The Pit and the Pendulum and you find an appeal to the nerves by tawdry physical affrightments." The Pit and the Pendulum "The Pit and the Pendulum" is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1842 in the literary annual "The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843". The story is about the torments endured by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, though Poe skews historical facts. The narrator of the story describes his experience of being tortured. The story is especially effective at inspiring fear in the reader because of its heavy focus on the senses, such
Historical revision of the Inquisition empire and ultimately contributed to its defeat during the Spanish–American War of 1898. However both Juan Antonio Llorente's in his "Histoire critique de l'Inquisition espagnole" (1817) and Lea had access to original documents. For a long time, the Spanish Inquisition had been associated principally with persecution of Protestants. Nineteenth-century historian José Amador de los Ríos brought a focus to bear on the situation of Spain's large "converso" population. The two most significant and extensively-cited sources of this revised analysis of the historiography of the inquisitorial proceedings are "Inquisition" (1988) by Edward Peters and "The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision" (1997)