The files of the Holy Office of the Inquisition have been an invaluable source of information for scholars of early modern Europe, especially for those interested in social relations and religious behavior in Spain, Italy, and Portugal. Of these three tribunals, the Portuguese branch has received the least amount of attention, a state of affairs which is likely the result of the relatively small number of specialists in Portuguese history. It is certainly not the case that the vast store of documentation preserved in the Portuguese national archives is less rich with regard to the kinds of details so prized by contemporary scholars. As if to prove this point, Bryan Givens offers an analysis of one processo (trial record) found in the archives of the Lisbon branch of the Holy Office in Judging Maria de Macedo. Following the trail blazed by one of his thesis advisors, Carlo Ginzburg, Givens attempts to re-create the social, mental, and religious contexts of his protagonist, a woman summoned by Portuguese inquisitors in 1665 to explain her magical, millenarian visions.

Judging Maria de Macedo is an attempt at micro-history and Givens has identified an interesting case. Macedo, a woman of moderate means married to a low-level court official, claimed to have been visited at night by “Enchanted Moors” over the course of several years. According to her testimony, and especially in the words of a pamphlet that she dictated to her husband in 1650 and which circulated in manuscript in Lisbon, Macedo was obliged to mine precious minerals for these magical figures in order to help them realize their goal of restoring a lost king to his rightful throne. When news of her nocturnal wanderings were brought to the attention of other plebeian visionaries in the Portuguese capital, Maria began to adapt her story to the contours of a contemporary millenarian discourse that predicted the return of an Encoberto (Hidden One) or Desejado (Desired One) to rule over a vast Christian empire, either King Sebastião I, who had died in battle in 1578, or the first king of the Bragança dynasty, João IV (r. 1640–1656). Perhaps owing to the Sebastianist tenor of her visions, which were possibly construed as lèse-majesté, Macedo was denounced to the Inquisition. In an analysis of the depositions offered to the Holy Office, Givens shows the limits of Maria's knowledge of the millenarian and folkloric elements of her visions, a weakness that eventually mitigated the severity of the punishment she received. In the end, Macedo was sentenced to home confinement and the Inquisitions dismissed the type of millenarian visions she circulated as popular fantasies.

Givens's study relies on a very small corpus of sources—a handful of Inquisition cases and a few millenarian tracts—and a limited number of secondary studies of early modern religiosity to achieve “a greater understanding of a very specific belief system in early modern Portugal: Sebastianism” (7). Indeed, the book's first two chapters are devoted exclusively to a survey of this strain of Portuguese thought, with particular stress placed upon João de Castro, a prolific Sebastianist who lived in Paris at the beginning of the seventeenth century. When Givens turns to Macedo's case, he begins with a translation of her 1650 pamphlet and then recounts her trial. The level of analysis that Givens offers is not profound, since he gives little background on the other forms of popular piety in contemporary Lisbon and offers no contrasts to other inquisitorial investigations of either magic or millenarianism. As the narrative recounts the depositions given by Macedo to the inquisitors, Givens attempts to create a sense of drama through his insistence on the malevolence of Maria's chief interrogator, Fernando de la Cerda. Yet without evidence from other trials, the reader is left without an adequate frame of reference to do precisely what Givens's title suggests he or she should: judge Maria de Macedo.

There are numerous flaws in this study, including several errors in Portuguese names and places. Perhaps the most severe flaw, however, is that Judging Maria de Macedo is largely identical to the doctoral thesis that served as its basis. A comparison of the two texts shows that the author was content to remove some of the more plodding passages (although not all of them) and to synthesize his extensive treatment of the development of Sebastianist thought until 1650. Those already familiar with early modern Portuguese history will find little here of interest, with the exception of Macedo's pamphlet itself (although that text is presented in a rather stilted translation). While there is clearly material in Macedo's file to say something about the nature of Portuguese folklore or female piety, Givens refrains from doing so. His analysis, and many of the speculations that he offers with regard to the questions of the Inquisitors, examine only Sebastianism—despite the fact that most of Macedo's testimony describes the Enchanted Moors. Despite this unswerving focus and his attempt to invoke tension between the Sebastianistas and the Holy Office, Givens concludes by asserting that the Inquisition was ultimately uninterested in this folkloric variant and therefore dedicated little prosecutorial attention to it (200). As such, the microhistorical genre that Givens has chosen seems inappropriate for gauging the presence of Sebastianist thought in mid-seventeenth century Portugal. While there is no doubt that Sebastianism was an important, if marginal, phenomenon rooted in contemporary forms of political and religious anxiety, any insightful investigation must be considered within a broader context of early modern discourse.