What follows is not a catalogue of horrors. The horror is there, if you choose to look for it, but that is not the point I wish to make. The point is the people. Ten of them (in two parts), spanning fifteen centuries, from Rome to Seville. They were astronomers, monks, priests, soldiers, peasants, visionaries. Some were saints; some were considerably more complicated than that. What they shared was a refusal to stop thinking. The institutions that burned them called this heresy.

The auto da fé (act of faith) was the formal ceremony of the Inquisition: a public ritual of judgement, confession, and punishment, staged with considerable theatrical care. It was a performance of institutional domination, a demonstration that the powerful were strong, and right. The bonfire at the end was almost an afterthought, except it wasn’t.