The Inquisition horrifies us today and when Edgar Allen Poe wanted to pluck a nightmarish book to feature in The Fall of the House of Usher he looked no further than the 14th century Directorium Inquisitorum of Nicholas Eymerich, the most substantial Inquisitors' manual of the period. The Inquisition of the 14th century saw the burning of Joan of Arc, the Templars and Marguerite Porete along with the foundations of the Witch Trials to come. To better understand this period, let's explore the first Inquisitors' manuals where torture becomes commonplace, public punishment replaces penance and Magic is ruled to be Heresy, dramatically shaping the history of Western Esotericism.

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Recommended Readings:

Gui - Practica Inquisitionis heretice pravitatis - https://archive.org/details/practicai...
Ugolini - De Haereticis - https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_y7...
Eymerich - Directorium Inquisitorum - https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_fl...

Hill - Inquisition in the Fourteenth Century: The Manuals of Bernard Gui and Nicholas Eymerich - 978-1903153871
Given - Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc - 978-0801487590
Sullivan - The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors - 978-0-226-78167-9
Wakefield & Evans - Heresies of the High Middle Ages - 978-0231096324