The Trouble with Research

It's no secret to anyone who's vaguely interested that I'm putting together a book that focuses on the 15th century Spanish Inquisition, the life of Tomas de Torquemada in particular.

I have no illusions whatsoever that this thing'll be 100% accurate and historically factual, but not for lack of effort. The trouble with research is, who do you believe?

The controversy in a nutshell: the Spanish Inquisition is possibly the most embarrassing blemish (to put it politely) in Christianity's history, particularly for Catholicism. The secular position has been, traditionally, that this was a near-Holocaust-level action that persisted for centuries, perpetuated by the greed and wrath of the Catholic church. The Catholic position has been, traditionally, that the statistics have been exaggerated and inflated and the whole thing simply wasn't as bad as it's made out to be.

And I'm quickly getting to the point where I'm losing interest in the controversy, I just want to friggin' know what really happened.

It's gets hairier when I ask members of the Catholic church for their viewpoint on it. Predictably, it's not an area in which most Catholics (or non-Catholics for that matter) have massive amounts of expertise. But when pressed, the shields tend to go up and it's hard to get solid information from someone who feels they're entering an apologetics-style battle of truth and zeal.

My goal has always remained the same: Christianity/Catholocism needs to cop to what happened, but not to what didn't. It's a pickle, too: any refutation of a sobering statistic concerning torture or execution is seen as an insensitive refusal of reality.

In the meantime, I'll just keep reading.