Judging Maria de Macedo: A Female Visionary and the Inquisition in Early Modern Portugal (review)

In late February 1665, Maria de Macedo found herself before the Lisbon tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, accused of falsely claiming to be a visionary. In response to the judges’ questions, she confirmed that since childhood, she had experienced visions of mysterious “enchanted Moors” from a “Hidden Isle” (p. 116). The strange visitors brought her to the island, where she encountered figures such as the prophets Elijah and Enoch, St. John the Evangelist, and King Arthur. She also met Sebastian, Portugal’s legendary king who had been lost in battle in Morocco in 1578 and whose supporters, known as sebastianistas, awaited his imminent return to restore Portugal to greatness. Sebastian’s arrival in Lisbon, said Macedo, would be marked by “revolutions and punishments” (p. 68) and sunshine at night. He would bring “different laws, of which there will only be five, written by his hand and confirmed by Our Lord Jesus Christ” and would “reform the World, conquer the Moors and Turks, convert the heretics, put everything right, and, being the Hidden One, would go to the Holy House [of Jerusalem]” (pp. 68–69, 127). Sebastian would rule until his death at age 120, after which his son would rule until the coming of the Last Judgment.

In Judging Maria de Macedo, Bryan Givens explores Macedo’s visions within their social, political, and intellectual contexts and examines the proceedings against her. He takes a microhistorical approach, unpacking the ideas embedded in her visionary experiences, tracing their roots, and comparing her cultural values to those of the inquisitors who judged her. He devotes special attention to a manuscript pamphlet of her visions that Macedo dictated to her husband. This unusual source, included in the trial record but created some fifteen years before her arrest, allows unusually direct access to Macedo’s voice, unmediated by inquisitorial personnel. The translated pamphlet text appears in full within the text; a transcription of the Portuguese original is included in an index. Givens’s reading of Macedo’s ideas as expressed in the pamphlet and in her interrogation is careful and sensitive. Using small details as a means to opening up the cultural strands within her visions, he examines Macedo’s folkloric and millenarian sources. Overall, his analysis is convincing, although there are places where a more expanded discussion of Macedo’s cultural context could have lent greater nuance. The interventions of Macedo’s husband in the redaction of the pamphlet and his defensive rhetorical strategies also deserve examination.

For the most part, Givens avoids a simplistic division between “popular” and “elite” religious belief and practice, preferring to speak of “cultural recycling” (p. 185)—the circulation, appropriation, and transformation of ideas among elites and non-elites. He sees Macedo as a member of the “middling sorts” (p. 3), receptive to cultural influences from above and below. Her judges, however, ascribed very different values to the ideas she cherished. Macedo was convicted not for the sebastianista content of her visions, but for falsely claiming to have had visions at all. Her visions seem to have curiously little overt political content. Instead, Givens’s analysis grounds Macedo’s visionary experience in her deep personal piety and her identity as a Catholic Christian. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the case of Maria de Macedo is not her unusual visions but the very typicality of the views and values to which she adhered. This book will be of interest not just to readers interested in Sebastianism and millenarianism as well as in the workings of the various early-modern Inquisitions but also to those interested in the devotional life of the laity in the changing climate of Counter-Reformation Catholicism.