How do you now that?
We are talking about subject matter covered in a book of more than 200 pages with a 9 page bibliography.
Most non-Catholics have not even heard of Montesinos or de las Casas in the matter of civil rights, of Boscovich, who was an important figure in physics, of Grimaldi's work on the wave theory of light, or of the work of Buridan and Oresmes in economics. About the latter, Schumpeter and Rothbard in the 20th century attributed the origins of modern economics to 14th century scholastics. Rothbard traces the Austrian school of economics from scholastics.
Roamer_1 may be right; but so may Thomas Wood.
I know two guys, one a history prof at UVA and the other a Ph.D. candidate who have looked at the earliest records of the Spanish Inquisition. What they report is that, especially compared to contemporary and even later judicial proceedings they were advanced with respect to due process.
It's controversial, of course. But I think a lot of us, including a lot of Catholics, underestimate the effect of anti-Catholic prejudice in developing the substrate of things"everybody knows" which later turn out not to be true.
In particular the rivalry between England and Spain would have been fertile ground for spin.
How easy is it for Protestants even to imagine that the Protestant witch persecutions may have turned out to have relied more on trial by ordeal and have lead to several times the executions which came from the Spanish Inquisition? Nobody finds that a comfortable thought.
I regret that I probably won't be around for more than another 20 years, because I think we're going to see some new scholarship in the coming decades.
As I've mentioned before, the UVA historian attributes his opening to the monster whore of Babylon to his own discovery that so much of what everyone KNEW about the Spanish Inquisition was false. He began to wonder what else that he knew about Catholicism wasn't true.