historians have re-examined how severe the Inquisition really was, calling into question some of the assumptions made in earlier periods. 19th to early 20th century scholarship Before the rise of professional historians in the 19th century, the Spanish Inquisition had largely been portrayed by Protestant scholars who saw it as the archetypal symbol of Catholic intolerance and ecclesiastical power. The Spanish Inquisition for them was largely associated with the persecution of Protestants, or inexplicably, of witches. William H. Prescott described the Inquisition as an "eye that never slumbered". Despite the existence of extensive documentation regarding the trials and procedures, and to the Inquisition's deep bureaucratization, none of these sources were studied outside of Spain, and Spanish scholars arguing against the predominant view were automatically dismissed. The 19th-century professional historians, including the Spanish scholar Amador de los Ríos, were the first to successfully challenge this perception in the international sphere and get foreign scholars to make eco of their discoveries. Said scholars would obtain international recognition and start a period of revision on the Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition. At the start of the 20th century Henry Charles Lea published the groundbreaking History of the Inquisition in Spain. This influential work describes the Spanish Inquisition as "an engine of immense power, constantly applied for the furtherance of obscurantism, the repression of thought, the exclusion of foreign ideas and the obstruction of progress." Lea documented the Inquisition's methods and modes of operation in no uncertain terms, calling it "theocratic absolutism" at its worst. In the context of the polarization between Protestants and Catholics during the second half of the 19th century, some of Lea's contemporaries, as well as most modern scholars thought Lea's work had an anti-Catholic bias. Starting in the 1920s, Jewish scholars picked up where Lea's work left off. They published Yitzhak Baer's History of the Jews in Christian Spain, Cecil Roth's History of the Marranos and, after World War II, the work of Haim Beinart, who for the first time published trial transcripts of cases involving conversos. Contemporary historians who subscribe to the idea that the image of the Inquisition in historiography has been systematically deformed by the Black Legend include Edward Peters, Philip Wayne Powell, William S. Maltby, Richard Kagan, Margaret R. Greer, Helen Rawlings, Ronnie Hsia, Lu Ann Homza, Stanley G. Payne, Andrea Donofrio, Irene Silverblatt, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Charles Gibson, and Joseph Pérez. Contemporary historians who