Part of review forum on “The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa”
The Heretic of Cacheu is a landmark contribution to historiography, both for its substantive arguments and for the methodological horizons it opens for writing African history. Through an ambitious microhistory of Crispina Peres, a powerful Luso-African woman prosecuted by the Portuguese Inquisition in the seventeenth century, it offers a textured reconstruction of life in Cacheu, a West African trading town located in present-day Guinea-Bissau. An award-winning author, professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at King’s College London, and well-known historian among Africanists, Toby Green demonstrates how African history can be written at once from the smallest scale of lived experience and within the widest circuits of global connection, without allowing either level to dominate or flatten the other.
At its core, Green’s book challenges historians’ conceptualizations of political power, religious institutions, and agency in early modern West Africa. His central argument is that Crispina Peres was targeted not primarily for religious deviance but for her political and economic influence. It is not an isolated case of political use of the Inquisition’s gears within the temporal world. In fact, inquisitorial micro-powers, such as the ability to denounce someone’s behavior to the Holy Office’s authorities at the local level, were highly sought by subjects throughout the Portuguese Empire, who made extensive use of the Inquisition as a tool for governance and social advancement. Following this approach, Green reframes inquisitorial persecution in West Africa as an imperial device rather than a confessional response. Crispina’s “heresies,” he persuasively shows, were broadly shared practices in Cacheu and its hinterlands. What distinguished her was her prominence in a world where women exercised significant political and commercial authority, and where Portuguese ambitions remained fragile and contingent upon local consent.
Methodologically, the book is exemplary. Green constructs his analysis from an unusually diverse archive: inquisitorial trials from Lisbon and Lima; denunciations produced in West Africa; missionary letters and treatises; correspondence from the Conselho Ultramarino; travel accounts; oral traditions archived in The Gambia; and insights drawn from his own long-term fieldwork in the region. Crisscrossing sources produced in different places, moments, and epistemic traditions result in an archive that is textual, oral, and experiential. Such methodological breadth resonates deeply with the best scholarship of Africanist history, which has long relied on reading colonial and missionary archives “against the grain,” supplementing them with oral traditions and ethnographic sensibilities. This consistent triangulation allows Green to trace commercial networks, religious anxieties, and imperial strategies that connected Cacheu to Iberian, Muslim, and American worlds without subordinating African history to external frames.
Inspired by masterpieces of microhistory, such as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, Crispina’s inquisitorial process serves as the narrative backbone for reconstructing her world. The foundational books of this historiographic tradition and most of the following were concerned with European subjects. Since the 1980s and 1990s, the field has evolved towards the African diaspora, with works like Luiz Mott’s Rosa Egipcíaca, even though it remained strongly rooted in European tradition. More recently, however, Africanist scholars have entered this field and brought nuanced approaches to African lives, first through studies of the African diaspora, then through a more diverse array of characters in their home continent. João Reis, Flavio Gomes, and Marcus Carvalho’s O alufá Rufino, James Sweet’s Domingos Álvares, and Charlotte de Castelnau-L’Estoile’s Páscoa et ses deux maris are great examples of how the field has grown. Green’s work adds to this wave and contributes to a growing corpus of African-centered microhistories, adding Crispina Peres’s case to a still short list of African historical subjects whose lives are reconstructed with sustained narrative attention and analytical rigor.
Unlike Ginzburg’s deep immersion into Menocchio’s cosmology, Green privileges the social, cultural, and political environments that shaped Crispina’s actions. Nevertheless, emotions play a central analytical role in his narrative. Love, jealousy, fear, resentment, and grief, particularly surrounding Crispina’s familial relationships, the death of her daughter, or her enemies, drive historical action and give coherence to what Green aptly describes as a “tapestry” of social relations. In this respect, the book aligns with recent Africanist efforts to take subjectivity seriously without psychologizing historical actors.
Organized into ten chapters, initiated by a strong and theoretical introduction and followed by a short conclusion, The Heretic of Cacheu detaches from dominant thematic emphasis in African historiography, such as statecraft, warfare, slavery, and large-scale trade, by foregrounding everyday life, interpersonal conflict, and emotion as the motor of history. Green’s micro historical approach zooms in on local intrigues, rivalries, marriages, and grievances, showing how these “small” dynamics shaped broader historical outcomes: a global history truly built from below. The result is not a retreat from structural analysis, but a demonstration of how structure emerges through lived experience. It exemplifies what African history can achieve when methodological experimentation, narrative craft, and archival creativity are combined. While the title reflects a European category imposed upon Crispina rather than her self-understanding, since she never accepted being labeled as a heretic, the book decisively moves beyond European perspectives. It recenters African experiences, power, and historical time. In doing so, it opens new possibilities for writing African microhistory and challenges scholars to rethink how small lives can illuminate large historical processes.
