God's Jury : The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

For centuries states have used their power to censor information, to conduct surveillance, to impose belief, to manipulate and to punish. Cullen Murphy's extraordinary, provocative new book explores the idea that the Inquisition - the Catholic body that existed in Europe (and beyond) for over 700 years - is not a medieval oddity, but is intrinsically bound up with the creation of the modern world. "God's Jury" shows how the creation of the Inquisition epitomized the moment when the West passed from one kind of world to another, and when persecution acquired a distinctly modern platform: requiring record-keeping, a law system, communication structures, bureaucracy, an educated professional class - and a terrifying sense of certainty. Exploring the Inquisition from its establishment in 1231 onwards, Murphy argues that not only did its offices survive into the twentieth century, its spirit lingers on in the modern world too. Travelling from freshly opened Vatican archives to the detention camps of Guantanamo and the filing cabinets of the Third Reich, he traces the Inquisition's legacy to show how, as time went on, its techniques became the standard operating procedure of secular persecution. With vivid immediacy and authority, "God's Jury" portrays the Inquisition as a new phase in the battle between the individual private conscience and the forces that try to contain it. It is, Murphy argues, a central contest of the modern era and the centuries that lie ahead.

Cullen Murphy is Vanity Fair's editor at large and the author of Are We Rome? and The Word According to Eve. He was previously managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly.