This view isn’t wrong: The Inquisition was definitely medieval, in a literal sense. This disciplinary effort mounted by the Church got its start in 1231 AD and continued for centuries. Thousands of people were burned at the stake; hundreds of thousands were subjected to lesser punishments. The Inquisition targeted heretics, Jews, Muslims, Protestants, and rationalists. Read the transcripts of interrogations — and the theological points on which many of them turn — and you become conscious of a worldview that is very far away.
And yet to consign the Inquisition to the distant past — to think of it as merely medieval — is a mistake. Though the underlying mind-set reflects another age, what made the Inquisition possible at all — what underlay its operations and gave it staying power — was the fact that the world, in fits and starts, was becoming what we think of as modern.
The past several decades have seen a golden age of Inquisition scholarship as historians have sifted through voluminous archives in Spain, in France, in Mexico, and in cities throughout Italy. In 1998, the Vatican for the first time opened its own Inquisition archives to scholars. Modern historians have shed light on many specific questions. But from between the lines a larger truth emerges — that the Inquisition was driven by a host of innovations. They are innovations that we take for granted, woven into the world we live in now.
It was becoming possible not just to collect and preserve information about people, but also to organize it in such a way that it could be retrieved when needed. In the Church as well as in secular governments, laws were being codified more coherently, making it possible to draw a clearer line between what was permissible and what was not. Self-perpetuating bureaucracies were being created, staffed by trained personnel. Even interrogation techniques were becoming systematized in a quasi-scientific way.
