Mad for God: Bartolome Sanchez, the Secret Messiah of Cardenete (review)

Sara Nalle’s most recent work, entitled Mad for God: Bartolomé Sánchez, the Secret Messiah of Cardenete, chronicles the experiences of Bartolomé Sánchez with Cuenca’s Inquisition tribunal over the course of seven years, from 1553 to 1560. Nalle’s selection of Sánchez—and her apparent long-time fascination with his case—stems from the dramatic nature of his story. A seemingly average impoverished laborer, Sánchez’s bizarre and rebellious behavior occasions three Inquisition trials to be prosecuted against him. He confesses and receives penances twice, once on the verge of execution, then finally is deemed insane and committed to an asylum at the close of his third trial. At this juncture, in 1560, Sánchez disappears from historical records. During his colorful trials, he claims to be the second coming, radically rejects some Church teachings, and challenges the Inquisition through arguing with the inquisitors and decrying the evils of the institution. Nalle transforms Sánchez’s trial record—the only source on his life—into a vivid reconstruction of “one man’s descent into religious madness” (p. 2). In her introduction, Nalle undertakes a novel presentation of an Inquisition trial.

It is part courtroom drama, part adventure story, and part debate over the nature of religious inspiration, insanity, and criminal responsibility. The issues raised by Sánchez’s story are at the same time universal and specific to the cultural environment of sixteenth-century Spain: Who decides what is a genuine message from God? (p. 2)

Sánchez’s trial thus becomes both a dramatic historical tale and a vehicle for exploring madness, religious toleration, and inquisitorial procedure in his era.

The depth of Nalle’s knowledge about early modern Cuenca and Spanish religious, inquisitorial and educational culture underlies the greatest strengths of her book. She produces an evocative portrait of the Inquisition’s workings, and of the practice of religion in Cuenca and Cardenete. Moreover, she allows the inquisitor Cortes, and the Inquisition functionaries like the doctor Vergara and secretary Ybaneta, to play an important role in her narrative. Nalle refreshingly treats all the interpersonal dynamics of the tribunal, rather than focusing merely on the “victim.” As she traces Cortes’ career through the 1550’s, she gives valuable impressions of the daily realities of an inquisitor’s docket. While they function as asides to her main narrative, she uses Cortes’ other cases addressing conversos, witchcraft, and insanity to round out her portrait of Cuenca’s Inquisition.

Nalle presents particularly strong material in her fourth chapter, which treats the possible sources of Sánchez’s heterodox ideas, biblical and legal knowledge, and the like. She draws links to legal culture, common visual imagery, and Franciscan spiritual currents. Notably, she finds a remarkable similarity between some of Sánchez’s pronouncements and a few propositions from the 1525 Edict of Faith combating alumbradismo (p. 65). She creates a compelling picture of the mid-sixteenth’s century’s complex intellectual milieu. “Without any training, he [Sánchez] leaped feet first into a complex religious world, where millenarian traditions met with heterodox ideas, all swirling just beneath the surface of outward conformity” (p. 63). Yet, Nalle later confuses this image. “Ordinary people, country folk without any real religious education or any Jewish or Muslim ancestry, were not supposed to become heretics and reject everything that society held dear” (p. 95). While these two statements are not necessarily contradictory, Nalle does not reconcile her theories about wide exposure to ideas with her rhetorical devices about the simplicity of country folk.

There is no doubt that all this makes for compelling reading, but Nalle’s desire for a dramatic presentation sometimes compromises her historical interpretation. She clearly aims for readers to “experience” and “feel” the realities of early modern Cuenca (6). Despite having only inquisitorial documentation with which to reconstruct his life, she often treats Sánchez as if he had left a detailed memoir. She...