society. Except for the Languedocian region of southern
France, inquisitorial activity declined in the 14th century.
After the mid-16th century, the Inquisition became an
important arm of the COUNTER-REFORMATION. Individual
communities (e.g., Rome, Modena, Venice, and Spain)
had their own inquisitorial bodies; the most famous are
the SPANISH INQUISITIONand the Roman Inquisition. The
former was founded by Tomás de TORQUEMADAand was
infamous for its severity. In Spain, confiscated properties
went to the royal coffers, and the Spanish Inquisition was
entirely independent of Rome. The Roman Inquisition
(reestablished in 1542) was given strict procedural rules
by Francisco Peña. No matter whether in Madrid, Rome,
or Modena, the Inquisition was a dreaded instrument for
heresy hunting. Once charged with heresy by a delator
(informer), the accused was imprisoned and intensely
questioned about his heresy. It was said that in the Inqui-
sition’s prisons one’s diet consisted of “the bread of sorrow
and the water of tribulation.” If the charge was not too se-
vere, the accused might be imprisoned for several years or,
occasionally, released after the trial and sentencing. In
more serious cases, if the accused was found to be unre-
pentant or was a relapsed heretic, the sentence was death.
The heretic was then “relaxed” to the secular authorities,
who burned him or her at the stake.
In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the local and
Roman inquisitions were active against both famous intel-
lectuals and village eccentrics whose theological ideas
went beyond the rather straitened bounds of Counter-
Reformation orthodoxy. Among the victims of the Inquisi-
tion’s investigations during this period were the philoso-
phers Francesco PATRIZI, Giordano BRUNO, and Tommaso
CAMPANELLA, and the scientist GALILEO GALILEI. Of these,
only Bruno was executed; Galileo ended his days under
house arrest and Campanella spent many years in prison.
The examination and fate of the miller Domenico
Scandella (known as Menoccio) from Montereale in
Friuli, burned at the stake in 1599, is studied by Carlo
Ginzburg in The Cheese and the Worms and may stand for
those of thousands of obscure victims with unconven-
tional reading habits, inquiring minds, or social eccentric-
ities who fell foul of the Inquisition in one of its many
manifestations.
Further reading: Carlo Ginzburg, Il formaggio e i
vermi (1976), as The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of
a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins
University Press and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1980); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou (New York:
George Braziller, 1978); Benjamin Netanyahu, The Origins
of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (New York:
New York Review of Books, 2001); Edward M. Peters, In-
quisition (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press,
repr. 1989).
Inquisition, Spanish See SPANISH INQUISITION
Institutes, The The popular English name for CALVIN’s
Christianae religionis institutio, the principal text of the
Calvinist or Reformed Church. The first edition, pub-
lished at Basle in 1536, was a brief manual of six chapters
based on the framework of the catechism and intended as
a short textbook of reformed orthodoxy. Its success
prompted Calvin to expand it considerably, so that by the
time of the definitive edition of 1559 it was five times its
original length. Its 80 chapters and four books now com-
prised a complete handbook of the reformed religion: a
systematic theology based on the Bible, a manual of ethics,
a guidebook to the Protestant creed, and a comprehensive
survey of Reformation theological controversy. The clear-
est and ablest systematic exposition of the ideals that in-
spired the Reformation, the Institutes was translated into
the languages of those countries influenced by Calvinism,
including French (1541; by Calvin himself), Dutch
(1560), and English (1561).
The English translation of The Institutes of the Christ-
ian Religion by John Allen (1813; first U.S. edition, 1816)
was frequently reissued during the 19th and 20th cen-
turies. An edition by John T. McNeill featuring a transla-
tion from the Latin by Ford Lewis Battles makes up vols
21 and 22 in the Philadelphia Library of Christian Classics
(1960; repr. 1980). The French text appeared in a modern
critical edition with notes by J.-D. Benoit (Paris,
1957–63).interlude (Latin interludium, “between-play”) In the the-
ater, a short dramatic piece, usually comical or farcical and
possibly including music, mime, and acrobatics, per-
formed as a diversion between the acts of a longer play. In
Italy the INTERMEDIIor intermezzi of the late 15th and
early 16th centuries were slight, often comic entertain-
ments, frequently on a classical or mythological theme, in-
serted as relief between the acts of a more substantial
work. The related French entremets was a similar comic or
satirical interpolation. The Spanish entremés evolved in
Castile from comic interludes performed in public the-
aters and became a separate independent genre, popular-
ized especially by Luis Quiñones de Benavente (c. 1583–
1631) and practiced by most Golden Age playwrights in-
cluding CERVANTESand Lope de VEGA.
In England, the term “interlude” was applied to a very
wide range of dramatic works written in the transitional
period (c. 1500–76) between the medieval religious drama
(mystery, morality, and miracle plays) and Elizabethan
drama as performed in theaters by professional compa-
nies. John Heywood (c. 1497–1580) was the first English
playwright to treat it as an independent dramatic genre
(as, for example, his farcical interlude The Pardoner and
the Friar). But the term continued to be used very loosely
in England and could as easily describe a late mystery play
or John BALE’s King John as a “classical” comedy (for ex-
ample, Nicholas UDALL’s Ralph Roister Doister).22554 4 IInnqquuiissiittiioonn,, SSppaanniisshh