Africans, Afro-Brazilians and Afro-Portuguese in the Iberian Inquisition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Abstract

The object of this article is to analyze aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century African culture in the Lusophone Atlantic through new methodological approaches to Portuguese inquisitorial sources. The records of the Inquisition are beginning to serve the needs of historians beyond their original functions as religious documentation. The text examines the confessions of Africans prosecuted or denounced for practices of sorceries provide new insights about the evolution of Afro-Atlantic culture. In this paper, I demonstrate that Africans incorporated elements of the popular Catholicism to reinforce specific aspects of their native or non-Catholic cosmogonies.