LLORENTE, Juan Antonio (1756-1823), the historian of the Spanish Inquisition, was born March 30, 1756, at Rincon de Soto, near Calahorra, Aragon, studied at Tarragona and Saragossa, received (by dispensation) priest’s orders in 1779, and became vicar-general to the bishop of Calahorra in 1782. In 1785 he became commissary of the Holy Office at Logrono, and in 1789 its general secretary at Madrid. In 1805 he obtained a canonry at Toledo, and in 1806-8 his Noticias Historicas sobre las tres Provincias Vascongadas appeared. In the crisis of 1808 Llorente identified himself with the Bonapartists, and from 1809 onwards he was engaged in superintending the execution of the decree of suppression of the monastic orders, and in examining the archives of the Inquisition for his History, a work which appeared in 1817-18 at Paris, where its author had been residing since the return of Ferdinand VII. to Madrid in 1814, under the title Histoire critique de l ’ Inquisition T Espagne, depuis l'epoque de son etablissement par Ferdinand Y. jasqu' au règne de Ferdinand YII., tirée des pièces originales du Conseil de la Supreme et de celles des tribunaux subalternes du Saint Office. Translated within a few years into German, English, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish, it attracted much attention throughout Europe, and involved its author in considerable persecution and hardship, which, on the publication of his Portraits politiques des Papes in 1822, culminated in a peremptory order (December 1822) to quit France. His death, caused, or at least hastened, by the fatigues of the hasty journey to Spain, took place at Madrid on February 5, 1823. Both the personal character and the literary trustworthiness of Llorente have been very bitterly assailed; but, although he was very imperfectly ...