In much of the popular imagination, the Inquisition remains synonymous with fanatical clerics and the burning of heretics. In recent decades, however, a wide range of historians have put forward a much different picture. In this newer scholarly image, the Holy Office becomes an institution frequently consumed with judging minor offenses and preoccupied with political and jurisdictional disputes. Contrary to the idea of a hyper-vigilant and ruthlessly effective bulwark against heresy, the Inquisition is increasingly perceived as having been rather languid and hopelessly bureaucratic throughout much of its history. Much of this revisionist narrative rests on more quantitative approaches. Indeed, looking at the statistics, serious heresy only constituted a fraction of the cases that came before the inquisitors, and the number of persons burned at the stake comprised an extremely small percentage overall.

But might these numbers obscure as much as they reveal? In The Lima Inquisition, Ana E. Schaposchnik provides such a critique. Purposefully eschewing a quantitative approach, she portrays the Lima Inquisition as “a tribunal that sought to discipline and shape culture not so much through frequency of trials or number of sentences as through the potency of individual examples” (6). For Schaposchnik, the ideological agendas and institutional character of the Lima tribunal can be most clearly discerned through an examination of the complex events of the late 1630s, when the inquisitors relentlessly pursued a so-called “complicity of Jews” (complicidad de judíos) in the viceregal capital, culminating in the 1639 auto grande de fe, when over a hundred persons were punished for practicing crypto-Judaism. Nonetheless, according to Schaposchnik, the point is never strictly numerical: “The impact of inquisitorial activities was not related to numbers but to the way in which the Inquisition, as an institution, articulated its repressive goals and punitive practices” (179).

The opening three chapters of the book provide the larger structural contexts to these dramatic events. The first chapter outlines the development of the Inquisition as an institution, emphasizing its administrative hierarchy and financial operations. Chapter 2 delineates the various stages of the trial of faith, beginning with the initial denunciations and ending with sentencing. The third chapter situates the Lima tribunal within broader inquisitorial networks that connected Peru to the peninsular tribunals in Spain and Portugal, revealing how these transatlantic connections allowed inquisitors in Lima to discover whether defendants or their relatives had been previously caught transgressing the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy. Although such distant communications with other tribunals caused innumerable delays, Schaposchnik claims that these broader networks did allow local branches of the Holy Office “to fulfill many of their responsibilities” in battling heresy (93).

The final three chapters focus specifically on Lima's complicidad. Chapter 4 examines “the names and faces” of this Portuguese community under siege. After presenting a broad social profile of those arrested by the Lima Inquisition, Schaposchnik delves into the vexing question of identity, arguing that “the salient features of prisoners' identities . . . are present in the records of the Lima trials” (121). It should be noted that for Schaposchnik “identity” seems here mainly limited to various crypto-Jewish beliefs and practices, including fasting, Sabbath observance, denial of the Trinity, and so forth. Unfortunately, other potential dimensions of a person's identity, such as nationality, class, or occupation, are not explored in any significant detail. In chapter 5, Schaposchnik explores the “inner world” of the inquisitorial prisons, elucidating three tools that the inquisitors utilized against prisoners to help secure an admission of guilt: institutional alienation, individual isolation, and bureaucratic secrecy—each of which were weakened by “a distinctive combination of circumstances and [individual] agency” (134). On this latter point, Schaposchnik strongly emphasizes the “agency” of the prisoners, who used bribery, secret codes, and slave messengers to communicate with one another and to disrupt the judicial proceedings of the Holy Office. Nevertheless, the success of the prisoners in this endeavor should not be exaggerated since, as chapter 6 clearly shows, most of the accused crypto-Jews in Lima were found guilty and given severe punishments.

In this final chapter, Schaposchnik details the careful planning and construction of the 1639 auto de fe, the grandiose pageantry of the occasion, and the dramatic sentencing and punishment of the convicted. For Schaposchnik, the purpose of the entire spectacle was didactic: “As an event, the 1639 Auto General de Fe in Lima was meant to be an exemplary punishment, a display of the Inquisition's reach and power, and a deterrent to anyone who might deviate from Christian doctrine or practice” (179). This brings the argumentative thread back full circle to underscore what was asserted in the introduction—namely, the power of the Holy Office lay not in the sheer number of heretics it punished but in its ability to execute “exemplary” punishments in a public fashion, thus keeping the broader population of colonial Peru within the proper bounds of Catholic orthodoxy.

But how much can be concluded about the Lima Inquisition in general from the admittedly “singular” and “exceptional” events of the late 1630s (7, 179, 181)? Although noted somewhat in passing, it is interesting to contrast the elaborate spectacle of 1639 with Lima's 1608 auto de fe, which had to be “celebrated at the cathedral cemetery because of lack of funds for building the stage” (48). Even Schaposchnik hedges her arguments at one point: “Although a description of the Lima tribunal as a slow institution mainly devoted to book censorship and moral control might have held true before 1635, the aggressive turn taken in the Complicidad trials that began in that year changed the picture” (129, my emphasis). Furthermore, drawing on Foucault, Schaposchnik claims that the Lima Inquisition “functioned as an immaterial panoptic” (102); however, shortly thereafter, she admits that the “facts suggest strongly that the tribunal did not know of the hidden network [of crypto-Jews] in advance” and that the tribunal “was actually surprised” by the scale of the complicidad (103).

All in all, The Lima Inquisition serves as an important reminder that, given the right confluence of circumstances, the Inquisition could indeed exact devastating punishments in a highly dramatic fashion. Nevertheless, the late 1630s ultimately proved to be the exception rather than the rule, and it remains difficult, therefore, to determine exactly how successful the Lima tribunal was in its long-term goal of disciplining and shaping the surrounding colonial society.