The Protestant stimulus to historiography was much stronger in France, and there was also no inquisition or Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Latin: "Index of Prohibited Books") to suppress free inquiry.
Although little harm could have come to him in the United Provinces (or, probably, in France, where there was no Inquisition, and considerable sympathy for Galileo), Descartes wanted to avoid arguments with theologians.
There are indeed some serious questions to be asked, but this was no inquisition.
And for most of us, no inquisition takes place on your 'return' to the lab.
When you read 16th- through 19th-century Ottoman court records, for instance, you realize there was no inquisition of magicians, no witch hunts, as was the case in Christian Europe, despite the jurists' harsh punishments".
Many great Roman names were implicated, falsely or not, and while that inquisition lasted no one on Capri was safe.
Nor could the Inquisition alone have condemned Spain to centuries of backwardness in science and education; after all, Cervantes thrived while the Inquisition did.
While the Inquisition was most notorious and most effective in Spain, it spread throughout Europe, taking hold in Italy, for instance, long enough to burn up Bruno and shut up Galileo.
Yet she ends with this chillingly condescending sentence: "While the Inquisition will never be totally divorced from the dark image that surrounds its activities nor its excesses condoned, recent research has enabled us to draw a more balanced picture of the nature and ambit of the authority it exercised".
