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  • In Defence of the Faith: Joaquim Marques de Araújo: A Comissário in the Age of Inquisitional Decline by James E. Wadsworth
  • Thomas M. Cohen
In Defence of the Faith: Joaquim Marques de Araújo: A Comissário in the Age of Inquisitional Decline. By James E. Wadsworth. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2013. Pp. xxii, 202. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-7735-4117-7.)

The Portuguese Inquisition, established in 1536 and abolished in 1821, never created a tribunal in Brazil. Resident Inquisition officials known as comissários and familiares investigated cases in Brazil and when necessary sent individuals to Portugal to be tried. James E. Wadsworth makes expert use of little-known archival documents in Portugal and Brazil to bring to life the comissário Joaquim Marques de Araújo (1742–1820), whose career “offers us a unique opportunity to examine the belief systems that animated inquisitional officials, the career path they followed, and the social, political, and religious niches they inhabited” (p. 6).

This is the first book-length study of an official of any of the early-modern inquisitions. Wadsworth builds here on his first book, Agents of Orthodoxy (Lanham, MD, 2007), a prosopographical study of the familiares in Brazil. He builds, too, on the work of Daniela Buono Calainho, Aldair Carlos Rodrigues, and David Higgs on the Inquisition in late-colonial Brazil (which reflects previous work by Anita Novinsky, Maria Luisa Tucci Carneiro, and other historians focused on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). [End Page 392]

With a few notable exceptions, Wadsworth’s portrait of Marques is an admiring one. By the late-eighteenth century, the Inquisition in Recife, where Marques was born and where he lived throughout his life, no longer focused on the heretical acts committed by New Christians (people of Jewish descent). Instead, it focused on crimes such as bigamy and blasphemy.

Through painstaking examination of Inquisition documents, Wadsworth is able to piece together the complex series of cases that Marques investigated. Wadsworth argues that Marques generally showed compassion for the men and women whom he was called upon to examine, and that his judicious style belies the image of fanaticism with which the Inquisition is generally associated. Reporting in 1806 to the Mesa da Consciência e Ordens about prisoners in Pernambuco who were waiting to be sent to Lisbon for trial, Marques wrote, “I pity them, because they are dying of hunger. . . . I call them to your attention so that you can practise the piety and justice which is your custom for these wretches.” Four years later he wrote on behalf of two men in Recife who were being held for blasphemy and bigamy and had endured “great calamities and miseries and needed to be sentenced” (p. 65).

The growing influence of Enlightenment thought in late-colonial Brazil challenged traditional institutions and changed Marques’s conduct of his inquisitional duties. He placed himself at the forefront of the Inquisition’s struggle against the so-called libertines (libertinos), whom Antônio de Moraes e Silva defined as men “who [shake] off the yoke of revelation and [presume] that reason alone can guide with certainty with respect to God, life, etc.” In the 1790s Marques “began to handle a growing number of cases dealing with blasphemy, libertinage, failure to respect the sacraments, and heretical propositions. Many of these cases represented the intellectual and social elite of Pernambucan society” (p. 73).

It was in this context that Wadsworth offers some judicious criticism of Marques’s conduct, especially in his sustained conflict with Father Bernardo Luís Ferreira Portugal and his patron, Bishop José Joaquim da Cunha de Azeredo Coutinho, who later served as Inquisitor General. Even those who are familiar with Azeredo Coutinho’s well-known economic treatises will discover new dimensions of his work in Wadsworth’s account of his service in Olinda (1798–1802).

Azeredo Coutinho was an instrumental proponent of Enlightenment ideas in Brazil and established a seminary that trained many of the priests (including Bernardo Luís) who participated in the 1817 rebellion in Recife. In summing up the attempt of Bernardo Luís and Azeredo Coutinho to deprive Marques of his canonship in the cathedral...

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