Portuguese Inquisition Research Articles

António José da Silva, as Obras do diabinho da mão furada e a Inquisição Portuguesa

António José da Silva (1705-1739), chamado “o Judeu”, é considerado um dos dramaturgos portugueses mais importantes, bem como uma das vítimas mais famosas da Inquisição Portuguesa. Menos conhecidas são as Obras do diabinho da mão furada, uma novela moralizante e ao mesmo tempo irónica, que, desde o século XIX, é regularmente atribuída ao poeta setecentista. Neste estudo, após um resumo do intenso debate sobre a autoria do texto, analisa-se os processos inquisitoriais contra António José da Silva, especialmente o primeiro processo porque possivelmente influenciou a redação do texto. Examina-se com pormenor aquelas passagens que contêm referências explícitas e implícitas ao Santo Ofício, acrescentando uma breve discussão sobre a influência deísta na novela. Conclui-se a argumentação indicando o quanto as Obras do diabinho da mão furada são de facto uma crítica satírica ao catolicismo e à Inquisição, escrita por um antigo preso desta instituição.

The Manichaean Apostolate: Catharism, Gnosis, and Reincarnation in a Trial of the Portuguese Inquisition (1759)

The Manichaean Apostolate: Catharism, Gnosis, and Reincarnation in a Trial of the Portuguese Inquisition (1759)

Calundu's Winds of Divination: Music and Black Religiosity in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil

Calundu was an African-derived religious practice known in colonial Brazil, most widely recognized in Minas Gerais during and following that region’s early eighteenth-century gold rush. Drumming, chant, and dance channeled healing and divinational powers brought about primarily through trance possession. Severely disrupted by Church intervention, descriptions of calundu found in Portuguese Inquisition testimony join the published observations by European travelers as windows into the social history of Minas Gerais, an important yet often overlooked cultural territory of Brazil. This region of gold, diamonds, and coffee formed one of the most intense, highly populated slave operations known in the Western Hemisphere. Calundu’s practitioners, its musical worlds and social spaces, promote the parallelism argument that contrasts theories of syncretism and creolization. Calundu’s fatal narrative as an independent system of thought paralleling Catholicism forms a chapter in the African Diaspora’s vital history.

From the Files of the Portuguese Inquisition: Isaac de Castro Tartas’s Latin Ego-Document, 1645

A semi-autobiographical essay written in polished Latin in his own defense by Isaac de Castro Tartas, a Portuguese-Jewish prisoner and victim of the Portuguese Inquisition, is published and analyzed here, historically and linguistically, for the first time. It is accompanied by an English translation. The autograph copy of Castro’s extraordinary essay, found in his Lisbon inquisitorial dossier, reveals a young man whose vision was deeply informed both by his Jesuit education in France, where he and his family lived as crypto-Jews, and by his exposure to early ideas of freedom of conscience in Dutch lands where he later lived. Probably composed in early 1645, it offers a life narrative some elements of which can be confirmed by other sources. In his firm defense of his right to profess Judaism, Castro deployed dialectical skills he learned from the Jesuits, while making a radical argument for freedom of conscience of a kind few Europeans of his day were articulating.

Philip IV of Spain and the Portuguese Inquisition (1621–1641)

The historiography of the Iberian Inquisitions has focused on analysing relations between the Holy Office and the secular authorities in the society in which it operated. The Inquisition was not an island. It influenced and was influenced by society. This line of inquiry will be reprised to study relations between the Crown and the Portuguese Inquisition in a complex and difficult period in the history of the Hispanic monarchy, namely the reign of Philip IV, during which the kingdom of Portugal regained full independence in 1640. It will offer a holistic view of the institution (not restricted to policies designed to repress heresy), and a detailed reconstruction of events in order to demonstrate the dynamic nature of these processes. The essential problem will be to determine the impact of the Crown's offensive, launched in an attempt to dominate the Tribunal, and the strategies and results of the response of the Inquisition, commanded by its Inquisitor Generals and the General Council of the Holy Office.

A State Within the State: The Inquisition in Enlightenment Thought

ABSTRACTEnlightenment thinkers wrote many pages against the Inquisition. In particular, they widely criticized the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions, which they regarded as the epitomes of cruelty and fanaticism. Both inquisitions were established at royal request and remained subjected to the authority of the kings until they were abolished at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Indeed, therein the kings nominated the grand inquisitors, who were invested with civil jurisdiction for reasons that were at least as much political as religious. However, Enlightenment writers almost always portrayed the Inquisition as the ultimate example of the many ills derived from clerical authority, ecclesiastical autonomy and monastic despotism. Kings and civil magistrates were, in fact, usually depicted as victims of inquisitorial power. This common portrayal of the Inquisition reveals that the Enlightenment idea of toleration was essentially constructed for reducing the power of churches to disturb public peace and challenge civil authority. Thus, this idea of toleration was in effect less capable of denouncing political intolerance, let alone of promoting the separation of church and state.

Hybridising Medicine: Illness, Healing and the Dynamics of Reciprocal Exchange on the Upper Guinea Coast (West Africa).

The present article seeks to fill a number of lacunae with regard to the study of the circulation and assimilation of different bodies of medical knowledge in an important cultural contact zone, that is the Upper Guinea Coast. Building upon ongoing research on trade and cultural brokerage in the area, it focuses upon shifting attitudes and practices with regard to health and healing as a result of cultural interaction and hybridisation against the background of growing intra-African and Afro-Atlantic interaction from the fifteenth to the late seventeenth century. Largely based upon travel accounts, missionary reports and documents produced by the Portuguese Inquisition, it shows how forms of medical knowledge shifted and circulated between littoral areas and their hinterland, as well as between the coast, the Atlantic and beyond. It shows that the changing patterns of trade, migration and settlement associated with Mandé influence and Afro-Atlantic exchange had a decisive impact on changing notions of illness and therapeutic trajectories. Over the centuries, cross-cultural, reciprocal borrowing contributed to the development of healing kits employed by Africans and non-African outsiders alike, which were used and brokered by local communities in different locations in the region.

Enforcing Religious Repression in an Age of World Empires: Assessing the Global Reach of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions

This article highlights how the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions endeavoured to police religious orthodoxy on a global scale in an era without modern means of communication or personal identification. It examines how the inquisitors struggled to deal successfully with the high mobility of individuals who not only moved within the Spanish and Portuguese empires but also across political boundaries. The first section examines the means by which inquisitorial tribunals surmounted the challenge of geographical distance in their attempt to impose orthodoxy throughout the Iberian empires and ensure that individuals suspected of heresy could not seek to take advantage of the vastness of the Spanish and Portuguese empires to evade justice. The second section focuses on a single trial initiated in the Indian tribunal of Goa in the early seventeenth century and uses this case study to illustrate the manner in which the Inquisition was able to overcome the seemingly intractable obstacles of geographical and temporal distance, as well as jurisdictional boundaries, to establish the identity of a suspected heretic and prosecute him.

Between Iberia, the Dutch Republic and Western Africa: Portuguese Sephardic long- and short-term mobility in the seventeenth century

Most scholarship on early modern Jewish history has used the Portuguese Inquisition archives to study the persecution and diaspora of Jews and New Christians. The Notarial acts of the Amsterdam Municipal archive and its Jewish collection, on the other hand, have been used mainly to reconstruct Jewish migration to the city and its Jewish community. Few studies, however, have utilised these collections to analyse Jewish short-term mobility. When utilised alongside one another, these materials prove to be an effective means to study Jewish movement. This article will shed new light on this topic by looking at seventeenth-century Jewish long- and short-term mobility between Europe and western Africa.

Greek Mythology at the Service of the Portuguese Inquisition: The Case of Hercules and the Hydra of Lerna

Greek Mythology at the Service of the Portuguese Inquisition: The Case of Hercules and the Hydra of Lerna

In Defence of the Faith: Joaquim Marques de Araújo: A Comissário in the Age of Inquisitional Decline by James E. Wadsworth (review)

Reviewed by: In Defence of the Faith: Joaquim Marques de Araújo: A Comissário in the Age of Inquisitional Decline by James E. Wadsworth Thomas M. Cohen In Defence of the Faith: Joaquim Marques de Araújo: A Comissário in the Age of Inquisitional Decline. By James E. Wadsworth. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2013. Pp. xxii, 202. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-7735-4117-7.) The Portuguese Inquisition, established in 1536 and abolished in 1821, never created a tribunal in Brazil. Resident Inquisition officials known as comissários and familiares investigated cases in Brazil and when necessary sent individuals to Portugal to be tried. James E. Wadsworth makes expert use of little-known archival documents in Portugal and Brazil to bring to life the comissário Joaquim Marques de Araújo (1742–1820), whose career “offers us a unique opportunity to examine the belief systems that animated inquisitional officials, the career path they followed, and the social, political, and religious niches they inhabited” (p. 6). This is the first book-length study of an official of any of the early-modern inquisitions. Wadsworth builds here on his first book, Agents of Orthodoxy (Lanham, MD, 2007), a prosopographical study of the familiares in Brazil. He builds, too, on the work of Daniela Buono Calainho, Aldair Carlos Rodrigues, and David Higgs on the Inquisition in late-colonial Brazil (which reflects previous work by Anita Novinsky, Maria Luisa Tucci Carneiro, and other historians focused on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). [End Page 392] With a few notable exceptions, Wadsworth’s portrait of Marques is an admiring one. By the late-eighteenth century, the Inquisition in Recife, where Marques was born and where he lived throughout his life, no longer focused on the heretical acts committed by New Christians (people of Jewish descent). Instead, it focused on crimes such as bigamy and blasphemy. Through painstaking examination of Inquisition documents, Wadsworth is able to piece together the complex series of cases that Marques investigated. Wadsworth argues that Marques generally showed compassion for the men and women whom he was called upon to examine, and that his judicious style belies the image of fanaticism with which the Inquisition is generally associated. Reporting in 1806 to the Mesa da Consciência e Ordens about prisoners in Pernambuco who were waiting to be sent to Lisbon for trial, Marques wrote, “I pity them, because they are dying of hunger. . . . I call them to your attention so that you can practise the piety and justice which is your custom for these wretches.” Four years later he wrote on behalf of two men in Recife who were being held for blasphemy and bigamy and had endured “great calamities and miseries and needed to be sentenced” (p. 65). The growing influence of Enlightenment thought in late-colonial Brazil challenged traditional institutions and changed Marques’s conduct of his inquisitional duties. He placed himself at the forefront of the Inquisition’s struggle against the so-called libertines (libertinos), whom Antônio de Moraes e Silva defined as men “who [shake] off the yoke of revelation and [presume] that reason alone can guide with certainty with respect to God, life, etc.” In the 1790s Marques “began to handle a growing number of cases dealing with blasphemy, libertinage, failure to respect the sacraments, and heretical propositions. Many of these cases represented the intellectual and social elite of Pernambucan society” (p. 73). It was in this context that Wadsworth offers some judicious criticism of Marques’s conduct, especially in his sustained conflict with Father Bernardo Luís Ferreira Portugal and his patron, Bishop José Joaquim da Cunha de Azeredo Coutinho, who later served as Inquisitor General. Even those who are familiar with Azeredo Coutinho’s well-known economic treatises will discover new dimensions of his work in Wadsworth’s account of his service in Olinda (1798–1802). Azeredo Coutinho was an instrumental proponent of Enlightenment ideas in Brazil and established a seminary that trained many of the priests (including Bernardo Luís) who participated in the 1817 rebellion in Recife. In summing up the attempt of Bernardo Luís and Azeredo Coutinho to deprive Marques of his canonship in the cathedral...

“Mulheres de fonte e rio”: solicitação no confessionário, misoginia e racismo na Bahia setecentista

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Le refus de la communion aux nouveaux-chrétiens. La tendance rigoriste de l’Inquisition portugaise sous la présidence du dominicain João Vasconcelos (1640)

Studies on conditions for administering and receiving the Eucharist in the modern age generally deal with polemics resulting from the Protestant rupture, which led to quarrels between Jansenists and Jesuits within the Catholic realm. Above all centred around theological questions, those studies have so far left aside a quarrel that emerged in an inquisitorial context in Portugal, shortly before the publication of Arnauld’s Treatise on Frequent Communion. This involved avoiding the sacrileges which might be committed by people detained in the jails of the local Holy Office. But in placing the Eucharist before all else, the deputy of the General Council of the Inquisition, responsible for the very recent prohibitions against receiving the Blessed Sacrament, instituted in 1640, bypassed a whole series of legal and political questions - which his colleagues unsuccessfully tried to point out to him. In the history of the Portuguese Inquisition’s proceedings, this polemic marked the beginning of a straying, on the inquisitors’ part, from the standards they were expected to follow.

From Lisbon to Venice: the Trials and Tribulations of the New Christian Duarte Gomes

The humanist and polymath Duarte Gomes, born in 1510 to a prominent New-Christian family in Lisbon, underwent three processos by the Portuguese and Italian Inquisitions in his lifetime. His encounters and escapes from these tribunals are at once extraordinary and representative of the experience of many Portuguese Jews and suspected Judaizers who were compelled to flee abroad when the Inquisition initiated proceedings in their homeland. While their existence was precarious, it was made more bearable by a complex network of coreligionists and sympathizers in commercial, diplomatic, and humanist circles. In Gomes's case, the Inquisition itself proved vulnerable to influences from these networks. This paper makes use of previously unstudied documents which reveal important information concerning when and how Gomes left Lisbon for Antwerp while the initial inquiry into his alleged marranismo was still taking place. The details of this and the subsequent processos against Gomes reveal, on the one hand, Inquisitions that wielded very real power to intimidate even those who, like Gomes, ostensibly enjoyed royal and episcopal favour; on the other hand, in comparison with Gomes's own connections, the Inquisition's manifest significant limitations of geographical reach and influence.

Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta . The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World . New York: Cambridge University Press. 2011. Pp. xv, 262. $80.00.

Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta have written an engaging history of the emergence and fading away of Jewish communities in the Petite Côte region of Senegal. Jewish communities differentiated themselves from a larger Portuguese trading diaspora, formed by merchants who established themselves on the mainland away from major centers of Portuguese power. This diaspora contained a substantial number of New Christians (forced converts), some of whom took advantage of new conditions in the early seventeenth century to publicly embrace and reaffirm their identities as Jews. These conditions were the protection offered by African rulers to all merchants from Europe, regardless of nation or religion, and the breach of the Portuguese trading monopoly with the arrival of Dutch, English, and French merchants. While the presence of Jewish merchants has been noted by previous studies, this is the first full examination of their history and their connections with the Atlantic world. Their story appears in documents of the Portuguese Inquisition, which denounced both their religious activities and their “illegal” trade. They also figure in documents dealing with trade and in notarial records in Amsterdam, where a Sephardic Jewish community with ties to both Portugal and the Petite Côte emerged during this period of time.

Forms of Cooperation between Dutch-Flemish, Sephardim and Portuguese Private Merchants for the Western African Trade within the Formal Dutch and Iberian Atlantic Empires, 1590–1674

This article examines how private merchants based in the Dutch Republic, Portugal, Spain and their imperial spheres of influence joined efforts to reduce risks and maximize profits, developing various forms of cooperation in order to operate within the formal Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic empires. Based on extensive and thorough research in the collection of Notarial contracts of the Amsterdam's City Archive, the materials of the Dutch West India Company, travel accounts, and documentation from the Portuguese Inquisition and Portuguese State Papers it looks at the Amsterdam merchant community, in particular their activities in the Atlantic and western Africa between 1590 and 1674.

La cuestión de la naturaleza de los ministros del Santo Oficio portugués. De las disposiciones legislativas a la práctica cotidiana

Many foreigners served the Holy Office in Portugal for its almost three centuries of existence (1536-1820). They were mainly relatives, especially Galician merchants and businessmen. However, among them we also find various «qualifiers», some commissioners and even an inquisitor of Spanish origin. Actually, the Regiments that were ordained in 1552, 1570 and 1613 did not state anything about the nationality of the Ministers and Officers of the Court. It was not until 1640, as a response to the continuous debates that took place during the Dynastic Union about the introduction of Spanish inquisitors in the Portuguese court, that the Portuguese Holy Office decided to implement the requisite of nationality. However, once the Restoration War was over, foreigners joined the Portuguese Inquisition again without problems, as it had, eliminated that requisite in the new instructions commissioned by the cardinal da Cunha in 1774.

‘It is not possible to be both a Jew and a Christian’: Converso religious identity and the inquisitorial trial of Custodio Nunes (1604–5)

This work analyses the previously unedited inquisitorial trial of Custodio Nunes, a converso who lived in the Portuguese town of Évora and who was put on trial for crypto-Judaism by the Portuguese Inquisition in 1604–5. Custodio Nunes was accused by the Inquisition of being a crypto-Jew, but defended himself, somewhat remarkably, by claiming that he was both a Jew and a Christian. This article will examine the manner in which the trial of Custodio Nunes brings to light problems of religious identity within the converso communities of Spain and Portugal, and the problems of using inquisitorial trial dossiers as historical evidence.

Four chapters in the history of crypto-Judaism in Brazil: the case of the northeastern New Christians (17th–21st centuries)

The present work examines the history of a group of New Christians who were imprisoned by the Portuguese Inquisition between 1730 and 1740 in the northeastern Brazilian Captaincy of Paraiba. Our purpose is to assess the importance of Jewish interventions to the maintenance or resurgence of Jewish practices and Jewish identity among Portuguese conversos. Our point of departure is a discussion of three specific periods in the history of the New Christians of the Brazilian northeast: First, a period during which an openly-professing and Jewish community existed legally in Pernambuco under Dutch rule (1630–1654); second, the post-Dutch period, when a crypto-Jew who was not related to the group and harbored a stronger faith than its members, revived crypto-Jewish practices and instilled a crypto-Jewish identity among them. Third, we examine a much more recent period, beginning in the 1970s, in which historiography itself has played a central role in causing the local resurgence of crypto-Judaic practice and identity. We attempt to demonstrate that, contrary to the claims of traditional historiography on conversos, the Judaic practices and beliefs of the descendants of the Iberian Jews who converted to Christianity during the fifteenth century did not survive or reappear as a consequence of an uninterrupted cultural transmission of Jewish precepts; rather, these beliefs and practices survived because of external influences that the New Christians experienced in the course of their history.

JUSTIá‡A E MISERICÓRDIA NA MESA DO SANTO OFáCIO DE LISBOA: as penas dos padres sodomitas

Não obstante as preocupações dos concá­lios, especialmente as do de Trento, quanto á disciplina eclesiástica, a alcunha medieval vá­cio dos clérigoscaracterizou bem o contexto de Portugal e do Brasil dos séculos XVI- XVIII, quando vários homens da Igreja se envolveram com o pecado da sodomia. O artigo analisa as punições que lhes foram dadas pelo Santo Ofá­cio português, uma importante instituição do Antigo Regime, procurando comprovar não só possá­veis privilégios, como também a misericórdia inquisitorial perante os confitentes e os denunciados. Além disso, analisa a colaboração da justiça da Igreja para com a engrenagem do Tribunal, uma vez que colheu denúncias, auxiliou nas prisões e no envio de pecadores a Lisboa.