Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Agents of Orthodoxy: Honor, Status, and the Inquisition in Colonial Pernambuco, Brazil

2008; Duke University Press; Volume: 88; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2008-022

1527-1900

Donald Ramos,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

This book fills several voids in the literature of colonial Brazil. It focuses on Pernambuco, a major Portuguese sugar-producing colony which has received less attention than it merits. James Wadsworth looks at the Inquisition from a new perspective: instead of exploring the impact of the Inquisition on colonial society, Wadsworth examines this organization from the inside to produce a powerful institutional study. The work draws heavily on the documents related to the 1,046 applicants from Pernambuco for affiliation, primarily as familiares, during the years between 1613 and 1821. Whereas the Spanish Inquisition functioned bureaucratically in the New World, Brazil and other parts of the Portuguese empire (except Goa) were under the jurisdiction of the Lisbon Inquisition, where interrogations of the accused, their trials, and ultimately their punishments occurred. Without ignoring the functioning of the Lisbon Inquisition, Wadsworth focuses on operations and staffing in the sugar colony.Within this context, the author presents a series of important arguments. Wads-worth argues that the Inquisition in Pernambuco was not solely an imperial imposition but rather an institution which fulfilled local needs for the production of honor and social prestige for upwardly mobile individuals and their families. Grant of a patent to be an Inquisition official, whether a familiar, comisário, notário, or qualificador, was, until the 1774 regimento, a guarantee of whiteness and Old Christian ancestry. Appointments were almost equally divided between Portuguese and Brazilian-born applicants.An appointment helped facilitate intermarriages within the elite and the near elite (what Wadsworth calls the meio estado, the heart of the Pernambucan Inquisition), which created a social group concerned with maintaining the export economy based on African slavery, and producing and defending honor and status. This status was reinforced by special militia units and membership in the brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr.The long view adopted by Wadsworth is very important. It permits him to describe the transition in the Inquisition’s role from social repression to social promotion. The impact of the Marquis de Pombal weakened the Inquisition in the second half of the eighteenth century, especially when ethnic, racial, and religious distinctions were removed. As described by Wadsworth, the Inquisition initially was useful to the crown as a tool of social control. But new philosophies and new agents of social control led first to tighter crown control and then, when these processes were joined with internal institutional decline, led the Inquisition to be severely weakened and finally disbanded in 1822.In the same fashion, this long view permits Wadsworth to trace the Inquisition’s early reliance on church officials to a greater dependence on its own officials in the eighteenth century. Wadsworth attributes this delay to the disruptions caused by the Portuguese union with Spain, the Dutch invasion, and the existence of an established secular ecclesiastical network. Through the transition, personal and professional tensions and rivalries frequently delayed or subverted the work of the Inquisition. Also critical to this shift was the convergence of the Inquisition’s need to strengthen its own base of support in the general population and the need for Pernambucan social groups to find new tools of social promotion. But this reliance on local officials served to limit the power of the Inquisition largely to the plantation zone.The author is at pains to counteract several perceptions about the Inquisition. The first is the larger image of its almost demonic role, an image accentuated by the Protestant-Catholic divide of the sixteenth century. Wadsworth, for example, emphasizes that familiares were not spies, an unnecessary function since the church relied on the entire community to be vigilant. The second is the perceived division between merchants and planters in Pernambuco, an image centered on the Guerra dos Mascates. Wadsworth is able to demonstrate the strong familial ties between these social groups.A great strength of this work is Wadsworth’s attention to the nuts and bolts of the Inquisition and its judicial processes. He examines the applicants, the application process, the costs involved, and the resulting investigations. Along the way, he provides valuable insights on a range of topics such as honor, purity of blood, discrimination, quality of life, and genealogical fraud, to mention a few.This is a valuable book based on a significant research effort but it is lessened, most especially in the final substantive chapter (11), by a sense of haste. Issues of importance are passed over. For example, the internal institutional decline that helped bring down the Inquisition is not fully discussed. This book left this reviewer wishing that some issues had been explored more fully. For example, what were the internal philosophical forces at work which undergird the institution at each stage of its development? The author’s point that the Enlightenment in Portugal was less about individualism and more about expanded state control is provocative and its relationship to the Inquisition and its demise worthy of greater exploration.This work expands our knowledge of the Iberian Inquisition and its workings in Brazil. It is an important guide to the internal structure of the Inquisition and its bureaucrats. Wadsworth’s analysis of those Pernambucan agents of orthodoxy is an important contribution to the literature.