Inquisition. It's a word that conjures up terrible images of persecution, torture and execution.

But it's the Spanish Inquisition that has most likely created this perception because it executed thousands of so-called heretics in a 200-year period.

Yet the Spanish Inquisition was just one of the Inquisitions in the early modern period.

You see each Inquisition was a tribunal or court in the Roman Catholic Church, and each tribunal had its own jurisdiction.

The Venetian Inquisition was therefore separate from the Spanish Inquisition.

But did this mean that the tribuners operated in different ways or were they united in aims, methods and effects?

To find out, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor Nick Davidson.

Professor Davidson is an emeritus fellow of St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford.

I remember his lectures when I was an undergraduate that was so inspiring.

A significant proportion of his long and illustrious academic career has been spent researching the religious divisions created by the Reformation.

Spending many summers in the Venetian archives has led him to write the Venetian Inquisition and conformity and descent in Renaissance Venice, which he's here to talk about today.

He'll be very intrigued to discover that something we think of as an organisation that inspired fear actually tells us much about the power of ordinary people,

maybe even tells us something about toleration.

Professor Davidson, Nick it is so wonderful to have you join me on not just the tutors,

I'm really delighted to have a chance to talk to you about your work on the Venetian Inquisition.

I suppose the first thing to say of course is that the Venetian Inquisition is not nearly as famous as the Spanish Inquisition.

We have to thank Monty Python for that, but were they part of the same organisation?

In some ways, yes, in that they were both judicial tribunals,

that investigated religious offenses and, of course, punish, thumb and disciplined contemporaneous religious belief and behaviour.

But no, there were big differences between them in the way they were set up, the dates they were set up,

the ways they were organised and so on.

So I'm afraid it's a sort of yes and no answer.

...