Incantation

1. Incantation Alice Hoffman

2. Alice Hoffman

3. Biography of Alice Hoffman Alice Hoffman was born in New York City on March 16, 1952 and grew up on Long Island. She currently lives in Boston and New York.

4. Hoffman’s first novel, Property Of, was written at the age of twenty-one, while she was studying at Stanford. Since that remarkable beginning, Alice Hoffman has become one of our most distinguished novelists. She has published a total of eighteen novels, two books of short fiction, and eight books for children and young adults.

6. -Here on Earth (an Oprah Book Club choice) • -Practical Magic (a Warner film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman) • -At Risk • -Blackbird House • -Aquamarine (was recently made into a film starring Emma Roberts) • -Indigo • -The River King • -Blue Diary • -The Probable Future • -The Ice Queen • -Green Angel • -Incantation • -Skylight Confessions • -The Third Angel

8. Hoffman’s work has been published in more than twenty translations and more than one hundred foreign editions.

10. Background of the Spanish Inquisition The Spanish Inquisition could be compared to the Holocaust in Germany except for a few important details. First of all, the inquisition was not under the control of only one ruler and then ended. It lasted for a period of 356 years and had many rulers.

11. The idea behind the inquisition, at the time, was not a horrible idea. It was to unite the country of Spain into one single religion, Catholicism. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were to blame for the beginnings of this conquest. It began with the support of the Catholic Church and Pope as Jews, Protestants, and Muslims were either forced to convert or driven out of the country without their children (the children were given to good Catholic families to be raised in the church) but quickly turned deadly when “inquisitor general,” Tomas de Torquemada, took over to lead the inquisition.

13. No longer were the “non-believers” driven out of the country, they were either killed or thrown in jail for life for not practicing Catholicism. The Catholic Church attempted to stop this from happening as murder was not an accepted practice, but unfortunately the inquisition had entirely too much power since it was supported by the King and Queen of Spain. Even without the support of the Catholic Church, the religion that everyone was being forced to practice, this horrible method of “cleansing” continued.

14. Even the people who had converted were not fully accepted; there was a special name for them. “Conversos” were Christians (Protestants) who had converted and “Moriscos” were Jews and Muslims. They lived in separate communities, most of the time gated, and were marked by a special mark so everyone knew that they were not “blood Catholics.”

16. There were, of course, people who “converted” but practiced their own religion behind closed doors. We are sure that some of these people practiced well enough to hide it. But the people who didn’t, the people whom were caught practicing religions other than Catholicism, were put on public trial and hanged, shot,stoned, or burned alive in the middle of the town square.

17. The Spanish Inquisition was one of the bloodiest inquisitions in history. Tomas de Torquemada himself was responsible for an estimated 2,000 deaths of Spaniards in the short time that he was inquisitor general and the actual inquisition lasted for 356 years…imagine the number of people who were killed or sent to life in prison.