Blasphemy : a study on power relations between the Roman Inquisition and the common people

Abstract

The aim of my study is to understand the power relations between institutions mainly the Roman Inquisition and the common people. I have thus perceived it imperative to understand the writings by the French historian and thinker Michel Foucault. These are important works if one is to understand the power relations between individuals. The first section of my first chapter is dedicated to an understanding of the notion of power giving special importance to Foucault's notions. The purpose of writing history in Foucault's view is to understand how we think today in the past. In Chapter 4 I have given an account on the way in which blasphemy effect the minds of the contemporary individual. As do cultural historians such as Keith Jenkins and Mark Poster, I have even questioned the 'doxa which states that the proper study of the past is a study for its own sake'. It is relevant to point that the aim of my study is not to establish some sort of "truth" but to understand the way in which 'texts' from the past effect the minds of the individual living in the twenty-first century. Mine is a study of present society in the past, what Foucault describes as 'histories of the present' As one will see in the first chapter Elizabeth Ermarth remarks that 'she accepts the expanded use of the term "text" which includes artefacts ranging from architecture to events'. I have also made an analysis on the way in which 'discourse' and 'punishment' were used by the higher echelons of society as a tool to maintain power this includes the way in which different strategies are used in society to gain and to sustain power. My main primary sources are from the Inquisitorial archives. These sources have given me incite on the ways in which early modern society perceived right and wrong which one may understand as relative to the needs of maintaining power by the upper echelons of Maltese society.