On 25 February 1888, the church historian Philip Schaff sent Henry Charles Lea a notice that called for a meeting at Schaff’s home in New York. It led to the founding of the American Society for Church History. Schaff invited Lea, a Philadelphia publisher who had made a name for himself through publication, a year prior, of his work on the medieval inquisition. The society’s purpose would be to educate and evangelise about Protestant Christian history. Schaff was an acerbic and cultured critic of ‘our Catholic friends’ and encouraged this attitude among society members. Lea needed no coaxing, but it helped to be in an illustrious group of fellow historians to confirm his stance.

Henry Charles Lea (1825–1909) left a prodigious literary legacy on historical subjects, almost none of which related to his own Unitarianism. He was the grandson of Mathew Carey, a Catholic printer who in 1798 was responsible for publishing the first Catholic version of the Bible in the new United States. Lea received no formal education as a boy. Instead he was tutored at home. He demonstrated an early perspicacity in natural science, but he eventually began to show interest in historical subjects, mainly as a way of tracing out the social values his family had helped instill in the new nation, particularly freedom of religion, association and thought. He carried on a somewhat surreptitious love affair with his cousin, whom he eventually married. Assuming the family publishing business, he championed economic enterprise and civic participation, was a stalwart defender of the Union during the American Civil War, wrote numerous pamphlets, but suffered from nerves and fatigue. He was a philanthropic liberal, even to Catholic causes when they came begging.

Lea’s work on the history of auricular confession, sacerdotal celibacy and the Spanish Inquisition titillated his readers with his mastery of source material and the bold inferences they held about the corruption of the Catholic hierarchy. He was able to marshal a team of archivists, librarians, translators and shippers to convey a large quantity of manuscript material to and from Philadelphia. This decades-long operation required considerable financing, meticulous record- keeping and enormous trust on the part of European institutions, which routinely sent bulky document caches to Lea’s home. His assurance in meeting all costs – and returning the manuscripts on time and in good order – helped him to assemble a unique set of heritage materials that now resides at the Kislak Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The staying power of Lea’s labour is evidenced by modern-day writers, all of whom feel in some way indebted to him.

Richard L. Kagan, now an emeritus professor of history at Johns Hopkins and an influential scholar of the Inquisition in his own right, has gone through every box in the Lea archive – over 200 of them. He has penned a solid and fair biography of Lea, a figure with whom his own scholarship has had to reckon. Kagan’s is an important corrective to the 1931 ‘official’ biography of Lea by Edward Sculley Bradley, who took the Lea family’s memorabilia as a guide, a body of material curated mainly by Lea’s son Arthur. He likely had a hand in editing Bradley’s study in order to burnish his father’s reputation. Kagan, by contrast, has had the benefit of examining all the Lea papers, worked with Lea’s own library which has been recreated within the Penn library’s special collections division, and culled from numerous other collections in Philadelphia and beyond. Kagan’s thoroughness is coupled with his balance, especially when it comes to calling out Lea for his anti-Catholic lapses. This is particularly welcome in view of Lea’s near relentless attacks on the medieval Church – both its officials and its practices. At once venomous and dispassionate, Lea could insist that his histories were predicated on assertions that were well documented. He was merely reporting back what history revealed to him and he was able to extract moral judgements on his subjects accordingly. However, Kagan makes clear that he often embellished, as in reference to Lea’s near fascination with torture as a method not only to extract confession but to use the threat of it as a normal part of the inquisitorial process. To hear Lea tell it, torture was an ‘exquisite’ method, ‘hideous’ in its effects, and both ‘frequent’ and ‘unsparing’ (p. 179). In fact, Kagan notes that the written record provides comparatively few instances where torture was used. Lea’s multiple references to it suggests that Catharism, among other heresies, was erased in a bloodbath carried out by a cadre of crazed zealots.

Lea’s copious descriptions of depraved clergy (and one must admit, there were more than a few) were all lumped under one umbrella: sacerdotalism. Kagan notes that this catch-all term served Lea well, leading him to complain that it prevented an otherwise noble instantiation of Christ’s Church from completing its mission. Its dark legacy continued to cover the papacy with a pall. Further, sacerdotalism’s degradation retarded the progress of Western Europe and the Americas where Spanish and French influences were seeded. It was antithetical to authentic freedom, humanism and peace. So earnest were Lea’s arguments that he became a pillar in the historical guild in the United States. His papers give some indication of this. They are strewn with numerous laurels, even from across the Atlantic, as when he was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences or the Academia nazionale de Lincei in Rome. Under the cover of these affiliations, and on the strength of his source material, Lea’s work has been spared from accusations that he was strictly a polemicist.

In his own day, however, this was not universally held. For example, several authors have pointed to the row created when Lord Acton asked Lea to write the chapter on the ‘The eve of the Reformation’ for the Cambridge Modern History. Some thought reaching out to a notorious anti-Catholic bigot would yield a wholly biased essay while others thought Acton was hoodwinked into offering Lea the opportunity. The two men knew one another because of a review Acton published on Lea’s History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, which was printed in the English Historical Review in October 1888. For the most part, Acton raved over it, but picked at Lea’s understanding of the rise of heresy and the Inquisition’s creation. It did not dissuade Acton from offering Lea the chance to contribute to the Cambridge Modern History and to do so without inhibiting him in any way. Acton died in 1902 and never uttered a public word of displeasure at Lea’s essay. However, critics were legion and a long, lingering feud between Catholic historians and Lea commenced. Though Kagan doesn’t mention him, among Lea’s most vociferous detractors was the Jesuit Herbert Thurston, who, nearly three decades after Lea’s death, found the American’s writings on auricular confession, indulgences and the Reformation ‘intolerably biased and inaccurate’. Thurston’s contemporary, G. G. Coulton, a Cambridge medievalist, thought the Jesuit’s criticisms of Lea were overly harsh, calling them ‘libelous and false to a ludicrous and almost inconceivable degree’.

Whatever one draws from the mixed historiography, Lea’s oeuvre continues to wield a measure of authoritativeness. Kagan’s book exhibits a fascination with Lea that extends beyond his historical work to include his business, civic and political interests as well as some of the more intimate details of the first several decades of Lea’s life and context. His facility in the sources of the Spanish Inquisition, in which Lea himself was deeply immersed, certainly gives this biography an edge. He is also quite skilled in giving the reader insight into Lea’s fellow scholars, their writings and the mutual enterprise they shared. As a ‘retired’ scholar with time to ponder the connections in Lea’s papers, the result is a pleasurable and informative exposé on one of America’s foremost intellects.