Documents of the Spanish Inquisition as a source of national-cultural and linguistic heritage of medieval Spain

The present addresses the early documentation of the Spanish Inquisition. The research objective is to identify specific features of the Spanish language at the end of the XVth – in the middle of the XVIth centuries, used in the documents of the Inquisition, as well as to determine the dominants of the national mentality of the emerging new Spanish society in the late Middle Ages. The content of the inquisition documents made it possible to determine both the position of the Church, represented by the Inquisition, on certain issues of behavior in the society and the type of thinking of the common people. The dominant national mentality at that period is, first of all, religiosity and the related spiritual and moral values. However, some phenomena, which are opposite to the strict Christian morality, were not alien for the local people. From the linguistic point of view the early texts of the Inquisition documentation already demonstrate a unity of certain tendencies and characteristic linguistic forms. Some of them are still unstable. They contradict the rules of the modern Spanish language, but all this testifies to the living evolutionary process of "finding" the norm of the single national language. The results of the study can be used in studying the history of Spain and the Spanish language, as well as the national and cultural specifics of the Spanish society.