The inquisitorial office in the sixteenth-century Low Countries. A dynamic perspective.
with Gert Gielis, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 66(2015) 47-66.
The long acknowledged Mediterranean character of the early modern Inquisition(s) has recently been positioned within a global context. This article aims to integrate the Habsburg Low Countries into this newly emerging picture. Firstly, it argues that the Inquisition there should be understood as an office rather than as a tribunal: only individual inquisitors were called upon as specialised judges for offending clerics, or for judicial procedures de fide conducted by laymen. Secondly, this article emphasises that the inquisitorial office underwent continual redefinition in the four decades of its existence. Hence, the situation in the Low Countries offers a contrast to the religious persecution in France and England, where secular courts more clearly monopolised jurisdiction over heresy, and to the institutionally organised tribunals on the Iberian and Italian peninsulas.
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