Agents of Orthodoxy: Honor, Status, and the Inquisition in Colonial Pernambuco, Brazil (review)

Studies on the Portuguese Inquisition have increased and have led to very important publications in recent years. Gone are the days when works that dealt with the Holy Office centered mostly on the lists of heretics such as the New Christians (Jews converted to Catholicism who continued to profess their faith in secrecy). Such studies have allowed us to analyze many aspects of the societies subjected to the Inquisition. However, as the subject also gained new followers amid the scholars in research centers and universities, the focus also has changed.

James Wadsworth is an author who belongs to this new generation of scholars who have intensified the studies on the Holy Office by embracing such other perspectives. In Agents of Orthodoxy, he presents to the reader a detailed and institutional study on the presence and practices of the Portuguese Inquisition in the Captaincy of Pernambuco, one of the most important regions of colonial Brazil. Working with an extensive and varied manuscript documentation found in Portuguese and Brazilian archives and usually difficult to read, as well as using an updated bibliography, the author delves into the archives of the Inquisition and studies the Pernambuco case from 1613 through 1821, successfully analyzing the structures of the Holy Tribunal in Brazil.

Wadsworth demonstrates how social uplift marked Portuguese American society as it adhered to the Iberian values of purity of blood; legislation granted access to military orders as well as public and ecclesiastical functions to those deemed noble. Such was the case for the agents who served or worked for the Tribunal of the Holy Office, including the Familiares, the author’s main focus. Only after a very detailed and long investigation that attested to their “purity of blood” could they be approved to enter the privileged group of officers chosen for the Inquisition bureaucracy. They were laymen who played a significant role in the inquisitorial structure created in colonial Brazil, especially in the absence of a tribunal in the region. These agents received most denunciations, accompanied the prisoners during the autos de fé, guarded them in jail, and imprisoned suspects as well as enjoyed several privileges.

Wadsworth has unveiled this web of agents in Pernambuco and provided an extremely interesting socioeconomic profile of this group. He thoroughly discusses limitations on the agents from the late-seventeenth century onward, including Don Pedro II’s curbing the number of familiares who could benefit from the exemption of taxes and tributes as well as other advantages. Given the many conflicts that arose over these measures, the author concludes that the motivation for pursuing such a post was because of the prestige and honor that it conferred on its occupant. Agents of Orthodoxy is certainly a book worth reading by those who want to better understand the many meanderings and secrets of the Lusitanian Holy Tribunal in America.