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Controlling Bodies, Controlling Empire: Sex and Violence in The Inquisition Prisons of the Early Seventeenth Century Iberian Atlantic
Summers, Amanda Jeanne
Summers, Amanda Jeanne
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2024-08
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History
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http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/10658
Abstract
This dissertation examines sex and violence in the Inquisition prisons in Cartagena, Lima, and Mexico City. In the early seventeenth century, maintaining control of the Spanish empire required the control of the body of the Other. Focusing on the Inquisition’s pursuit of two conspiracies, I employ a microhistorical approach to the spaces and environments of the Inquisition prisons. I use the lens of the body to discuss gender, race, sex, and violence. I examine how the Inquisition pursued people and how those people navigated trial and imprisonment despite the effects of space and environment on their bodies and emotions.
Prisons isolate suspected criminals, remove their autonomy, and subject them to various tortures. The bodies of the injured and dead were left in occupied cells as a form of psychological torture and prisoners were forced to turn on each other in their cells and trials. Yet the imprisoned found ways to retain their autonomy and humanity. Women used or refused sex, pregnancy, and relationships to shorten their trials and lessen punishments. Men faced gendered, social, and economic competition and retaliated against those they perceived as traitors with violence while supporting those they saw as brethren. Families and friends collaborated to develop strategies of care and survival, using the prisons' spaces against their intended purposes.
This dissertation begins with the establishment of the Holy Office in Cartagena in 1610. The largest entry port for the slave trade in South America set the stage for emerging Spanish racial fears. Here, Inquisitor Juan de Mañozca developed his strategies to pursue heretics beginning with establishing patterns of witchcraft spells among Cartagena’s women, moving to malicious brujerÃa among the enslaved and free-Black populations, and settling on covert Judaism among wealthy Portuguese merchants. The escalation of his pursuits followed his personal ambitions, the economic needs of the Holy Office in the Americas, and the financial crisis of the Empire. I conclude with the effective elimination of the powerful elite Portuguese from the colonies in 1649, having demonstrated the ways in which prisons were used to control the colonial populations.
This dissertation engages with historiographies of the Iberian Atlantic, the Inquisition, the Caribbean and South American African diaspora and slave trade, and religions and witchcraft. Its critical interventions bring together carceral studies and death and dying studies to show the critical overlap between prisons and shameful death. It builds upon existing knowledge of the construction and purpose of the prison space and its environments as unique to each location and shows how it was necessary to change that construction over time as the early modern carceral systems grew and modernized. Prisons were a space where the idea of a good death for the dominant population was built against the bad death forced upon subjugated populations. Controlling the body was critical to controlling the empire. However, the incarcerated did not willingly submit to bad death, showing that power is gradient and present at all levels of the carceral and Inquisitorial process.
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