One weakness of this argument, and indeed of the whole book, is that Kamen, anxious to counter the 19th-century conception of the Inquisition as a monster that ultimately consumed Spain, fails to get inside the belly of the beast and to assess what it actually meant to individuals living with it. Little is said, for example, about the Inquisitors themselves, and what they sought to achieve beyond a confession of a guilt. Recent studies suggest that they were not faceless bureaucrats but law graduates with varying interests and career aims. Some were even capable of fraternizing with the people they investigated. Nor does Kamen lead the reader through an actual trial. Had he done so, a reader might conclude that the institution he portrays as relatively benign in hindsight was also capable of inspiring fear and desperate attempts at escape, and thus more deserving of its earlier reputation. More too might have been said about the lawyers who intervened in the trials and manipulated its procedures, along with the ploys, like bribes and pleas of insanity, that defendants used to bring the inquisitorial machinery to a halt."
Arguments like this make me trust the book more. The job of a historian is to assess the accuracy of claims, to discover the facts of what really happened. Obtaining reliable, scientifical knowledge about the past. Not to play psychologist and get in the mind of the people back then (which is best left to the historical novels, or alternate historians
If we are studying the Inquisition and its effects, we need to know about numbers, about percentage of convictions, about the accuracy of those convictions in respect to the legislation of the moment. Not about the motivations of the lawyers or the fear of those being tried, because, in the end, without written proof, those are bound to be anacronic.