Review: Secret Files of the Inquisition (PBS Series)

[lunadelcorvo]

I am a big fan of PBS in general. So when a documentary series covering the history of the Inquisition and some of the major heretical movements in medieval Europe showed up on my Netflix recommendations list, I was cautiously optimistic. (I say cautiously because so far, in my experience, history documentaries tend to be dismal in terms of you know, actual history, having instead an alarming and overwhelming tendency to favor sensationalism over fact every time.) But being PBS, I thought the chances of some actual history leaking in were good. Ah, hope springs eternal! Sadly, I was disappointed.

After a predictably dramatic (and sensationalized introduction – almost de rigeuer for this sort of production), the series begins with the Cathar heresy. However, it glosses over the heyday of Catharism in Europe in the first ten minutes (badly, needless to say) and instead jumps right into the supposed account of the small town of Montaillou in the French Pyrenees. Now this in itself is odd for several reasons. One, the Inqusition (initially a body created for investigation, not murder and mayhem, as this series luridly suggests) was founded directly in response to what even the Vatican considered a disaster – the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of southern France. Montaillou was a small remote town, and didn’t fall under the eye of the Church until some time after the Inquisition was founded.

What’s worse however, are the “experts” who appear on screen to give credence to the dramatized action (complete with overly dramatic voiceover). For this section, the main authority is a novelist, who, according to the website for her novel, read a French account of Montaillou while studying French literature in her undergraduate. From this, apparently entranced by the romanticism of it, she wrote the novel whose title appears with her name on screen. (The book is not noted as a novel, leaving the viewer to assume it is a volume of history rather than fiction.)

This is pretty much typical of the series )or at least as much of it as I could stomach watching). Part one, at least is a small handful of facts, picked seemingly at random, pasted together with a patois of drama and pseudo-history. I did look at the list of sources listed on the PBS site, but found little to convince me that later installments would be of any higher quality. The series lists among its bibliography James Carroll (of “Contantine’s Sword” fame, or perhaps infamy is the better term; my review of that is here),  Mark Pegg (author of “The Most Holy War,” which I reviewed here), and Michael Baigent, the fellow behind the Holy Grail, bloodline of Christ business that formed the basis for the DaVinci Code. All of these men are known for work on the medieval church which is spotty at best. Clearly PBS was not particularly rigorous in its research.
Yes, they did list a few more authoritative sources, among them Malcolm barber, one of the most respected historians on the subject of medieval heresy and the Episcopal Inquisition, but I saw little evidence of his work and far more of the influence of the former.

The series also seems happy to present events from a single (and somewhat myopic) viewpoint. For example, in presenting the Albigensian Crusade, it is suggested that the devastation of the Languedoc was the intent of the Church. Not only do they fail to mention the murder of the papal legate sent to the court of Raymond of Toulouse, which was the last in along string of provocations from the Cather side, they also utterly ignore the machinations of the French nobles, only to eager to sweep in and reclaim lands long under the control of English. It was this desire to recapture any territory possible which accounts for the awful brutality of the Albigensian Crusades at least as much (I would argue more) than any sentiment of the Church itself.

Another thing, minor, perhaps, but it bugged me – they showed the Inquisitors accompanied by Templar knights. But to my knowledge the Templars were not involved with the inquisition at all, that is until they were on the wrong end of it, and then only by virtue of being offered up as sacrificial fodder to placate the King of France and protect the name of Pope Boniface VIII. I suspect the Templar presence is inspired by Baigent and his ilk; I’m surprised they didn’t try to claim the Grail was being hidden in Montaillou, too.

It is just this convenient ignorance of the context of events, together with a seeming reliance on the same old sensationalism surrounding the Inquisition, which is itself a product of protestant and subsequent romantic literary and historic traditions that makes this series no better than anything the History Channel puts out (which may be damning with faint praise, or is that praising with faint damnation?). All in all, if you like hijinks and mayhem in the Middle Ages, enjoy this for entertainment value, but don’t look to this series for anything resembling actual history.

Comments

[nygoldfish54.livejournal.com]

I totally loved this post because I don't really know anything about the Inquisition except a lot of people were tortured, killed, and now it's something the Catholic Church "regrets."

I will defend the interviewees only to the extent that, as someone who got an education on how to cut footage to fit into what you need it to be, you can literally cut anything anybody says to look like/sound like/imply whatever you want. The novelist, for example, could have had some true things distorted by editing. She very well could have been ball to the wall wrong (probably was, based on your research of her website) but there is also a chance that they cut what was said to enhance their "vision." It's the worst part of documentaries. I hated doing them in school.

[raven-moon.livejournal.com]

It's not so much the statements made; they and the whole thing were in pretty good sync. It's the sources themselves; it would be much like citing J.K. Rowling as an authority on medieval alchemy. I do know that documentaries are edited and assembled to maximize the drama, with fact and accuracy consigned to the cutting room floor (as it were). I'm just not sure these sources would have had much to add in any case...

[raven-moon.livejournal.com]

On, and glad you liked it! LOL Two things to consider vis a vis the Inquisition: With regard to torture; yes, they used torture. However, at that time, civil courts used torture as a matter of course, and the Church's limits on how much, how often were quite a bit tighter (initially at least; the Spanish Inquisition got out of hand by even the Vatican's own reckoning at the time) than those of the secular authority. Also, the percent of accused that were executed in the Inquisitorial courts was actually lower than any secular court of the time (inasmuch as we have records for each, naturally).

Secondly, without defending the idea of trying and executing anyone over religion, it is the case that even the Spanish Inquisition accounted for far fewer deaths than is commonly thought. Much or our 'popular' idea of the inquisition is based first on the protestant anti-Catholic rhetoric of the Reformation era (whose own records on dealing with dissenters is far from sterling) and Enlightenment historiographical tradition which was (laudably, if at times inaccurately) anti-religion. All of this was then picked up by the Romantic and Gothic literary traditions, which gave us many a fictional account of the virginal girl being subjected to unspeakable and lurid depravity at the hands of the cowled inquisitor....

So while it was by no means a good thing, it was never quite the bloodbath is has been supposed to be, and contextually speaking, was not at all outside the normal level of brutality or repressiveness of the time period. I tend to be pretty passionate about this point, because I think we are heading into a new sort of 'neo-medievalism' at the hands of the GOP/RR, and unless we know how these things really happened, and what they were and were not, they could happen again....