Any good Apologetic Books on the Inquistion?

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I know Hillaire Belloc wrote one. Currently I’m working my way slowly through his history of the Crusades. It is fascinating.👍
 
I forgot to add. How about the Crusades? An unbias resource. A fair and balance book
 
Mannyfit75 said:
Anyone know a good Catholic Apologetic book on Inquisition?
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Rather than apologetics, you would do well to read good scholarship on the subject. This will carry a lot more weight with fair-minded Protestants (with real bigots you have no hope anyway–they will believe what they want to believe). Henry Kamen, for instance, has written a very influential recent treatment of the Spanish Inquisition. For the Crusades there are a lot of recent scholars, such as Jonathan Riley-Smith. These guys are blowing up a lot of the long-held myths about these subjects, but they have more credibility with non-Catholics than someone writing purely as an apologist would.

Edwin
 
Scott_Lafrance said:
Hillaire Belloc is a great resource for the Crusades.
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Belloc is not much use for any historical topic if you are trying to convince people who are not already convinced. If you just want to make Catholics happy to be Catholic, this might be a good resource. Belloc did a great job in his own day of challenging silly Protestant prejudices, but he didn’t do such a good job of making positive scholarly contributions of his own. The “Whig” view of history, for instance, has been challenged in a far more thoughtful and solid way by Herbert Butterfield. Belloc’s historical work is mostly of, well, historical interest (though he remains a great essayist and comic poet).

Edwin
 
*The New Concise History of the Crusades *by Thomas Madden

I wouldn’t disregard a book on the Inquisition just because it happens to have been written by a Catholic; if it contains factually incorrect statements then of course its usefulness it lessened.

If someone makes a statement about the crusades or the inquisitions then it is up to them to provide factual evidence for the truth of the claim.

If someone tells lies about your grandmother, who is more interested in proving her innocence - someone in the family or a stranger who has an interest in local history?
 
yinekka said:
I wouldn’t disregard a book on the Inquisition just because it happens to have been written by a Catholic
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Oh, certainly not. I did not say anything about books written by Catholics, but about books of apologetics as opposed to scholarship. For instance, the best book I know on sixteenth-century martyrdom (on both sides) is by a Catholic. He is able to get inside the heads of Protestant as well as Catholic martyrs, because he treats the material with respect.
If someone tells lies about your grandmother, who is more interested in proving her innocence - someone in the family or a stranger who has an interest in local history?
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But I will gain a lot better insights from someone whose sole goal is not to prove my grandmother’s innocence. If that is their only motivation for investigating the subject, they aren’t likely to do justice to facts pointing in the other direction.

Actually I happen to have a very controversial grandmother (controversial within the small circle of people who have heard of her:D–she was once accused of being a cult leader), and I found that one of the most helpful sources for understanding her was a doctoral dissertation written on the church she grew up in (with a lot of insights on the pastor who was her spiritual mentor as a young woman) by someone with no connection to the family. However, he was in basic sympathy with the spiritual ideals of my family (and in fact mentioned them with honor at the end of the book as people who carried on the original ideals of the church, which is now defunct).

In Christ,

Edwin
 
I just taught a class about this last night at my parish.

Generally speaking, you should seek books about “The Inquisition” that have been written within the last 30 years are so. There has been SO MUCH recent scholarship in this area, that almost everything that everyone thought they knew about this period (as well as about the Crusades, BTW) is almost totally wrong. Most of what passed for conventional wisdom until recently was based on polemnic books rooted in the Reformation and included impossible exagerations and wildly inflated numbers. Even past works of apologetics by Catholics had relied on faulty and incomplete information.

The folks that ran the inquisitions kept meticulous notes on those procedings. Modern scholars have only recently been concetrating on authentic, first hand reports which, put into the context of the times, reveal a much less sinister picture that what we’ve been led to believe. Unfortunately, none of this has yet made it’s way into high school and college textbooks, let alone the popular media.

Here are some other resources that may be helpful:

catholiceducation.org/links/search.cgi?query=inquisition
 
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