PART ONE—
THE INQUISITION AND THE LIMITS OF DISCIPLINE

One—
Colonizing Souls: The Failure of the Indian Inquisition and the Rise of Penitential Discipline

J. Jorge Klor de Alva

When you tell someone your secret, your freedom is gone.
—FERNANDO DE ROJAS, La Celestina

On a November morning in 1539 don Carlos Ometochtzin, the native leader of the former city-state of Texcoco, was taken out of the prison of the Holy Office garbed in the typical sanbenito cloak and cone-shaped hat of the sentenced offender. He was paraded through the streets of downtown Mexico City, candle in hand, to a scaffold surrounded by the multitude that came to witness his sentencing and abjuration, and later to see his strangled body burn at the stake.^[1] For the majority of the natives, it would be unfortunate that never again would an anti-Spanish rebel meet his end at such a public spectacle. In less than a decade, the stake where individual bodies were set ablaze was replaced by the local controls of provisors (or vicars-general) of the dioceses or archdioceses^[2] and, even more important, by the confessional, its penances, its magical threats, and its very real capacity to command the submission of tens of thousands of wills to the nascent colonial structure. The two related processes alluded to by these events—the failure of the Indian Inquisition and the consequent rise of penitential discipline, whose control mechanisms played a leading role in the colonization of the Nahuas (the Aztecs and their linguistic and cultural neighbors)—are the subject of this essay.

From the beginning of the colonial effort in New Spain, ambivalence about the Holy Office limited its utility as an instrument for the domination of natives. For instance, the movement to exclude the Indians from the authority of the Inquisition reached an early climax in 1540, when the apostolic inquisitor, Fray Juan de Zumárraga, received a reprimand from Spain for imposing the death sentence on the cacique don Carlos.^[3]

Fig. 1.
Two figures in penitential costume.

The Indians, however, continued to be processed by the Inquisition throughout the decade. And although official warnings to avoid treating the natives with severity were heard, no official prohibition against trying them outside the local dioceses or archdioceses was issued until 1571, when Philip II formally removed the Indians in the Spanish colonies from the jurisdiction of the Holy Office.^[4] Despite a previous absence of legislation specifically excluding the Indians, some form of proscription nonetheless existed, because it appears that only one case involving Central Mexican Indians came before the Holy Office from 1547 to 1574.^[5] Ambivalence is further suggested by the fact that out of 152 procesos acted upon between 1536 and 1543, the years of greatest inquisitorial

persecution of natives, only about nineteen involved Indians (see Table 1.1) and the number accused was quite small, approximately seventy-five.^[6]

Given the seemingly endless possibilities—painfully brought home to us by the experiences of some contemporary nation-states—for forcing subordination through a "culture of terror,"^[7] why were so few natives tried, tortured, or executed by the Inquisition? And why was colonial policy so inconsistent that the Indians ended up beyond its grip altogether, although no law demanded that that be the case until 1571, while the need for maximizing control was fully recognized as critical, by both Church and Crown, prior to this date? As is usually the case when spectacular forms of oppression give way to their more subtle varieties, the reasons commonly offered for the Spanish retreat from an aggressive application of such a powerful instrument for subjecting natives have centered on an assumed rising cry of humanitarian sentiment,^[8] which is said by some^[9] to have echoed the following orders issued in 1540 to the apostolic inquisitor, Archbishop Zumárraga:

since these people are newly converted . . . and in such a short time have not been able to learn well the things of our Christian religion, nor to be instructed in them as is fitting, and mindful that they are new plants, it is necessary that they should be attracted more with love than with rigor . . . and that they should not be treated roughly nor should one apply to them the rigor of the law . . . nor confiscate their property.^[10]

But the implementation on humanitarian grounds of these instructions could not have been the primary force that led to the exemption that was generally observed. First of all, the Visitor General Francisco Tello de Sandoval, who replaced Zumárraga in New Spain in 1544 and was responsible for making known the New Laws of 1542—the laws that exhibited the greatest degree of toleration Charles V was able to muster on behalf of the Indians—not only was not instructed to avoid trying natives when acting as apostolic inquisitor but, on the contrary, during his three-year term failed to dismiss the cases against the Indians that came before the Holy Office.^[11]

Second, although we know from the effects of the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas and those of other reformers that this movement could have an influence on the formation of colonial policy,^[12] the reform was focused on limited circles during the middle decades of the century and was more successful among Spanish rulers in the Old World than among colonial officials, who had to face the very real wrath of the settlers when they ventured arguments on behalf of the Indians. Fur-

thermore, in the New World much if not most of the legislation that favored the indigenes over Spanish interests was generally disregarded or selectively applied.^[13] As a consequence, the disputes of the intellectuals, particularly those that took place in Spain,^[14] had very limited practical significance in New Spain unless they reflected policy implications that supported the powerful sectors that ruled the colony. These facts point to the difficulties that undermine any categorical conclusion concerning the timing and role played by the toleration movement in the collapse of the Indian Inquisition. Thus, when it comes to measuring the relative strength of the forces that acted to remove the Indians through the Holy Office, it may be more profitable to pay attention to the everyday exigencies of colonial control than to the royal fiats or the juridical or theological arguments that sometimes informed them.

The Inquisition and the Economy of Punishment

Although its ostensible function was to safeguard the orthodoxy of the faith, the Holy Office was recognized to be and constantly was used as an important tool for social and political control since its founding in the thirteenth century.^[15] In the New World the history of the Inquisition is primarily the story of the struggles over power and truth that marked the changing fortunes of the various ethnic, racial, and social sectors.^[16] Following the defeat of the Mexicas of Mexico-Tenochtitlán in 1521, Cortés and the Franciscan friars put the Holy Office to work to secure their predominance over both upstart Spaniards and recalcitrant Indians. By the surprisingly early date of 1522 an Indian from Acolhuacán appears to have been formally accused of concubinage, thereby becoming the first person in Mexico to be tried by an agent of the Holy Office.^[17] This presaged the use of inquisitorial punishment to regulate the behavior of Indians and Europeans that was generalized the following year, when two regulations were issued whose topics fit well into the hands of the Cortesian band. One edict, aimed at Europeans, opposed heretics and Jews; the other, whose vagueness was more a license to prosecute than a guide to proper behavior, was "against any person who through deed or word did anything that appeared to be sinful"!^[18]

In New Spain the regulatory possibilities of the latter ordinance were especially clear to those who interpreted the culture of the Nahuas as a satanic invention, and who used this as a justification for persecuting indigenous religious and sociocultural practices as criminal. Indeed, as the military and political hegemony of the Spaniards solidified, this popular interpretation was implemented as an apparatus of control by turning

Fig. 2.
"Discipline of players and gamblers and punishment of one who 
had ridiculed our holy faith, by order of Cortés."

social customs and beliefs, acceptable in the native moral register, into sins, subject to temporal and symbolic punishment according to the Spanish criminal/canonical code. The tracing of both European and New World moralities onto the same penal map resolved the problem of cross-cultural (national) jurisdiction immediately. Thus, the Franciscan friar Martín de Valencia, who read into many aspects of the native cultures the authorship of the Devil, began to persecute recently baptized Indians in his capacity as commissary of the Holy Office immediately after his arrival in 1524. By 1527 his zeal was such that he had four Tlaxcalan leaders executed as idolaters and sacrificers,^[19] even though the previous year the Franciscans had lost control of the Inquisition to the Dominicans.^[20] In turn, the Dominican leaders of the Holy Office lost no time setting the institution to the task of stopping Cortés and his Franciscan allies from monopolizing the mechanisms of social and political domination; they sought to accomplish this power shift primarily by processing scores of their rivals as blasphemers.^[21] However, with the arrival of the first viceroy in 1535, and the initiation of Zumárraga's episcopal tribunal the following year, the attention of the Holy Office shifted from the highly partisan contests between Spaniards^[22] to the need to organize a colonial society primarily out of Nahuatl-speaking Indians.

It is hard to imagine a more difficult project: political and religious resistance, demographic ratios, language barriers, cultural distances, and extensive geographic spaces stood in the way, and the Spaniards had few precedents they could follow with confidence. Neither the confrontations with heretics, apostates, or non-Christians back home, nor their experiences with the far less socially integrated tribal and chiefdom communities in the circum-Caribbean area, prepared the Spaniards for the encounter with the city-state polities of New Spain. In Central Mexico cultural, regulatory, and security concerns contrasted sharply with those faced in Spain; there, not only did a variety of effective mechanisms of social control exist that could not be duplicated in the New World, but the problems of ethnic diversity in the peninsula tended primarily to affect civic unity rather than to challenge political stability or cultural viability, as was frequently the case in Mexico.

Consequently, from the time of the fall of Tenochtitlán, the primary requirement for the establishment of a colony was tactical and ethnographic knowledge, which called for the development of new disciplinary and intelligence techniques.^[23] To gain control, the Spaniards needed information about the topography and natural resources of the land, the

political and social organizations and their jurisdictions, the geography of economic production, the type and extent of religious beliefs and rituals, the meanings and implications of ideological assumptions and local loyalties, and the nature and exploitability of everyday practices. All these data had to be elicited, translated, interpreted, and ordered within familiar conceptual categories that could make practical sense of the land and the people in order to form the New Spain out of highly ethnocentric and aggressively self-interested city-states.

To this effect, what today would be called ethnography drew the attention of some of the early conquerors (particularly Cortés himself),^[24] priests, and secular officials, so that by the early 1530s missionary-ethnographers were formally instructed to collect the information needed to found a productive and peaceful colony.^[25] Of the various institutions charged with the creation of new knowledge about the Indians, the Inquisition seemed to hold the most promise. After all, it enjoyed overwhelming support on the part of Church and Crown, and it appeared to have access to the maximum force needed to extract confessions, draw forth information, and punish those who remained silent or otherwise resisted its claims.

A close study of trial records nonetheless suggests that the efficacy of the Holy Office as a punitive system and the quantity and variety of information the inquisitors could elicit were limited by a number of factors. First, quite apart from the ruses and manipulations that sometimes precipitated inquisitorial accusations (denuncias or informaciones ), charges were formally restricted to the types of crimes and breaches legally recognized as within the competence of the Holy Office. These included a significant but extremely small number of categories of acts that needed to be controlled by the colonial powers (see Table 1.2, A). Second, there were legal restraints upon the interrogative procedures used that made it difficult for important but excludable information to enter the record. Third, the extreme and public nature of the penalties could serve as a warning to many but did so at the price of moving the key rebels who resisted the colonial order further underground, where it became more difficult to uproot them.^[26] Fourth, the cultural and demographic barriers between Indians and Europeans, the Holy Office's legalistic procedures, and the Inquisition officials' constant concern with status—all called for levels of financing, energy, and personnel that spelled the need for the institution to focus its attention and resources on what it knew best and ultimately feared most: heresy and deviance among Europeans. Not surprisingly, of the 152 procesos tried by Zumárraga's tri-

bunal, ninety-three were for crimes associated almost exclusively with Europeans: blasphemy, heresy, Judaizing, and clerical crimes (Table 1.2, B).^[27]

Together, these restrictions contributed to making the Inquisition a poor mechanism for meting out the type of punishment needed to effectively regulate masses of unacculturated Indians. But what ultimately marginalized the Holy Office from the efforts to subjugate the native populations was the widespread deployment, during the first half of the century, of two related practices: sacramental confession and missionary ethnography. Because each of these was far more pervasive and intrusive than the Inquisition, together they were more efficient at gathering the kind of information needed to transform the Nahuas into disciplined subjects. Elsewhere I take up the role of the penitential system as an inciter of discourse on the self and as an apparatus of self-formation;^[28] here my sole concern is to study how, in the first half of the sixteenth century, a shift took place from the inquisitorial techniques of random investigation and selective punishment to a technique of penitential discipline that sought to affect each word, thought, and deed of every individual Indian.

From Punishment to Discipline

The responsibility for the forced acculturation of the Indians moved from the Holy Office to the (seemingly) less stringent local offices of the bishops (known as the provisorato del ordinario ) in 1547 (see Moreno de los Arcos, this volume). The archival record attests to the timing of this de facto shift in jurisdiction because only one relevant case^[29] appears between that date and 1574,^[30] by which time the Holy Office had already lost its official jurisdiction over the indigenes (see Table 1.1). Although the change of venue is nowhere explicitly explained or noted, the letters sent to Zumárraga in 1540, after he had had don Carlos executed, suggest the outline of a new policy. Translated into today's analytical language, the critical points in the instructions to the archbishop could be summarized—and were justified then—as follows:

1. Punishment, by functioning as part of a regime of exercises aimed at disciplining through indoctrination, is to be discreet and to have the self (mind/soul), rather than the body, as its object. That is, instead of torture, rigorous punishments, or scandalizing executions, what was needed was for the Indians "first to be very well instructed in and informed about the faith . . . because gentleness should be applied first, before the sore is opened with an iron."

2. The source and end of the discipline are to be invisible. For instance, "the little property they possess" should not be confiscated "because . . . the Indians have been greatly scandalized, thinking that they are burned on account of the great desire for these goods."

3. The discipline is to be made imperceptible by appearing to be evenly applied throughout the whole social body. In effect, instead of teaching them a lesson through rigorous persecution, "the Indians would be better instructed and edified if (the Inquisition) proceeded against the Spaniards who supposedly sold them idols, since they deserved the punishment more than the Indians who bought them."^[31]

I will continue by analyzing the meaning and implications of each of these points.

Punishment and the Disciplining of the Soul

Scholars have made much of the humanism the first point seems to imply. The call for tolerance is an echo of the arguments developed in the late 1530s by Las Casas^[32] to attack the superficial and sometimes violent means with which the Spanish officials and Franciscan friars sought to impose the new faith on the Indians. However, a survey of the

methods used by the missionaries during these early years attests to the futility of Las Casa's appeals for moderation.^[33] It could not have been otherwise. The popular idea that natives needed to be treated in a special manner (because they were new to the faith, because they had a weak understanding, or because they were inclined to vice, etc.) originally arose out of very real political exigencies, although the specific conclusions may have been drawn from speculative reflections on ethnographic data or theology. However contradictory, policy was primarily driven by the pragmatic requirements of the colony, although, as is the case today, in official discourse the need to control was frequently masked by lofty language that expounded on the humanity of subordinates.

A particularly vivid example of the rhetorical, rather than empirical, nature of assessments of native capacity to acculturate is suggested by the following fact: almost thirty years after the letters to Zumárraga were written, the priest Sancho Sánchez de Muñón, while advising the king about the need to establish a Tribunal of the Holy Office in the New World, could still argue that

[the Inquisition] would be one of the most important things in the service of God, for use against the Spaniards, mulattoes, and mestizos who offend our Lord [but] for now it should be suspended in what concerns the natives because they are so new to the faith, weak [gente flaca], and of little substance .^[34] [My emphasis]

In effect, the movement toward leniency was less the product of the reformers' rejection of the spectacular punishment of criminal acts, which continued for the Indians in an attenuated form at the local provisorato del ordinario level, and more a recognition, on the part of most priests and secular officials, that what colonial order called for most was the eradication from Indian life of the myriad of seemingly banal deviations from Spanish cultural habits and social customs. The friars, in their letters, sermons, doctrinal works, and detailed manuals for confessors, were quick to argue that every gesture and thought, from those associated with sexual life and domestic practice to the magical and empirical procedures employed in agriculture, the crafts, and social relations, had to be disciplined, retrained, and rechanneled, so as (I would add) to serve the interests of those who wielded power in the colony.^[35]

To discover and punish these minute illegalities, systematic and pervasive forms of intervention were necessary. In this situation the Inquisition's attention to the scandalous cases of a few indigenous cult leaders^[36] was clearly a dangerous and wasteful display of colonial power. Furthermore, too much delinquency went unperceived by most Spaniards and

was primarily confined to the private or local spheres, which were too numerous to be handled with the juridical safeguards called for by the inquisitorial process. Meanwhile, as these minor infractions continued to escape the grip of the authorities, they helped to reinforce and legitimate sociocultural and political alternatives to the habits and practices necessary for the formation of a homogeneous, predictable, and submissive population.

Although the need to impose some form of consistent and uniform discipline had been coming to light since the early 1530s, a substantial division in the Spanish perception of the level and nature of native resistance to Christianity made it impossible to implement one. On the one hand, Zumárraga's Inquisition, charged with defending the assumptions and practices that articulated Hispanic culture, had the debilitating effect of propagating the idea that native heterodoxy continued primarily as a result of heretical dogmatizing by a few indigenous religious leaders. On the other hand, some of the Franciscans, especially Motolinía,^[37] a key figure in the Christianization process since 1524, were claiming that the natives were seeking salvation by the millions and were quickly forgetting the beliefs of the past. On one level, these representations were slowly being challenged by the ethnographic studies undertaken during this time, primarily those begun by Olmos in 1533.^[38] On another level, the varieties of regional experiences and the urgent need for immediate control were leading some priests to the realization that local knowledge of the Indians was fundamental to the development of the type of discipline capable of forming "docile bodies."^[39] If this latter call for widespread, rather than selective and exemplary, intervention had failed, the Indian Inquisition might have continued—as it did for the other more assimilated racial castes.

The Indian Inquisition, however, did end. And, in particular, its demise came about because it had been organized to function only among the baptized, who presumably already shared with the inquisitor the basic idea of what was and was not an infraction. If this is the case, it follows that the Holy Office was ill suited to discipline a people who did not share its basic cultural or penal assumptions. Before the spectacle of the stake could move beyond striking fear in the hearts of the natives to transforming their behavior permanently, they had to know the prohibitions of the Holy Office and accept the illegality of the things prohibited. Only an efficient system of indoctrination could make these prerequisites a reality.

But an effective proselytizing strategy had to go far beyond violent or physical coercion, the performance of baptisms, or the teaching of

the rudiments of the Christian doctrine. It had to penetrate into every corner of native life, especially those intimate spaces where personal loyalties were forged, commitments were assessed, and collective security concerns were weighed against individual ambitions. Thus, "the invasion within"^[40] could not be done by scare tactics, whose ultimate result would more likely be resistance than acquiescence, but rather by shifting the moral gears to produce social and political effects that favored the interests in stability and productivity of those in power. An operative indoctrination that could produce such results had to begin with the widespread, but localized, imposition of a constant regime of moral calisthenics through corporal and magical punishments (like the threat of the first of Hell). These exercises, backed by the threat of the provisors, had to have as their aim the retraining of the individual in order for him or her to internalize a Christian form of self-discipline that would ultimately make external force secondary or unnecessary.^[41] This intrusive strategy sought to constitute the most discreet punitive mechanism possible: a fear of divine retribution nourished by a scrupulous consciousness of one's wrongdoings. And where this failed, as it very frequently did, it excused the policing intervention of the priest, with his threats of supernatural punishment, corporal penance, and public shaming and ridicule. It also permitted pious neighbors to force the sinner to behave properly by threatening to exclude him or her from the moral and civic community. It was a brilliant experiment in mass subordination: the costly punishment of individual bodies by colonial officials or the Inquisition could be replaced, for the most part, by the economical disciplining of myriads of souls.

The Invisible Origin and Object of Discipline

The authorship and end of inquisitorial punishment were always evident. The source was obvious to all: Spanish hegemony—a force coming ultimately from the same external apparatus that inflicted innumerable other penalties and burdens. To the Indians, almost all of whom remained unacculturated in the 1540s, its ends were equally apparent: to deprive the accused of his or her traditions, the guiding memory of the ancestors, personal liberty and dignity, corporeal well-being and temporal property, and life (or so it must have seemed after the execution of the cacique don Carlos). Since at this early date the crimes the Inquisition sought to punish were not generally regarded as illegalities by the still unacculturated community, the Holy Office depended primarily on

the exercise of power rather than assent. It therefore lacked the legitimacy to turn scandalous punishments into moral lessons.

In contrast, the transparency of the discipline the friars sought to establish had as its source a continuous and permanent project of acculturation at the margins of Spanish life. The ritual origin and legitimating structure of this program of assimilation, which historians traditionally identify as "conversion,"^[42] was a baptism which, in the early colonial situation, the friars had effectively transformed into a new social contract. Thus, unlike inquisitorial punishment, which turned the native subject into an object of punitive force, baptism, the voluntary acceptance of a new social pact, could force each party to it to participate as an active agent in his or her own punishment.

On one level, this new social contract was put into effect by the forces that were slowly appropriating for themselves the authority to determine both the rules of civic life and the nature of the new colonial truths. At the points of general concentration, and therefore penetration, these forces appeared in the form of local priests who (genuinely, for the most part) sought the temporal and symbolic (or supernatural) well-being of the Indians. Their good intentions had the rhetorical and emotive capacity to transpose agency, making the initial phases of indoctrination appear to be the voluntary acceptance of new rules of behavior and new codes of belief. Colonial power thus could circulate at a symbolic level that erased in its very movements the origins and ends that drove it. At another level, the new social pact, by resting on the rhetoric of magic,^[43] could be enforced by the manipulation of punitive signs,^[44] whose supernatural source was continually preached and whose human origin could thus remain hidden from the believers. The source of the new discipline was consequently made invisible by making it appear as if its fountainhead were either the individual, who voluntarily assumed it, or a deity who commanded it from above: Its end, the peaceful subordination to and productive loyalty on behalf of the colonial powers, was reconstituted as the personal quest for temporal well-being and supernatural salvation.

The Ubiquity and Uniformity of Discipline

The letters to Zumárraga underlined how important it was that inquisitorial punishment appear to be justly assessed and evenhandedly applied. As already noted, this was not possible as long as the Holy

Office had jurisdiction over such a culturally heterogeneous population as the one in New Spain. By weaving the new discipline into the personal and public strands of native and Spanish lives, however, the friars could be seen to cover with it all social and cultural sectors. The widespread use of an apparently common Christian doctrine, penal code, and ritual cycle was at the heart of this tactic.

Furthermore, by introducing the Christian sacraments in ways that made them coextensive with the life-cycle rituals of everyday indigenous life, the missionaries attempted to reify these rites and their meanings so that they would appear to be normal and universal. The ultimate result was to make the Christian practices accessible through the native registers of common sense, thus giving them the appearance of being natural and ubiquitous, while freeing them of the need to justify themselves on other grounds. Of course, the sporadic public punishment of non-Indians that continued after 1547 reinforced this image of penitential discipline as general and uniform.

In effect, the domestication and normalization^[45] of millions of unacculturated Indians by dozens of friars needed far more than an Inquisition. It called for a new regime of control that acted upon the soul to create self-disciplined colonial subjects. Unfortunately, an analysis of the methods used to effect this end, primarily through a penitential discipline founded on confessional practices, is beyond the scope of this volume, but it is taken up elsewhere.^[46]

Bibliography

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———. La actividad del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en Nueva España, 1571-1700 . Colección Científica, vol. 96. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1981.

Axtell, James. The Invasion Within; The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America . New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Baudot, Georges. Utopía e historia en México: Los Primeros cronistas de la civilización mexicana (1520-1569). Translated by Vicente González Loscertales. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1983.

Behar, Ruth. "Sex and Sin, Witchcraft and the Devil in Late-Colonial Mexico." American Ethnologist 14 (1987): 34-54.

Cortés, Hernán. Cartas y documentos. Introduction by Mario Hernández Sánchez-Barba. Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1963.

Cuevas, Mariano. Historia de la iglesia en México. 4th ed. 5 vols. Mexico City: Ediciones Cervantes, 1942.

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Fabian, Johannes. Language and Colonial Power. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

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———. Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967.

———. "Indian Societies Under Spanish Rule." In Colonial Spanish America . Edited by Leslie Bethell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

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———. Procesos de indios idólatras y hechiceros. Mexico City: Archivo General de la Nación, 1912.

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———. "The Inquisition and the Indians of New Spain: A Study in Jurisdictional Confusion." The Americas 22 (1965): 138-166.

———. The Mexican Inquisition of the Sixteenth Century. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969.

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———. Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970.

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———. "Spiritual Conflict and Accommodation in New Spain: Toward a Typology of Aztec Responses to Christianity." In The Inca and Aztec States, 1400-1800: Anthropology and History . Edited by George A. Collier, Renato I. Rosaldo, and John D. Wirth. New York: Academic Press, 1982.

———. "Sahagún and the Birth of Modern Ethnography: Representing, Confessing, and Inscribing the Native Other." In The Work of Bernardino de Sahagún: Pioneer Ethnographer of Sixteenth-Century Aztec Mexico . Edited by J. Jorge Klor de Alva, H. B. Nicholson, and Eloise Quiñónes Keber. Vol. 2 of Studies on Culture and Society. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988.

———. "Sin and Confession among the Colonial Nahuas: The Confessional as a Tool for Domination." In Ciudad y campo en la historia de México . Edited by Richard Sánchez, Eric Van Young, and Gisela von Wobeser. 2 vols. Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1990.

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Two—
New Spain's Inquisition for Indians from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century

Roberto Moreno de los Arcos

It is common knowledge that the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition was expressly prohibited from interfering in cases involving Indians. "Thank God," the distinguished Spanish historian Guillermo Céspedes del Castillo adds recently in the volume dedicated to the colony from his Historia de España .^[1] What has not been made common knowledge is that this does not imply in any way that the Indians were exempt from punishment for transgressions of the faith. In effect, throughout the entire colonial period and well into the nineteenth century, there existed an institution expressly dedicated to punishing the Indians' religious offenses, identified by various names: Office of Provisor of Natives, Tribunal of the Faith of Indians, Secular Inquisition, Vicarage of the Indians, Natives' Court. This institution generated an enormous number of trials, very few of which have come to light.^[2]

Ignorance of this tribunal's existence is based partly on the fact that historiography on the colonial Church is basically furnished by clergymen and Catholics eager to exalt Spain's efforts in America and to cover up the incidents that might appear negatively to liberal minds. The undeniable existence of the Holy Office of the Inquisition has been so well documented—so worn out yet so poorly understood by politically liberal writers—that this other capacity the Catholic Church had (and still has) to inflict punishment should have been discovered. What is evident is that a great number of colonial books do exist, clearly revealing all the details of the inquisitorial procedure regarding Indians, but it seems that we cannot see the forest for the trees.

Most of the known trials of that tribunal have been published and

studied as "sources" of indigenous ethnohistory. This they are, in effect, but primarily they are trials that can be used as a source for many other investigations, although it seems to me that the first one should be the study of the particular institution that generates them. In and of themselves, like any other documents, they are of no use as a study of what they do not contain.

It would be unjust to affirm that there has been a universal ignorance of this institution's existence. Obviously, those who created it knew about it, as did those it punished. I am more concerned with emphasizing the recent investigations of this institution, and I will refer to only two.

At the end of the nineteenth century, a Mr. Carrión, a Protestant, published a gallery of renowned Indians.^[3] Among the Indians in that gallery was a Dominican Indian, Friar Martín Durán, whose existence was invented, and who was supposed to have been burned at the stake by the Holy Office for heresy. Don José María Vigil, director of the Biblioteca Nacional at the time, consulted with the scholar don Joaquín García Icazbalceta regarding this case. The latter had already published a letter debunking the myth, and with his characteristic prudence, had arrived at the conclusion that the falsifier's intention was to create the existence of a pre-Lutheran Indian in sixteenth-century New Spain. Among Icazbalceta's many arguments refuting the truth of this history is that of jurisdiction. He demonstrates that an Indian would have been subject to trial not by the Holy Office but instead by the authority of the ecclesiastical judge (i.e., the bishop or archbishop) through the Natives' Court.^[4]

Much more recently, Professor Richard E. Greenleaf, with great insight and acumen, has clarified the issues. In an article published in 1965 in The Americas , he studies both tribunals, the Holy Office and the Office of Provisor, along with what he terms "jurisdictional confusion." This article allows us to clarify the underlying causes regarding the punishment of the Indians' transgressions of the faith as well as to establish a historical perspective of the facts. In this first essay, Professor Greenleaf's principal subject is the Holy Office.^[5] His second article, published in the same journal in 1978, deals with inquisitorial trials against Indians as ethnohistorical sources and presents a compilation of invaluable information on this theme. It also includes a list of trials initiated against Indians, derived from the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), principally from the Inquisitorial branch, as well as half a dozen from the National Welfare branch.^[6] In these investigations as well as in the author's other works dedicated to studying the Holy Office, the problem I am focusing on has been well outlined.

My investigation of the subject takes a different approach. It focuses

uniquely on the Office of Provisor, ignoring the Holy Office completely, except when for some reason they coincide. This is, in short, the history of an institution's ecclesiastical-jurisdictional power over the Indians. As can be easily understood, this is a major undertaking that must confront enormous difficulties. We are dealing with vast documentation generated throughout three centuries, very difficult to access, of the dioceses and archdioceses of Mexico City (in this case the sources are located in part in the AGN, Bienes Nacionales, and in part in a locale which I cannot recognize since the destruction of the Mitre in the earthquake of 1985), Oaxaca (which involves its own difficulties), Chiapas (which is organized and now publishes a bulletin), Yucatán, Michoacán (now publicly accessible since it is considered the property of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia), and Guadalajara. The undertaking is impossible without a team of historians. I trust I will be able to organize one and offer the initial results by 1992, with catalogs of the trials and lists of the provisional judges of each diocese. The bibliography of the colonial books I have discovered on this material is presented in this essay and will soon be published, in an identical edition, as the Bibliotheca Superstitionis et Cultus Idolatrici Indorum Mexicanensium , beginning with Diego de Balsalobre's classic treatise. In this essay, I offer a summary of the problem and will allude to the progress of the investigation.

No one is unaware that the Church's power over society, like that of the state, has two axes composed of its authority and its territory—that is, its jurisdiction or power to set standards, to revise sentences, to correct, and to punish, and the territory or demarcation within which all of this can take place. As an example that will serve for what follows, we remember that many medieval Spanish cities contained more or less isolated precincts known as Moorish mosques and Jewish synagogues. Civil jurisdiction over these spaces fell to the state; the Church had no jurisdiction over them. The Christians would enter by force in order to baptize Moors and Jews, thus making them liable to ecclesiastical jurisdiction. They were prosecuted afterward if they willingly apostatized or attempted conversion through peaceful entrance into the precinct, a privilege enjoyed only by the Franciscan order. Those who were Christianized in this way were known as moriscos or judíos conversos . If this was not the case, then they maintained their own faith and could not be forced, a fact which is, it will be recalled, the cornerstone of Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas's argument in his defense of the Indians.^[7] Jurisdiction and territory are also the axes in the Americas of what Ricard, a Catholic, called "spiritual conquest,"^[8] and Duviols, a liberal, called "destruction of the indigenous religions."^[9]

Primarily, jurisdiction over the "faithful" is exercised by the bishop

or ecclesiastical judge within the confines of his territory, which are almost always clearly delimited. The necessity of conserving the faith and its orthodoxy led to the creation, generalized in the Old World, of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition against Heretical Perversity and Apostasy. Its jurisdiction, which was above that of the bishops, exceeded the diocese but not the kingdom. The principal crimes that it originally prosecuted were Christians' acts of heresy, that is, departure from or error concerning dogma in its two forms, material (i.e., through ignorance or confusion) and formal (through pertinacity),^[10] and apostasy, or the rejection of the true faith in order to embrace another religion, which was fundamentally the case with the conversos .^[11] This last crime was punished with the severest penalties. The catalog of punishable crimes expanded with the passage of time, and the Tribunal of the Holy Office gained enormous importance and respect. It is worth remembering here that "inquisition" simply means "investigation." It was the tremendous weight of the Tribunal of Faith that led to the semantic change, so that its exclusive claim to inquisition was recognized and sanctioned.

The encounter with the New World created many problems. To understand what occurred jurisdictionally, we must refer to the theological underpinnings. The Holy Scriptures, dictated by the Holy Spirit, say in the New Testament that Christ's apostles preached throughout the entire world.^[12] Such a decisive affirmation thus authorized created quite a difficulty for Catholic theologians, since the New World was populated by millions of human beings, none of whom were Christian. In the face of such a reality, some explanation had to be found. The most ingenious theologians postulated that the intentionally lost apostle, St. Thomas, had preached in the Americas. The foundations were taken from the indigenous myths like that of the priest Quetzalcóatl, whose alleged kindheartedness the Catholic priests were set on promoting. This thesis, which also occurred in Peru with some variations, arose in the sixteenth century and was expunged by the nineteenth.^[13] It did not actually flourish, because among other things, it implied the brutal fact that the entire continent had apostatized. The practical solution was to declare that the existence of the New World was a mystery and that the Indians were "gentiles" (that is, without ever having received Christian doctrine), and to set about evangelizing them. The Church was able to do this because they deemed the Indians "idolaters," among other negative things.

Idolatry is an unpardonable error for Christianity. It consists of offering latria , or worship and service owed solely to God (the worship of the saints is called dulia ), to an idol, an image created by human beings.^[14]

Fig. 3.
"Bonfire of clothing, books, and items of idolatrous priests burned by the friars."

That the Indians were idolaters provides one of the principal justifications for what Spanish historiography continues to call the "just titles" of the conquest of the New World. This implies that if Spain had conceded the existence of the Indians' own religion, it would not, in terms of what has been said above, have had Christian jurisdiction over them. As far as civil jurisdiction was concerned, the Indians were alleged to be, among other things, drunkards and sodomizers.

In spite of some heroic attempts to slacken the zeal, Spain proceeded with the conversion of New World Indians. The process turned out to be more difficult than had been anticipated. The main problem is that, in spite of the friars' investigations which are our principal sources, the Indians had their own religions and were unfamiliar with Christianity, unlike the Moors and the Jews, who had centuries of contact with Christians. The two religious mentalities confronted each other without mutual understanding: one exclusive, that of the Christians, and one inclusive, that of the indigenous peoples. This reality has been conceptualized in terms of "syncretism" or "nativism," and yet these terms are not completely satisfactory. The fact is that the Christian Church expanded its battlefronts. It did not simply have to contend with the heretical deviations or the apostasies with which it was familiar in the Old World, but now saw itself forced to employ its imagination regarding the novelties that the Evil Spirit manifested in America.

The Church held that the Devil was the guilty party. I have already compiled some notes toward an essay that could be entitled "The Devil in the New World."^[15] He was the one responsible for the veil that hid these lands and peoples from European eyes. He had fooled the Indians into worshipping him with excrements in place of the sacraments of the Church of God and as a mockery of divinity. He was responsible for the fact that the Indians committed crimes against the faith after having been baptized. All of this resulted in the primary necessity of exorcising lands, animals, plants, and people. This resulted, I believe, in the initial Franciscan practice of limiting the baptismal rite. It also resulted in indispensable and constant vigilance in order to detect and punish all deviations, that is, to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

According to Llorente, inquisitional jurisdiction was introduced in America when, by order of Charles V, the cardinal inquisitor Adriano named don Alfonso Manso, bishop of Puerto Rico, and Friar Pedro de Córdoba, vice-provincial of the Dominican Islands, as inquisitors of the Indies and other islands on 7 January 1519.^[16]

Regarding New Spain, jurisdiction arrived with the famous "first twelve" Franciscans headed by Friar Martín de Valencia. This privilege

was derived from Pope Adrian VI's bull dated 10 May 1522, entitled Exponi nobis and known as Omnimoda , which stated that "in case there were no bishops," the friars could act as secular clergy and exercise the jurisdiction corresponding exclusively to the bishops.^[17] This produced two interesting historical outcomes. The first generated a peculiar conflict that lasted for almost three centuries regarding the Spanish state's efforts to secularize the Indian parishes, finally achieved with great effort around 1770. The second concerns the topic I am now addressing.

The first twelve Franciscans received episcopal jurisdiction as well as jurisdiction of the Holy Office and that of inquisitors of the Indies, on their passage through the West Indies.^[18] The Franciscans arrived in New Spain with this power, prepared to exercise their authority. The head of the faculty was, obviously, Friar Martín de Valencia. We have incomplete information about the number of trials he initiated, but as he formed part of that reality which severely punished apostates, we know that in 1526, one year after the evangelization of Tlaxcala, he ordered the hangings of at least six men and one woman from among the "most principal caciques" in various autos de fe , as attested in diverse sources and portrayed in two illustrations in the codex that accompanies Muñoz Camargo's work.^[19] I have always believed that these acts deprived Valencia of the honor of sainthood that his order wished to bestow upon him.

Since jurisdiction could be delegated and the Franciscans had complete control in this area, it is on record that in the following year, 1527, Friar Toribio de Benavente, the humble Motolinía of our literature, sentenced the conquistador Rodrigo Rangel to one day at mass with a candle and nine months in a monastery for blasphemy.^[20] Scant information exists regarding this primitive inquisition by the secular clergy.

I do not know whether it was intentional, but everything seems very well thought out. The Spanish Crown sent to Mexico Franciscans whose vocation was conversion, as we noted earlier. The first bishop of Mexico, Fray Juan de Zumárraga, was also Franciscan, with ample experience in the extirpation of witchcraft in the Basque provinces. The "elect one," as he was called, arrived in New Spain with episcopal jurisdiction in 1528. Since it fell to Zumárraga, Friar Martín de Valencia and his companions immediately yielded the jurisdiction they had exercised for four years, "although he refused it," according to the document of cession.^[21] In 1534, Zumárraga was invested by delegation with the office of inquisitor. In this capacity he carried out dozens of trials, among which many of the published ones are of increasing interest.^[22] The most well known is that of the cacique don Carlos de Texcoco, which ended with his death at the stake in 1539.^[23] When the king found out about it, he

Fig. 4.
"Great punishment of five major caciques and one woman for obstinancy 
and returning to idolatry after becoming Christians."

angrily issued a decree condemning Zumárraga's action, saying that since the cacique's life could not be returned to him, all his belongings should be returned to his kinsmen, and he prohibited the maximum penalty for Indians, "tender shoots in faith."^[24] This decree thereafter saved Indians from execution on grounds concerning the Christian religion.

The following and third chapter on jurisdiction concerned the inspector Tello de Sandoval, who, between 1544 and 1547, was employed as apostolic inquisitor and carried out various trials.^[25] Zumárraga had been tacitly relieved of this function, although his episcopal jurisdictional powers were not suspended.

Between 1548 and 1569, jurisdiction reverted to the bishops, since the Holy Office had not named any inquisitors. Very little is known about the trials during these years. At any rate, the Omnimoda bull was not abolished, and the evangelists were able to exercise their authority in areas without bishops. Between 1561 and 1565, Friar Diego de Landa authorized trials in Yucatán leading to harsh denunciations which he was able to dispel in Spain, aided by the aforementioned bull.^[26] As far as we know, the missionaries exercised jurisdiction in areas without bishops (as in the case of the Jesuits in Baja California in the eighteenth century—a fact which certainly must have terrorized the enlightened Hegel).

After much hesitation, the Spanish Crown resolved to reestablish the Inquisition in American territories in 1569.^[27] Their purpose had much to do with the prosecution of the old crimes of heresy and apostasy that were its traditional target, given that the colonies were being infiltrated in an effort to avoid the Old World tribunals, as was amply demonstrated later on. In the document regarding the creation of the Holy Office in America, the king expressly prohibited interference in Indian cases and preserved the bishops' authority.^[28] Beginning at that time, in civil as well as ecclesiastical matters, New Spain was decidedly split into two republics, that of the Indians and that of the Spaniards (including all types of Europeans, criollos, mestizos, blacks, mulattoes, etc.).^[29]

Consequently, after 1571, when the Holy Office of the Inquisition was formally established in Mexico, two tribunals of the faith existed until 1820, at which time the first tribunal was definitively closed and the bishops published edicts proclaiming their recuperation of total jurisdiction.^[30] We are thus studying a very active institution that arose in 1548 and disappeared—if indeed it has formally disappeared—quite recently. It is well worth our efforts to make a thorough study of it.

Three—
The Inquisition's Repression of Curanderos

Noemí Quezada

As an ethnologist, I have focused my interest on the curanderos, or folk healers, of colonial Mexico in order to explain both their persistence and their continuity in medical practice. I also wish to define the role of the curanderos and to examine their importance within this evolutionary social process, for the curanderos' knowledge and skills contributed to the health of the oppressed and led to the formation of a traditional mestizo medicine that syncretized Indian, black, and Spanish folk medicines. These categories of analysis confirm the important social function of traditional medicine and its practitioners who offered a solution to the health problems of the majority of the population of colonial Mexico.

The necessary existence and function of the curanderos in New Spain can be attributed to the scarcity of doctors.^[1] The authorities allowed for their presence and practice with a degree of tolerance that came to characterize the prevailing social relations in the American colonies, allowing not only for the continuity of traditionalist medicine but also for the beliefs and practices of the ancient pre-Hispanic religions as a means of resistance.^[2]

The Crown was politically conscientious in establishing a legal medical system for Spaniards, thus protecting the health of the group in power. The Indians, and eventually the blacks and mixed castes, were assigned the practices of the curandero. Yet this division along class lines went ignored; Spaniards frequented the curandero as much as the other groups. Given its social dynamics, traditional medicine permeated the entire New Spanish society.^[3]

If the curanderos were necessary, then why were they pursued, tried,

and punished by the Holy Office of the Inquisition? The contradiction presents itself in ideological terms: on the one hand, their services were required as experts on the human body, as able surgeons, and as superior herbalists; on the other hand, they were harshly repressed for the magical part of their treatment, which frequently contained hallucinogens and which the authorities, according to the Western world view of the time, viewed as superstitious.^[4] The authorities intended to prove that medical expertise derived solely from Spanish medical knowledge; they would thus invalidate the entire medical practice of all other practitioners and justify their condemnation.

The Curanderos and the Holy Office^[5]

From the very beginning of the conquest of New Spain, the Spanish Crown attempted to impose a Catholic world view upon which to base a system of normative practices that would organize the entire society within the framework of religion. The problems presented by the social and ideological heterogeneity of New Spain were extremely difficult to solve. The colony's reorganization was carried out along administrative, economic, and political lines, but resulted in a different dynamic on religious and cultural levels. The goal was to unify the entire society under the Catholic faith, which in actual practice was interpreted and molded according to each social group's conception. Despite the Church's efforts to disseminate its official doctrine through regular and secular clergy with the support of the civil authorities, the various social groups—mixed castes, Indians, and marginalized Spaniards—perceived Catholicism as an ideal impossible to live up to on a daily basis. Thus, the religious beliefs of New Spain reveal a process of syncretism reflecting popular religion and culture.

At times even unconsciously, civil and religious authorities strove to achieve their assigned goal of social integration; unity, however, was at best superficial in a society where diverse ideologies coexisted and interrelated, ultimately resulting in a less strict and orthodox situation than in Spain.^[6] The unification of Spanish society under the reign of the Catholic monarchs, as well as the Church's gradual loss of political power as it increasingly came under monarchical control, had repercussions in the American colonies, where the lack of jurisdictional limits over control and conservation of the faith led to frequent confrontations between civil and religious authorities. To maintain order and to ensure the system's equilibrium, constant vigilance was needed via the institution created in Europe in the thirteenth century and adopted by the Catholic

kings at the end of the fifteenth century:^[7] the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, which functioned as a disciplinary apparatus, "an organism of internal security,"^[8] controlling dissidents within the religious, moral, and social order.

The first missionary friars were invested with the powers of the secular clergy where there was no priest or bishop, and they were responsible, among their other duties, for the detection and punishment of all violations of the faith.^[9] No case of curanderismo appears registered under the first commissioners of the Holy Office.

Fray Juan de Zumárraga, the first bishop of New Spain, received inquisitorial powers in 1535, and he established the episcopal inquisition with a tribunal and inquisitorial functionaries in 1536. Under his supervision, which lasted until 1543, twenty-three cases of witchcraft and superstition were tried, probably including some cases of traditional medical practices.^[10]

Petitions first circulating in the middle of the fifteenth century explained the need to establish a Tribunal of the Holy Office which, like that in Spain, would have total disciplinary control, thus avoiding the frequent abuses and jurisdictional equivocations of the civil authorities. Philip II authorized the tribunal in 1569 with royal letters-patent, and it was established in New Spain in November, 1571. As in Spain, the New Spanish inquisitors were, above all else, men of law who scrupulously carried out their duties in order to maintain social control.^[11]

After Zumárraga had condemned the cacique of Texcoco to the stake for idolatry in 1539, causing him to be removed as inquisitor, the question arose as to whether the Indians should suffer inquisitorial penalties since the Crown was legally responsible for their guardianship and protection.^[12] Fully aware of the abuses committed by the provincial commissioners supervised by the bishops during the episcopal inquisition, Philip II decided to leave the Indians outside the control of the Holy Office and placed them under the ordinary jurisdiction of the bishops.

Although the royal decision was respected, inquisitorial commissioners did receive accusations against the Indians. For some of these commissioners the separation of jurisdictions was quite clear;^[13] for others, confusion, jealousy, or the belief that the crime merited inquisitorial punishment incited them to apprehend, reprimand, and threaten the Indian curanderos.^[14] Once the denunciation was issued, it was important to determine whether it concerned "pure Indians" or mestizos; to remove all doubts, the Holy Office thus required that the commissioners formalize the proceedings with documents such as testimonies.^[15]

Of the thirteen cases concerning Indians found among the proceed-

Fig. 5.
"Punishment of a cacique of Tlaxcala for falling into idolatry after becoming a Christian."

ings I have examined, that of Roque de los Santos, who was accused as a mestizo, appears to be illegal. During the course of the trial, it was discovered that he was an Indian; nonetheless, he was sentenced, and it remains unclear whether sentencing occurred because he was part of the same trial as Manuela Rivera, "La Lucera," or because the inquisitors decided that the punishment was appropriate for a mestizo. Proof of this racial status was furnished in a document not included in the proceedings. He was sentenced to be paraded in a cart preceded by a town crier who announced his crimes, to receive two hundred lashes, and to labor eight years in a mining hacienda.^[16]

The Curanderos Punished by the Holy Office

Of the seventy-one delations and denunciations which the Holy Office received against curanderos, fourteen warranted attestations and were dismissed after being considered inappropriate. Twenty-two cases were tried which called for testimony; in fourteen cases the inquisitors decided in favor of public or private reprimand, two suffered public humiliation, only one had a public auto de fe in the Church of Santo Domingo, and one was exiled. These were the maximum punishments suffered by the curanderos.

The first cases specifically recorded in the registers of the Inquisition as offenses of curanderos were those of Francisco Moreno, a thirty-year-old Spaniard accused of healing by incantation in 1613, and the mulatta Magdalena, for having taken peyote as a divinatory aid.^[17]

From this time until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the accusations against the superstitious curanderos give descriptions of the therapies that identified specializations and the use of herbs and hallucinogens in the curative ceremonies. Most importantly, they attempted to understand the practitioners of traditional medicine and their patients, disclosing the latter's reactions and fears regarding the unknown, the mysterious ways of those who dealt with their health, and patients' belief in their powerful supernatural faculties.^[18]

It was also a common belief that bewitchment and all incurable illnesses resulted from hatred or unrequited love. Between these two poles revolved the relationships of New Spanish men and women; seeking good health, they appealed to the curanderos, yet when undergoing treatment, sometimes positive and other times negative, they often fell into the contradictory position of thinking they had violated the norms imposed by the Holy Office. This reaction, quite natural for the times, accounted for the detailed records of the inquisitors which have fur-

nished us with all the cultural data needed to confirm the continuity of curanderismo within medical practice, to determine its changes, and to specify the concepts and judgment of that medical practice, formed, on one side, by the curanderos defending their practices and, on the other side, by the inquisitorial authorities who wished to repress them.^[19]

The Accusations

Self-accusations were unusual, perhaps because the curanderos did not consider their practice a crime. Only Francisco Moreno and Mariana Adad denounced themselves. The former found out in an Edict of Faith that the occupation of spell-caster (ensalmador ), which he had practiced for many years in various cities in New Spain, was prohibited; presenting himself before the inquisitorial commissioner of Oaxaca, he sought clemency through his open declaration of ignorance. In her report, Mariana minutely describes her case, from predestination since infancy through her initiation and practice; she was confident that the inquisitors would assess her healings as a gift from God.^[20]

Delation was the most frequent reason for detention given in the reports, and it is not surprising to discover that the majority of the delators were the former patients of the accused curanderos. On occasion, knowledge of an edict that had been posted on the doors of the church and had been read by the priests during mass on Sundays or holy days aroused unrest and fright, unleashing in turn a series of accusations made by the informers "in order to relieve the conscience."^[21]

When the informer presented him- or herself before the inquisitors at the Holy Office in Mexico City, the provincial commissioner or priest with inquisitorial authority swore to keep the secret. The informer was asked what type of declaration he or she was prepared to make, since the kind of process depended upon whether it was merely a delation or an actual accusation. The prosecutor of the Holy Office made the accusation after hearing the attestations and presenting the case before the qualifying judges.

In spite of the declaratory oath, it is probable that the actual reasons for a delation were hatred or resentment when the cure had negative results, at times worsening the patient's condition, or when the curandero had refused to attend a sick person.^[22] In those cases where the remedy had positive results, the patients, having disobeyed the faith by resorting to forbidden practices and specialists, sought to lighten the punishment they believed they deserved by accusing someone else. Neither family nor romantic ties were exempt in these circumstances.

Feelings of impotence in the face of illness, fear of the unknown, envy, competition, and fear inspired by love, all impelled New Spaniards to the Holy Office.^[23]

Delations presented through public rumor were received and investigated. Between one and four attestations were sufficient to ensure continuation of a case. In some cases, the curanderos' public reputation became an issue with the priests or civil authorities, as it caused a public disturbance and loss of control over the faithful; the priests then had the responsibility of making the accusation to the Holy Office.^[24]

When provincial commissioners or priests with inquisitorial authority were involved, they usually sent the complete delations and reports to the commissioners of the Holy Office beforehand, so that upon receiving a response from the qualifying judges they would know how to proceed with each case.^[25] Inquisitors were responsible for the most stringent enforcement of the rules and regulations of the Holy Tribunal. They often expedited the Instructions to ensure the correct methods of inquiry and to obtain greater information in order to standardize judgment by the qualifying judges, thus avoiding, wherever possible, errors that might discredit the prestige and deplete the treasury of the Holy Office.^[26] There were few cases where the accused could not be located, either because too much time had transpired between the crime and the accusation, or because he or she had died.^[27]

The Trials

Once the delation or report was received and the trial subsequently endorsed, the first step was to call upon the witnesses, dismissing those cases where interrogation revealed that they had been motivated by hatred, desire to defame, or other similar reasons. Witnesses presented by the informer or called by the commissioner were advised of their responsibility and the importance of their testimony, as well as of the punishment incurred if their testimony should prove false or motivated by hatred or enmity. In accord with the rules, witnesses were assured of and sworn to secrecy.^[28]

The purpose was to gather as much information as possible in order to continue the trial or to dismiss it. Although the number of witnesses in the cases of curanderos varied depending upon the offense committed, it was usually determined by the conscientiousness of the commissioner. For example, more than twenty witnesses were called in the trial of María Tiburcia, while eleven were called in the trial of Manuela Josefa; in general, the average number was four or five witnesses. In the

case of Petra Narcisa, six testimonies were presented, and since the information was considered insufficient to decide the case, the trial was rescheduled and six other witnesses were called in order to define the charges.^[29] Moreover, it was common to request testimony from the curanderos' former patients, relatives, or assistants.^[30]

Detentions and Imprisonment

The judges ruled whether or not to proceed with the trial on the basis of the testimonies, with the prosecutor of the Holy Office presenting the formal accusation.^[31] Once the decision to proceed had been made, the accused was detained and placed either in the secret jails of the Holy Office, in the curate jail, or in the royal jails; in some cases, women were taken to houses of correction.^[32] The goal was to interrogate the accused as many times as necessary.

When the prisoner was placed in the jail of the Holy Office, a very meticulous physical description was made, along with a description of all articles of clothing, other personal belongings, and bed clothes.^[33] In six cases the prisoners' belongings were confiscated, and in only one was it noted that they were "few and poor." The other five cases make no mention of the value, from which we can infer that the total was unimportant. Transfer of prisoners from the interior of New Spain to the jails of the Holy Office in Mexico City was done infrequently, since the expense was covered by the prisoner's own possessions. Where there were no possessions, the tribunal covered the expense, ordering a careful examination of "the quality of the person and the nature of the offense, and the trial to take place only under great consideration."^[34]

There were anomalies in the detentions; for example, when Miguel Antonio and his wife presented themselves to denounce Manuel José de Moctezuma, all three were imprisoned. The curandero was set free, but the denouncers were detained for an additional period of three days and received a sharp reprimand for having taken pipiltzintzin , a hallucinogen recommended by Manuel José.^[35] Priests who made arrests without the authorization of the Holy Office were also severely reprimanded, and if the civil authorities tried to make arrests, the inquisitors protested the encroachment on their jurisdiction.^[36]

The length of time in prison varied with the duration of the trial; in general, it fluctuated between the three and five years it took to complete the trial. Only the prison cells of the Holy Office were safe and adequately guarded; in other locations the prisoners were able to escape. One curandera did so by burning down the door; although she was able

to escape, she was captured because she was very ill. "El Churumbelo" escaped through the rafters of the jail ceiling, but he was captured and returned to prison. María Margarita, with the help of her daughter, escaped in shackles. Among the fugitives was José de Roxas, arrested for teaching forbidden prayers to children; he was the only fugitive who was never captured.^[37]

The Confession and Torture

The interrogations of the curanderos proceeded in the usual way. In general, they accepted the charges and confessed correspondingly; only Agustina Rangel denied the eighty charges imputed to her. "La Cirujana," feigning insanity and sickness with hallucinations of snakes, almost managed to deceive the inquisitors and avoid indictment.^[38] The interrogations provided proof complementing the accusations against the prisoners. For example, Lorenza, an elderly midwife, never "wished to declare the kinds of herbs" that she used in her healings. In these cases, specialists were sought to identify the medicinal plants in order to determine if they were prohibited.^[39]

All of the punitive rules and regulations of the Holy Office were based on physical punishment: not only torture but deprivation of liberty, imprisonment in dark, humid cells, solitary confinement, whipping, and even the public exhibition of the prisoners in specific clothing and the parading of male and female prisoners naked to the waist were all degradations not easily forgotten by the individual or society. That was, after all, the objective: to conserve a vivid memory of the punishment.

In two cases of curanderos, both were tortured in order to obtain confessions: José Quinerio Cisneros, a mulatto whose file contains the decree that torture be applied, because of his reluctance, "one or more times, as much as is necessary,"^[40] and Agustina Rangel, aware of the inquisitorial mechanisms, who declared that she thought she was pregnant, since she "finds herself with great pain in the belly and hips." This excuse most probably postponed both trial and torture.^[41] Despite the torture, Agustina continued to deny the eighty charges pressed by the prosecutor, repeating before the inquisitors if she had cured people, it was by "the grace of God and of the Holy Virgin and Santa Rosa," who helped and advised her, Santa Rosa entering her body to cure the sick. The qualifying judges were the ones who asked the prosecutor to torture her, to see if she would confess the truth.^[42] Convinced of her revelations, she insisted on denying the charges even after torture. When she was sentenced in October 1687, two years after she had

been detained, she again denied the charges. Not until February 1688, when the sentence was carried out, did she admit to them.^[43]

The Sentences

The most frequent punishment against the curanderos was a reprimand with a prohibition against their practices. In most cases, the reprimand took place privately before the commissioner, the notary, the prosecutor, and the inquisitorial witnesses, gathered together at the trial's final hearing when it took place in Mexico City. In other places, it was made before the representatives of the Holy Office. Public reprimand was carried out by the same officials with six, eight, or more witnesses.^[44]

The reprimand was meant to be a lesson to the accused, and the justification was that in many cases no other punishment was applicable, since "because of their backwardness they cannot be charged with any heretical intention," or because they had committed the offenses "without malice, only in order to avoid working and to swindle innocent people."^[45] The reprimand was severe and its threat was important. The tribunal took harsh measure against recidivists. After the reprimand, the prisoners would make an oath promising not to repeat the offense. Juan Luis, a black man, was warned he would receive public reprimand of twenty-five lashes at the church door if he did not honor his oath.^[46] "La Cirujana" was a recidivist, who, because of her illness, did not receive any major punishment and was placed in a convent.^[47] Moreover, reprimands were issued against ignorant witnesses and denouncers.^[48]

Public Punishment

Public punishment functioned as an educational ritual of inquisitorial power. The principal assumption was that exemplary punishment would prevent New Spaniards from committing offenses. Francisco Peña is emphatic about the concept of punishment: "The primary objective of the trial and death sentence is not to save the soul of the accused but rather to procure public welfare and to terrify the populace."^[49]

The penitents, carrying candles, gagged, and wearing tunics, coneshaped hats, and nooses, covered with symbols indicating their offenses, were exhibited publicly, their crimes published and repeated by the town crier. The prisoner was thus penalized not only by inquisitorial authority but by the entire society as well, represented by those participating in the ritual. People who attended the ritual liberated themselves

through self-expression in the ceremony, and they learned from the punishments not to commit the same offenses. They saw the penitents' sufferings in these rituals that catalyzed the repressive New Spanish society. The goal of publishing the penalties was to avoid social transgression, disequilibrium, and rupture.

Few curanderos received these punishments. Two women suffered public humiliation. Manuela "La Lucera," after a long imprisonment of five years, was paraded in 1734 through the customary streets by a crier who finally gave her twenty-five lashes at the pillory; the second part of her sentence consisted of working in a hospital for six months.^[50] "La Salvatierreña," a forty-six-year-old free mulatta, was led through the streets by a crier promulgating her offense and received twenty-five lashes at the pillory; she was sentenced to prison and severely reprimanded, being required for one year thereafter to make her confession at the main altar, and to pray three Salve Reginas and three Apostles' Creeds after mass.^[51]

The maximum penalty for the curanderos was the abjuration de levi , a formal oath to avoid this sin in the future. The only one who received it was Agustina Rangel. Before it was carried out, she embraced Christianity and accepted the accusation made against her. The abjuration took place in the church of Santo Domingo on 8 February 1688. At the end of mass, she offered a votive candle to the priest and performed the abjuration in expiation of her sins. The following day, 9 February, she was "taken on a beast of burden, naked to the waist, wearing the aforementioned noose, and cone-shaped hat, and led through the customary streets," with the crier announcing her offenses as he led the way to the pillory where she received two hundred lashes. On 12 February she entered the Hospital of the Conception of Jesus of Nazareth to serve the poor for a period of two years. Her file states that she served the entire sentence, obtaining her liberty in February 1690.^[52]

José Antonio Hernández, a Spaniard whose case required ten witnesses and whose trial lasted four years, was kept prisoner by order of the board of royal physicians who charged him with being a curandero and an herbalist. The qualifying judges finally found him to be "a suspect de levi against the Holy Catholic Faith," but there is no definitive sentence.^[53]

Finally, José Quinerio Cisneros, accused of being a superstitious curandero, received the following sentence: exile from the towns of Madrid, Mexico, and Salamanca for "a period of ten years, during which the first two are to be spent in the Castillo de San Juan de Ulúa, assigned

to royal tasks, on prebend and without salary." After one month in San Juan, he made his confession, and did so also at Easter. Every Saturday he offered part of the rosary to the Virgin Mary.^[54]

Conclusions

The beliefs, practices, and behavior of the curanderos punished by the Holy Tribunal were as follows:

1. The belief that they should not infringe upon established religious norms. They were convinced that they should heal the sick through their therapeutic techniques and with the aid of supernatural beings, whether originating in Catholicism or in other religions.

2. The use of hallucinogens that served not only as medication but also as a means of achieving a magic trance, consciously seeking auditory and visual hallucinations that would allow them to establish contact with supernatural beings.

3. The presence of prayers, images, and sacred and at times consecrated relics in the curative ceremonies.

4. Divination as a means of making both diagnosis and prognosis.

New Spain's classist society, with its heterogeneous culture, included several conceptions and practices of the curanderos. While Spanish curanderos argued that they healed people "through the grace of God," the mestizos, mulattoes, Indians, and blacks followed a traditional method based on their teachings and practices. The supernatural beings invoked in the curative ceremonies correspond to the world view of each group. For the Spaniards they were the Catholic deities: Jesus Christ, the Virgin, the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit, various saints, and the Devil. They cured with their dialogues, revelations, and even through bodily possession, but always within the framework of individual healing. The other groups however, while acknowledging and invoking Catholic deities, fundamentally perceived pre-Hispanic deities in the hallucinatory episodes; and while these divinities aided, directed, and prescribed, it was the curandero who healed, involving both the patient and the assistants in a collective healing.

The curanderos appeared as transgressors of established morality, since they were said to have participated in condemned practices such as concubinage, homosexuality, and promiscuity. Yet the vast majority of the curanderos were exempt from punishment, as their herbal medicine did not merit any type of condemnation, and they were eventually

permitted the use of officially sanctioned images and relics. The Holy Office's response confirms that the medical practice of the curanderos was viewed and accepted as a necessity. It was within reach of the general populace; the curanderos were as poor as their patients, since in the confiscation of personal belongings, no curandero with money was ever found. The colonial curandero thus served a specific function by offering a solution to the health problems of most of New Spain through the use of an efficient traditional medicine.

Four—
Sorcery and Eroticism in Love Magic

María Helena Sánchez Ortega

During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries—and even now in some rural areas—Spain maintained a long and extensive tradition of magic. Men and women of all ages and social conditions passionately practiced some of these rituals that the Church considered superstitions. One large group of magicians of both sexes—although some Inquisition tribunals prosecuted more women—claimed the power to cure illness, especially when caused by dark forces. The Inquisition prosecuted them for the improper use of Catholic liturgical prayers. A second large group composed mainly of men were feverishly caught up in the search for enchanted treasures, supposedly hidden by both Muslims and Jews at the time of their expulsion from the Iberian peninsula. Monks and priests, intellectuals, peasants, and city dwellers all formed silent partnerships with judeoconversos and moriscos , the former members of the expelled ethnic groups.

Largely carried out by men, this "masculine magic" employed—or at least claimed to employ—knowledge derived from such sources as astrology, the cabala, readings of the psalms, and the more popular esoteric books; thus we may also call it an "educated magic," although in most cases the protagonists were no more than simple amateurs with very vague notions of the specializations that experts—among whom we must include the level-headed men of science—had practiced for centuries. Women were not completely absent from these silent partnerships, although their role was always that of extra or assistant in the complicated maneuvers intended to disenchant hidden riches.^[1]

Inquisitorial proceedings clearly distinguish another group of women

as equally involved in magical practices, with the primary goal being seduction and conquest of a suitor. This third type of magic had a distinctly amorous nature, not only in its objectives, but also in its cants, invocations, and rites.^[2] The Spanish Inquisition prosecuted all of these men and women equally for their deviation from one of the fundamental dogmas of the Catholic Church, the exercise of free will, and for the misuse of the sacred liturgy and of the names of God, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. The practice of love magic was also condemned for its invocation of evil spirits—such as the Lame Devil (el Diablo Cojuelo ), Satan, Barabbas, and similar demons—that allowed the possibility of establishing some kind of inadvisable pact with Evil. The "diabolical pact" had already been clearly defined and repudiated by ecclesiastical authorities since well before the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition.^[3] Fortunately for our sorceresses and amateurs, however, as well as for the solutions to their problems by means of magic, the attitude of the judges and prosecutors of the Spanish Holy Office were never so strict as in other areas, and even in the most extreme cases, prisoners usually received penalties limited to whipping and exile.^[4]

The inquisitional archives constitute the best source available for studying the three types of magic referred to above. On the basis of these sources, I have cataloged the following summary of superstitious practices and sorcery performed by women who were concerned about the absence or possible loss of love.

Love Magic

In my analysis of the relaciones de causas (the lists of prisoners sent by every local tribunal to the central or supreme council) that I have been able to study to the present, the rituals practiced by the Catalan, Valencian, Andalusian, and Castilian sorceresses, as well as those tried by the tribunals of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, belonged to a common store. Transmitted orally, and slowly elaborated over an undetermined period of time, they probably originated in the early Middle Ages.^[5] Little by little the sorceresses incorporated themes and rites into a common repertory, which immediately "traveled" over all of Spain as a result of the women's great mobility. The sorceresses tried by each tribunal frequently came from areas quite distant from where they had finally been denounced and detained, and, as we shall see, many led restless lives, continually moving from place to place.

As these women came into frequent contact with one another, their consultations rarely ended after visiting one "expert." Each chance oc-

casion—a gypsy who entered the house asking for alms, a traveler who arrived at the town, a short trip made to another city—provided an opportunity for making contact with some new professional who contributed original solutions and new methods. For in effect, the practice of sorcery is almost a profession for many women, and this double aspect of professionalism and geographical mobility explains the fundamental sameness of these practices, which offer few variations throughout the entire Iberian peninsula.

The study of the various tribunals reveals very similar profiles, and according to the goals and content of these rituals, the characteristics of "love magic" may be classified in the following manner:

First, there is a cluster of romantic procedures or spells, aimed always at uncovering the intentions of the man. These procedures are divided according to the instruments needed for the divination:

a) procedures carried out with beans, cards, a sieve, scissors, or other similar instruments;

b) divinations that make use of fire, spells that employ alum and salt, spells with "saucepans," "flasks," and similar items;

c) spells with various other objects such as a rosary or oranges.

Second, we can distinguish a cluster of rites with either an obvious or an underlying erotic content. Their erotic content may be termed implicit or explicit:

a) explicit: those rites which employ menstrual blood, semen, public hairs, and similar items;

b) implicit: those prayers and rituals whose goal—as stated in the documents—is to achieve "illicit" contact in a more or less implicit manner, such as the conjuration of the shadow-broom, and other similar cases.

Finally, there are a series of cants and invocations of spirits which may be accompanied by a generally uncomplicated ceremony, such as gesturing with the hands, or showing oneself at a window, with the conjuration or recitation of the decisive act. These cants are meant to appease some suitor, to regain his love, to make him return and visit the enamored woman, and other similar goals. I am grouping them under the heading of "the power of the word," because without the sorceress's conviction and force in reciting them, no one would seriously believe in their effect:

a) cants to placate a man and obtain his favors such as "Furious you come to me" ("furioso vienes a mí"), and "Hello, hello, man" ("hola, hola, varón"), and conjurations to the sun, moon, and stars;

b) conjurations to obtain a visit from the man, such as conjurations of the door and window;

c) magic cants to obtain the love of a suitor and avenge his neglect, such as the cant to the Lonely Soul [Ánima Sola], to Santa Marta, to "wicked" Marta, to Santa Elena, to San Silvestre, and to San Onofre.

As we have seen, the sorceresses' objectives completely justify the label of "love magic," and this has appeared to be the appropriate name for the practices generally carried out by women, but the seeming passion of these sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century women deserves to be examined with greater thoroughness. In reality, and as is readily apparent in these supplications to the spirits, the presence of a suitor represents more of a material necessity than a truly amorous one. More than any other, our sorceresses' most frequent conjuration, that "[man's name] come, giving me what he has and telling me what he knows ," demonstrates that the desired "friend's" presence basically meant the support of someone who would help the women overcome life's difficulties in a society controlled by men economically as well as religiously. The single woman not only saw herself obliged to fight against material adversity, but also became suspect to her neighbors, unless she placed herself under the tutelage of some mystic "spouse" by following the path of the nuns and beatas . Isolated in society, unable to count on any masculine support, whether real or sublimated, she risked falling into the category of witch, especially if she had reached middle age. The sorceresses and their clients, therefore, were deeply invested in winning over and retaining the man who, in this case without any extraordinary powers, could ward off poverty and social marginalization. The fundamental goals underlying their rites were those of women who desperately sought men's redeeming company by:

a) determining a man's amorous intentions;

b) obtaining a man's love;

c) recovering and retaining the love of a scornful man.

Amorous Anxiety in Feminine Sorcery

The long tradition and repeated practices of the cants, rites, and conjurations in the Middle Ages and the following centuries amassed so many possibilities for the woman in search of a stable companion that without having to analyze all the categories previously mentioned, and examining only the most frequently recited phrases and refrains,^[6] we

penetrate the very heart of "feminine magic," discovering the most intimate aspects of the sorceresses and their clients during these rituals. Judging from the cants recited by the sorceresses in order to attain the secret desires of their clients, love was the chief aim of these women of the Habsburg regime, who so readily solicited "love magic."

Despite their assertions, these enamored women were not satisfied merely with having their love reciprocated. Their aspirations and amorous passion extended to the total control of the beloved's will, and the reasons for desiring such control had little to do with the admired mystical sighs of their religious sisters' passion. Our enamored women, practitioners of magic, were essentially pragmatic souls who realized that they must obtain masculine support at all costs, so as not to be socially devalued.

Yet the purely amorous or erotic aspect of most of these practices is undeniable. Refrains of a basically impassioned nature are recited in all the rites and conjurations. In a client's name, a sorceress entreated the immediate appearance of the man, they ordered him to return if he had gone away, and repeated, through various chants, the desire that he be consumed with passion. This was only one facet of love magic, however, and we need to examine and learn about the others. Let us first examine the emotional characteristics of our foremothers.

The usual divinatory practices with beans or cards tell us very little regarding feminine emotions. The expert restricted herself to telling fortunes and inquiring about the possible appearance of the man. The extremely long conjuration of the beans recited by a sorceress named Castellanos who was tried by the Toledo tribunal contains only one enlightening phrase. After a tedious conjuration in which the beans were tossed to reveal the future, and after naming the Virgin, the saints, and such elements as the sea, the sands, the ground, and the seven heavens, the conjuration included only the following phrases:

Así como esto es verdad
me declaréis lo que os fuere preguntando . . .
habas que me digáis la verdad
desto que os fuere preguntando
si hubiere de venir fulano^[7]

[Just as this is true
You will tell me what I ask . . .
Beans, tell me the truth
About this which I ask you
If (man's name) will come]

Other sorceresses stated the case even more concisely. Isabel Bautista, also tried by the Toledo tribunal,^[8] recited a long conjuration, repeating only:

Si fulano ha de venir
salga en camino

[If (man's name) is coming
Let him be on his way]

In spite of their complexity, neither the conjurations recited before tossing the beans nor fortune-telling with cards offers much information about the emotions of the women tried by the Inquisition, except for their desire to conjure a man who would take an interest in them.

Fortunately for us, the conjurations and practices of love magic were so numerous that other sorceries and cants reveal, little by little, the most recondite thoughts of these enamored women as well as the extent of their desires. Love magic is a process through which we can observe the various stages of love as well as the diverse psychological states which the lovers—men or women—experienced in their erotic-emotional relations. The sorceries of the beans and the cards would have been useful only during the initial anticipatory phase when the beloved had not yet appeared, or resisted doing so. The professionals would employ these sorceries only for women wishing to know whether or not they were to achieve this essential goal, but they still reserved a vast repertory for future situations that might occur once the coveted suitor had been trapped, such as the need to arouse a passion not overly potent, to achieve the beloved's constancy, and—admittedly—to calm the anxieties and thirst for revenge of a rejected woman. The professional sorceress applied each phrase on the conjurations, according to the specific needs and circumstances of the women, since they hid nothing regarding their personal situations. This specificity created an entire range of psychological nuances that must also be taken into account.

Clients requesting the appearance of a man, therefore, consulted the beans or the cards—a common occurrence, judging by the frequency with which these conjurations were solicited. But the woman visiting the sorceress was not always lonely or frustrated, and almost as frequently we encounter in the trials other sorceries, such as the oranges and the rosary, which confirmed that love had finally arrived, albeit without the desired intensity. Once again the enamored woman had to resort to an expert who could change the course of her future by bringing the will of her man to a more complete state of submission.

The phrases in the sorceries requiring a rosary or some oranges as the divinatory instrument allow us to understand the second stage of the amorous process. Esperanza Badía, for example, tried in Valencia, held a rosary and recited a long and complicated conjuration in which she invoked various demons and other magical characters, ending with the following phrase:

Venga el corazón de fulano
atado, preso y enamorado^[9]

[Let the heart of (man's name) come
Bound, captured, and enamored]

The same phrase also appears in the conjuration employed in the sorcery of the oranges, in Castile as well as in Valencia and the rest of the peninsular regions. It thus constitutes a veritable leitmotiv expressing the central message of such apparently diverse practices. The preliminary phrases vary, the conjured "diabolical" beings may be different, but the essential phrase is always the same: "Let the heart of [man's name] come / Bound, captured and enamored" [Venga el corazón de fulano / atado, preso y enamorado].

The fundamental goal now became retaining the male lover. The conjuration accompanying the sorcery of "the palms" was recited with this goal in mind. The sorceress would pat the length of her arm with the palm of her hand in order to uncover the intentions of the absent man and would again recite a very similar phrase. Laura Garrigues, a sorceress in the 1655 Valencian auto de fe, stated quite bluntly:

Fulano,
donde quiera que estés,
te envío este clavo
te doy este martelazo
Por mi amor presto vengas
por mi amor, preso y atado^[10]

[(man's name,)
Wherever you are,
I send you this nail
I strike you with this passion
Soon you will come for my love
For my love, captured and bound]

Like the other sorceries, the sorcery of the palms circulated in multiple versions over the entire Iberian peninsula, but the variations occurred principally at the beginning of and in addition to, the mantic

practice.^[11] The central phrase, however, is very similar in all cases and confirms that this sorcery belongs to the second amorous phase together with the sorceries of the rosary and the oranges. In Castile, María Castellanos recited it as follows:

Yo, María, te llamo Francisco,
que vengas por mi amor gimiendo y llorando^[12]

[I, María, call you, Francisco,
To come for my love, moaning and crying]

With this variant, this singularly interesting woman, to whom we shall refer again, introduces us to a new phase in love magic beginning with the conjurations and rites in which the symbolic value of fire intervenes: conjurations of salt and alum and sorceries of "pans" and "flasks" or "phials." In the latter, the name varies in different regions according to the language, but the examples all reveal the intimate feelings of women in search of love.

The conjurations of alum and salt were recited in order to divine the future. The sorceress threw a fistful of salt or a bit of alum into the fire so that she could interpret the flame. In all cases the sorceresses began to reveal a state of mind in which impatience appeared to have played an important part. The woman reciting the conjuration did so on behalf of someone whose anxiety was much more intense than in the former cases. In the simplest versions, as in Gerónima González's case in the Valencia auto de fe, the invocation is simple:

Sal, salida . . .
assi como moros ni cristianos
pueden estar sin ti
que Fulano no pueda estar sin mi^[13]

[Salt, pouring forth . . .
Neither Moors nor Christians
Can be without you
Nor can (man's name) be without me]

However, the use of fire seemed somehow to stimulate and to contribute to a new psychological state in those women who resorted to the help of sorceresses, as we can clearly observe in the conjuration of alum. María Antonia de Neroña, also from Valencia, explicitly indicated her desire to inflame her beloved's heart:

No pongo alumbre
sino el corazón y entrañas de Fulano^[14]

[I do not use alum
But rather the heart and soul of (man's name)]

Gerónima González uses a very similar phrase in the same alum ritual:

Así queme el corazón de Fulano
y arada en amor mío^[15]

[Thus burn the heart of (man's name)
and plow in my love]

The formula is repeated in Castile (in the version of our friend Castellanos) in even more explicit form. The beloved must be consumed with love and visit the woman who loves him.

. . . Que así como te has de quemar
se queme el corazón de Fulano
porque me venga a ver^[16]

[Just as you will be burnt up
(man's name)'s heart must be inflamed
So that he comes to see me]

Of course, all of these imprecations, which are in general quite poetic, were accompanied by flames and were directed toward the powers of Avernus, who conferred upon them their magical aspect; we are, however, more concerned with analyzing their psychological content and scope.

As we can see, the emotional temperature of the love-magic enthusiasts rose quite a few degrees thanks to the use of fire, and we begin to understand their real intentions toward their suitors. The enamored women of the Habsburg regime wanted absolute control over the will and movements of the men they had snared, and this wish is an essential chapter in their magic manipulations and anxieties, clearly manifested in the fact that the experts' conjurations employed no instrument or ceremony. The unadorned word is the fundamental factor here, and it is an indispensable key to our elemental "psychoanalysis" of love magic.^[17]

When the professional sorceress resorted to magic cants, the relationship had apparently reached its worst state. The man was scornful, he missed assignations, and the woman also suspected the presence of another woman on the scene. To revive his interest, it now became necessary to resort directly to evil forces. St. Marta, Marta "the wicked," and the entire chorus of devils already familiar to the client—Satan, Barabbas, the Lame Devil—were invoked directly or indirectly, but with almost no instruments or paraphernalia.

At this point the enamored woman had to placate her companion's anger, and the sorceress placed at her disposal a wide variety of "appeasing conjurations" to rekindle his passion, mainly through the influence of St. Elena or St. Marta. The sorceress would also endeavor to reinstill in the man the need to see his abandoned lover. The conjurations aimed at changing the man's angry attitude were usually short and extremely graphic. No doubt the women of the Habsburg regime feared their companions' violent tempers, proof of which is frequently documented in the declarations. Prudencia Grillo, tried by the Toledo tribunal, justifiably resorted to magic because she was afraid of being locked in a castle by the man on whom she depended.^[18] Other women also speak of the bad treatment they received at the hands of their husbands or lovers, and of attempts on their lives in various forms. One woman even stated that she was fed ground glass in a murder attempt.^[19] Given the men's violence and mean temperament, it is not surprising that these women viewed sorcery as a far more satisfactory recourse than the customary Christian prayers and resignation recommended by their confessors.

In any case, a brief reading of one of these women's versions confirms their obvious fears. Undoubtedly the man's presence is as much feared as desired. Laura Garrigues, for example, tried in Valencia in 1655, would conceal her hand inside her clothes when she saw her angry lover approach, and pulling her public hairs, would repeat:

Furioso vienes a mí
furioso vienes a mí
tan fuerte como un toro
tan fuerte como un horno
tan sujeto estés a mí
como los pelos de mi coño
están a mí^[20]

[Furious you come to me
Furious you come to me
As strong as a bull
As hot as an oven
You will be as subject to my will
As the hairs of my cunt
Are to me]

The best-known and most widely spread refrain, however, contains a somewhat mysterious formula—surely a synthesis achieved after centuries of use—that gives it even greater poetic charm. Most likely its obscure meaning and brevity contributed at the same time to its enor-

mous divulgation and popularity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:

Con dos te miro
con cinco te ato
tu sangre te bebo
el corazón te parto^[21]

[With two I watch you
With five I bind you
Your blood I drink
Your heart I rend]

Laura Garrigues also knew a version of this conjuration which reveals more clearly the need to control an overly impetuous man:

Con dos te miro
con tres te ligo y ato
la sangre te voto
el corazón te parto
con las parias de tu madre
la boca te tapo
¡Hale, asno!
sobre ti cabalgo^[22]

[With two I watch you
With three I bind and tie you
Your blood I curse
Your heart I rend
With your afterbirth
I cover your mouth

(The sorceress covered her mouth here)

Come along, ass!
I'll ride you]

It is not difficult to infer, after reading this brief imprecation, that the magic enthusiast believed she would shut the mouth that insulted her, subjecting it to her will in the same way as women dominated the little asses that so frequently served as ladies' mounts precisely because of their inferior strength and docility. The version Isabel Bautista used in Castile confirms and expands my point:

Con dos te miro
con tres te tiro

con cinco te arrebato
calla, bobo, que te ato
tan humilde vengas a mí
como la suela de mi zapato^[23]

[With two I watch you
With three I toss you
With five I captivate you
Quiet, fool, I'll bind you

(At this point the sorceress would slap her knee as a sign of command, and finish:)

You will come to me humble
As the sole of my shoe]

As shown above, enamored women understood quite well the mean temperament of their companions, but surely this formed part of the rules of the game. It was extremely important to placate their tempers in order to achieve a reconciliation. The amorous encounters and visits—which were most likely at night, judging by the extramarital nature of the majority of the relationships—rekindled the love interest. Without a doubt, the man's return constitutes an important motive for anxiety. His arrival is impatiently awaited, but he does not appear. The lover goes to her window, opens the door and looks down the street. He is nowhere to be seen; feeling exasperated, she nevertheless continues to wish for his presence, perhaps with increased anxiety. The conjurations of the door and the window reflect perfectly the scene I have just described.

In the conjuration of the door, like that of the window, the woman who recited went outside and looked down the street, where she supposed the man she wanted to attract would appear. Laura Garrigues did not object to going outside in broad daylight to call her lover:

Fulano
ni tú me ves
ni yo te acíerto
yo te llamo con el Padre . . .
tan humilde
tan sujeto
vengas a mí
como mi señor Jesucristo
subió al santo árbol de la cruz

a morir por ti y por mi
Amén

[(man's name)
You do not see me
Nor have I found you
I call you in the name of the Father . . .

(Here the sorceress invoked the powers of the Holy Trinity, and this was followed by the supplication and command:)

so humble
so subjected
You will come to me
As my lord Jesus Christ
Climbed the Holy Tree of the Cross
To die for you and me
Amen]

Evidently the sorceress tried to evoke the sacred figure's proverbial docility and resignation before a superior will. But, as the reader can imagine, the inquisitors were not partial to complex poetic associations.^[24]

María Antonia de Neroña, also of the Valencian tribunal, preferred to act at night, apparently at ten o'clock sharp. She would then invoke the lover, calling him three times, imagining him with a noose around his neck, that is, bound like a prisoner pleading for help:

Fulano, Fulano, Fulano,
por la calle abajo te veo venir
una soga de ahorcado traes a la garganta
a grandes voces diciendo
Fulana, váleme . . .

[(man's name, man's name, man's name,)
from down the street I see you coming,
A hangman's noose around your neck
Clamoring in a loud voice,
(woman's name,) help me . . .]

Repeated again and again, the refrain emphasizes not only the attempt to draw the companion's attention, but the woman who is to help him as well. The woman then denies him her aid, however, and turns him over to the conjured demons so they may penetrate the man's heart, provoking the same anxieties and pain she has suffered, as she recites this magic prayer:

. . . No te quiero valer
válgate Barrabás y Satanás
y todos los diablos que allá están
todos os juntaréis
y en el corazón de Fulano entraréis
y este cuchillo de cachas negras
por el corazón le clavaréis
tantas ansias le daréis
que a mi casa le traeréis

[I don't wish to help you,
Let Barabbas and Satan help you
And all the devils who are there
You will all gather together
And this black-handled knife
You will plunge into his heart
You will cause him so much anguish
That you will lead him to my house]

The basic intention is evident, but the woman is not satisfied with this wish alone, and she adds one of the refrains frequently repeated when the woman's anxiety led her to the brink of desperation:

. . . Y no le dejaréis
reposar, ni comer, ni dormir
ni en la cama reposar
sino conmigo pensar

[ . . . And you won't let him
Rest or eat or sleep
He will not rest in bed
But will think only of me]

The rest of María Antonia de Neroña's conjuration is explicit in this invocation "of the window":

. . . Que venga con ansias y pena
en su corazón
por verme y hallarme

[ . . . Let him come with anguish and sorrow
In his heart
To see me and find me . . .]

The only instrument the woman employed during this ceremony was the black-handled dagger that was to be thrust in the windowsill at the opportune moment—an obvious symbol of the forgetful lover's heart.^[25]

María Antonia de Neroña was one of the women who best expressed her love frustration in these cants. Her trial summary included a similar cant bidding the man to visit her again. On this occasion María Antonia was even more decisive: the man should appear bound and held fast by his most delicate parts:

A Fulano veo venir
soga de ahorcado trae tras él . . .
estas le traeréis
de su coxón
de su riñón
de su baçón
de las telas de su corazón^[26]

[I see (man's name) coming
A hangman's noose after him . . .

(At this point she conjured the demons who were in this case, interestingly enough, feminine.)

You will bring him
By the balls
By his kidney
By his spleen
By his heartstrings

Yet most of the sorceresses are not as explicit or rhetorical as María Antonia de Neroña. Gerónima González conjured the street and called the demons, limiting her entreaty:

¡Ah de la calle!
¡ah, so compadre!
 . . . Satanás, Barrabás y Lucifer
que me den a saber si Fulano vendrá^[27]

[Hey, the street (repeated)
Hey, mate!

(The invocation of the demons continued and was much longer than in Neroña's version, surely because Gerónima González emphasized the ceremony's magic aspect rather than merely stating her desires, which were limited to one phrase:)

. . . . Satan, Barabbas, and Lucifer
Let me know if (man's name) will come]

Laura Garrigues employed a brief and disconsolate imprecation to make her man return. She then entreated him by invoking such magic characters as María de Padilla, of the so-called Circle of the Castilian king Pedro I, who bewitched men and subjected them to her will with a ring containing an enchanted demon, and condemned the souls to hell, diabolical figures, like the "desperate souls":

Vecino y compadre,
gran señor de la calle
Fulano solía venir a verme
y ahora no viene
yo quiero que venga
y me lo has de traer
yo te conjuraré

[Neighbor and mate,
Great lord of the street,
(man's name) would come and see me
And now he does not come
And you are to bring him to me
I will entreat you . . .]

As with María Antonia de Neroña, Laura also added her wish that the demons penetrate this man's heart to induce such anguish that he would not rest until he had sought her out.^[28]

At this precise psychological moment, these semi-abandoned women employed very simple ceremonies, whose symbolic value was as evident as the use of fire. In general, the rites associated with the door, the place where one awaits the appearance of the beloved man, were limited to sweeping the threshold and conjuring him. Laura Garrigues awaited nightfall, left the door of her house ajar, and recited:

Conjúrote, puerta y quicial
por donde Fulano ha salido
ha de volver a entrar^[29]

[I conjure you, door and side-post
where (man's name) went out
He must enter again]

The pleas of the sorceresses and their clients directed to the stars, the moon, and the sun follow the same pattern we have seen during this

stage, as the woman attempts to retrieve her man but also desires to avenge herself for his absence. These cants addressed to the stars praise their beauty—"Maiden star, the highest and most beautiful . . ." [Estrella doncella, la más alta y la más bella]—and entreat them to penetrate the ungrateful heart painfully. One of the most ancient is the prayer by the beata of Huete, from the Cuenca tribunal of 1499; she invokes nine stars in all and then proceeds to the cant's central message:

Al monte Synay iréys
e nueve varas de amor me saquedes
por la cabeza de Santa Cruz las hinquedes
e de la cabeza al coraçón al riñón
y al taso o al baço
y a las andas del espiñaço
e las tresientas coyunturas
que en su cuerpo son
que no pueda comer ni beber
hasta que a mí venga a bien querer
e a aver plaçer^[30]

[You will go to Mount Sinai
And bring me nine staffs of love
You will drive them into the head of the Holy Cross
And from the head to the heart
And from the heart to the kidney
And to the taso or the spleen
And all along the spine
And the three hundred joints
in his body
So that he can neither eat nor drink
Until he comes to love me well
And to take pleasure in me]

The conjuration of the stars appears frequently in the Castilian tribunals at Cuenca and Toledo, and the well-known refrain from this conjuration, "So that he can neither eat nor drink . . ." [que no pueda comer ni beber], constantly accompanies other invocations throughout the following centuries. The Castilian Juana Dientes disrobed and let down her hair before reciting it, perhaps as a means of invoking the physical encounter with the lover; we must not forget that during this time, nudity and untied hair had sinful erotic connotations. Her conjuration was even more forceful than that of the religious devotee from Huete, who does not invoke the demons Beelzebub and Satan conjured by Juana:

Y con la fragua de Belzebú y Satanás
siete rejones le amolad
e con el coraçón de Fulano las lançad
para que ningún reposo pueda tomar
hasta que venga a mi mandar
Diablos del horno
traédmelo ayna
diablos del peso
diablos de la plaça
traédmelo en dança
diablos de la encrucijada
traédmelo a casa^[31]

[ . . . and with the forge of Beelzebub and Satan
You will sharpen seven daggers
And thrust them into (man's name)'s heart
So that he shall have no rest
Until he answers my command
Devils from the furnace
Bring him to me now
Devils of the scales
Devils of the plaza
Bring him dancing to me
Devils of the crossroad
Bring him to my house]

The proceedings against Isabel Bautista contain another conjuration to the stars recited by the Castilian sorceresses as early as the sixteenth century. Isabel added a brief and surprising ritual difficult for us to interpret. She measured the door jamb and door of her house with a cord, threw salt into one of the door jambs and placed a broom in the other, conjured the nine stars just as the other sorceress did, and then specified her desire that the man not forget her:

Tres varas de mimbre me traeréis
por las muelas de Barrabás las afiléis
por las calderas de Pedro Botero las pasaréis
una la hincareis por el sentido
que no me eche en olvido
otra por el coraçón
que vaya a mi afición
otra por las espaldas
que venga por mis palabras^[32]

[Bring me three willow rods
Sharpen them on Barabbas's molars
Carry them through hell
Drive one into his mind
So that he won't forget me
Another into the heart
So he will come when I desire
Another into his back
So he will answer my call]

The conjurations that employ the stars, the sun, and the moon as the magical motifs, as well as others we will examine below, are basically all the same. The sorceress varied the invocation to the evil spirits, increased or reduced the form of the cant, but always concluded by supplicating the same thing: the recovery of lost love.

We can observe this wish clearly in the cants invoking the sun and the moon, which are usually quite brief: " . . . so that [man's name] cannot live without me" [que Fulano no pueda estar sin mí], or simply, "so that [man's name] loves me" [que Fulano me quiera]. The cant to the moon recited by doña Juana de la Paz, tried in Valencia in 1655, demonstrates the features of these conjurations, actually the laments of abandoned women expressed aloud:

Luna clara
bella y hermosa
tan clara y tan bella
como me paresces a mí
tan bella y hermosa
paresca yo a mi galán
como la estrella que está cerca de ti^[33]

[Bright moon
Lovely, beautiful
As bright and beautiful
As you appear to me
So bright and beautiful
May I appear to my man,
As the star which is near to you]

To express simultaneously their frustration and attempt to recover lost love, the sorceresses not only resorted to profane elements like the stars; their repertory also included the Church's intercessors, certain saints, whose relation to the golden legend associated them with the basic purpose of the sorceresses' love magic. The sacred figures most fre-

quently invoked include the "Lonely Soul" [Anima Sola], who requires prayers because of her destitution; San Silvestre, magical because of the date of his feast day; and Santa Elena and San Onofre.

The prayer to the Lonely Soul, generally quite beautiful, nonetheless sheds very little light on the situation of these enamored women. After the ritual invocation, the woman simply repeats a wish very similar to that which we have already seen. Doña Juana de la Paz recited thirty-three Our Fathers, Hail Marys, and the accompanying Glorias, standing by her window, and enumerated the conditions of her plea to the spirit:

Esto que he rezado os ofrezco
os encomiendo
ánima sola
para que me traigas y me déis
buena señal desto que os pido^[34]

[I offer you this prayer
I commend you
Lonely soul
To bring me and give me
A hopeful sign of what I ask of you]

In other cases, the prayer is even more similar to previous conjurations. The preambles employed to conjure the Lonely Soul are not prayers but rather diabolical entreaties to such various elements as "Lucano's blood" [la sangre de Lucano], "the heart of the man who was stabbed in cold blood" [el corazón del hombre muerto a hierro frío], and the "twelve tribes of Israel" [las doce tribus de Israel] to cut nine wicker staffs:

Tres me las clavaredes a Fulano por el corazón
que no pierda mi amor
tres por el sentido
que no me eche en olvido^[35]

[You thrust three of them into (man's name)'s heart
So he won't forget my love
Three of them into his consciousness
So he won't forget me]

Still less original are the invocations in the prayers to Santa Marta, San Onofre, San Silvestre, and Santa Elena, yet they are beautiful compositions that would naturally impress a woman in need of help. As in the former case, all of these cants are simply assorted preambles fol-

lowed by familiar refrains employed on other occasions. In the case of the prayer to San Onofre, the sorceress limits herself to entreating:

Como atastéis y encontrastéis
a todos estos—la Draga y el Dragón—
así venga Fulano
tan humilde,
tan rendido, tan prostrado
tan atado y tan encortado
como todos estos se rindieron
y prostraron a vuestros santísimos pies . . .

[As you bound and encountered
All of these—the lady Dragon and the Dragon—
Thus will (man's name) come
So humble
So surrendered, so prostrated
So bound and tied
Like all of those who surrendered themselves
And prostrated themselves at your holy feet]

The conjuration ends with the refrain, "May he not eat, or drink, or rest," and so on [Que no pueda comer, ni beber, ni reposar, etc.].^[36]

All the petitions to San Onofre are very similar. First, the sorceress evoked his harsh penitence in the following manner:

Así como estas palabras son verdad
santo glorioso
me cumpláis esto que os pido
de traerme a mi marido^[37]

[Just as these words are true,
Glorious saint
Do what I ask of you
And bring me my husband]

The prayers to Santa Marta, Marta "the Wicked" [La Mala], and Santa Elena usually repeat familiar refrains ("May he not eat or drink . . ." [Que no pueda comer, ni beber . . .]) and various entreaties to make the man appear or to "resuscitate" his heart.

The Erotic Bond As Weapon

Once the enamored woman had exhausted all the possibilities of the above magical cants, she was then obliged to employ the most powerful weapon in this type of magic. She had to bind her lover so tightly

through intimate relations that he would be unable to leave her for another woman. The "binding" or "impotency spell" thus consists of rendering the man impotent, except when in the presence of the woman who bound him either through the conjuration or some other magic practice.

Men and women of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries literally believed in the possibility of producing this kind of spell, ironically justifying the double meaning of the term "sorceress" as pronounced by the male lover. Frequently we find men who appear before the Inquisition, afraid that they have fallen victim to this embarrassing spell and hoping that the imprisonment and sentencing of their domestic Circe will release them from it. Women were at once perpetrators and victims of an attitude that helped them to achieve their goals, but that also brought them to the attention of the Inquisition. Although these details cannot be described here, the repertory of conjurations itself reveals sufficient information to help us understand their circumstances. "Love magic" also contains the appropriate cants for "binding" a man to prevent him from approaching anyone other than the woman who loves him.

The conjuration of "the shadow-broom" appears in multiple versions throughout Castile, Valencia, and other regions. According to the documents, it renewed "illicit relations," its essentially erotic content recited by a woman generally completely naked and with her hair down. The shadow-broom came to symbolize an entreaty to both a demonic spirit and to the man whose return was desired. Actually, each sorceress added the touches from her personal repertory which seemed most opportune or which most openly suggested the possibility of inducing the absent lover to desire the woman once again. In one case the woman simply swept her own shadow with the broom, saying, "Come, husband, for I am alone."^[38] The beata from Huete, however, added a conjuration allowing us to appreciate the symbolic value of the scene:

Sombra
cabeça tenéis como yo
cuerpo tenéis como yo
yo te mando que ansí como tienes
mi sombra verdadera
que tu vayas a Fulano
e lo traigas a mí^[39]

[Shadow,
You have a head like mine
You have a body like mine

I command that, just as you have
My true shadow,
You go to (man's name)
And bring him to me]

María de Santarem, tried in Cuenca in 1538, employed a cant that seems to apply sorcery of the beans to her specific case. She would pitch several black chickpeas as she mentioned them (calling them beans in the invocation), finishing the spell by positioning herself to await the conjured man:

Sombra señora
con vos me vengo a enamorar
sombra señora
con vos me vengo a consolar
ava, que me habéis de ir por Fulano
y me le avéis de traer
ava, que quiero echar las suertes
ava, que si en vos cayere
ava, que me lo avéis de traer . . .
¡ah! en vos cayó la sombra
presto, presto
traédmelo preso y atado
y presto en un crédito
y no me lo dexéys a la puerta
sino traédmelo a mi cama^[40]

[Madame shadow
I come to fall in love with you
Madame shadow
I come to console myself with you
Bean, you must fetch (man's name)
And bring him to me
Bean, I want to cast lots
Bean, I want to cast them
Bean, if it falls to you
Bean, you must fetch him to me.

(Here, she pitched the chickpeas, letting the last one fall in her shadow.)

Ah! The shadow fell on you
Quickly, quickly
Bring him captured and tied
And quickly on your word
And don't leave him at my door
But bring him to my bed]

Sexual relations constituted the real weapon which the sorceresses and their clients relied upon in order to retain a man. The woman's physical surrender, however, guaranteed neither his constancy nor his good humor, the two fundamental goals that were desired. Consequently, sorceresses cast spells obliging the man to seek out only one woman, who became the heroine of these occult narratives. Our enamored women counted on a wide range of methods for their purposes. They may have bewitched the man by using his semen to cast various "impotency spells." Similarly, he may have been bound to the woman by means of some love potion composed of her sexual fluids. The following are examples of several practices which, while not always poetic, were indeed quite expressive.

Throughout Spain, sorceresses frequently performed the "conjuration of the oil lamp's wick," which utilized semen. The woman would collect it after having had "contact with her friend"—called illicit in the documents. The cotton or linen with which the woman cleaned herself after intercourse was twisted into a "wick," then placed in an oil lamp and ignited. For several nights she would leave it burning while she recited:

Así come arde esta torcida
arda el corazón de Fulano

[As this wick burns
So shall (man's name)'s heart burn]

Doña Juana de la Paz performed this conjuration in Valencia,^[41] while in Castile we find a similar procedure where the woman recited a more complex and explicit cant:

Vida de la vida
de la carne y de la sangre
de Fulano
que me ames . . .
y te conjuro Fulano con Barrabás
y assí como estas torcidas arden en este candil
assí me quieras^[42]

[Life of life
Of the flesh and blood
Of (man's name)
You must love me
 . . . And I conjure you, (man's name), with
Barabbas

And just as these wicks burn in these lamps
You will love me]

Another curious ceremony with wicks had to be performed collectively. The women all sat in a circle and called upon the man to perform "lewd acts." Lighting nine wicks, they would pass around three grains of salt, three lumps of coal, nine nails, nine beans, and a wax candle. They would throw the salt, beans, and other objects into the circle and then pick them up again; if the two beans indented with teeth marks landed together in the circle, it was a sign that the absent man would return.

Women's menstrual blood also contained magical powers that could be channeled to the same ends as semen. In this case, the sorceresses generally did not utilize this ingredient alone, but would add the brains of an ass and pubic hairs. Once the dish containing the impotency spell had been prepared, the man would have to eat it for the desired effect. Laura Garrigues, for example, added a little pepper; doña Juana de la Cruz simply dried the blood and mixed it with wine; other women spread it on a meat dish. The conjuration recited by doña Juana de la Paz adds a poetic touch:

Yo te conjuro
sangre de la fuente—o de mi fuente—la vermeja
que vaya Fulano tras de Fulana
como el cordero tras la oveja^[43]

[I conjure you,
Blood from the crimson fountain—or my fountain—
Make (man's name) follow (woman's name)
Like the lamb after the sheep]

The inclusion of menstrual blood, pubic hair, and semen guaranteed these rites the most obvious and astonishing sexual content. Yet the "conjuration of the sexual member" probably originated because some women dared to venture even further in their desire to cause their lovers' impotency with other women. Laura Garrigues held her lover's penis and, making several crosses, recited: "I repeat, the cross enters" [Hago coro, entra cruz].^[44] María Antonia de Neroña made the sign of the cross on her lover's back—presumably in bed, although the document does not specify where—and said:

Hasta que esta cruz te veas
tú me ames y me quieras^[45]

[Until you see this cross
May you love and desire me]

Besides these "love potions" and magical concoctions, sorceresses resorted to less complicated rites also aimed at rendering the undecided lover impotent. The Valencian sorceresses would take a ribbon touched by the man, and at the stroke of six, they would make nine knots, tying and untying them nine times; the woman would then wear the belt for nine days. Variations of the "spell of the knots" with cloths or similar objects appeared in Castile and other areas.

These rituals thus describe clearly women's anxieties regarding love, but a more profound analysis reveals that, although they wished to be accompanied and loved by men, material support was an equally desired goal, a fact evinced orally through the conjurations.

Sentimental Pragmatism and Love Magic

Despite the essential constant in love magic of winning over and keeping a man, the institution of matrimony appears only in an occasional conjuration. Marriage, the official bond par excellence, is scarcely ever mentioned; in most cases the magical rites were directed toward a purely sexual conquest. "Love magic" was also extramarital magic, one in which erotic relations always carried a sinful, condemnable connotation for the zealous priests and inquisitors. The inquisitorial proceedings refer to physical relations in such unequivocal terms, in spite of the fact that no lack of married women resorted to the sorceresses to recover husbands distracted by other women. In the terminology appearing in the inquisitorial documents, the sorceresses and their clients sought "illicit contact" and "lewd acts," they used fluids from "private parts," and they were interested in "dishonest relations"; in effect, the words "husband" and "wife" were rarely mentioned, nor were marriages reclaimed.

While the term "husband" does not always mean a spouse officially recognized by the Church, but can also refer to a stable couple, only Isabel María de Mendoza, tried in Valencia, employed the term in her prayer to San Onofre:

Assí como estas palabras son verdad
santo glorioso,
me cumpláis esto que os pido
de traerme a mi marido^[46]

[ . . . Just as these words are true,
Glorious saint
You will do what I ask of you
And bring me my husband]

Very few of the experts whose practices I have collected in this basic repertory of love magic make any reference to marriage or to legal husbands. Nor is the conjugal bond mentioned with any frequency in the proceedings and causas de relaciones in other peninsular trials I have studied. This does not mean that married women were not involved in this type of magic, but they generally resorted to it in secret when they suspected their husbands of leaving them for some rival. It was undoubtedly better to try to recover a husband's love through spontaneous means such as physical relations than to suffer in silence and resign oneself, following the confessor's advice. In any case, love magic became an unorthodox method, not only for the religious reasons adduced by the theologians and judges of the Holy Office, but because the Church Fathers condemned and marginalized sexual relations. For these women, carnal pleasure thus assumed a significance that is more characteristic of the classical world than of Christianity.

Of course, the term "husband" is not completely absent from the basic repertory, a term whose distinct resonances compare with the variant "friend," according to Cirac Estopañán.^[47] Significantly most of these women were either prostitutes, the lovers of friars or married men, or simply women who had no qualms about having sexual relations with whomever they chose. One of the advocates they appealed to most frequently was "Marta the Wicked," whose description illustrates the extramarital nature of these relations:

Marta, Marta
no la digna ni la santa
la que descasa casadas
la que junta los amancebados
la que anda de noche por las encrucijadas
yo te conjuro con tal y tal demonio
y con el de la carnicería
que me traiga a Fulano más ayna
o de hombre que hable
o de perro que ladre^[48]

[Marta, Marta,
Neither decent nor a saint
She who separates married women

She who unites lovers
She who travels the crossroads by night
I conjure you with such-and-such a demon
And with the demon of the slaughterhouse
That you bring (man's name) to me more quickly
Than a man speaking
Or a dog barking]

In truth, the women who practiced such rites were rather importunate, taking advantage of their male friends' sexual desires to benefit themselves. Requests for gifts are an essential part of the conjurations and rites that attempt to recover and maintain carnal relations with scornful suitors. Many of the more poetically structured compositions usually end with the pragmatic refrain: "Let [man's name] come, and give me all he has and tell me all he knows" [Venga Fulano y me dé lo que tuviere y me diga lo que supiere].

Although one of the most erotic, the following conjuration of the wicks recorded by Paz y Melia ends on a pragmatic note:

Que me ames
me estimes y me regales
que me des cuanto tuvieres
y me digas lo que supieres^[49]

[ . . . So that you love
And esteem me and give me gifts,
So that you give me all you have
And tell me what you know]

The lengthy and poetic invocation to the stars also contains the same line:

Que venga con ansias y pena en su corazón
por verme y hallarme
dándome lo que tuviere
y diciéndome lo que supiere^[50]

[So that he come with anguish and pain in his heart
To see me and find me
Giving me all he has
And telling me what he knows]

The same phrase appears in Laura Garrigues's invocations of the street:

Ansias le daréis
que no le dejaréis reposas
hasta que me venga a buscar
dándome lo que tuviere y diciéndome lo que supiere^[51]

[ . . . You will provoke his anguish
And you won't let him rest
Until he seeks me out
Giving me all he has and telling me what he knows]

As the reader may guess, this phrase appears in the conjurations and phrases that conclude the ceremonies with explicitly erotic content, and in the superstitious cants:

La gloriosa santa Elena
de la cruz los tres clavos sacó
el uno en el mar echó
el otro a su hijo Constantino dió
para que en las batallas entrase
no fuese vencido sino vencedor
así, santa bienaventurada,
sea yo la vencedora con Fulano
que no pueda estar . . .
hasta que me venga a buscar.
Que venga volando
que you le estoy esperando
véngame dándome quanto tuviere
y me diga quanto supiere^[52]

[Glorious Santa Elena
Took the three nails from the cross
She threw one into the sea
She gave one to Constantine her son
So that in battle
He would be victor instead of conquered
In like manner, blessed saint
Let me be the victor over (man's name)
So that he cannot . . .

(The sorceress adds the refrain conjuring the anxiety wished upon the man)

Until he comes to find me
May he arrive as fast as possible
As I am waiting for him
Let him come to me, giving me all he has
And telling me all he knows]

This new leitmotiv reveals facets that were unimagined until now. What conclusion can we reach regarding these women and their practices after having analyzed the material? Were they, in effect, basically concerned with love, or were they unprotected and self-centered women? They seem to include elements of both, no doubt, but what is most essential is that their rituals created an authentic popular poetry that allows us a view of a previously unknown world.

Five—
Visionaries and Affective Spirituality during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century

Geraldine McKendrick and Angus MacKay

Shortly before his death on 25 January 1516, Ferdinand the Catholic received a message from God, passed on to him by Sor María de Santo Domingo, the celebrated visionary and Dominican tertiary who was also known as the Beata de Barco de Avila or the Beata de Piedrahita:^[1]

And while His Highness was in this place (Madrigalejo), his illness became much worse, and he was made to understand that he was very close to death. But he could hardly believe this because the truth is that he was much tempted by the enemy who, in order to prevent him from confessing himself or receiving the sacraments, persuaded him to believe that he would not die so soon. And the reason for this was that, when he was in Plasencia, one of the royal councilors who had come from the Beata de Barco de Avila told him that the Beata was sending to tell him on behalf of God that he would not die until he had taken Jerusalem. And for this reason he would not see or send for Fray Martín de Matienzo, of the Order of Preachers, his confessor, even though the confessor himself tried to see him several times.^[2]

Although in this particular case Sor María's prophetic powers proved ineffective, she had for many years been a cult figure. In love with God, with whom she talked intimately, embracing his body, Sor María delivered sermons-in-trance, underwent ecstatic crucifixions, and even claimed that she was Christ. She enthralled the royal court with her ecstasies and celestial dances, Cardinal Ximénez de Cisneros consulted her on important matters such as the conquest of Oran, and the duke of Alba built a magnificent convent for her in Aldenueva, near Avila.^[3] Of course, not everyone believed in her, and the Dominicans in particu-

lar were hostilely skeptical.^[4] Nevertheless she had protectors in high places, and when a special ecclesiastical commission was set up to investigate her, she emerged from the investigation with her reputation for saintliness intact. The Italian Pietro Martire d'Anghiera particularly commented on Cisneros's devotion to Sor María, and indeed the cardinal, who was himself a Franciscan, gave the beata a Franciscan girdle to wear under the Dominican habit, thus emphasizing both his attachment to her and a symbolic process of "Franciscanization."^[5]

A large number of visionaries like Sor María de Santo Domingo, as well as other practitioners of an emotional, intensive, and affective spirituality, figure in one way or another in the Inquisition records, and in terms of culture and control, they raise some very interesting problems. In the first place, the degree to which some visionaries of the first half of the sixteenth century were left undisturbed by the Inquisition is quite remarkable. Perhaps the most astonishing case is that of the millenarian friars of Escalona.^[6] In 1524 the Franciscan church in Escalona witnessed some bizarre scenes. Fray Olmillos, for example, improved on his public visionary performances by moving the altar to the middle of the church so that more people could witness his ecstasies,^[7] and Fray Ocaña unfolded a millennial program for the reform of the Church. Preaching on the text, "Behold we go up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of man shall be accomplished" (Luke 18:31), Ocaña told his audience that the people of Escalona were the most blessed in the world. In another sermon he called for those in power in the Church to be "thrown out like pigs"; the messianic program revealed to him and Fray Olmillos stipulated that Charles V would defeat the king of France and take over his kingdom, the pope would be deposed by the Marquis of Villena, Ocaña himself would be installed as the new reforming pope, and the illiterate visionary Francisca Hernández would reform and revise the Holy Scriptures.^[8] Here surely was an open challenge to establish authority within the Church that could hardly be ignored. Yet the Inquisition never moved against these friars, or indeed against the group to which they belonged that practiced recogimiento, an interiorized religious state, but concentrated instead on the dejados, who practiced spiritual abandonment to God and actually considered the visions, ecstatic fits, convulsions, and excesses to which recogimiento gave rise to be delusions induced by the Devil. Moreover, even when the Inquisition did condemn individual visionaries, it frequently did so after a considerable delay, during which the visionary enjoyed fame and prestige. In this sense the career of Magdalena de la Cruz, the celebrated visionary of Córdoba, constitutes

a good example. During the early decades of the sixteenth century she was considered saintly and was in constant and intimate communication with God, and her devotees included the general of the Franciscan Order, Fray Francisco de los Ángeles Quiñones; Fray Francisco de Osuna, the mystic whose writings were so appreciated by Santa Teresa; and the archbishop of Seville and inquisitor general, Alonso Manrique. Indeed, on the birth of the future Philip II in 1527, "the hábitos of this nun were sent off as a sacred object so that the infante could be wrapped up in them and thus apparently be shielded and protected from the attacks of the Devil." In 1533 Magdalena was elected abbess of her convent and was at the height of her power and popularity. But only in 1546, and after many prophecies, visions, and miracles, including even a pregnancy by the Holy Spirit, did the Cordoban Inquisition finally try her and sentence her to life imprisonment in a convent in Andújar.^[9]

The second point of interest is the fact that so many of the visionaries and practitioners of intense affective spirituality were women. In addition to the Beata de Piedrahita and Magdalena de la Cruz, already mentioned, a list of only a few outstanding examples would include Francisca Hernández, whose powers and marvels were well known in Salamanca and Valladolid, and whose reputation for sanctity spread to New Castile; Isabel de la Cruz, leader and idealogue of the dejados; Isabel de Texeda, whose visionary excesses were notorious in Guadalajara; the ecstatic Mother Marta, a miracle-working Benedictine nun in Toledo who was visited by the king, courtiers, and prelates; and Juana de la Cruz, the visionary abbess of Cubas.^[10] Nor were these isolated cases, as incidental references in the Inquisition records demonstrate. In Guadalajara, for example, a widow went into a trance in a public square and claimed that she had seen more visions than St. Bridget of Sweden, and elsewhere in the same town another widow fell into a rapturous ecstasy and saw all the blessed souls in heaven.^[11]

The object of this essay, therefore, is to place affective spirituality and the visionary phenomenon into context. Why were some "excesses" controlled and others condoned? What assumptions and beliefs lay behind María de Santo Domingo's assertion, and Ferdinand's apparent acceptance of this assertion, that the king would not die until he had conquered Jerusalem? Why did women play such a relatively prominent role in the visionary phenomenon?

In pondering why the inquisitors failed to take any action after they had learned of the revolutionary reform program of the Franciscans of Escalona, Nieto comments: "The solution which comes readily to one's mind is that in some way, somehow, they themselves believed the ideas

contained in this ideology of religious-political reformation."^[12] He is surely right; the fact is that in the drive to define and protect orthodoxy the policies of both the monarchy and the Inquisition are of interest not only because of the war waged on "heresy" but also because of what was accepted or tolerated within the confines of orthodoxy.

Christian eschatological doctrines or beliefs concerning "the last days" enjoyed a particularly flourishing tradition in the Iberian world: rooted in the appropriate biblical texts and producing Spanish and Portuguese variants, its last important manifestation occurred as late as 1896 in the famous Brazilian rebellion, inspired by Sebastianism, of Antonio the Councilor.^[13] But its most outstanding feature was that it was based on a mutation of the apocalyptic legend of The Last Roman Emperor . The source of this West European legend was the Greek apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, written in the seventh or early eighth century, although the Greek text was itself a translation of a seventh-century Syriac original, also attributed to a Methodius, but composed in Mesopotamia. This apocalyptic legend was translated into Latin in the late seventh or eighth century in Merovingian Gaul, thus introducing into the West the belief that at the end of days a king of the Greeks or Romans would defeat the Muslims, conquer Jerusalem, and renounce his empire directly to God at the hill of the skull, Golgotha. Subsequently a tenth-century monk, Adso, rewrote the legend to fit an eschatological French king, and between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries Germanic variations developed, so that by the fifteenth century it was believed that Emperor Frederick II, who died in Apulia in 1250, was still alive and hidden on Mount Kyffhauser, awaiting to return and fulfil the millennial prophesy.^[14] But, in addition to the last World Emperor, the figure of the Angelic Pope emerged toward the end of the thirteenth century and came to reflect the aspirations of the spiritual Franciscans. For the Spirituals Rome was identified with the carnal Church, to be rejected by Christ at the end of the sixth age. Rome was Babylon meretrix et impudica; illa Babylon meretrix magna . At the end of days, therefore, the World Emperor would be helped by the Angelic Pope.^[15]

In Spain the legend of The Last World Emperor, suitably influenced by Joachimite ideas and prophesies attributed to St. Isidore of Seville, produced a messianic king and world emperor, known variously as the Encubierto (the Hidden One), the Murciélago (the Bat), and the New David.^[16] Moreover, as was amply demonstrated in the highly influential apocalyptic treatise of the Franciscan Fray Alemán, the eschatological "events" underwent a marked process of Hispanicization, for in Alemán's treatise the Antichrist appears in Seville, the messianic armies

disembark "near Antioch, which is the port of Cádiz," and a titanic battle ensues in Seville near the present-day cathedral. Victorious, the messianic forces proceed to take Granada; thereafter Jerusalem and the rest of the world are conquered, and of course an Angelic Pope is installed in Rome.^[17]

Although the eschatological tradition was a long-standing one, it was only from about 1470 onward that reality began to match messianic expectations; as Milhou has demonstrated, an avalanche of prophetic texts, commentaries, and ballads, and even a letter of revelation which the Marquis of Cádiz, don Rodrigo Ponce de León, circulated to the great nobles of Castile in 1486, identified Ferdinand the Catholic as the Encubierto or Bat who would conquer the Holy House of Jerusalem and the whole world.^[18] Nor was Ferdinand averse to believing all this. Pietro Martire thought in 1510 that Ferdinand was obsessed with the conquest of Africa, and in February of that year Ferdinand himself wrote in one of his letters that "the conquest of Jerusalem belongs to Us and We have the title of that kingdom."^[19] Is it a coincidence that Sor María de Santo Domingo's rise to fame dated from 1509, or that from 1510 onward rey de Jerusalén came to be included by Ferdinand among his other royal titles?^[20] In any case the dying Ferdinand would certainly have understood all the implications of the divine message which Sor María had sent him.

Of course, such messianic ideas could be projected onto others or be assumed by others. Within months of the conquest of Granada, for example, Columbus had received royal backing for his empresa de las Indias, which was designed to establish contact with the pro-Christian Mongol grand khan in the East in order that a combined offensive to recover the Holy House of Jerusalem might be undertaken. Subsequently Columbus continued to regard the lands he discovered as a stepping-stone toward this objective, and on the basis of a purported Joachimite prophecy that the conqueror of Jerusalem would come from Spain, he eventually came to believe that he himself was the messianic figure.^[21] Messianic ideals were similarly projected onto Cardinal Ximénez^[22] and, after his death, onto Charles V. Thus, for example, the famous apocalyptic prophecies contained in Manuscript 1779 of the Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid) identify Charles V as the messianic ruler who will be lord of Spain, France, and Germany, and who, after being crowned emperor of Rome, will cross the seas, become the ruler of all the world, conquer the Holy House of Jerusalem, and finally surrender his crown, presumably to God, on the Mount of Olives.^[23] When, therefore, the Franciscans of Escalona prophesied that Charles V would de-

pose Francis I in 1523 and that Clement VII would be replaced by the equivalent of an Angelic Pope, were they not simply confirming messianic notions already in circulation? As far as the inquisitors were concerned, it would appear that visionaries who identified Ferdinand the Catholic or Charles V as the world emperor should be tolerated and left alone. Matters would be quite different when a visionary like Lucrecia de León would identify someone like Miguel de Piedrola as the New David or the Encubierto destined to rule over the whole world.^[24]

Yet few visionaries conformed to this precise eschatological tradition, and the phenomenon needs to be placed within a broader context—particularly, but not exclusively, within the context of the nature and influence of Franciscan spirituality.^[25] Above all, the anti-intellectual and affective thought espoused by the Franciscans made them favorably disposed to certain aspects of female spirituality.^[26] The dejados' opposition to "men of letters," for example, was a motif running through evidence given by witnesses in Inquisition trials. "In order to know God, the study of letters is not necessary," declared Pedro de Baeza, repeating what he had heard in Escalona about the teachings of the dejados;^[27] and Isabel de la Cruz, a Franciscan tertiary from Guadalajara, believed that "learning killed the spirit," a sentiment echoing the old Franciscan dictum that "Paris has destroyed Assisi."^[28] The Franciscans' attachment to an intuitive and emotional religiosity also led them to value the gift of prophecy. By the fourteenth century the Franciscan Nicolás de Lyra already referred to prophetesses as illuminatae mentis, made lucid by special grace.^[29] Thus as the example of Francisca Hernández demonstrated, studying theology of the Scriptures at university was not essential—and was indeed inferior to knowledge obtained through faith and above all by an intimate experience of God. For when Francisca, responding to the request of her Franciscan devotee Fray Francisco Ortiz, offered her own interpretations of passages of Scripture, such as the Sermon on the Mount, The Song of Solomon, and Revelation, the friar had been astounded by her grasp of the essential truths of these writings; what Francisca had discussed in three short words would have been endlessly debated by theologians in long and arid treatises.^[30] Similarly, those who listened to the sermons-in-trance of Sor María de Santo Domingo marveled at her insight into difficult theological problems:

Sometimes in her raptures Sor María is accustomed to answering difficult questions about theology, profound problems, matters concerning the Holy Scriptures, things pertaining to our Holy Catholic faith or to good customs, the glory of Paradise, the pains of Hell, Purgatory, and the Holy Sacraments . . . Thus all who see her and hear her respond think that it

is a marvelous thing that a poor, ignorant little woman like Sor María, who was brought up in a village, should respond so well and sometimes better than a Master of Theology or a man of great learning.^[31]

"A poor, ignorant little woman": being a "fragile" female without any formal education and from a suitably humble background was in itself a guarantee that only God (or the Devil) could work such a miracle.^[32] And so Cardinal Ximénez would consult Sor María as to whether he should cross the Straits of Gibraltar, and Fray Francisco de los Ángeles Quiñones, the General of the Franciscan Order, would ask Francisca Hernández for advice about a proposed journey to Italy.^[33] Even the clothes of these women transmitted spiritual graces and healing powers as if they were relics. Contact with the girdle of Francisca Hernández, for example, cured Fray Francisco Ortiz of sexual temptation; Cardinal Ximénez gave Sor María a Franciscan girdle, requesting that she should always wear it and, through it, continually remember him in her divine prayers;^[34] and, as has been seen, the habits of Magdalena de la Cruz were wrapped round the infante Philip to protect him from the Devil.

In fact, women were positively encouraged to develop an affective and intense spirituality. For example, Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz, the devoted disciple of the Franciscan tertiary Isabel de la Cruz, spent long hours persuading women to practice dejamiento, or abandonment to the love of God, and Inquisition witnesses claimed that he had targeted three particular types of women—widows, beatas, and doncellas .^[35] In Escalona he had considerable success among the maidservants and ladies-in-waiting in the palace of the Marquis of Villena. After mass in the local Franciscan church, the women would kneel at his feet, with their hands on their breasts, and listen in adoration as he discussed dejamiento. In Pastrana and Madrid, likewise, he would lodge in the houses of widowed devotees and hold private spiritual consultations for women, particularly those who were not married.^[36] Alcaraz, of course, was a "heretic," but Ignatius Loyola was to operate in a similar fashion amongst the widows and beatas of Alcalá in 1526–1527.^[37]

Moreover, the great Cardinal Ximénez de Cisneros himself helped to promote a visionary spirituality characterized by such mental states as trances, swoons, visions, dreams, and fits. It was not simply that Mother Marta, Juana de la Cruz, and Sor María de Santo Domingo were all his spiritual mentors; Cisneros also exerted a powerful influence over the type of material that issued from the printing presses at Toledo and Alcalá, and this included numerous works by such mystical authors as Vincent Ferrer, Catherine of Siena, and Angela of Foligno.^[38] Indeed, just as Cardinal Ximénez protected Sor María from her Dominican de-

tractors who thought her trances were the work of the Devil, so the passage in which the Dominican Vincent Ferrer condemned such mystical excesses as revelations and visions was deliberately omitted from the 1510 printed edition of his Tract of Spiritual Life .^[39] Such mystical works were primarily intended for friars and nuns, but, as Bataillon rightly pointed out,^[40] Cisneros almost certainly wished them to be distributed among the laity as well. The works of Catherine of Siena and Angela of Foligno must have been of particular interest to nuns and beatas, for both these women were tertiaries whose mystical experiences took the form of visions and raptures. Angela of Foligno, for example, was devoted to contemplation of the minutiae of Christ's suffering on the Cross, and her most profound mystical experiences took place during this spiritual contemplation. Thus in the Franciscan church in Assisi, Christ appeared to her dripping in blood, whereupon she herself, like Sor María, experienced the agony and pain of the Crucifixion.^[41] And, like many Spanish female visionaries, Angela in her raptures suffered from temporary loss of speech or lost the use of her limbs.

But, although they did not enjoy the educational opportunities that were available to men, it should not be imagined that women who practiced an affective spirituality or were visionaries were either ignorant or simply reacting in a slavish manner to the encouragement or promptings provided by the male establishment. The medieval Church, following Pauline injunctions, had silenced women; but the language and behavior of the female spirituality that emerged during the early sixteenth century circumvented this silence, and some women seized the opportunity. Besides, the testimony of Inquisition witnesses provides ample evidence that women were actively interested in the religious education of their own sex. The town of Guadalajara provides an example. There María de Cazalla, who was arrested by the Inquisition in 1532 on a variety of charges ranging from Lutheranism to alumbradismo, or illuminism, did not confine herself merely to educating her two daughters and encouraging them to read the many spiritual tracts emanating from the Alcalá press, but she also gave catechism classes to rural women^[42] and preached in urban households. In Advent, 1522, for example, she visited her widow friend Catalina Hernández Calvete and read one of the Epistles of St. Paul aloud, discussing its meaning in front of a female audience gathered together in the kitchen. As Catalina Alonso recalled:

. . . there were a lot of people there, and it seemed as if they were all women. . . . I think that there were more than twenty women because the kitchen was big and it was full. María de Cazalla read from a book, and then spoke, and everyone was silent as if they were listening to a sermon.^[43]

Nor was María de Cazalla unique or exceptional. In the same town of Guadalajara a woman recalled seeing Isabel de la Cruz reading a book in a public square, a cleric affirmed that he had seen many women reading books aloud in the vernacular in front of other people, and the aristocratic Doña Mencía de Mendoza categorically stated that "it is a well-known fact that literate women read aloud to illiterate women books such as the Scriptures and Lives of Saints."^[44]

Although such examples could be multiplied, it is also important to note that female literacy was also assuming an even more active role, with women either writing books themselves or having their books written for them. Isabel de la Cruz and Alcaraz, for example, were rumored to have composed a book on contemplation,^[45] María de Cazalla's written correspondence on spiritual matters was bound together like a book and circulated among sympathizers and acquaintances,^[46] the visionary Isabel de Texeda enlisted the services of a cleric to commit her revelations and prophecies to paper,^[47] Juana de la Cruz had her sermons-in-trance written down by three of her fellow nuns,^[48] and Sor María de Santo Domingo's Oración y contemplación was published by the press of Jorge Coci in Aragoza in 1520.^[49] This was the same Sor María whose celestial ecstasies had so enthralled the royal court, who had been protected by the great Cisneros himself, and who had relayed God's personal message to the ailing Encubierto, promising that the Bat would not die until he had taken Jerusalem. During the first half of the sixteenth century God moved in mysterious ways.

Six—
Politics, Prophecy, and the Inquisition in Late Sixteenth-Century Spain

Richard L. Kagan

The aim of this essay is to explore a triad of Inquisition trials, from the late 1580s, that centered on the issue of prophecy. The trials are those of Miguel de Piedrola, a seer nominated by the Castilian Cortes for the position of Spain's national prophet; that of Sor María de la Visitación, a Dominican nun in Lisbon famous for her stigmata; and that of Lucrecia de León, a young woman from Madrid known for her millennial dreams of Spain's future. Together these trials provide an opportunity to examine the Inquisition's attitudes towards seers, and, in a wider sense, the relationship between prophecy and politics in late sixteenth-century Spain.

Prophecy—which can be understood as a spiritually-inspired teaching or warning—is a complex subject that has been extensively studied by anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and literary scholars. Generally speaking, research on the history of European prophecy has followed one of two tracks. The first considers prophecy as a literary genre; its principal concern is to classify various types of prophecy as well as to establish what might be called a "thematic genealogy," tracing individual prophecies back to their source, either biblical or medieval, and then explaining the changes and permutations that occurred along the way. In this guise prophecy serves as an available language, a discourse always available for use and one that is constantly being adapted and reformulated to fit particular purposes and needs. An excellent example of this type of inquiry is Robert Lerner's study of the Cedar of Lebanon prophecy from the Middle Ages until the Enlightenment.^[1] The other track, pioneered by social scientists, considers prophecy primarily from

a structural-functional perspective and views it principally as the product of a particular set of social circumstances, usually of moments of crisis and/or unusually rapid social and economic change. Scholars as diverse as Norman Cohn and Michael Adas thus seek to explain the role prophecy played in society and to understand the specific purposes to which prophecy was put.^[2] Although these tracks are sometimes viewed as running in opposite directions, in this essay I shall attempt to make the two intersect, paying particular attention to the motivations of Piedrola, Lucrecia, and Sor María, one aspect of prophecy that scholars have frequently ignored.

Prophecy is essentially a public endeavor, though its origin is quintessentially a private experience, such as a vision or dream. Prophecy is also a social act. Often allied with a particular cause, the prophet is a mediator between the supporters of that cause and the general public as well as a transmitter of messages received through a miraculous medium: a mysterious voice, an angel, a heavenly vision. The prophet usually addresses a concrete, well-defined audience and intends to achieve specific, well-articulated ends such as the reform of the Church, a perennial theme in medieval prophecies. Prophecy is also a collective phenomenon; prophets rarely speak for themselves but rather serve as the mouthpieces for ignored, neglected, or marginal groups seeking to obtain legitimacy for a particular cause. Prophecy in this guise becomes a legitimating device, or, if you will, a cloak, a disguise; it represents a bid both for legitimacy and power. From this proposition it follows that ruling authorities almost invariably view prophets with considerable suspicion.^[3]

Yet prophecy need not necessarily serve as a vehicle for protest. In early modern Europe prophecies were commonly announced to consolidate support for a new monarch or regime, and in Spain royal births were regularly accompanied by the circulation of "fulfillment prophecies" which avowed that the future monarch was destined to complete the work of the Reconquest.^[4]

The "gift of prophecy" was also considered a sign of divine favor, and hagiographers regularly took pains to establish the clairvoyance of the individual whose sainthood they sought to promote. Thus Fray Pedro Navarro's 1616 biography of Juana de la Cruz, the beata associated with the foundation of the miracle working shrine in Illescas, included a chapter on Juana's prophetic powers.^[5]

Yet most prophets were not candidates for canonization. Many, like the peasant girls studied by William Christian, were ordinary individuals

who claimed to have seen into the future as a result of a dream, a vision, or some other form of supernatural experience.^[6] Others had a political agenda, especially those seers who Ottavia Niccoli has called "plaza prophets," that is, individuals, both clerical and lay, who used prophecy to establish religious standards by which to judge a secular regime.^[7] Prophecy thus often became an ideological weapon wielded by opposition movements and radical groups. Among those who turned prophecy toward political protest, the best known are Savonarola, the radical Dominican preacher whose followers gained control of Florence in 1491, and Thomas Müntzer, the Anabaptist leader who attempted to establish a millennial kingdom at Allstedt and later at Mühlhausen before being defeated by imperial forces in 1525. William Hackett, the former serving man who warned of plague unless Queen Elizabeth reformed her government, was somewhat less successful; he was arrested for sedition and executed in a London square in 1590.^[8]

The history of plaza prophets in Spain has yet to be written, but there is ample evidence of their activity. At the start of the fifteenth century, for example, the fiery Dominican preacher Vicente Ferrer (1350–1419) cited Jeremiah 23:16 to warn against the horde of prophets inundating Spanish streets: "Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy and deceive you. What they tell you are their visions; it does not come from the mouth of God."^[9] Despite this admonition, a Savonarola-like street prophet known popularly as "el bachiller Marquillos" claimed to have been inspired by the Holy Spirit and collected a sizeable following during the anti-converso riots that erupted in Toledo in 1449. Other prophets surfaced in Valladolid during the tumultuous years immediately preceding the outbreak of the Comunero revolt in 1520, among them Fray Juan de San Vicente, a Franciscan who made public pronouncements about the "bad government" of Spain.^[10] Two years later, during the Germanía revolt in the Valencian town of Játiva, there appeared a hermit who described himself as el rey encubierto (The Hidden King), evoking the medieval idea of the pastor angelicus or blessed redeemer who would come from the east, rescue the kingdom from its enemies, and forever defeat the Moors. Dressed in animal skins, possibly to identify himself with the biblical David, the hermit claimed to have been sent by the Holy Spirit to destroy "the swamp of this kingdom." Promising riches for all his followers and rewarding some with noble titles, this "king" was soon assassinated by agents hired by the royal viceroy.^[11]

The decade of the 1580s was another period in Spanish history when street prophets suddenly proliferated, in part prompted by international

events of the day. In 1580, for example, there surfaced in Albuquerque, a small town near the Portuguese border, a widow who claimed to have experienced a vision which revealed that Philip II's endeavor to become king of Portugal would not succeed unless he first vowed to follow in the late King Sebastian of Portugal's footsteps and embark on a North African crusade.^[12] There was also isabel de Jesús, a Dominican nun in the small town of Huete, who first became known around 1583 for her stigmata, various miracles, and her "prophetic gift." Gradually, Isabel's reputation for saintliness grew and by 1587 her supporters compared her with the then famous Nun of Lisbon, Sor María de la Visitación (see below). Yet Isabel's prophecies were not strictly religious and among the "secret and future things" she told Hernando de Toledo, one of Philip's councilors of state, were events related to "the war with England."^[13]

Most of this decade's prophetic activity was centered in Madrid and was linked to the monarchy's mounting economic and political difficulties, both at home and abroad. Another cloud on the horizon was the health of Philip II. The king suffered a serious illness in 1585 and the slow pace of his recovery fueled speculation that Philip was no longer capable of personal rule nor of protecting his kingdom against its enemies. The depth and extent of this crisis of confidence in Philip's ability to rule remains to be determined, yet it is clear that by the late 1580s many Spaniards feared that Philip's reign was nearing its end. Remarkably, the monarch ruled another ten years despite his age and ill health, but they were years marked by the spread of apocalyptic ideas and various doomsday scenarios. In Madrid, Fray Alonso de Orozco, a prominent Augustinian preacher widely revered for his saintliness and prophetic gift, publicly expressed concern that the Armada would end in defeat because "our sins are great." Millenarian ideas were also fomented by the discovery, in a tower in Granada in March 1588, of the plomos de Granada, lead boxes holding a series of parchments written in Arabic and Greek. Among these documents was an Arabic version of John the Evangelist's prophecies about the end of the world, as well as others that scheduled the millennium for "the years just short of 1600." Although the parchments were later proven to be forgeries, the interest they aroused indicates that the current of millennialism had spread well beyond the royal court.

Astrological forecasts added yet another dimension to these alarms about Spain's future. In 1566 Michel Nostradamus announced that "in the year five hundred fourscore more or less, there shall be a strange age." Other astrologers were more precise, predicting that 1588 would

be a year of cataclysm because of one solar eclipse, two lunar eclipses, and a grand conjunction, namely a rare astronomical alignment of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. Since biblical times, these conjunctions had been associated with wars, revolutions, deaths of important persons, and other momentous events. In sixteenth-century Europe printed almanacs and popular prognostica helped to spread these astrological ideas among street prophets and soothsayers. Throughout the continent, 1588 was anticipated as the "wonder year," a time of great changes, perhaps even the end of the world.^[14] In Spain these ideas could be found in the prophecies of Isabel de Jesús as well as in those of Miguel de Piedrola.

The first Spanish street prophet who actually voiced dissatisfaction with the monarchy itself was probably Juan de Dios, a faith healer by trade and still a somewhat mysterious personage previously connected to a group of Toledan visionaries arrested by the Inquisition in 1574. By the mid-1580s Juan de Dios turned up in Madrid, where he spent half of his time in the mental ward of the Hospital of Anton Martín, and the rest on the streets uttering prophecies about the coming destruction of Spain. Allied to members of the Mendoza family and the court faction associated with Antonio Pérez, the once popular royal secretary who had been arrested on suspicion of murder in 1579, Juan de Dios identified himself with St. John the Baptist and publicly announced that Spain's sins would soon lead to her destruction by her enemies.^[15] More directly critical of the monarchy was Guillén de Casaos, a royal official from Seville who, after a stint in the Yucatan, returned to Madrid in search of a royal gift and expressed his frustration at failing to obtain this prize through a series of dream visions that pertained to the bad government (mal gobierno ) of Spain and attacked the corruption of Philip's court.^[16] In these two examples at least, prophecy served political purposes, and its heralds were individuals who used it to proclaim in public what could otherwise only be whispered behind closed doors.

The attitude of the Spanish Church toward prophets was somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, the church could not deny the proposition that God had the power to communicate prophetic messages through ordinary individuals; to do so would be to refute Scripture itself. On the other hand, it was skeptical of anyone, particularly of "unlettered" men and "weak" women, who claimed to have received divine communications. This skepticism was first articulated by Aquinas in the thirteenth century, although it was left to the famous fifteenth-century theologian, Jean Gerson, to develop the investigative formulae required to separate

the true prophet from the false.^[17] In De Probatione Spirituum and De Distinctione Verarum Visionum A Falsis, two treatises prepared for the Council of Constance in 1415, Gerson argued that the only sure way to dispel uncertainty about prophetic visions and dreams was, quoting John the Evangelist (1 John 4:11), to "test the spirits to see whether they are of God." He therefore recommended that both the contents of the vision and the personality of the alleged visionary or prophet be subjected to a series of rigorous tests, which he memorialized in a famous couplet:

Tu, quis, quid, quare,
Cui, qualiter, under, requiere.

[You should seek who, what, why,
to whom, what kind, whence.]^[18]

In the course of the fifteenth century, Gerson's De Probatione Spirituum and its companion treatise became a vademecum no confessor could afford to be without. Gerson influenced Jakob Sprenger, the German inquisitor responsible for the Malleus Maleficarum, first published in 1493. Gerson also had a profound effect on the Fifth Lateran Council, which in 1516 ordered bishops to investigate anyone who claimed prophetic knowledge on the basis of divine revelation.^[19] In Spain, Gerson's influence can first be detected in Sánchez de Vercial's Book of Examples, written circa 1420, a treatise which warned "not to believe in visions," particularly those of women.^[20] Gerson's skepticism toward prophetic visions later appears to have influenced Diego de Simancas, author of the much reprinted Institutiones catholicae (first ed., Valladolid, 1552), a handbook widely used by Spain's inquisitors.^[21] In the seventeenth century Gerson's rules for distinguishing true visions from false appeared in the "Interrogatorio para e examen de revelaciones, visiones, y sueños," a set of instructions distributed to judges by the Inquisition.^[22]

Still, the criteria for distinguishing true prophets from false remained somewhat vague, and this perhaps explains why inquisitorial persecution of would-be prophets was haphazard and generally limited to those whose prognostications constituted a direct political threat to the monarchy.^[23] In this sense it was politics, rather than religion, that occasioned the prosecution of prophets. What this suggests is that historians from Henry C. Lea to Henry Kamen may be wrong in concluding that the Holy Office did not serve as an instrument of royal absolutism.^[24] As we shall now see with Piedrola, Lucrecia, and Sor María, the Inquisition only became involved in these cases after having been prodded to do so by the Crown.

Piedrola

The first of the three case studies to be discussed here is that of Miguel de Piedrola Beamonte, the so-called soldier-prophet.^[25] Originally from Navarre where he had worked as an itinerant tinker (ollero ), Piedrola later joined the army and became a foot soldier, serving first in Italy where, by his own account, he was captured by (and ransomed from) the Turks on two separate occasions. After having served briefly in the campaign to suppress the morisco revolt in Granada (1568–69), Piedrola drifted into Madrid in about 1570, hoping to secure a royal pension. Shortly thereafter he began writing a series of arbitrios (memorials) to the king, offering advice about the "conservation of his kingdoms," and suggestions for ending the war in Flanders. Such missives were a commonplace means of communicating with the monarch, but Piedrola's messages had a macabre twist: he warned that Philip's children would die unless the monarch heeded his advice. For a while Piedrola was evidently considered harmless, and he was left alone. Official attitudes changed, however, some time late in 1578, when Piedrola began to deliver similar messages in the streets of Madrid. Identifying himself with the biblical prophets Elijah and Malachi, Piedrola publicly asserted that the advice he was offering the monarch had a divine source. Soon after, one of Philip's secretaries advised Piedrola to abandon Madrid. This he did, sometime in 1579. Piedrola's precise movements over the next few years are difficult to trace. He seems to have rejoined the army, arriving in Naples some time before January 1580. By 1584 he had returned to Madrid and resumed his career as the soldier-prophet. Piedrola's reputation as a seer rested on the (mistaken) belief that he was an illiterate soldier who had miraculously memorized the entire Bible with divine assistance. He further claimed that his knowledge of the future derived from a series of dreams—seventy-two in all—which he attributed to God. No records of these dreams survive, but evidently they dealt with contemporary political events and openly criticized the king and his ministers. Some spoke of the "greatest events of the year 1588," which would result in the "imminent destruction of Spain." The soldierprophet also proclaimed that at the moment this destruction began, his supporters were to seek refuge in a cave called la Espelunça. There, like a latter-day Pelayo, the mythical eighth-century king said to have planned the Reconquest, Piedrola would deliver Spain from her enemies. He envisioned a new Spain governed by a limited monarchy under a constitution—ideas that represented an open challenge to the absolutist principles of Habsburg rule.

The source of Piedrola's radical ideas remains unknown, although it may be traced to the constitutionalist traditions (fueros) of his native Navarre which limited the powers of that kingdom's monarch. Piedrola's adopted second surname of Beamonte—or Beaumont—further identifies him with old Navarrese traditions of resistence to monarchs perceived to be unjust. The Beamontes were an aristocratic faction that surfaced in the mid-fifteenth century in opposition to Juan II, an Aragonese monarch who had deposed his son Carlos, Prince of Viana, as ruler of Navarre. The leader of this faction, Luis de Beamonte, claimed that Juan deserved to be overthrown since he violated the kingdom's fueros. Piedrola's position on this particular moment in Navarrese history remains unknown, but his identification with the Beamonte faction suggests that he might have considered Philip II as the Castilian equivalent a Juan II—a tyrant who ruled without popular consent.

Very little is known about the extent of Piedrola's following. In 1588 the papal nuncio in Madrid reported to the Vatican that Piedrola "was esteemed by many persons of great and small estate" along with other "wise persons of quality" who compared his prophetic powers with those of Isaiah and Jerome.^[26] No list of these supporters has survived, and Piedrola himself referred to his friends only by a series of mysterious aliases such as "Dr. Silence, the Strong Knight of the Golden Key, Pastor Anastasio, and Lady Obstinate."^[27] Other sources indicate that Piedrola was closely allied with the supporters of Antonio Pérez as well as other individuals directly associated with the royal court.^[28] Alonso de Orozco, for example, alleged that Piedrola deceived "many honorable letrados," a group which seems to have included Juan de Herrera, the royal architect, and even Gaspar de Quiroga, the inquisitor general.^[29] The royal chronicler, Jerónimo de Sepúlveda, also attested that Piedrola "fooled and deceived . . . not just anyone but very important people," among them the dukes of Medina Sidonia, Nájera, and Pastrana, the marquis of Carpio, as well as Lady Dormer, an English Catholic and widow of the duke of Feria, who frequently meddled in the politics of the Spanish court.^[30] In sum, Piedrola successfully gathered a small but influential band of followers, many of whom were evidently prepared to enter the Espelunça once the millennium began.^[31]

Piedrola's followers appear to have had several agendas, including the prompt release of Antonio Pérez. In this respect the apocalyptic message of Piedrola's prophecies and the demand for governmental reform can be interpreted as part of an attempt to rally popular support for the imprisoned royal secretary. Another aim was to have Piedrola officially designated as Spain's national prophet, a new and previously unfilled

post. Oddly enough, this scheme almost succeeded, owing to worries about the worsening economy and increasing dissatisfaction with Philip's government. At the prompting of Piedrola's well-placed allies, the Castilian Cortes appointed a special commission to investigate Piedrola's prophetic credentials and the implications of his dire prognostications for Spain's future.

Thus during the summer of 1587, at a moment when Piedrola's reputation as a prophet and seer reached its height,^[32] the national assembly sent the head of a parliamentary commission, a certain Gaspar Gómez, to meet with Piedrola. Apparently, the two engaged in a learned discussion about Holy Scripture. In a report delivered to a plenary session of the Cortes on 22 August 1587, the commission acknowledged that many "important churchmen and preachers . . . consider him [Piedrola] a prophet, as in times past" and recommended that the king establish his own royal commission to determine "if Piedrola justly deserves the title of Prophet and if the prophecies he publicizes are sincere and true." During the subsequent debate in the Cortes on the merits of this proposal, Dr. Guillén, a representative of Seville, maintained that "one of the most important issues facing the kingdom is to determine whether Piedrola is a prophet."^[33]

Yet Piedrola also had powerful detractors, among them, Fray Alonso de Orozco, a rival prophet, and Fray Juan Baptista, an Italian Franciscan then resident in Madrid.^[34] Beginning in June 1587, Fray Juan denounced the soldier-prophet as an "evil spirit" and an "agent of Lucifer"; in one sermon the friar claimed that Piedrola "was possessed by a demon that was responsible for everything he said and did."^[35] Within a matter of weeks the controversy sparked by these denunciations spread to the royal court and apparently led Philip II to name a commission to investigate Piedrola's prophetic career.

The three commissioners—Quiroga, the inquisitor general; Fray Diego de Chaves, the royal confessor; and García de Loaysa, the royal almoner—met in late July and gathered a series of reports concerning Piedrola. Fray Luis de León, the famed Augustinian theologian and expert in prophetic discourse, advised that Piedrola's "spirit of prophecy" should not be doubted. But the vicar of Madrid accused the soldier-prophet of speaking only to those "a quien tocar" (that is, his friends) and of treating many important people with "poca modestía" (little respect).^[36] The commission also heard testimony that Piedrola's prophecies included ideas that "our Holy Catholic Faith cannot tolerate," and it was apparently this allegation that persuaded its members to recommend that the proper venue for a detailed inquiry into Pied-

rola's prophetic credentials was not the Cortes but the Inquisition. Thus, on 18 September 1587, precisely at the moment when the Cortes was publicly debating the merits of Piedrola's prophecies, the Holy Office ordered the soldier-prophet's arrest and spirited him off the following day to Toledo for trial. The arrest, the secretary of the Florentine ambassador in Madrid noted, caused "great murmurings" at the royal court.^[37]

In the weeks that followed, Piedrola's supporters worked diligently to secure their prophet's release. On 19 September 1587, only a day after the arrest, Dr. Alonso de Mendoza, canon of Toledo, appealed to Cardinal Ascanio Colonna in Rome, comparing Piedrola's arrest and imprisonment to Darius's order to cast Daniel into the lions' den.^[38] In the meanwhile, Piedrola saw to his own defense with a claim of insanity as well as a confession, offered in May 1588, in which he asserted that his visions were nothing more than "illusion and deceit." Later that year the Holy Office decided that Piedrola was indeed a "false prophet" and on 18 December 1588, at an auto de fe staged in Toledo, sentenced him to two years' seclusion followed by perpetual exile from Madrid.^[39]

Piedrola's case illustrates several points relevant to our understanding of the relationship between prophecy and politics in late sixteenth-century Spain. The Spanish Inquisition, it appears, treated false prophecy as a relatively minor offense. In Elizabeth's England, by way of comparison, William Hackett's prophecies and public criticisms of the queen's government led him directly to the scaffold. In theory the Inquisition, following the general tenets of the Counter-Reformation, took a dim view of any lay person who claimed to have the "prophetic gift." Yet in practice most seers were tolerated so long as they did not openly espouse heretical concepts or ideas.

The Spanish Crown also tolerated the vitriol of self-proclaimed street prophets—for years the monarchy did not acknowledge Piedrola's presence in Madrid—as long as the prophet had only a scattered following. In part, such tolerance derived from Philip II's own skepticism about the importance of prophecy. Thus when discussion of the "public abuses" emanating from various "prodigies and divinations" arose in a meeting with the papal legate in March 1588, Philip reportedly said, "It was the practice of the emperor [Charles V], my father, not to believe in or to act upon such things."^[40] But once a prophet seemed to pose a political threat to the power of the throne, once the Cortes started to transform Piedrola into a national figure, even Philip's tolerance ceased. To deny Piedrola a public pulpit for further criticisms of the monarchy, Philip decided to have him arrested by the Holy Office rather than by

civil authorities, since the Inquisition was the sole tribunal that could guarantee a secret trial. The essentially political, rather than religious, nature of Piedrola's arrest was evident to his supporters, one of whom wrote to another that the political implications of the case required the Inquisition to handle the trial in an "extraordinary" fashion.^[41]

Even then the Crown went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that Piedrola be kept in strict isolation, a policy it enforced long after his sentence was announced. Ordinarily, the Holy Office sent those condemned to a period of seclusion to any convent or monastery willing to take them. In this case, however, the Crown instructed the Suprema , the Supreme Council of the Inquisition, to undertake a thorough investigation of a number of sites in order to make certain that security for this seditious prisoner was adequate. After considerable deliberation it was decided that Piedrola would be confined to the fortress of Guadamur, situated in a small and relatively isolated village six miles west of Toledo.

Lucrecia de León

Lucrecia de León was a young madrileña directly inspired by Piedrola's bleak vision of Spain's future.^[42] Born in 1568, Lucrecia was the semiliterate daughter of a Madrid solicitor, Alonso Franco de León. Beginning when she was twelve, Lucrecia experienced a series of dream-visions about the future of the Spanish monarchy. By 1587 these dreams focused on the defeat of the Armada and the subsequent destruction of Spain, a "loss" which Lucrecia attributed to the "bad government" and personal sins of Philip II. Lucrecia also envisioned the monarch as a tyrant who levied unjust taxes and failed to provide either charity or justice. Some of the dreams even portrayed him as a new Roderic, the Visigothic monarch believed to have been singly responsible for the Muslim conquest of Spain in 711.

Knowledge of these dreams was initially limited to Lucrecia's family, but in September 1587, immediately following Piedrola's arrest by the Inquisition, Lucrecia began speaking freely about these dreams in public. Lucrecia's father, afraid of the Inquisition, urged her to remain silent, but her mother, eager for the notoriety the dreams brought, encouraged her daughter's dreaming. Lucrecia's own aspirations are vague, but clearly she relished being a clairvoyant, once comparing herself to "the sun in the window." She also appreciated the attention her dreams inspired, particularly the suitors they brought to her door. She in fact secretly "married" a certain Diego de Vitores, the amanuensis

of her confessor, although the two agreed to keep their union a secret so as not to jeopardize Lucrecia's prophetic career—prophets, particularly female prophets, were supposed to be chaste. The dreams also suggest that Lucrecia had a political "agenda" roughly akin to that of Piedrola and his followers. Both she and her father were supporters of Antonio Pérez; they were also critical of Philip II and his ministers, and in the dreams the monarch regularly appears as a tyrant and his beloved Escorial as a building constructed with "the blood of the poor." Lucrecia, a former serving girl at court, also had personal reasons for being angry with the king; he had once promised her a dowry which he had failed to deliver.

As with Piedrola, Lucrecia succeeded in establishing a small but enthusiastic following that promoted her as a prophet whose dreams were divinely inspired. Her most ardent supporters were Alonso de Mendoza, previously a supporter of Piedrola, and Fray Lucas de Allende, the influential head of Madrid's Franciscan convent. Against her father's wishes, Lucrecia agreed to dictate her dreams to these two churchmen on a daily basis. They in turn prepared copies of the alleged dream texts and circulated them for wider distribution to their friends and allies at court. By February 1588, rumors of the seer who dreamed of Spain's impending "loss" led the Vicar of Madrid to place Lucrecia under house arrest for a brief period. Allende and Mendoza protested and managed to convince the archbishop of Toledo to order Lucrecia's release, thus allowing for the continuation of her prophetic career.

Lucrecia went on to experience over four hundred dreams, nearly all of which warned of Spain's impending loss unless Philip reformed his government, altered his economic policies, and publicly repented his sins. Gradually, Lucrecia's prophetic reputation grew, particularly after her prediction about the loss of the Armada came true. She even inspired a small cult, similar to Piedrola's Espelunça, whose members formed a brotherhood (gremio) and even hoped to establish a new military order—the Holy Cross of the Restoration—dedicated to the defense of Spain from its enemies, both Muslim and Protestant. By 1590, Lucrecia's reputation was such that she was featured at fashionable gatherings where she recited what she claimed were her dreams to groups of courtiers. Some of these onlookers viewed her as a mere curiosity, one of "the ignorant and rustic who dream marvelous things, including predictions about future events." But others considered her a prophet and expressed their belief in her prophetic powers by wearing a scapular similar to the one she had envisioned in her dreams. According to Lucrecia, those who wore this garment would survive the disasters

her dreams presaged and subsequently establish a new regime which, unlike Philip's, would be dedicated to charity, justice, and the defense of the Church.

In the end Lucrecia's undoing was directly related to her fame. In the weeks following Antonio Pérez's escape from prison in April 1590—an escape known to have been aided by some of Lucrecia's supporters—Chaves, the royal confessor, initiated an investigation into the source of Lucrecia's dreams and by late May gathered evidence suggesting that Lucrecia and her followers were engaged in some sort of seditious plot. He subsequently convinced the monarch to put a stop to their activities and on 25 May 1590, the Inquisition, acting on Philip's orders, arrested Lucrecia together with five of her most ardent supporters. The following day, the Florentine ambassador in Madrid reported:

Here, and in Toledo, the Inquisition has arrested some important noblemen, among them is the brother of Don Bernardino de Mendoza, ambassador to France, and the prior of the [convent of] San Francisco [in Madrid]. The reason is a woman who some call a beata and who is said to have had divine revelations in her dreams and to have predicted the defeat of the Armada and now says that the king will soon die.^[43]

Lucrecia's trial began within a week, with the judge noting briefly that she was "six or seven months pregnant." Lucrecia later gave birth to a girl who was still alive when her proceso was finally over, in July 1595. The trial itself was a tumultuous one, marked by a series of scandals that involved a notable lack of secrecy in the proceedings, a series of late night parties that disrupted life in the supposedly "secret prisons" of the tribunal, and even the attempt of one inquisitor, Licenciado Lope de Mendoza, to seduce Lucrecia. Mendoza and several other members of the tribunal were subsequently suspended and fined, but disruptions caused by these scandals help to explain why Lucrecia's trial lasted so long.

In any event, the Inquisition repeatedly attempted to get Lucrecia to confess that she had purposely invented her dreams for political ends. This was something which, even in the torture chamber, she steadfastly refused to do. Her dreams, Lucrecia claimed, were dreams whose message she, as an ignorant doncella , did not understand. Finally, in July 1595, her case was voted "en diferencias," an admission that her inquisitors were unable to determine if Lucrecia was truly responsible for her dreams. But they did agree that the dreams contained some false and heretical ideas as well as statements critical of the monarchy. Castilian law defined as alevoso or seditious, "anyone who speaks badly of

the king and his family." The minimum penalty for such statements was the confiscation of one half of one's goods. But if it was determined that the accused had advised or counseled anyone to rebel against or refuse to obey the king's law, the penalty was death.^[44] In this instance, however, the Inquisition only punished Lucrecia—as she herself had predicted—with an abjuración ad levi , a relatively light sentence which called for one hundred (lightly delivered) lashes, two years confinement in a convent, and life exile from Madrid.^[45]

The parallels between Lucrecia and Piedrola are many, and it is worth emphasizing that their arrests were prompted primarily by political as opposed to religious or spiritual considerations. The same applies to the arrest of the third of our prophets, Sor María de la Visitación, prioress of the Dominican Convento de la Anunciata in Lisbon.

The "Nun of Lisbon"

Beginning in 1575, the Nun of Lisbon, as Sor María was called, experienced a series of ecstasies, raptures, visions, and miraculous levitations. She was far better known, however, for her stigmata or "llagas ," five wounds in her side that dripped blood in the shape of a cross. These were publicized by her confessor, Fray Luis de Granada, the famous author of Guía de pecadores and a number of other widely read devotional books. Beginning in 1584, Fray Luis wrote letters to various Church authorities, including Carlo Borromeo, archbishop of Milan, and Juan de Ribera, patriarch of Valencia, describing Sor María as "another Saint Catherine of Siena."^[46] He also wrote a short, hagiographic treatise, Relación de la vida y milagros de la priora de la Anunciata , published in Paris in 1586.^[47] Adding further to Sor María's notoriety was a painting of her and her miraculous llagas by Hernán Gómez Román, a late Mannerist Spanish artist employed at the Portuguese court. The original is now lost, but it was reproduced (as a woodcut) in Alonso de Villegas's best-selling (but soon censored) Flos sanctorum . Reports of Sor María's miracles were also included in the correspondence of the Fuggers, the famous German banking house.^[48] By 1588 Sor María was known throughout Europe for her saintliness. It was also said that no visitor to Lisbon failed to stop by la Anunciata convent in order to catch a glimpse of the famous nun.

In addition to her visions and ecstasies, Sor María also had worldly concerns. Following the annexation of Portugal by Philip II in 1582, she emerged as a supporter of the exiled Portuguese pretender, An-

tonio, Prior of Crato and nephew of the late King Sebastian. Antonio had taken refuge in England where he endeavored to persuade Queen Elizabeth to organize an invasion designed to restore him to the Portuguese throne. Expectations for such an expedition ran high in the months following the Armada's defeat in August 1588, and at this time Sor María stirred up the political ashes by making several public, anti-Spanish statements on Antonio's behalf. According to one source she boldly announced that "The Kingdom of Portugal does not belong to Philip II, but to the Braganza family," and prophesied that "if the king of Spain does not restore the throne that he unjustly usurped, then God will punish him severely." Sor María also presented herself as the living incarnation of Portugal and her wounds as the symbol of Portuguese sufferings under the Spanish yoke.^[49]

As with Piedrola and Lucrecia, it was these overtly political statements that led to Sor María's downfall. Cardinal-Archduke Albert, the royal governor in Lisbon, feared that Sor María's prestige would strengthen the Portuguese nationalist cause at a time when Antonio was known to be actively planning an invasion, and in October 1588 he ordered the Holy Office to investigate Sor María's many miracles. The inquisitors soon reported that her famous stigmata were self-induced pinpricks, that her levitations were faked with the aid of sticks, and that her halos had been craftily created by mirrors and lamps. Sor María confessed her wrongdoing; on 6 December 1588 the Inquisition announced that she was guilty of "trickery and deceit" and sentenced her to life exile to Brazil, although this was later changed to Abrantes, a small town north of Lisbon.^[50]

More needs to be learned about Sor María's case, but her trial resembles those of Piedrola and Lucrecia to the extent that they were all causes célèbres, widely reported throughout Europe. These cases are also alike to the extent that each of three prophets considered here drew from a common wellspring of apocalyptic imagery and thought. On the one hand, the apocalyptic tradition provided these prophets with a grammar of political protest as well as a way of expressing various criticisms of the monarch and his regime. On the other hand, this grammar was not immutable, and each of these prophets shaped it to suit particular needs and purposes. In this sense, prophecy cannot be fully understood unless it is examined within its historical context and directly related to the aspirations of the individuals involved.

As for the Inquisition, the fact that the Holy Office did not immediately muzzle plaza prophets like Piedrola but waited for instructions

from the king suggests that this institution, despite its celebrated role as a censor, was generally prepared to allow seers considerable room to maneuver. This is not to say that freedom of political expression in Habsburg Spain was any greater or lesser than in other sixteenth-century states—an important issue yet to be adequately studied—but that the Inquisition's ambivalent attitude toward prophecy, together with its reluctance to involve itself in cases where the religious issues were not necessarily clear-cut, offered Philip's vassals a political voice along with a political language that modern scholarship has overlooked.^[51] To be sure, the political use of prophecy in Spain generally surfaced in times of political and economic crisis, moments when the future looked especially bleak or uncertain. But in a regime which offered few other modes of political expression, prophecy ensured discontents a means of being heard. Beyond the three cases discussed in this paper, however, much still needs to be learned about this particular strain of Spanish political life.