Two Councils by A.N. Maykov in F.M. Dostoevsky’s Novel The Brothers Karamazov

The article is devoted to the issue of reception of the poems about Catholic Church written by A.N. Maykov, a close friend of F.M. Dostoevsky, in his novel The Brothers Karamazov and, above all, in The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. We are talking about the poems - The Queens Confessions. The Legend of the Spanish Inquisition, Sentence. The Legend of the Constance Council and The Legend of the Clermont Council. It is The Queens Confessions which led Dostoevsky to make Seville the setting for the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. The main character of the Sentence, Cardinal Hermit, became the prototype of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevskys novel, and the main character of The Legend of Clermont Council, the Pilgrim Hermit, in many ways became the prototype of the unrecognized Christ from the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. The article presents significant textual parallels between Maykovs poems and The Brothers Karamazov .

Family Matters

History has so far paid scant attention to Muslims in the earliest phase of colonizing the Americas. As a general policy, the Spanish Crown prohibited all non-Catholics from going to early Spanish America. Nevertheless, historians recognize that a few Muslims managed to secretly cross the Atlantic Ocean with the European settlers during the sixteenth century. Later they imported African Muslim slaves but historians considered both Africans and indigenous peoples passive participants in forming Latin American society until evidence refuted these erroneous views. Furthermore, the public had assumed that only single Spanish men went to the American unknown until historians challenged this view, and now women’s role is fully recognized in the colonizing enterprise. Additionally, despite the ban on non-Catholics, researchers found many Jews in the Americas, even if the Spanish Inquisition found out and killed almost all of them. In line with revisionist history, my research pioneers in three aspects. It demonstrates that Muslim men and women went to early Spanish America. Also, the Spanish Crown allowed Muslims to legally go to its American colonies. Additionally, the documents substantiate my new findings that Muslims went to sixteenth-century Latin America as complete families. They mostly proceeded out of Spain as the wards or servant-slaves of Spanish settlers after superficially converting to Catholicism. The present study follows two case studies that record Muslim families in early sixteenth-century Spanish America. Paradoxically, their very persecutor—the Spanish Church and its terrible Inquisitorial arm—established their contested belief in Islam.

DNA and historical evidence indicate many colonial French Canadians were of Sephardic Jewish ancestry

The Spanish Inquisition in 1492 resulted in the deaths of thousands of Spanish Jews and the exile of around 150,000. The Huguenots and Acadians who settled in Colonial French Canada are assumed to be of Christian faith and ancestry. To support this hypothesis, the researcher uses a novel combination of methods drawn from historical records and artifacts, genealogies and DNA testing. In recent years, this combination of methods has led to the discovery that several of the Plymouth Colony settlers, Central Appalachian Colonial settlers, and Roanoke Colony settlers were of Sephardic Jewish origin. Thus, using the new methodology of ancestral DNA tracing, the researcher document that the majority of Huguenot and Acadian colonists in French Canada were of Sephardic Jewish ancestry. They are most likely descended from Sephardic Jews who fled to France from the Iberian Peninsula in the late 1300s and early 1500s. The researcher additionally propose that some members of both groups continued to practice Judaism in the new world, thus becoming secret Jews or crypto-Jews. The researcher also finds evidence of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry in both groups.

Othello’s ‘Travailous History’

This article aims to relocate Shakespeare’s Othello the Moor in the cultural roots of Moorish Spain, arguing that he is not a Moor in the inclusionary, monolithic sense of the term, but a diasporic Iberian finding refuge in fifteenth–sixteenth-century Venice. It seeks to contextualise Shakespeare’s play by setting the Othello/Iago binary as an epitomisation of the Spanish inquisition. Giving Othello, the Moor of Venice an allegorical reading against its historical background facilitates better perception of the play’s motivational dynamics: why a Moor? And why such extreme enmity? To substantiate the argument, textual and contextual factors, such as characters’ appellations and the Moorish refugee’s ‘royal siege’, are viewed from a different perspective, factors designed to direct the mind towards specific realities, already visible to the playwright’s audience.

The long-run effects of religious persecution: Evidence from the Spanish Inquisition

Religious persecution is common in many countries around the globe. There is little evidence on its long-term effects. We collect data from all across Spain, using information from more than 67,000 trials held by the Spanish Inquisition between 1480 and 1820. This comprehensive database allows us to demonstrate that municipalities of Spain with a history of a stronger inquisitorial presence show lower economic performance, educational attainment, and trust today. The effects persist after controlling for historical indicators of religiosity and wealth, ruling out potential selection bias.

Foreign Models

This chapter examines gay reparations models from Spain, Britain, and Germany that American gay rights activists emulate. It recounts the long and dark histories of repression of gay people in those three countries, and analyzes how those histories encapsulate the most paradigmatic examples of the repression of homosexuality in the West. It discusses Spain’s repression of homosexuals, which goes back to the Middle Ages and the burning of “sodomites” at the stake during the Spanish Inquisition. It also reviews Britain’s Victorian-era accusation of “gross indecency” and Germany’s notorious Paragraph 175, which justified a bloody crackdown on homosexuality by the Nazis. It explores the significant steps Spain, Britain, and Germany have taken to reckon with their legacies of anti-gay discrimination.

La Inquisición en España en textos de viajeros alemanes del siglo XVIII = The Spanish Inquisition According to Several Texts by German Travellers of the 18th Century

En este artículo se aborda el rastro de la Inquisición española en varios textos de viajeros alemanes del siglo XVIII. A pesar de haber sido casi ignorado por la historiografía alemana sobre el Santo Oficio, en estos libros de viajes se puede encontrar numerosas referencias que recogen no solo evidencias sobre distintos casos, sino que aportan también información sobre la mirada desde la que dichos viajeros contemplaron la actuación de un Tribunal que se aproximaba a su fin. A los asuntos tratados, que incluyen uno de los más celebres de entonces, el procesamiento de Pablo de Olavide, se añade como anexo una lista de 38 alemanes y suizos procesados por el Santo Oficio en el siglo XVIII.AbstractThis article is about the Spanish Inquisition as it was regarded in several texts by German travellers during the 18th century. Although they were all but ignored in German studies about the Holy Office, these books contain numerous references not only to the various cases involved, but also about how the travellers assessed the workings of the Trinbunal as it was nearing its end. Apart from the various cases cited, including the trial of Pablo de Olavide, which was one of the most famous of that time, we include also a list of 38 German and Swiss citizens indicted by the Holy Office in the 18th century.