply never was a single capital I Inquisition that was an all-powerful, institutional tribunal. There were rather three distinct periods of inquisition. The first, the medieval inquisition, began in 1184 when Pope Gregory IX appointed ecclesiastical judges to deal with the Albigensian heresy. The medieval inquisition was dissolved at the end of the fourteenth century. And as historians are now pointing out, it’s quite clear from surviving documents, and there are many, that the people of the middle ages never considered inquisition as an agency or organization. So understandably, the term inquisition is never used in documents of the time to refer to an organized tribunal, which it wasn’t, but rather to a mode of jurisprudence, which it was.

—MATTHEW ARNOLD from Fire and Sword