Henry Charles Lea (1825-1909)
Juan Antonio Llorente (1756-1823)
William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903)
John Foxe (1516-1587)
Henry Charles Lea (1825-1909)
Born into a family of wealth and influence, Lea had the best education that money could buy and all of his intellectual desires were nurtured by his parents. Tutored privately at home by Eugenius Nulty, Lea learned mathematics, chemistry, botany, and celestial navigation. He learned to read and wrote classical Greek, Latin, French and English, but, alas, only to read Spanish and Italian. Later in life, he also learned to read German and Dutch. Nourishing his teenage enthusiasm for science and nature, Lea's parents provided him with a scientific laboratory where he did work which lead to his first published paper, written at age 13, was on the salts of manganese. His interest in chemistry developed into an interest in photographic chemistry where he did pioneering work. His scientific drawings of fossil shells were used to develop engravings to illustrate his father's revision of the Synopsis of the Naiades in 1838. He also learned to appreciate art at this time, an appreciation which lead to a collecting trip to Italy in 1852 when he acquired one of the finest collections of Italian art in America at the time. Henry, under his mother's influence, developed an appreciation of poetry: Later in life, one of his diversions was to write satirical parodies of popular songs on political subjects.
Lea's maternal grandfather Matthew Carey, an immigrant to the United States from Ireland in 1784 and an employee in Benjamin Franklin's Passy print shop, began his own publishing house in Philadelphia with financial assistance from Lafayette to publish a periodical, The Pennsylvania Evening Herald. The publishing house thrived, and, upon his marriage, Henry Charles Lea's father, Issac Lea (1792-1886) entered the firm, then called Matthew Carey and Sons. Issac Lea, a distinguished naturalist in his own right and a descendant of a Philadelphia Quaker family, lost his birthright membership in the Society of Friends because of his military service during the War of 1812. On March 8, 1821, Issac Lea he married the Roman Catholic, Frances Anne Carey (1799-1873).
Due to overwork, Henry Lea suffered a nervous breakdown in 1847 and abandoned his intellectual and scientific work for some time. During his convalescence, Lea read several French memoirs of the medieval period, changing the direction of his life by creating a life-long interest in medieval history. Becoming a first-rate scholar of medieval Europe, Lea began to accumulate one of the premier libraries in America containing primary source documents on medieval history; his library went to Penn after Lea's death. On 27 May 1850, Henry Charles Lea married Anna Caroline Jaudon (1824-19?), his first cousin. During the decade of the 1850s, his four children were born: Francis "Frank" Henry Lea, (1851-1902); Charles "Charlie" Matthew, (1853-1927); Anna "Nina" Lea, (1855-1927); and Arthur Henry Lea (1859-1938).
Henry entered the family firm in 1843 and became a partner in 1851. From 1865 to 1880 he carried on the business alone; he retired in 1880 to devote his time to academic studies, civic interests, and philanthropy, leaving the management of the firm to his sons. Lea wrote his first three major works while managing the publishing business, but realized that he could not continue to pursue both his personal interests and his career at the same time. Consequently, he put aside his historical writings for a time, until he could retire from the business and allow his sons to run the firm. So in 1880, at about age 55, Lea retired from business and devoted the remainder of his life to his historical scholarship 1.
When a person has no demands on his time, no need to spend time earning a living, raising a family, or caring for a home and when all of a person's personal needs, such as cooked meals and clean clothes are provided by someone else, a lot of time and energy are freed to enable one to do extensive research. When you own a vast storehouse of primary documents on your area of research and when you add new materials by drafting a letter to your contacts throughout the world asking them to acquire the material on your behalf, one can do an enormous amount of research and writing in 30 years. Such was the second half of the life of Henry Charles Lea. Lea's major works include:
* Superstition and Force. Philadelphia, 1866, 1870, 1878, 1892.
* An Historical Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy. Philadelphia, 1867, 1884, 1907.
* Studies in Church History. Philadelphia, 1869, 1883.
A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages. 3 volumes. New York, 1888, 1906, 1922.
Chapters from the Religious History of Spain Connected with the Inquisition. Philadelphia, 1890.
A Formulary of the Papal Penitentiary in the Thirteenth Century. Philadelphia, 1892.
A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church. Philadelphia, 1896.
The Moriscos of Spain. Philadelphia, 1901.
A History of the Inquisition of Spain. 4 volumes. New York, 1906-1907.
The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies. New York, 1908.
A History of the Inquisition. 8 volumes. Complete and uniform edition of
Materials toward a History of Witchcraft. Arranged and edited by Arthur C. Howland, with an introduction by George Lincoln Burr. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1939 (published posthumously from the notes Lea was making on a book on witchcraft when he died)
Minor Historical Writings and Other Essays. Edited by Arthur C. Howland. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1942.
* work referenced by Gage
Lea corresponded with many influential medieval scholars of his time: the Henry Charles Lea collection at Penn contains 22 boxes of correspondence by and to Henry Charles Lea dating from 1860 to 1920. Lea's correspondents included several individuals whose work Gage referenced: William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838–1903, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism In Europe, 1865) and Felix Adler (1851-1943, The Position of Woman in the Present, 1892) of Cornell University
From the Preface to Superstition and Force: Torture, Ordeal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval Law (1870), Lea says of his writing style, "The aim of the following essays is simply to group together facts so that, with a slender thread of commentary, they may present certain phases of human society and progress which are not without interest for the student of history and of man. The authorities for all statements have been scrupulously cited, and it will be seen that, for the most part, they are drawn from the original sources. The conclusions the reader can verify for himself." True to his word, Lea presents copious evidence culled from papal bulls, the proceedings of church councils, and letters between ecclesiastical authorities (such as Inquisitors, bishops, and cardinals) and various popes, true primary sources, to present historical information in sometimes mind-numbing detail, which only underscores the quality of Lea's source material.
Lea truly minimizes his own religious opinions and commentary on historical events. Lea did distinguish between the doctrines taught by Jesus and written about in the Christian Bible, believing theme to be "sublime", and the institutions of religion, the Roman Catholic church and the various churches created by the Protestant reformers. Beyond that, he says little about his own religious beliefs. His commentary on the events on which he writes is only slightly more copious. After 431 pages, Lea writes of the legal system instituted by the Roman Catholic church and the Inquisition that it was the "worst body of jurisprudence invented by man2."
By allowing the story to unfold as a drama and by explaining the medieval worldview which enabled the events to occur, Lea's writing takes on extra-ordinary power. By not demonizing the leading figures in his dramas, rather, by explaining how his figures could perceive themselves and be perceived by others as good and godly men, the true horror of the Inquisition is revealed. Even in his work entitled Superstition and Force Lea speaks very little about the methods of force that were employed, noting that they had been adequately covered elsewhere. Rather, he discusses the role of force in the judicial system and the superstitious beliefs of the era which allowed people of the age to have faith in a legal system grounded on trial by ordeal and trial by combat. To read Lea's works is to journey back to a time in which the role of God and government in society were profoundly different from their role in today's society.
Juan Antonio Llorente (1756-1823)
Born into the lower nobility, Llorente's family was not rich, but it was economically comfortable. Orphaned by age 10, Llorente went to live with an uncle, a priest, who provided Llorente with a fine education. Studious, Llorente excelled in scholarship even as a youth. Because of his youth, Llorente required a papal dispensation to be ordained in 1779. Appointed vicar general of Calahorra in 1782, Llorente came under the influence of a man of letters who, by introducing him to the finest enlightenment literature of the period, changed Llorente forever. Llorente became an enlightenment despot who wanted to abolish the Inquisition, an institution which he joined in 1785.
Seventeen eighty-nine, the year in which the French Revolution began, was a watershed year throughout Europe as progressives and conservatives both monitored the news emanating form France. In the same year, Inquisitor-General Don Afustín Rubín appointed Llorente Secretary General of the Inquisition of Madrid where Llorente had access to important documents pertaining to the Inquisition. As a staunch monarchist and devoted follower of the Roman Catholic church, who did admittedly want to make some reforms, Llorente's career continued to flourish.
In 1791 King Charles IV granted him the prebend in Calahorra and in 1792 the Inquisitor-General commissioned Llorente to investigate the problems of book censorship and to develop a plan for changing the legal proceedings of the Inquisition. Then Llorente made a plunder; in 1801 he wrote a paper Discourse on Trial Proceedings in the Tribunals of the Inquisition which caused him to lose his position as secretary of the Holy Office and his access to documents. But by 1805, being restored to the king's favor, he was asked to write a history of the Basque provinces. The following year he was appointed canon of the cathedral of Toledo and in 1807 he was granted membership in the Royal Order of Spain.
In 1808, Napoleon invaded Spain and put his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. In December, Napoleon abolished the Inquisition by decree. Llorente, placed in charge of the archives of the Council of the Inquisition and of the Inquisition of Madrid, had access to all documents relating to the Inquisition through Spain. In 1813, the Spanish Parliament abolished the Inquisition. Napoleon defeated, Llorente fled to Paris for safety where in 1817-1818 he wrote The History of the Inquisition of Spain (4 volumes in French). But the Inquisition would not die. The Spanish revolution of 1820 abolished the Inquisition yet again
In 1822, the first Spanish edition of the History appears in Madrid. The influence of Llorente's History on Spanish history is immense because it provided documentary evidence that reformers needed to permanently end the Inquisition. Historians regard Llorente's History to be the first history of the Inquisition based on original documents written by someone other than an apologist for the Catholic church..
In 1823, Llorente returned to Spain under a general amnesty for Napoleon's supporters, but died shortly after his return. The Holy Office reappeared in 1823 in the form of individual juntas without official sanction. In 1834, Holy Office was eliminated for the final time.3.
Here is what Llorente himself has to say about his History compared with histories of the Inquisition written by other authors:
"No one could write a complete and authentic history of the Inquisition, who was not either an inquisitor or a secretary of the holy office. Persons holding only these situations could be permitted to make memoranda of papal bulls, the ordinances of sovereigns, the decisions of the councils of the "Supréme," of the originals of the preliminary processes for suspicion of heresy, or extracts of those which had been deposited in the archives. Being myself the secretary of the Inquisition at Madrid, during the years 1789, 1790, and 1791, I have the firmest confidence in my being able to give the world a true code of the secret laws by which the interior of the Inquisition was governed, of those laws which were veiled by mystery from all mankind, excepting those men to whom the knowledge of their political import was exclusively reserved. A firm conviction, from knowing the deep objects of this tribunal, that it was vicious in principle, in its constitution, and in the laws, notwithstanding all that has been said in its support, induced me to avail myself of the advantage my situation afforded me, and to collect every document I could procure relative to its history. My perseverance has been crowned with success far beyond my hopes, for in addition to an abundance of materials, obtained with labour and expense, consisting of unpublished manuscripts and papers, mentioned in the inventories of deceased inquisitors, and other officers of the inquisition, in 1809, 1810, and 1811, when the Inquisition in Spain was suppressed, all the archives were placed at my disposal; and from 1809 to 1812 I collected everything that appeared to me to be of consequence in the registers of the council of the Inquisition, and in the provincial tribunals, for the purpose of compiling this history.
Never has a prisoner of the Inquisition seen either the accusation against himself, or any other. No one was ever permitted to know more of his own cause than he could learn of it by the interrogations and accusations to which he was obliged to reply, and by the extracts from the declarations of the witnesses, which were communicated to him, while not only their names were carefully concealed, and every circumstance relating to time, place, and person, by which he might obtain a clue to discover his denouncers, but even if the depositions contained any thing favourable to the defence of the prisoner. The maxim on which this was founded, is, that the accused ought not to occupy himself but in replying to the chief points of his accusation, and that it was the province of the judge afterwards to compare the answers that he had made with those which had been given favourable to his acquittal. Philip Limborch and many more of veracity have erred in their histories, from their ignorance of the method of conducting an inquisitorial trial. Those authors relied wholly on the accounts of prisoners, who knew nothing of the ground-work of their own case; and the details of Eymerick, Paramo, Pegna, Carena, and some other inquisitors, are too limited to yield the necessary information.
These facts make me hope that I shall not transgress the bounds of propriety when I say, that I only can give a true history of the Inquisition, as I only possess the materials necessary for the undertaking.
I have read the most celebrated trials of the modern Inquisition, and the details given by me differ essentially from those of other historians, not excepting those in Limborch, who is the most exact of them4."
William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903)
One of the most influential nineteenth century historians, Lecky's work is readily available in both electronic and print forms, an indication of his continuing influence on historical studies. For a time influenced by Buckle, Lecky sought out a grand theory to create a "science of history," just as the new "science" of economics was then arising. Lecky saw human progress as the gradual ascendancy of rationalism over superstition. The book blurb from Ayer Company Publishers at http://www.scry.com/ayer/religion/4413059.htm, publisher of a modern edition of Lecky's work, reads, "William Lecky was a prominent Victorian historian of Irish Protestant origins; He focuses attention on major sociological factors discussing the clash between the morals of pagan Rome and the new moral attitudes accompanying the rise of Christianity. His dogmatic rationalism, which led him to somewhat simplify his overall approach by seeing whole periods of complex historical developments as simple instances of the warfare between reason and theology, is no longer fully acceptable to modern readers, yet this history of moral evolution is still a key work of nineteenth century scholarship." I concur; portions of Lecky's work are self-evidently true, although not part of the reader's conscious thoughts until his ideas are put into words. Other parts greatly simplify complex historical events, leaving the reader disappointed at what could have been a truly monumental work. Nonetheless, the work was influential in the 19th century and many of Lecky's points are still valid.
"Historian, the son of a landed gentleman of Carlow, was born near Dublin, and educated at Cheltenham and Trinity Coll., Dublin. Originally intended for the Church, he devoted himself to a literary career. His first work of importance was Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland (1861) (essays on Swift, Flood, Grattan, and O’Connell). The study of Buckle’s History of Civilisation to some extent determined the direction of his own writings, and resulted in the production of two important works, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1865), and History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869), both remarkable for learning, clearness, and impartiality. Both, however, gave rise to considerable controversy and criticism. His principal work is The History of England in the Eighteenth Century (1878-90). Characterised by the same sterling qualities as his preceding books, it deals with a subject more generally interesting, and has had a wide acceptance. His view of the American war, and the controversies which led to it, is more favourable to the English position than that of some earlier historians. Other works are Democracy and Liberty (1896), and The Map of Life (1899). Though of warm Irish sympathies, Lecky was strongly opposed to Home Rule. He sat in Parliament for his University from 1895 until his death. He received many academical distinctions, and was a Corresponding Member of the Institute of France, and one of the original members of the Order of Merit.5."
John Foxe (1516-1587)
Written in 1563, Foxe's Acts and Monuments, better known as, Book of Martyrs, details the persecutions of early Christians by pagans and, later, of non-Catholic Christians by Catholic Christians and includes a large number of official documents such as injunctions, articles of accusation, and letters. Book of Martyrs, one of the most widely read and influential books of early American history, also explains the theological arguments of the reformers, both those who chose to remain in the Catholic church and Protestants who left the Catholic Church. Full of woodcuts, even the illiterate could grasp the hideousness of the various means of torture that were used on Protestant renegades from the Catholic Church. Some scholars of colonial and early federal American history claim that the popularity of Foxe's book was exceeded in those periods only by the popularity of the Bible itself. In the mid-nineteenth century William Forbush abridged Foxe's much, much longer work (at least 7 volumes), removing most of the theological points addressed by Foxe and leaving the history of persecution. Forbush then "updated" Foxe's work by adding chapters on anti-Protestant prosecution which occurred after Foxe's death. Taught from this book at early age about the atrocities committed against Protestants by Catholics, many Protestants came to either fear or hate Catholics. Nonetheless, one of the lessons that it teaches is that unrestrained power in the hands of clergy corrupts both the state and the church.
Educated at Magdalen School and College, Oxford, under Edward VI Foxe acted as tutor to the children of the recently beheaded Earl Of Surrey. Fleeing Queen Mary, Foxe settled first in Frankfort, then Basle, before returning to England in 1539 and entering the ministry. Helped by his old pupil the Duke of Norfolk, Foxe undertook to write an early edition of his martyrology which dealt mainly with Wycliffism. While in Basle in 1559, he expanded this early work to include persecutions beginning with Wyclif and ending with Cranmer. Returning again to England, he once again expanded his martyrology and published it in 1563 under the name Acts and Monuments. A corrected edition was published in 1570. An immediate success, a Convocation of the English church in 1571 ordered that copies of the Book of Martyrs be kept in all cathedrals and in the houses of all church dignitaries for public inspection. Two more editions (1576 and 1583) came out during his life and five (1596, 1610, 1632, 1641, 1684) within the next hundred years6..
In summary, Henry Charles Lea, Juan Llorente, and William Edward Hartpole Lecky are all impeccable sources and we can thank Matilda Joslyn Gage for bringing them to our attention. Foxe, a more partisan source, sheds light on how eighteenth- and nineteenth- century American Protestants viewed Catholics.
End Notes
References
Henry Charles Lea, Torture, Ordeal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval Law, (1870)[New York: Barnes and Noble, 1996]
Henry Charles Lea, History of Inquisition of Middle Ages vol 1, (1888) [New York: Harbor Press 1955 ]
Juan Antonio Llorente, A Critical History of the Inquisition of Spain (John Lilburne 1823 abridged English edition) [Williamstown, Mass: John Lilburne Company 1967]
"Foxe's Book of Martyrs" by F.F. Urquhart in The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume II (1907) Copyright © 1907 by Robert Appleton Company Online Edition Copyright © 1999 by Kevin Knight Imprimatur. +John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02681a.htm accessed April 8, 2001
Lecky, William Edward Hartpole from bibliomania at http://www.bibliomania.com/2/3/259/1255/23169/1.html accessed Sept. 4, 2001
Lecky, William Edward Hartpole, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Ratonalism in Europe book blurb at Ayer Company Publishers at http://www.scry.com/ayer/religion/4413059.htm