Читать книгу Inquisitor Dreams - Phyllis Ann Karr - Страница 4

Author’s Foreword

When I began this book, I thought it would be easy for me to understand its Catholic viewpoint, since I had grown to college age before Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council. I quickly learned that a Polish ethnic version of Midwest American Catholicism on the eve of Vatican II was a very different thing indeed from Southern European Catholicism in the decades preceding the Council of Trent! Whoever calls the Roman Catholic Church monolithic speaks from gross misinformation.

There are things in this novel, both religious and secular, which I myself would probably have thought erroneous before doing my research. To cite four examples: (1). Priests were not automatically called “Father.” That title was reserved to bishops, abbots, and—by pentitents—to their own personal confessors (the use which presumably led to its present “universal” application, at least in the English-speaking world). Thus, in these pages priests belonging to monastic and itinerant orders are “Brother” (“Fra” or “Fray”) like their fellow but non-ordained monks or friars, while secular priests are “Don” (“Sir”). (2). Confessions were heard in the open, often before an altar; St. Charles Borromeo (1538-1584) is credited with inventing the confessional box. (3). Wives did not automatically receive their husbands’ surnames. Even in Don Quixote, written almost a century after my Felipe’s time, Sancho’s wife is surnamed Gutiérrez and Panza alternately, and, in the later case, Cervantes deemed it necessary to explain that that was a custom in La Mancha. (4). It seems highly unlikely that Don Felipe would have known the Sanskrit term “swastika,” but he would have known the very ancient, widespread, and—until Hitler got hold of it—good symbol, probably as a “gamma-cross.”

Outside of the dream sequences, in which I have purposely mixed up fact and symbolism, I have tried to be as meticulously accurate as possible. Where I have erred through forgetfulness, misplaced dramatic license, or failing to find the best reference work, the fault is my own; for the rest, I insist on pleading that no historical fictioneer can possibly be better than the research sources available.

As with the characters, so with the places: some, like Alhama, are authentic; others, like Agapida, completely fictional. The real places, though not the recorded facts of their history, have been somewhat fictionalized. A footnote in one of Lea’s volumes mentions a perplexing reference to “the bishop of Daroca” in an old document, and I took this—almost certainly a scribal error—as my excuse for creating a fictional bishopric seated in that city.

This foreword would not be complete without acknowledging Gregory Remington, who made my acquaintance after I critiqued one of his stories rather harshly in print. Some of his as-yet-unpublished tales feature a Spanish inquisitor named Don Felipe. While discontent with Greg’s acknowledged shallow level of research, I liked the character and traded Greg free use of some of my own characters and worlds for the chance of doing something further with Felipe.