Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews & Other Heretics (review)

This appears to be a minor work by a major—and prolific—talent. Richard Kagan is a master of many Spanish archives, including those of the Holy Office. Assisted by a junior scholar (whose exact role is never explained), Kagan has assembled a half-dozen quasi-autobiographical texts, mostly discursos de su vida, all elicited under varying levels of coercion by the Spanish Inquisition and delivered with even greater variations in candor. These six narratives are here presented in English translations, accompanied by solid commentary, notes, and useful maps.

Kagan's reasons for selecting exactly these particular inquisitorial "autobiographies" seem idiosyncratic. He presents them in simple chronological order, from the early sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth. However, two kinds of clusters emerge. Although they range geographically from Madrid to Mexico City, four of these cases were heard at the tribunal of Toledo, with one each at Cuenca and Mexico City. As the book's subtitle suggests, three prisoners had Jewish ancestors. Another was an "old" Morisco from New Castile, whose ancestors had become Christian before 1500. Another was a soldier of impeccable "Old Christian" ancestry who developed a gift for politically-disruptive prophecy and had to be silenced. The oddest prisoner was born in Valencia to a Moslem slave and a Christian father, but her troubles with the Holy Office owed nothing to this religious miscegenation. Instead, she was a clever and ambitious hermaphrodite; briefly and unhappily married to a man, she later passed as a man, becoming a licensed surgeon and ultimately marrying a young woman in a village near Toledo. Secular justice arrested her for sodomy in 1587, but the Inquisition took the case, charging her with "disrespect for the marriage sacrament" and ultimately punishing her for bigamy (of which she was probably guilty). Including such a case immediately dates this collection to the age of same-sex marriages.

What type of behavior did these defendants display? Kagan's examples suggest that inquisitorial "life-history" or discurso de su vida did not encourage much more than straightforwardly self-serving narratives, sometimes chronologically incoherent, usually feigning some degree of contrition and always with the specific purpose of reducing one's eventual punishment to a minimum (significantly, none of these defendants was executed). All Kagan's examples were native Spaniards who fully accepted the legitimacy of the institution which investigated them; all of them understood orthodox Spanish Catholic devotional practices very well. Kagan regrets (p. 9 n. 10) that he found no useful discurso from anyone charged with Protestant sympathies (in inquisitorial language, Luteranismo). A few rich examples do exist (see for example my Frontiers of Heresy, p. 250 n. 48), but such defendants were never native Spaniards. In the wake of this effort, perhaps someone will now produce a new version of "Fiction in the Archives" by studying discursos de su vida from people whom the Inquisition burned.