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47 ‹ 3 › maria de macedo and the vision in her own words T he story of Maria de Macedo began in 1635 and came to an end in 1667, at least according to the extant documentation. These thirty-odd years were an interesting period in Portugal for at least two reasons: one, they comprehended the entire length of Portugal’s struggle to free itself from Spanish domination; and two, they coincided with the period of the most intense debate within Portugal as to the identity of the Encoberto. Both the war and the debate were to have their effects on Maria de Macedo and her vision. Before we proceed to her story, however, we must address the question of who Maria de Macedo was. An answer to this question is possible only because she had a story that was recorded by the Inquisition. The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 destroyed virtually all the parish records from the Lisbon area before that date, and so in a somewhat ironic turn, the only genealogical information available for Maria de Macedo comes from inquisitorial records. As has been demonstrated in many other studies, only the fact that they became enmeshed in the machinery of the early modern judicial system saved many nonelite people from the cold anonymity of history, and this is certainly true in the case of Maria de Macedo. So, who was Maria de Macedo? In her fifth deposition before the inquisitor Fernão Correa de la Cerda on March 5, 1665—a session that was dedicated to her genealogy—she stated that she was an Old Christian and that she was fortytwo years old.1 This is at odds with the testimony in her pamphlet, which gives her age as somewhere between ten and eleven as of November 1635, thus making her forty in 1665. Little should be made of this slight discrepancy, though, because in the early modern period, neither the accounting nor the recounting of ages was an exact science. In any event, she was born sometime between 1623 and 1625. the vision and the trial 48 Maria was married to Feliciano Machado, styled as a senior official (“official maior”) of the secretary of the Treasury, Gaspar de Abreu, although other witnesses described him as merely an official. Perhaps both were correct: It is possible that the witnesses who described him simply as an official had dated information, for in a September 4, 1663, decree Feliciano had been promoted, along with João de Costa and António Correa, to a higher position within the Treasury with an annual salary of 8,000 reis—not a princely sum, but a comfortable one for a midlevel functionary.2 Maria went on to depose that she was a native of Lisbon and that she and her husband lived in a neighborhood of Lisbon close to the Church of the Martyrs. Turning to her family, Maria gave her father’s name as Luis Ribeiro and stated that he was still alive and was a guitar maker (“violero”) for the king. Her mother, Agostinha de Macedo, was an Old Christian from Lisbon who had died many years before. According to testimony from Maria’s stepmother, she had been married to Luis for thirty-three years in 1665, so Maria’s natural mother must have died while she was a young child. Maria mentioned no brothers or sisters. Her paternal grandparents were both dead, both Old Christians, and were named as Diogo Ribeiro, a tailor, and Maria Luis. Both had also come from the Lisbon area. Her maternal grandparents were also deceased, had been Old Christians, and had lived in Lisbon. Her maternal grandfather was named João Delgado, a native of Carrasqueira and also a guitar maker; her grandmother was Lourença de Almeida, a native of Lisbon. To mitigate any suspicions the inquisitor might have had as to her religious ancestry, Maria made sure to point out that João Delgado had been a familiar of the Holy Office. From other documentation within her processo, we know that Feliciano and Maria had four children : three daughters who, in 1665, would have been between fourteen and ten years of age, as well as a boy of five.3 Maria went on to state her religious history. She was a Christian and had been baptized in the Church of St. Nicholas in Lisbon by the parish priest there. She did not know his name, but she did mention...

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