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  • This Happened in My Presence: Moriscos, Old Christians, and the Spanish Inquisition in the Town of Deza, 1569–1611 translated by Patrick J. O'Banion
  • William A. Christian Jr.
This Happened in My Presence: Moriscos, Old Christians, and the Spanish Inquisition in the Town of Deza, 1569–1611. Edited and translated by Patrick J. O'Banion. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2017. Pp. lxxx, 184. $26.95 paperback. ISBN 978-1-4426-3513-5.)

This fascinating book provides in English translation ninety-two Inquisition documents about the Moriscos in one small New Castilian town. Deza had 1,600 inhabitants, of which about 400 were Moriscos, who were in contact with a nearby zone of Aragón where Moriscos in higher concentration maintained customs and religion.1 The documents range over the period from 1569, when because of the rebellion in the Alpujarras region of Granada, Moriscos in general became more suspect, and 1611, when those of Deza, along with most of the others in Spain, were expelled to North Africa. The material includes denunciations to visiting inquisitors, confessions in order to receive edicts of grace, a sample sentence in a prominent case, and letters of prisoners to their families for help and to authorities for pardons.

Patrick J. O'Banion, in addition to making the fluent translations, provides an introduction for non-specialists that sets the town in the context of Spain in the second half of the sixteenth century: its Old Christians, converted Jews, the Inquisition, and the monarchy. The book is arranged for use in undergraduate classes, with study questions at the end of chapters (which this reader tended to find difficult to answer), a timeline, a cast of about 150 characters, photographs of the town as it is now, a glossary of terms, bibliography, and index.

This Happened in My Presence will acquaint students with a diverse set of everyday people from four centuries ago, set them to work like detectives, inform them about Muslim customs, and give them a sense of cultural interactions in a small town at a time when neighbors held excessive power over one another. They will face the hard issues historians face when assessing accusations, denunciations, [End Page 148] denials, and confessions in a context of coercion, and see at close hand a run-up to ethno-religious cleansing.

But the book is not just for students. It will be enjoyed by non-students as well, for it provides some of the intimacy and detail of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's classic Montaillou.

This reader was left with many questions and a few suggestions for the second edition. He would like to know if the exceptional character with a sensational confession, Román Ramírez the younger, was tortured. He would like to know more about the relations of the Duke of Medinaceli with his Morisco subjects, who hoped he would rescue them (perhaps a telling document could be found from a different kind of archive). He would have liked to see the complete set of letters from jail intervened by the Inquisition in 1611, and especially to have the text of at least one of the Edicts of Grace, given that such edicts provided the people of Deza with specific items of behavior or verbal propositions to denounce or confess.

This story is set over 400 years ago, but worldwide there are many places now in which saying the wrong thing, performing the wrong ritual, or believing in the wrong God can get one jailed, exiled, or killed.

William A. Christian Jr.
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain

Footnotes

1. For nearby villages in the mid-twentieth century, see Susan Tax Freeman, Neighbors, the Social Contract in a Castillian Hamlet (Chicago, 1970), and Carmelo García Encabo, Reyes Juberías Hernández, and Alberto Manrique Romero, Cartas Muertas: la vida rural en la posguerra (Valladolid, 1996).

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