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Michael Ward and Peter S. Williams (eds), C. S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner

appeared from Christendom until its reappearance after the European expansion into the Americas, to be condemned once again, most clearly by Pope Paul III, and opposed by religious orders such as the Jesuits in Paraguay. For instance: the Spanish Inquisition was not the bloody terror alleged. Rather than being about hunting down heretics (the conversos, former Jews and Muslims), it ‘replaced mob violence against them with due process’ (p. 128); and fewer than 2 per cent of all those brought to trial between 1540 and 1700 were executed – five or six per year – a total of 626, compared with the 750 per year hanged in England between 1530 and 1630 (pp. 121–2). Scholarly evidence of the falsity of much of the standard historical account of Catholicism has been mounting for a long time. Stark summarizes it and references it and goes into great and convincing detail, using both his own research and a wide range of contemporary historians. What is presented here, however, is not itself new scholarly investigation, but more a polemic. It’s all good stuff. Exploding the (lazily) received views of how things were is always satisfying – at least to those against whom myths are used as sticks to beat them. But the pleasure wears thin. One looks for some explanation of why falsehoods took hold in the first place and were then found sufficiently credible to become the standard account. The explanation offered here is a simple one: the bitter animus of anti-Catholic propagandists whose lies were ‘repeated ever after by malicious or misled historians’ (p. 119) intent on bolstering the narrative of the dawn of rationality in modernity, overcoming the darkness of the preceding Christian-inspired ages. The villains of the piece for Stark are Voltaire, Hume and Gibbon – originators of the Enlightenment, ‘that utterly misnamed era’ (p. 94). As explanation, however, this is but another competing, and itself well-rehearsed, narrative. Beyond the polemics, however, there is the issue of who can rightly lay claim to modernity. Stark rejects (not entirely fairly, in my judgement) Max Weber’s portrayal of its (capitalism’s) Protestant provenance. Charles Taylor, on the other hand, has recovered ‘Catholic modernity’. Modernity itself has now become newly and freshly contested as a construct. Perhaps the historical animosities might be more clearly explained if they were set in some such new interpretative framework.