Autos-da-fé: The Roles of a Saint in Spanish Sicily
2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/691183
ISSN2037-6731
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American history and culture
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeAutos-da-fé: The Roles of a Saint in Spanish SicilyRobert S. StoneRobert S. StoneUS Naval Academy Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTambién, vemos que las imágines cristianas no sólo miran a Dios, mas a nosotros y al próximo.1(Francisco Pacheco, 1649)In a recent essay on Africans in Renaissance Europe, Kate Lowe notes that “the first black European saint, San Benedetto (St. Benedict, known as ‘il moro’ or the Moor), lived in Sicily in the sixteenth century, although he was not canonized until 1807.”2 He is seen here in an eighteenth-century Spanish sculpture (fig. 1). Several versions of his life (1526–89) are to be found, ranging from a hagiographical sketch by Antonio Daza in 1611,3 to Antonino de Randazzo’s longer Italian account of 1623,4 to another short life by the Jesuit Sandoval in his 1627 treatise on slavery.5 Soon after the saint’s beatification in 1747, Joaquín Benegasi’s narrative poem was published,6 and on the two-hundredth anniversary of his canonization, in 2007, a booklet was published for pilgrims to the Santa María di Gesú monastery in Palermo where Benito, as the Spanish called him, entered as a lay brother to work in the kitchen and eventually, despite his illiteracy, was chosen to become the superior.7Figure 1. Anonymous, San Benito de Palermo, 1700–1725. No. Inv: CE0570. (© Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid.)The trajectory of Benito’s life is quasi-picaresque. Born in Sicily to converted Ethiopian slaves, this mendicant Franciscan friar was forced by papal decree to abandon the wandering life and join a cloistered order in which he thrived by virtue of his pious humility, intelligence, and character. It is not hard to see why he was fervently embraced by the Spanish crown as a model for the conversion of slaves, freedmen, and indigenes throughout the empire: “he represented the ideal, illiterate slave (Daza calls him a ‘santo idiota’), a docile and loyal laborer, pastor, and cook.”8 Today, churches dedicated to St. Benedict the Moor are found throughout the Americas and in the Philippines, with the greatest number by far in Brazil.In selecting Benito as a subject for Spanish comedias, the well-known Golden Age playwrights Lope de Vega and Luis Vélez de Guevara exploited his popularity in both high and mass culture. Furthermore, both dramatists had indirect contact with Sicily. Three of Lope’s patrons were either viceroys or sons of viceroys of the Two Sicilies;9 Vélez de Guevara, meanwhile, took part as a young soldier in turn-of-the-century campaigns in Savoy, Milan, and Naples. It is likely, therefore, that these authors knew something of Sicilian society under Spanish rule and that this awareness found its way into their plays, as will be argued below.A century ago, Benedetto Croce noted a lack of historical and literary studies on relations between Spain and Italy, a gap that remains today, although it is narrowing.10 In the pages of this journal, for example, Edward Muir surveyed contemporary Italian Renaissance scholarship and found its focus shifting forward from the fifteenth to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and southward from Florence toward the Mezzogiorno, stopping short of Sicily, however, with Peter Mazur’s New Christians of Spanish Naples.11 In modern Sicily there is a tendency to downplay the years of Spanish dominion by the Habsburgs and their Bourbon successors in favor of a more remote, more easily romanticized heritage of Hohenstaufen, Norman, Arab, Byzantine, Roman, and Greek rulers. This is an understandable and persistent postcolonial attitude—after all, rancor against the half-Spanish king Ferdinand II was a driving force behind Garibaldi’s revolt launched from Sicily in 1860. I will try to address the Sicilian-Spanish literary lacuna by viewing history through the prism of two seventeenth-century comedias de santo set in Palermo, Lope de Vega’s El santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo (ca. 1607) and Luis Vélez de Guevara’s El negro del serafín (ca. 1643). Cognizant of Terry Eagleton’s formulation that one purpose of “fictionalizing history is to reconfigure the facts in order to throw into relief their underlying significance,” I will juxtapose situations in the dramas with aspects of Sicily’s sociohistorical reality at the time of their production.12In Sicily, the dominant institution of the age was the Spanish Inquisition, a presence characterized by William Monter as “overtly colonial and resented as such.”13 Another historian, Denis Mack Smith, describes the situation as follows: “From 1487 onwards the notorious Torquemada was sending Inquisitors to Sicily, and soon a permanent institution was properly organized with its headquarters in the royal palace at Palermo. Naples successfully resisted the introduction of the Holy office; but in Sicily, though there was some initial opposition to it, to be enrolled as an Inquisition official was soon regarded as a great privilege by the Sicilian nobility. The chief Inquisitors were always, or almost always, Spaniards.”14 That the Inquisition, consciously or not, found its way onto the Spanish stage is not surprising, given that the Holy Office’s power was predicated on a well-attended ritual, the auto-da-fé. Richard Kagan and Abigail Dyer define this as “a public gathering in which the ‘penitents,’ as the Inquisition called them, paraded before a gathered crowd, wearing garments known as sanbenitos (smocks bearing an insignia symbolizing the prisoner’s crime) and corozas (similar to dunce caps) symbolizing shame.”15 The highly spectacular aspect of the auto-da-fé has been remarked on by historians, even when noting its modest execution rate as compared to other European juridical systems. Monter, for example, writes that “none pronounced its judgments more theatrically,” while Kamen is at pains “not to see the Inquisition as the only player in the dramas in which it participated.”16 Mack Smith points out that in Sicilian autos-da-fé “the choreography was always carefully devised to make each occasion entertaining and instructive for as many spectators as possible,” and Nadia Zeldes observes that in Palermo the “spectacle began with a procession, which made its way from the Inquisitor’s house … to the square beneath the Viceroy’s palace … [and] usually included the appareance [sic] of the inquisitors, the alguacil and other officials as well as armed familiars of the Inquisition.”17 In other words, the auto-da-fé was a cautionary sort of Grand Guignol avant la lettre, helping to explain its effectiveness as a tool for the enforcement of orthodoxy meant to instill a “salutary fear; as the Castilian glossator of Eymeric’s ancient handbook for Inquisitors remarked in 1578, ‘there is no doubt that to instruct and terrify the people by proclaiming the sentences and imposing the sanbenitos is a good method.’”18 The following analysis holds that the plays dramatizing the life of San Benito for a seventeenth-century public implicitly portrayed the implementation of this “salutary fear” even as they interrogated social behaviors deemed proper in the age.Of the black saints before and during the sixteenth century, Benito is the most historically verifiable. The others are most commonly North African early martyrs such as St. Victor, St. Perpetua, and St. Felicity, while the fourth-century ascetic St. Anthony of Egypt is considered to be the patriarch of all monks. Benito’s most renowned predecessor—the first black of any nation to be canonized—is St. Maurice, the individual composite of a legendary Egyptian battalion that refused to bow down before Roman gods. Yet his “historical existence is so doubtful that more than once the legitimacy of his cult has been vigorously contested.”19 Although Maurice’s very name resonates with North African Moorish-ness, artistic depictions regularly portrayed him as a black, and as such he became the patron for the Hohenstaufen Holy Roman Emperors in the Middle Ages. From this perspective, Benito was the early modern Habsburg heir apparent to Maurice, who was emblematic of “the Holy Roman Emperor’s right to rule nothing less than all the earth.”20 Depictions of St. Maurice diminished during the fifteenth century as the Atlantic slave trade developed; there are even late sixteenth-century paintings of a white St. Maurice by El Greco and the Italian artist Rómulo Cincinnato.21 Thus, the Spanish crown’s promotion of Benito seems to have been an attempt to find a “homegrown” saint whose reach would surpass that of St. Maurice. The Felipes of Spain, after all, headed “a global empire of which Italy was a central part,”22 and their patronage of Benito evinces a desire to be recognized on their own terms as rulers over people of all nations and races.23 Just after the appearance of Lope de Vega’s play in 1607, a direct link between the monarchy and Benito was established: “In 1608 King Felipe III contributed twelve-hundred ducados for the construction of a silver casket that would hold the remains of the future saint” (El rey Felipe III colaboró en 1608 con una limosna de mil doscientos ducados para la elaboración de un ataúd de plata donde reposasen los restos del futuro santo).24 The royal donor is alluded to in Vélez’s play when it is prophesied that “el monarca mayor del orbe todo / se nombrará tu dueño,” lines that equate the Spanish king with the Lord of all creation while predicting the slave’s service to both.25 The prophecy (an encomiastic trope) also seems to acknowledge Benito’s evangelical (and Spain’s political) power when it says that his “deeds will astound many nations, and tame lands across the sea.”26Contemporaneously, the Inquisition’s desire to place its imprimatur on Benito is asserted in the last sentence of the first hagiography, which grants permission for the future saint to be depicted with signs of celestial splendor: “And the holy Inquisition of Sicily, aware of his great holiness and many legally proven miracles, gave license for him to be painted with rays of light and a halo on his head as signs of his heavenly reward” (Y la santa Inquisición de Sicilia, atenta a su gran santidad y muchos Milagros jurídicamente comprobados, dio licencia para que se pintase con rayos de resplandor y diadema en la cabeza en señal de la que goza en la bienaventuranza).27 Does Benito’s path from a slave of man to a slave of God simply reflect his usefulness for the purposes of propagating orthodoxy? This is the interpretation foregrounded in the hagiographies. However, the dramatizations of his life would also have resonated with anyone living under the Spanish Inquisition as a critique of that institution and its officers. Although the Spanish Inquisition was the creation of the Catholic Kings, this did not mean that the Holy Office felt obliged to bend to the monarchy’s will at all times, and some of the conflict in the plays is attributable to discord of this nature. Furthermore, from a postcolonial, globalized, and “postracial” point of view, the substratum of honor disputes in both plays proves as interesting as the primary (if counterfactual) conversion tale, because it shows Benito cast in the role of mediator between Sicilian and Spanish nobles, pointing up sociopolitical tension on the island.Historically, one focal point for resentment of the Inquisition was the Holy Office’s familiars: “It was in the Italian provinces of the Spanish crown that the greatest and most successful revolts against the Inquisition occurred. There were risings in 1511 and 1526 in Sicily, caused partly by popular hatred of the tribunal’s familiars.”28 Familiars, men with written proof of a bloodline untainted by Jew or Muslim (a prerequisite to holding office in the Spanish bureaucracy), numbered at times in the thousands in Sicily. Even Lope trumpeted his status as a familiar on the frontispiece of several works, including El santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo, possibly as a way of immunizing himself against potential accusations of blasphemy. In any event, Sicilians “from all classes of society tried to become familiars and thus escape liability in proceedings which gave little chance to the accused. … In order to increase its authority throughout the island where it was deeply mistrusted as part of Iberian imperialism, the Holy Office adopted a policy of making rural noblemen into familiars; they eagerly grasped at a title which guaranteed immunity from arrest by royal officials and punishment by royal courts.”29These circumstances led to “guerrilla warfare” between viceroys and inquisitors in Sicily in the late sixteenth century.30 For example, when in 1589 the viceroy Alba tried and executed a familiar before the Inquisition’s tribunal could claim jurisdiction, “both parties appealed to Philip II who, after examining all the documents, wrote to Alva [Alba], March 29, 1590, strongly reproving him for bringing such scandal and discredit on an institution so necessary for the peace and quiet of the land.”31 The king “was firmly convinced that the Inquisition was essential to keep Sicily in subjection, which accounts for his upholding it against his own representatives.”32 Viceroy Alba, in addition to challenging the authority of the Inquisition during his tenure in Sicily, favored and consulted with Benito on occasion. Daza’s hagiography mentions this, and indeed, it is Alba whose daughter is exorcised by the saint in Lope’s play, an incident suggestive of the viceroy’s untenable situation, his near “possession” by an office more powerful than his. At the center of strife among Sicilians, Spaniards and their king, then, stands the Inquisition, which competed with the viceroy for the king’s favor, although in practice the two Sicilian Inquisitors were only answerable to the Suprema, the Holy Office’s high council in Madrid.33Historian Helmut G. Koenigsberger surmises that “nothing could show more clearly the confused and undeveloped state of Spanish ideas in imperial administration than [the] struggle between the civil government and the Inquisition in Sicily.”34 This state of affairs is in effect reproduced onstage alongside more imaginative scenes from the saint’s life. The two San Benito dramas gloss over Mediterranean history and more discreetly gloss Sicilian circumstances of the day in order to broach controversial topics without drawing the ire of the censor, paradoxically bringing us closer to the truth of the times. Beyond evincing the zeal of the newly converted, the dramatic role of Benito is that of a reconciler who curtails potentially disastrous clashes between representatives of the Spanish crown and officers of the local government, as well as between “honorable” men and women, all the while raising questions about the Inquisition.The Names of a SaintLope’s protagonist Rosambuco (Benito’s prebaptismal name in both plays) is at first blush a stereotype, as indicated by this name that signifies the blossom of the elderberry bush, a white flower emerging from a black-fruited plant. After a series of divine interventions, he is convinced that he should abandon his “natural” faith, Islam, for Catholicism. Although the historical Benito was as Sicilian as any first-generation child of immigrant parents, the plays foreground his purported Ottoman otherness, in spite of the perfect Castilian Spanish he speaks, in contrast to the laughable farrago of the plays’ female African characters (except, notably, when one of them is possessed).35 Beyond the exigencies of staging his exemplary life for a Spanish audience, Benito’s fluency is explained by his ties to Ethiopia, a land associated with Prester John’s legendary Christian kingdom located somewhere beyond countries ruled by Muslims in North Africa.36 Nevertheless, while the name Rosambuco may sound vaguely African, it also resonates with Sambuca, a Sicilian municipality that was elevated from a barony to a marquisate during Benito’s lifetime. Rosambuco/Benito’s corporeal blackness (synonymous in the plays with turco, moro, perro, and diablo, and commonly associated in popular culture with servility) must emulate its opposite in order to reveal the purity within his soul,37 exercising a fascination for the spectator through the association of his complexion with “death, sin and the demonic, and by extension with Islam.”38 However, the inescapable racism in the plays is so riveting to modern readers that we can easily be deflected from pursuing other compelling undercurrents, such as those that link Benito to the Inquisition.39Conspicuous by its absence in either play is the utterance of the name San Benito. In Lope, the alguacil (sheriff) Lesbio comes closest when he calls Rosambuco “Santo bendito” upon freeing him from servitude. Similarly, the captain cured by Rosambuco refers to him as “Santo negro, gran Benito.” In Vélez, the saint is consistently referred to as Fray Benito. While never explicit, the bond between Benito and the Inquisition is as close as those entries listed consecutively, in reverse alphabetical order, in Covarrubias’s famous dictionary of 1611.40 The first entry, “san benito,” outlines the import of the original Saint Benedict (whose order first donned the sanbenito-like scapular in the Middle Ages); this is followed by “sambenito”—an abbreviation of “saco bandito,” or blessed jacket—and defined as “the insignia of the holy Inquisition, worn on the chest and back of the reconciled penitent” (la insignia de la santa Inquisicion, que hecha sobre el pecho y espaldas del penitente reconciliado). These aurally indistinguishable terms conflate and invert in Covarrubias, joining the symbol of the Holy Office to the saint’s name, a linkage of which Spanish-speaking audiences could hardly have been unaware.In autos-da-fé, penitents wore a particular garment, “a black sanbenito on which were painted flames, demons and other decorative matter. Anyone condemned to wearing the ordinary sanbenito had to put it on whenever he went out of doors, a practice by no means popular in the first decades of the Inquisition.”41 Monter notes that when penitents condemned to the flames had already died or managed to escape, their sanbenitos might be draped over an effigy but saved from burning in order to be later displayed in churches as a badge of shame, bringing disrepute on families and communities for generations.42 Indeed, “it became general practice to replace old and decaying sanbenitos with new ones bearing the names of the same offenders.”43 Unsurprisingly, this caused unrest: “In the rising against the Spanish government in Sicily in 1516, the sanbenitos in the churches were torn down and never replaced.”44 In inciting that revolt, “Fra Hieronimo da Verona, in his lenten sermons in Palermo, denounced as sacrilegious the wearing of red crosses on the green penitential sanbenitos of the reconciled heretics, who were very numerous, and he urged the people to tear off the symbol of Christ from the heretical penitents.”45 Evidently, Sicilian resistance to Spanish rule was connected to the sanbenito for at least a decade before the saint of the same name was born, as may be inferred from the plays’ slightly enigmatic titles: were one to ask what either was about, the simple answer would be the never-uttered “San Benito.”Rosambuco’s RolesThe miraculous is felt from the start in Lope’s El santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo, which opens with a fall from great heights, an attempted (and markedly un-Catholic) suicide on the part of Rosambuco, a good man born into an unfortunate life. The defeated leader of a Turkish galleon, he prepares to fling himself down from atop its mast, but Heaven intervenes, and he instead becomes the slave of the Spaniard Don Pedro Portocarrero.46 In the play’s secondary plot of an honor dispute, Rosambuco/Benito’s sombrero heals an infected wound suffered in a duel between the gallant Spaniard Captain Molina and Don Pedro, who wrongly suspects his fiancée of infidelity.47 In Act II, an envious monk named Pedrisco makes the first of several attempts to sabotage Benito’s rising reputation as a miracle worker, but this goes comically awry when his guitar turns into a lizard. In Act III, as noted above, the future saint exorcises a demon from the viceroy’s daughter; Pedrisco tries to poison the now-sickly Benito, but when the intended victim makes the sign of the cross over the venom-containing glass, it breaks.48 Ultimately, in what Fra Molinero calls an act of “auto-inmolación,” a moribund Benito trades his own life for that of Palermo’s alguacil/sheriff Lesbio, who revives after seeming to perish in a house fire.49In the opening act, Lesbio becomes so suspicious of his wife’s infidelity that he is prepared to kill her.50 When he confronts her, his tone is clearly that of an interrogator: “Qué, en fin, ¿no habéis salido a la marina esta tarde, señora?” (So, then, my lady, you did not go out to the marina this afternoon?).51 He says he is burning with “infernal” suspicion, conjuring the flames of passion and hell, as well as the earthly justice of the Inquisition when a penitent is “relaxed” to the secular authorities: “Un infierno llevo / de sospechos dentro el pecho.”52 Lesbio, undoubtedly a familiar of the Holy Office, is like the Inquisition, acting with impunity while technically under the authority of Sicily’s viceroy. His despicable actions are carried out in the name of honor and piety, and so, when the Spanish officer Don Pedro thinks him dead, he eulogizes the alguacil as “the best man Sicily has ever had” (Murió al fin el mejor hombre / que tuvo Sicilia).53 Canónica believes that Lesbio’s death “in flames and unconfessed” signals his destination in the afterlife, even though his repentance in the play may ring true.54 Lesbio’s place in the drama is therefore ambiguous, and his near death may allude to certain Sicilian events of the times. In 1590, for example, “when the Inquisitor Bartolomé Sebastián made a visitation of the town of Jaca, the inhabitants piled up wood around the house in which [he and his officials and servants] were lodged and would have burnt them all. … Soon afterwards, when the alguazil went [there] to arrest some heretics, he was left for dead.”55 Regardless, a “staged” fire in Palermo that claims lives brings to mind the auto-da-fé. The city’s first great auto-da-fé was held in 1573, following rules “enshrined for the first time in the inquisitorial Instructions of 1561. … It was now determined that autos be held on feast days, so as to ensure maximum public participation. … The rules also laid special emphasis on the promotion of the Inquisition’s own status, a fact that immediately led to conflicts with officials of both Church and state, who were asked to take oaths of loyalty to the Inquisition.”56 These measures correspond to the monastic period of Benito’s life, his cloistered years in Palermo.Sometimes, if an executioner took pity on penitents in an auto-da-fé, he would strangle them before lighting the pyre. A parallel incident in Lope’s play finds Lesbio punishing his African servant girl Lucrecia for a dalliance, thus sublimating his fear of cuckoldry. Lesbio has his servant Rosambuco/Benito (given to him by Don Pedro at the viceroy’s request) tie up Lucrecia and her elderly Spanish lover Ribera, binding them to each other as if to a stake. Fra Molinero maintains that Lesbio’s erotic pleasure is dependent on the suppression of the sexuality of those in his household, raising doubts about his rectitude, and, sure enough, Lesbio now orders Rosambuco to strangle his wife Laura for her perceived indiscretions. She is only saved by the divine intervention of a statue of the original St. Benedict. Cumulatively, these acts conjure not only the many autos-da-fé celebrated in Palermo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but also the abuses of authority committed by the likes of Lesbio. Their corollary in the Vélez play will be briefer but more explicit: the unconverted Rosambuco, brimming with the bravado that sets him apart from Lope’s humbler servant, threatens to burn down César’s house with the count still in it. Later, as will be discussed below, the African servant Catalina is imprisoned, whipped, and tortured, although not onstage. First, however, Lope’s slave girl Lucrecia warrants a closer look.Encoded in her argot, the black servant Lucrecia—a “natural” target for racist gibes—becomes a mouthpiece for subtlety and wit as she mounts a critique of honor and the Inquisition. By virtue of their aural nature, hidden in the midst of burlesque speeches in nonstandard Spanish, these barbs would perhaps have bypassed the censor who read them but probably not the audience that heard them. Lucrecia seems at first glance to be the conventionalized black of the comedia, a foil to Rosambuco/Benito’s refined mien. “All of the virtues that make Rosambuco exceptional are missing in Lucrecia. … The audience can still laugh at blacks, even though they might make an exception for Rosambuco.”57 But the sub-Saharan (and markedly non-Ethiopian) African slave named for an archetypally chaste Roman woman is perhaps the true graciosa of the play (the clownish Pedrisco is simply too odious). First she makes fun of the Spanish Captain Molina’s attempt to woo the veiled Laura. Lucrecia’s often-repeated word for caballero—cagayera—sounds cheekily insulting not only because it is a feminized noun but because cagar means defecation, hinting that gentlemen are full of it. (Catalina will repeat the epithet in the Vélez play.) Then Lucrecia parodies Spanish popular culture when, in her inimitable slang, she quotes a famous ballad (romance) that in 1620 Lope would transform into one of his most renowned dramas, El caballero de Olmedo. The original refrain, “Tonight they killed the Caballero, the pride of Medina, the flower of Olmedo” (Esta noche le mataron al Caballero, a la gala de Medina, la flor de Olmedo), is rendered by Lucrecia as “Y esta noche le mantaron / a la cagayera / quen lan galan de Mieldina / la flor de Omiela.”58 Mantar is a corruption of matar, meaning to kill, but the malapropism makes a verb out of the noun manto, the shawl that cloaks a woman’s honor. Mieldina is very nearly a diminutive of another common word for excrement, whereas Lucrecia’s vulgarized word for heart, culazón, calls attention to the place from which excrement emanates—so much for the “flower of Olmedo.” This picaresque wordplay subverts the concept that the Caballero de Olmedo will incarnate for Golden Age Spain, the code of honor that Lope famously claims as one key to popular drama in his verse manifesto Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo.59 Like Rosambuco, Lucrecia is dealt blows and insults, but she lacks his obsequiousness; in the crusty Spaniard Ribera and the saintly Rosambuco, she aspires to love (carnal and spiritual) supposedly above her station. Interestingly, the only punishment that she seems to fear is that of being scalded with grease (she mentions it three times). This reference to fire is further compounded by her use of the common idiom que me abraso (“I’m burning up”) to express her desire. When she tries to steal a kiss from a sleeping Benito, a fire-breathing serpent appears in order to frighten her away. Lesbio, who witnesses this, accuses Rosambuco of sorcery, one of several practices prosecuted by the Inquisition.60 Crucially, it is Lucrecia who appears in the final scene of Lope’s play to inform us that she has just witnessed an impossible deed performed by the “sancto neglo Benito,” whom she saw within Lesbio’s burning hacienda, casting out the flames to save the house from destruction. It is not overstating the case to suggest, as the drama seems to do with some insistence, that the edifice of Spanish hegemony is built on a partnership of slavery and piety under the aegis of the Inquisition.61 In her final speech, Lucrecia announces that she, along with all of the slaves and blacks in Palermo, will found a confraternity in honor of the saint, an act that points beyond the bounds of the play to link Benito to nonthreatening, noncoercive Catholic practices.The play ends with the establishment in Palermo of a penitent cofradía de negros (black confraternity), such as the famous one that had formally existed in the city of Seville since 1554. These popular religious associations presented an alternative mode of orthodoxy in the form of charitable organizations devoted to the exaltation and commemoration of a sacred image such as the Holy Sacrament, the Passion of Christ, an aspect of the Virgin, or a particular saint.62 Members helped each other in times of need and planned activities, most famously the Holy Week processions of Seville. Interestingly, the biggest and oldest confraternities in Spain tended to be those formed of slaves and former slaves.63 Added to their explicit religious purpose was that of providing a symbol around which collective identity and ethnic self-esteem could be constructed, including “the struggle for preeminence in the creation of religious spectacles that were more splendid than those of the fraternities of the dominant classes.”64 Typical of Spanish confraternities of any stripe is the capirote, a conical hat worn by penitents in processions. This headgear is indistinguishable from the coroza that a penitent of the Inquisition wore when handed over to the secular authorities and led to the pyre. Thus Lope’s play leaves the viewer with a memorable portrait of the saint, complete with a virtual predella of iconic images from the auto-da-fé: a sanbenito, a coroza, and a human conflagration.An Etymology of OmertàTurning now to Vélez de Guevara’s play, El negro del serafín begins with a recapitulation of an on
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