"Thomas F. Madden is professor and chair of the department of history at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author most recently of Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice and editor of the forthcoming Crusades: The Illustrated History."
and note that he says:
"The truth is that, although this report [based on Inquisition records] makes use of previously unavailable material, it merely echoes what numerous scholars have previously learned from other European archives. Among the best recent books on the subject are Edward Peters's Inquisition (1988) and Henry Kamen's The Spanish Inquisition (1997), but there are others. Simply put, historians have long known that the popular view of the Inquisition is a myth."
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/madden200406181026.asp
Also, "revisionism" is another example of a word that has an undeserved bad name because in terms of history many people associate it with Holocaust denial. But most good history revises previous accounts, taking into account new evidence - as in the case of one of the authors cited above:
"Thirty-five years ago Kamen wrote a study of the Inquisition that received high praise. This present work, based on over thirty years of new research, is not simply a complete revision of the earlier book. Innovative in its presentation, point of view, information, and themes, it will revolutionize further study in the field."
http://yalepress-test.its.yale.edu:81/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=0300078803
Cf:
"Edward Peters in "Inquisition" (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1989) explains how the myth of the all-embracing inquisition developed in European thought. ... Spain became the symbol of all forces of repression, brutality, religious and political intolerance, and intellectual and artistic backwardness for the next four centuries. Spaniards and Hispanophiles have termed this process and the image that resulted from it as `The Black Legend,' la leyenda negra. It is this post-Reformation anti-Catholic "black legend" that created the myths surrounding the Spanish Inquisition. Serious historical studies in the 20th Century have debunked these myths, but they continue to persist in popular imagination."
http://www.speroforum.com/wiki/default.aspx/SperoWiki/TheBlackLegendTheSpanishInquisition.html Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
