What is the History of the Inquisition?

📜 The Inquisiton as a Colonial Institution ❀･*･. ° . ✿ ｡ﾟ･

Before examining what women of color did within Inquisitiorial records, it is crucial to understand what the Inquisition actually was in the colonial Americas, and why the tribunal system established was not simply an extension of its Iberian predecessor, but something very structurally and ideologically different. The Spanish Inquisition that arrived in the Americas was a racial institution that used the language of religion to do its work even from its earliest colonial operations.

｡ﾟ･✧･ﾟ: . ｡ﾟ❀ Origins ❀･･. ° . ✿ ｡ﾟ･

The Spanish Inquisition was formally established in 1478 under the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, initially as a mechanism for investigating the "sincerity" of Jewish and Moorish converts to Christianity, the conversos and moriscos, who were suspected of secretly maintaining their original religious practices. Its founding logic was already racial before it had a vocabulary for race: the concept of a limpieza de sangre, or blood purity, determined that even conversion could not "fully cleanse the taint" of non-Christian ancestry (Stoler 2009), which reflects the foundation that would evolve into the racialized prosecution of any practice threatening colonial order. The Inquisition functioned as an arm of enforcement as its formal duties involved interrogating and punishing those whose behaviors or beliefs marked them as insufficiently Catholic.                              

Formal tribunals were established in Lima in 1570 and Mexico City in 1571, with the Cartagena de Indias tribunal following in 1610 (McKnight 2003, 68). They were colonial instruments shaped by the specific anxieties of a society built on the mass enslavement of African people and the dispossession of Indigenous populations. European societies at this time required such intense maintence of their racial hierarchies in order to subordinate and immorally maximize extraction and profit. The Inquisition in the Americas therefore inherited the blood purity logic of its Iberian predecessor and applied it to an entirely new racial landscape: one populated by Indigenous people, enslaved Africans, and the rapidly multiplying population of mixed-race castas whose very existence challenged the clarity of colonial racial categories.

Indigenous people were formally exempted from the Inquisition's jurisdiction in 1571, a decision that reflected the colonial state's assessment that they were recent converts who required missionary instruction rather than inquisitorial punishment (McKnight 2003, 76).

｡ﾟ･✧･ﾟ: . ｡ﾟ❀ Racial Hierarchies & Ideologies ❀･･. ° . ✿ ｡ﾟ･

In understanding the colonial Inquisition as a racial institution, Silverblatt's (2004) work describing that the Spanish Inquisition in colonial Peru was a thoroughly modern institution organized around what she calls race thinking is groundbreaking. This is describing the production and enforcement of racial categories as a mechanism of state governance. She also cites Arendt's analysis of how bureaucratic rationality and racial ideology were combined to produce modern forms of state violence which were located in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spanish colonialism (Silverblatt 2004). Discourse surrounding this topic often points a finger instead to nineteenth-century European imperialism, yet this is not deep enough. It is technically correct, but skips over where imperialism came from in the first place. The Inquisition, in this reading, was the way in which the state processed human difference into controllable racial categories and ensured their own authority through the threat of prosecution.

For the purposes of this analysis, Silverblatt's argument has one crucial implication: the prosecution of women of color for brujería and hechicería in Cartagena and Guatemala was a reflection of a much deeper colonial consciousness that had already epistemologically categorized them to be carriers of dangerous knowledge by their racial identity. 

This framework clarifies something that the individual cases in Guatemala and Cartagena might otherwise appear to contradict: the fact that Spanish and Creole women participated in love magic and sorcery networks without facing anything like equivalent consequences. The Inquisition was not trying to eliminate sorcery, but trying to manage the social body of the colony, and within that project, the bodies of women of color required management in ways that the bodies of elite Spanish women did not (Silverblatt 2004).

｡ﾟ･✧･ﾟ: . ｡ﾟ❀ How the Tribunal Worked ❀･･. ° . ✿ ｡ﾟ･

The Cartagena tribunal, established in 1610, had an official procedure for their prosecutorial process. This began with denunciation. Any person could report another to the Holy Office for suspected heresy, sorcery, or other offenses against the faith (McKnight 2003, 66). The accused was then arrested and their property was immediately seized and inventoried, leaving them to be held in the tribunal's secret prisons. What is interesting here is that the suspects were held usually without being told the specific charges or the identities of their accusers (Silva Campo 2021, 199). They were subjected to a series of hearings at which they were expected to confess and those who refused could be subjected to torture to produce compliance (Von Germeten 2013).

The reliance on denunciation created a system in which social rivalries, economic competition, and personal grievances quickly became entangled into prosecutable offenses. In Cartagena, this was exploited with devastating efficiency during the 1632 witch craze, when Paula de Eguiluz's denunciations of other Afrodescendant healers and practitioners triggered a cascade of arrests that ultimately dismantled an entire community (Von Germeten 2013, 126). This came at no surprise given the state's obsession with social control. Why would they not design the system to be useful for those same purposes? 

The confessions that emerged from these trials quickly became performances shaped by what the accused understood the inquisitors needed to hear and sometimes, coaching from other prisoners (Von Germeten 2013, 145). In Cartagena specifically, the confessions of Afrodescendant women accused of brujería followed the template of the European witches' sabbath almost exactly: nocturnal gatherings, sexual congress with demons, or some sort of ritual renunciation of the Christian God. This template had been developed in a completely different cultural context, and yet, was still mapped poorly onto the actual practices of Afro-Caribbean healers and love magic practitioners (McKnight 2016, 161). The fit between the confessional template and the accused women's actual knowledge traditions was irrelevant as the goal was for the confession to be legible to the inquisitors as confirmation of what they already believed.

｡ﾟ･✧･ﾟ: . ｡ﾟ❀ K n o w l e d g e , P o w e r , & P r o s e c u t i o n ❀･･. ° . ✿ ｡ﾟ･

Behar (1989) establishes the broader regional pattern that the Guatemala and Cartagena cases fit into. Her argument was that sexual witchcraft in colonial Mexico was actually a form of female power that the colonial Inquisition targeted specifically because it represented women's attempts to invert their subordination to men and gain some degree of agency. A particular pattern emerged of the women targeted, most were young, unmarried, mixed-race, or widowed which were all marginalized positions that only contrubuted to their treatment as women with a social "disorder."

What this analysis adds to the Guatemala and Cartagena cases is the argument that the colonial Inquisition's prosecution of love magic and sorcery was fundamentally about the regulation of female sexuality and domestic power. The Church framed its prosecutions in theological language because that was the language of its institutional authority, but the behaviors it classified as most threatening point to an anxiety of a loss of patriarchy. Women of color who engaged in networks of bodily and botanical knowledge were exercising forms of power over men and over domestic arrangements that threatened colonial norms.

The Inquisition prosecuted these practices to minimize the inversion of gender hierarchy and the circulation of knowledge outside institutional channels.

｡ﾟ･✧･ﾟ: . ｡ﾟ❀ T h e o r e t i c a l F r a m e w o r k s ❀･･. ° . ✿ ｡ﾟ･

Mahmood (2005) argues that feminist theory has historically evaluated women's agency against a universal ideal of liberal freedom. This is defined to be the autonomous subject who acts from a position that is unconstrained by structural conditions which is both analytically insufficient and politically dangerous since it does not account for colonial systems. It completely renders invisible the forms of agency that women exercise within and through structures of constraint rather than simply against them. Agency, in this framework, cannot be assessed relative to an ideal the subject never had access to. It must be understood as it emerges from within the specific institutional and social networks that define what is possible for a particular person in a particular historical moment.

Applied to the women in these Inquisition records, constrained agency means refusing two inadequate interpretations. The first positions women as passive victims of colonial violence without any sort of participation, and the second romanticizes their sorcery as a resistance that transcended the conditions of their oppression. A more honest reading places these women as people who moved purposefully through a world that had foreclosed most of their options and found in ritual knowledge or female networks forms of power. Despite the constraints of prosecution, it should not in any way diminishes agency. It is still agency, but constrained.

Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987) argue that the body must be understood simultaneously on three registers. The individual or conscious body refers to the body as it is lived and experienced from within. The social body is the level of body that is as a natural symbol through which societies think about and manage relationships culture and social order. The final body, the body politic, is the body as a site of institutional regulation, surveillance, and the reproduction of power. These three registers do not operate in sequence but simultaneously, and it is precisely movement between them through which power becomes most visible.

For the women in these records, the tripartite framework illuminates why sorcery was threatening at every level at once. At the phenomenological level, the practices these women engaged featured bodily fluids dissolved into drinks, or some sort of ritual that involved an understanding of the body as capable of extending beyond its own skin. At the social body level, the symbolic charge of chocolate and of domestic space charged these women's practices as alternative orders or the inversion of ones already in place. At the body politic level, the Inquisition's prosecution was the colonial state's attempt to reassert jurisdiction over bodies and knowledge that had organized themselves outside its authority.