Finding Fatima, a Slave Woman of Early Modern Spain

The Inquisition case of a Muslim slave woman in sixteenth-century Spain who was named both "Fatima" and "Ana" challenges assumptions that historians must leave in silent obscurity disenfranchised people for whom we have very few and very problematic sources. This essay presents a three-part methodological strategy for analyzing the single document available about this woman: contextualizing it with secondary and primary sources specific to her life; reading the document "against the grain"; and analyzing it with insights from anthropology, politics, and cultural and literary criticism. Although a cleric reported that Fatima/Ana had converted to Christianity in a hospital while ill with the plague, she denied after her recovery that she had been baptized and insisted that she was and would continue to be a Muslim. If she had in fact converted while in the hospital, she argued, it could only have been because she was "crazy and without sanity and without judgment." Her case illustrates the complexities of identity and the vulnerabilities of minority slave women, yet it also demonstrates that disenfranchised people develop strategies to empower themselves and challenge official power.