0 a period of asking questions in a detailed and unfriendly way: --
1 in the past, an official organization in the Roman Catholic Church whose purpose was to find and punish people who opposed its beliefs --
2 a detailed questioning, esp. of someone’s beliefs --
In addition to their institutional importance, prisons were important to the inquisition on another level.
It was the inquisition's use of prisons for heresy which demonstrated what could be achieved through imprisonment.
Probably most of those who held examinations were testing knowledge of the catechism, but some ministers apparently conducted a moral inquisition too.
Whatever the reason for its disappearance, the support of a pauper represents a failed experiment from a distinctive phase of the development of the inquisition.
Nevertheless, burning remained a crucial part of inquisition strategy, in that even with relatively few victims it allowed inquisitors to intimidate a community.
He strings the histories together with an outline narrative that explains the main points of the history of the inquisition and its judicial procedure.
The volume went to press in 1996 and was published in the same year that the archives of the inquisition were opened to research.
Most of the inquisition penances contained an element of financial punishment.
