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Between Court and Confessional explores the lives of Spanish inquisitors, closely examining the careers and writings of five sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inquisitors. Kimberly Lynn considers what shaped particular inquisitors, what kinds of official experience each accumulated, and to what ends each directed his acquired knowledge and experience. The case studies examine the complex interplay of careerism and ideological commitments evident in inquisitorial activities. Whereas many studies of the Spanish Inquisition tend to depict inquisitors as faceless and interchangeable, Lynn probes the lives of individual inquisitors to show how inquisitors' operations in their social, political, religious and intellectual worlds set the Inquisition in motion. By focusing on specific individuals, this study explains how the theory and regulations of the Inquisition were rooted in local conditions, particular disputes and individual experiences.

years. At the reception, I served as the foreigner, who arrived speaking a strange language. Who was this Fernand Braudel, whose long book on the Mediterranean (the 1949 edition) I had just read with such excitement? What was the École des Annales, whose journal I pawed through most mornings in the library's tombs to peruse book reviews? But one of the older students, an ordained Lutheran minister I later learned, asked bluntly the real question on everyone's mind, "Why Spain?" The era of Charles V constituted a fine choice, but, "Wouldn't it be better to study something important?" he inquired in a tone of genuine pastoral concern. Even in a huge graduate program in November 1966, Spanish history counted for nothing. My attempt to offer the justification from J. H. Elliott's Imperial Spain, 1469-1716 (1964), around which I had organized part of my special undergraduate reading course before departing for Wisconsin, fell flat with this audience. I still lived in a bubble of naïveté, unable to see that these students were unconsciously prepping me for later job

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