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This comprehensive three-volume history of the medieval Inquisition by the influential American scholar Henry Charles Lea, first published in 1888, was firmly based on primary sources, and adopted a rationalist approach that departed from the pious tone of earlier histories of the middle ages. Lea was convinced that the Inquisition was not arbitrarily devised and implemented but was an inevitable consequence of forces that were dominant in thirteenth-century Christian society. In order to give as full a picture of the Inquisition as possible, Lea first examines the jurisprudence of the period and explores the events that prompted the Church to set up such an institution. Volume 2 describes the Inquisition in France, Spain, Italy and Germany, and local opposition to it. The final volume focuses on the impact of the Inquisition on scholarship and intellectual life, faith, politics and society.