Henry Kelly offers a new appraisal of English inquisitorial proceedings. He begins with the mode of a trial’s inception at the end of the twelfth century and ends with an assessment of its character at the conclusion of the Elizabethan reign. The book commences with a helpful overview of the relevant medieval papal canon law, but the core of it is a series of case studies, presented in chronological order, which assess the degree to which selected English proceedings conformed to the prescriptions of the Corpus iuris canonici.

A major virtue of Kelly’s book is its careful attention to subtle variations between different forms of inquisitorial proceedings. Many historians make only a perfunctory distinction between proceedings ex officio mero, which were purely inquisitorial, and proceedings ex officio promoto (in the continental nomenclature inquisitio cum promovente), which were conducted for the judge’s office at the instigation of a third party. But Kelly, to his considerable credit, generally observes when one form or the other was being used, and the result is that his case studies are conducted with more finesse than one usually meets with.

A deeper exploration of such subtleties could actually strengthen Kelly’s rebuttal of certain common law criticisms. One of the greatest misgivings that common lawyers had about inquisition was, after all, that it combined the roles of judge and prosecutor – precluding or limiting, they said, any chance of impartial mediation between two sides. Just who was doing the prosecuting mattered a great deal. Some aspects of the inquisitorial proceedings Kelly studies hint at dynamics that perhaps undermine this particular critique. The judges presiding over Stephen Gardiner’s deprivation proceedings, for example, appointed two proctors of the Court of Arches to act as promotors of the office. If these promotors were mere stand-ins for the judges, then it is curious that the judges – as one can infer from Kelly’s own narration – sometimes denied the promotors’ motions (p 384). What was going on here? Why were the judges using promotors, and how (if at all) did the choice alter the rules in play? There is more to be said.

It might also be desirable to refine the book’s suggestion that English inquisitorial practice during the Elizabethan reign aligned more closely with papal canon law than it had in earlier periods. Near the book’s beginning, for example, Kelly acknowledges that proctors (whose purpose, as he presents it, was to stand in for absent defendants) were sometimes allowed in inquisitorial proceedings. Yet this description, which is not updated as the book progresses, somewhat understates the role that they had come to occupy in England by the end of the book’s chronology. A fuller exploration of manuscript material (from which the book might have benefited in other ways, too) reveals that during the Elizabethan period, the use of proctors by inquisitorial defendants – quite out of conformity with Romano-canonical prescriptions – became far more typical. By the mid-1590s, the use of proctors by defendants in at least one exclusively inquisitorial venue in the Diocese of Norwich appears, in fact, to have become almost mandatory; and advocates were being allowed in some inquisitorial criminal proceedings at York from at least the early 1560s. Such allowances make certain criticisms of inquisition’s historical practice less applicable to the Elizabethan reign than they would be otherwise. But they were a departure from, rather than a return to, the Romano-canonical rules.

There are some mistakes of the lapsus digitorum type. Robert Beale is called ‘James’ (p 411); Kelly says that opposition to the oath ex officio began in the seventeenth century (p 418), shortly after he has finished describing the mid-Elizabethan campaign against its use (p 412). Others are slightly more puzzling. Meaning to correct John Guy, Kelly, for example, claims that Richard Cosin’s defence of office proceedings ‘appealed only to “classic” canon law’ – i.e. to ‘collections of medieval law and their standard commentaries’ – rather than to (as Guy put it) ‘the latest textbooks and manuals of Roman canon law’ (p 410). The reviewer cannot agree. The printed marginalia of Cosin’s book bulge with references, yes, to older mainstays like Hostiensis and Panormitanus, but point also to late sixteenth-century canonists like Alfonso Villagut; not to mention civilian late-comers like Clarus and Alciatus.Footnote ¹ And the book’s use of Cosin is not always smooth. Kelly, for instance, quotes Cosin’s claim that in English proceedings oaths ex officio – in accordance with Qualiter II, the eighth constitution of the Fourth Lateran Council – were only administered after defendants had been provided with a written description of their offences (p 411). Yet he omits to quote Cosin’s immediate caveats. Qualiter II, Cosin wrote, did not specify ‘at what time [such allegations] are to be opened’ unto the defendant, ‘other then when he is to use his defence’. Cosin followed this observation with nine outright exceptions to the rule, which would apply even if Qualiter II had made such a stipulation.Footnote ² To the reviewer this would not seem the firmest ground upon which to stake (if in part) a defence of inquisition’s fairness.

The book’s physical qualities are excellent. The print is crisp; the paper is of a respectable grade; the book is properly case-bound; and its sheets are gathered into sections so that they open flat. References, best of all, take the form of footnotes rather than endnotes. In all there is much to recommend it.