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157 ‹ 7 › utopia’s judges Understanding Inquisitorial Subculture I n the previous chapter, I appraised the varied and sometimes disparate elements of Maria de Macedo’s vision as artifacts, discovering the origins and assessing the value of those elements. The result was a glimpse into the world of seventeenth-century popular culture in Portugal, as Maria selected, worked, and reworked elements of different traditions into a millenarian construction of her own making. This mental world is a window on the cultural values that informed it. Admittedly, it gives us insight only into a very specific case, though the virtue of such an approach is found in its concreteness, a concreteness that helps us, in turn, understand some of the ways by which Maria de Macedo understood herself. Maria’s self-identification is only half of the story, however; we can discuss her today only because she appeared as a defendant before the Holy Office and so was a subject of identification by the inquisitors as well. It is now to this half of the story, the half in which Maria de Macedo is evaluated and classified by the officials of the Inquisition, according to their own standards, that we now turn. And by understanding how the inquisitors understood Maria de Macedo and her claims, we will also gain a deeper insight into how they understood themselves and into the values that guided them. Before Maria de Macedo ever appeared before the Inquisition or uttered one word of testimony, the promotor of the Tribunal of Lisbon had already evaluated the testimony of the initial witnesses in her case and had come to a conclusion that would set the parameters of how the case would be decided. After reviewing the more unusual parts of Maria’s narrative (as recounted by those witnesses), he concluded that “because the aforementioned things cannot occur , it is easier to believe that it must be a fraud and invention of the accused, although it should be kept in mind that it could have come about by the deception of the Devil. Therefore, an investigation must be conducted in order to resolve understanding the artifacts 158 this matter.”1 The promotor’s decision echoed the tripartite schema found in the testimony of many of the witnesses in the case: they could not decide whether Maria’s story was true, fraudulent, or a result of an illusion by the devil.2 In the promotor’s case, though, the possibility that her story was true had already been excluded, since he deemed what she said impossible. In his report, the promotor also excluded the possibility of madness by neglecting to mention it at all, though his reasons for doing so remain unclear. All the judges in Maria de Macedo’s case were aware of the possibility that she suffered from mental incapacity or insanity and did ask the various witnesses a rather boilerplate question as to whether Maria retained her reason. One of the unusual aspects of the case is that they never seriously pursued the possibility of insanity as the source of Maria’s visions and they never discussed it among themselves. Perhaps, the witnesses’ universal assessment that Maria was not mad convinced the inquisitors early on that, whatever Maria’s problem, it was not due to a flaw in judgment (“uma falha no juizo”).3 Time and time again, both the witnesses and the inquisitors would return to the three possibilities of true, fraudulent, and demonic in their testimony about and discussions of the case. Keep these options in mind throughout the rest of this chapter because it would be this limited set of options that would ultimately determine Maria de Macedo’s fate. “As a baptized Christian and, as such, obligated to hold everything held and taught by the Holy Mother Church of Rome,” the libello against Maria de Macedo began, “she did the opposite, forgetting for a time her obligation, [and] she departed from the common usage due from faithful Christians.”4 This phrasing was part of the well-established formula of inquisitorial justice and appeared in virtually all formal charges against those who were tried by the Holy Office. In many ways, it was legal boilerplate from the theologians and canon lawyers who ran the Inquisition, but its formulaic nature does not imply that it was meaningless. If nothing else were to be said about the culture of the inquisitors, this example of stock phrasing is evidence of...

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