Ana Schaposchnik's insightful book about the inquisition in Lima, Peru, analyzes the criminal trials of the Church at the crossroads with ethnic and religious identity. In past decades, scholars have reached a consensus deemphasizing the brutal character of the Holy Office. They focus on a process that usually followed rules and meted out relatively few death sentences. Writing elsewhere, the historian Alejandra Osorio, for example, adds that the Lima inquisition mainly investigated humble clergy and Old Christians. Regardless, the process could well be frightening, tortuous, and deadly for the suspects, especially for minorities.
Schaposchnik follows this path when homing in on a number of suspects in Lima, who were accused of practicing the Jewish faith. These people, whom she calls crypto-Jews (instead of employing Nathan Wachtel's concept Marranism), were largely of Portuguese descent. Schaposchnik carefully traces the ethnic and religious identity of these suspects, their fate in the dungeons and torture chambers, and their verdicts. By favoring this micro-historical approach, she reveals the “agency, limited though it may be, as illustrated in both individual behavior and collective strategies” (6).
The author takes the reader to seventeenth-century Lima by writing a noteworthy and expansive introduction. Although reading Schaposchnik's discussion of the scholarship may be challenging for some undergraduates, other readers will find the synthesis very useful because she critically assesses the evolving interpretations and clearly marks her own contribution. She also shows a solid command of the literature, including recent contributions from Europe and Latin America. In addition, Schaposchnik draws on a solid array of trial records as well as the laws and discourses on the Inquisition. She culled these primary sources from the archives and libraries in Madrid and Lima and consulted the Coimbra inquisition papers in the National Archive of the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon.
Schaposchnik draws a detailed vignette of the heresy trial against the shoemaker Joan Vicente and his wife Isabel. They were both born in Portugal and moved to San Salvador de Bahia, Buenos Aires, and then Potosí, before falling into the hands of the Lima Inquisition. Schaposchnik shows that the Holy Office carefully documented the trial and even communicated with the tribunals in Madrid and Lisbon to gather additional information about the suspects’ heretical history. Lima's inquisitors knew, for example, that Isabel and Vicente had stood trial in Évora. Vicente had been sentenced to wear the sambenito, while the Inquisition burned his mother and sister at the stake. This knowledge about their relapse should have exacerbated the punishments, but in 1616 Isabel and Vicente managed to get off once more by wearing demeaning garb. Vicente finally perished in the 1626 fires of the Cartagena Inquisition.
Even more important than the trial of Joan Vicente and wife Isabel is the story of a concentrated effort by the Lima inquisitors to eradicate the Complicidad Grande (the great conjuration). The prosecution began when a customer walked into a shop on a Saturday in 1634, and the attending employee, Antonio Cordero, refused to sell merchandise that day. Cordero also ate fruits and bread for breakfast, and, when challenged as to why he forewent bacon, he replied, “Since my father did not eat pork, why would I?” (101). From this initial accusation, the denunciations snowballed, and investigations revealed an extended network of crypto-Jews. Between 1635 and 1639, the Lima Inquisition jailed 110 people, assigning various punishments to many and releasing others. The Holy Office also burned 11 convicts at the stake. Tracing the process against the Complicidad, Schaposchnik emphasizes the “dramatic but exceptional eruptions related to the persecution of religious heterodoxy” (14). Schaposchnik's book is a well-written and welcome contribution to the historiography. Upper-division and graduate students as well as scholars will it find rewarding.
