This is a primary source publication documenting the investigation into and the trial of Crispina Peres, a seventeenth-century middle-aged Bañun woman living in Cacheu, Guinea Bissau, ‘an outpost of empire’ (p. xx). Preceded by a historiographic and historical introduction that situates the text, and accompanied by a glossary and an index, the Peres file proper consists of 233 pages of witness statements, letters and report in the English annotated translation (192 folios in the original Portuguese).

The investigation, which dragged on for most of the 1660s, centres around accusations against Crispina Peres, a baptised Christian, asserting that she consulted feiticeiros and Jabacousses (‘withdoctors’ and ‘healers’, pp. xii, xiv) and engaged in witchcraft, ‘idolatries and other gentile ceremonies’ (p. 206) which proved she had had illicit ‘dealings with the Devil’ (p. 213). Peres and her husband Jorge Gonçalves Françes, former captain of Cacheu and ‘one of the most important people of this praça, with a major trading house, conducting the most trade and business’ (p. 180), pleaded ignorance. They claimed that Crispina Peres, due to her upbringing, had not been properly taught the Catholic faith; that she had merely sought curative treatments for herself, her daughter and her husband when they were gravely ill; and that she had been tricked by others into performing ceremonies that she did not know were contrary to the Catholic faith. Peres was eventually sentenced in March 1668 to a public auto da fé, after which she was allowed to return to Cacheu to better her life.

The documents of the investigation offer a window into the precariousness of life in the tight-knit community of Cacheu, where disease, gossip and jealousy abounded. The many contradictory statements as well as retractions of statements bear out the words of one of the witnesses that Cacheu was ‘a land where many rumours and falsehoods spread very easily and without any basis other than in well-known hatreds, such that with very little fear of God people testify to all of this’ (p. 179). Another witness eventually conceded that he had accused Peres because he ‘saw no other way of taking revenge’, since Peres was ‘a very powerful woman’ (p. 174).

The Peres inquisition file has a significance far beyond the detailed information on the intricacies of the Cacheu community; it offers a window into life on the Upper Guinea coast, including Cape Verde-Cacheu family ties, trade commodities, commercial, political and family networks and religious practices, including but not limited to Christian practices, and so on.

Green, Havik and Ribeira da Silva deserve praise for their painstaking work in making this source available in English.