The Consistory - Protestant Inquisition

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Has anyone here got any good resources on the Consistory? It was a body created by Geneva’s council under Calvin in order to presecute dissention. It acted like the Inquisition.
 
notself said:
This Wiki has information on the Consistory and a long list of articles and a bibliography.

There was no mention of torture, burning, or other forms of physical punishment in the article.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calvin
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Right. I think that one difference from the Inquisition is that the Consistory didn’t actually hand people over to the secular arm formally. However, the Consistory did exercise a lot of influence in telling the secular government how to punish those who offended against godly order, and like the Inquisition it handed out a lot of lesser punishments.

Geneva (and its imitators) is indeed as close as Protestants got to the Inquisitional model–elsewhere the Church was much more under the thumb of the state, though the state churches generally supported the punishment of “blasphemers” and the “seditious” (i.e., anyone who made trouble for the status quo, whether civil or religious). Some older secondary sources (for which I’m indebted to Dave Armstrong) speak of the Lutherans in Saxony establishing a “regular Inquisition” led by Melanchthon to deal with the Anabaptists, but I was unable to find confirmation for this claim and suspect that it’s a piece of rhetorical inaccuracy. However, I would not be surprised if Melanchthon and other theologians acted on behalf of the government to question suspected Anabaptists, try to convert them, etc., and this was certainly part of the function of the Inquisition (it’s the word “regular”–which implies actual legal powers to try people and hand them over to the civil authorities–which I doubt).

Edwin
 
^ Edwin, do you know of any even-handed article which describes the Cruelty of the Consistory?
 
AgnosTheist said:
^ Edwin, do you know of any even-handed article which describes the Cruelty of the Consistory?
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The scholar who has done most in-depth study of the Consistory records is Robert Kingdon. From what I’ve said above, you should gather that I do not think an even-handed study will have much to say about extreme cruelty, since the Consistory itself did not hand out extreme punishments. It was pretty strict and repressive, though.

Edwin
 
Contarini said:
The scholar who has done most in-depth study of the Consistory records is Robert Kingdon. From what I’ve said above, you should gather that I do not think an even-handed study will have much to say about extreme cruelty, since the Consistory itself did not hand out extreme punishments. It was pretty strict and repressive, though.

Edwin
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Thanks all for the info
 
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