These books offer very different perspectives and serve different purposes, but each contributes usefully, if unequally, to enriching a nonspecialist's view of the ‘Holy Office’. Bethencourt's work, which is essentially an expanded and updated English translation of a remarkable study originally published in French in 1995 (but omitted from Black's bibliography), is by far the more ambitious of the two and deserves the lion's share of this review.

Bethencourt's goal is stated in his title, affirmed in a lengthy introduction, and largely achieved. He attempts nothing less than a worldwide comparative investigation of three major long-lasting institutions of early modern southern Europe (two possessed colonial branches in America and Asia, while the third reached only as far as Avignon and Malta). Insofar as Bethencourt acknowledges a predecessor in his enterprise, it is a nineteenth-century North American, Henry Charles Lea, who ‘came close to a global history of the institution’ and ‘opened up far more comparative perspectives on the Roman and Portuguese Inquisitions than his immediate successors’ (p. 16). Like Lea, Bethencourt writes a form of extremely sophisticated institutional history and, again like Lea, Bethencourt prefers to construct his account from primary sources. Unlike Lea, Bethencourt is ‘inspired by cross-readings of Weber, Foucault, Bourdieu and Geertz … among many others’ (p. 2) to extend his account to such things as emblems and iconography.

Bethencourt is admirably positioned to undertake this vast enterprise. He is originally Portuguese, providing him with local access to the least well-known of Europe's three great Holy Offices. Portugal's was the middle one, founded over fifty years after the Spanish inquisition but before the Roman Inquisition; it was the smallest in size with only four tribunals (the Spanish system had twenty and the Roman system supervised forty-seven), but it was also the one whose records are most complete: those in Spain (where the inquisition was abolished three times) were pillaged by liberal revolutionaries, while the central records of the Roman inquisition were stolen by Napoleon with only scattered fragments returned after 1815.

When describing his approach as ‘an intermediate level … between global history and “national” history’ (p. 2), his unusually cosmopolitan background leads Bethencourt to put quotation marks around ‘national’ but not around global. After earning his highest degree in Italy doing what became the first version of this work, Bethencourt moved from Lisbon, where he ran Portugal's national library, to direct the Paris branch of the Gulbenkian Foundation before moving to England as an endowed professor at King's College, London. To him, ‘national’ perspectives obscure the specificity of each inquisitorial tribunal: ‘It becomes impossible to define the culture shared by different tribunals’, he asserts, and ‘in general, we lack a global vision or a comparative approach. This is precisely the purpose of my book’ (p. 28).

Once readers move beyond this meaty introduction, they will discover Bethencourt's ten chapters of 1995 arranged in the same order, but each of them now contains varying amounts of new information. The breadth and depth which marked the 1995 French version re-emerge, including rich details as early as Rome's only massive auto da fe with 250 penitents, held under a Spanish pope in 1498 (pp. 311–12), or as late as an Anglican priest's visit in 1808 to the Portuguese tribunal at Goa, then under English military protection (pp. 433–4). Each edition contains forty illustrations; a dozen of the most important appear in both. The same eleven tables appear in both versions, but the new English edition adds three maps.

Throughout Bethencourt's account, it is the papal inqusition of 1542 which appears institutionally underdeveloped alongside its older Iberian counterparts – an odd conclusion when comparing ‘tribunals of faith’ whose ultimate purpose was to identify and punish heresies and whose legitimacy everywhere devolved ultimately from Rome. But the Roman institution, with its numerous small branches run by monks rather than canon lawyers, never holding visitations and in latent or overt conflict with civil authorities, seems fragile alongside the robust, status-conscious bureaucracies of the Holy Offices in Spain and Portugal. Bethencourt calculates that Rome's forty-five Italian tribunals held no more formal trials than Portugal's four (roughly 50,000 each, one-fourth of his estimated Spanish totals), and the Roman inquisition executed only half as many people as the Portuguese (pp. 443–4). Yet the Roman inquisition managed to accomplish its major purposes: it had snuffed out Protestant heresy in the Italian peninsula by the 1580s and then disciplined ‘superstitious’ religious practices deviating from Tridentine norms. Through the related but subordinate Congregation of the Index, it also did a more thorough job of censorship than its Iberian counterparts; only the Vatican had agents at Frankfurt's annual fairs to stay current on the production of heretical books.

What separates Bethencourt's new English version most from his earlier French version are recent advances in studies of the Roman inquisition (whose archives were still closed to scholars in 1995), including a major synthesis by Andrea Del Col.Footnote ¹ And it is this institution whose history is sketched for English-language readers by Christopher Black, a veteran historian of early modern Italy but a newcomer to inquisition studies. Working within what Bethencourt calls (p. 28) an ‘anachronistic national ideology which still defines the basic framework of historical analysis’, Black offers an ‘overview of current knowledge produced by international scholars, with some input from … archival sources’ (p. vii). He delivers exactly that, with few frills; for instance, his map of Roman inquisition tribunals (p. xvi) is larger but conveys less information than Bethencourt's similar map (p. 85). Black's organisation pivots around a very brief chapter (pp. 123–30) on the 1567 execution of Pietro Carnesecchi, which separates four chapters on the tribunal's first and busiest period from four chapters on its diversifying and changing targets after the Council of Trent, principally censorship and prosecution of magical superstitions. Black's useful details include a discussion of Jewish-Christian sexual relations, where one tribunal handled 200 such cases within a century (pp. 147–9), and he notes the reliance of Italian inquisitors on Spanish procedural handbooks (p. 69); on censorship, however, expertise was reversed and Spaniards borrowed from Rome.