Introduction
Thinking about ego-documents such as memoirs or autobiographies, one quickly realizes that the documents generated in the course of an Inquisitorial trial in principle are not very different from others in the genre. When a defendant decides to call for a scribe and dictate his confession (or on rare occasions, write his own) he confronts all the same issues self-presentation, self-image, and narration. Even interrogations which result in lengthy self-declarative statements in a sense are ego-documents, in that the same deliberate positioning of self takes place. The difference is one of degree! Although we want to privilege autobiographies because we think that somehow they bring us closer to “what really happened,” we must realize that their authors are no more obliged to represent the truth than are inquisitorial defendants. Yet, we are prepared to assume that the formers’ motive is to “set the record straight” while the latters’ goal is to conceal the truth and confuse their audience. In reality, we must be equally suspicious of both types of ego-documents and apply to them the same methods of analysis.
For two generations now, historians have mined inquisitorial trials to study religious ideas and various forms of social deviance. Along the way, some memorable individuals have emerged from the transcripts. Nonetheless, few of the many authors who have used inquisitorial materials have been interested explicitly in the genre of ego-documents or in the questions that are raised by this seminar. Inquisitorial documents require a high degree of interpretation on the part of the historian, but the analysis applied is for the purpose of arriving at some conclusion about religious belief or some other topic external to what often are quite ambiguous texts. For example, in my own book on the would-be messiah Bartolomé Sánchez, I was more interested in Sánchez’s ideas and the interplay between the peasant and his inquisitors than in how he consciously (or unconsciously) presented himself to the world, even though Sánchez’s extensive confessions provide an excellent opportunity to study the issues addressed by this seminar.
While a few excerpts from Sánchez’s trial would provide ideal fodder for a seminar on ego-documents, he was neither a Jew or converso, so I have chosen instead to present two examples of confessions from my current study on ethnic identity and the family in Early Modern Spain. One chapter in the book deals with Spanish converso families in the sixteenth century. The two transcripts I have prepared illustrate the problem of intergenerational conflict in the early sixteenth century: how did members of the younger generation, brought up after 1492 in an all-Christian world, deal with parents who continued to practice Judaism? To what degree did they themselves start down the path towards assimilation? That is the subject matter of the confessions. However, their analysis is terribly compromised by the defendants’ need to convince the inquisitors that they were in fact faithful Christians. Perhaps subjecting these texts to analysis as ego-documents will help clarify both the facts presented in the confessions as well as their authors’ intention.
In Gaspar de San Clemente’s confession, he is at pains throughout to present himself as a committed Christian and to distance himself from his siblings and parents. In 1492, several members of his family emigrated to Portugal; afterwards the older generation tried to maintain contact across the border and even intermarry to preserve their property intact. Gaspar became both the emissary and potential husband who would serve to keep the family together, a future which ultimately he rejected.
Francisco Martínez’s pathetic confession revolves around how he betrayed his father in order to save his own life. Martínez’s confession clearly reveals how he tacked back and forth , torn by his father’s pleas for help, his duty as a son, and his need for self-preservation. Here, we can see how he justifies his actions to calm his conscience and earn leniency from the inquisitors.
Bibliography
General considerations relevant to dealing with early modern texts. Amelang, James S. The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Ciappelli, Giovanni, ed. Memoria, famiglia, identità tra Italia ed Europa nell’età moderna. Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 77. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 2009.
Essays centering on the use of ego-documents, particularly the Italian libri di famiglia, in discussing issues of family history.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Letters of remission are certainly ego documents, and present all the same problems of interpretation as do inquisitorial confessions.
Dekker, Rudolf M_.,_ ed. Ego documents and history: Autobiographical writing in its historical context since the Middle Ages. Amsterdam: Verloren Publishers, 2002_._
Includes an article by Avriel Bar-Levav on Jewish ethical wills as ego documents. Heywood, Colin. “Ego documents and the French historian in the twenty-first century.” In idem, Growing Up in France: From the Ancien Régime to the Third Republic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 17-35.
Lejeune, Philippe. “The Autobiography of those who do not write.” In Lejeune, On Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, 185-215.
Mayer, Thomas F. and D.R. Woolf. The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe. Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
Written at the height of the fascination with texts and post-modernism.
Mortimer, Geoff. Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War, 1618-48. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Includes a chapter on methodology.
Spain, and the Inquisition.
Gómez-Moriana, Antonio. “Autobiographie et discours rituel: La confession autobiographique au tribunal de l’Inquisition,” in Politique 56 (1983): 444-60.
Kagan, Richard L. and Abigail Dyer. Inquisitorial Inquiries. Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Valuable for the primary sources presented, with a nod toward the concept of Inquisitorial ego documents.
Mandel, Adrienne Schizzano. “Le process inquisitorial comme acte autobiographique: Le cas de Sor María de San Jerónimo,” in L’autobiographie dans le monde hispanique. Paris: Publications Université de Provenu, 1980, 155-69.
Nalle, Sara T. Mad for God: Bartolomé Sánchez, the Secret Messiah of Cardenete. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2001.
Includes lengthy transcripts of Sánchez’s confessions.
Source 1 Translation
Trial of Francisco Martínez, apothocary, resident of Deza
1533
Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca, Sección Inquisición, legajo 148, exp. 1787 Trial against Francisco Martínez, apothocary, resident of Deza. 1533
Interrogation 18 January 1533
It could be around New Year’s that they were saying in Deza that there would be an auto de fe in Cuenca and my father, Bachelor Diego Martínez, whose wife was being held prisoner, asked me to go there. On Saturday, January 4, on the other side of Arcos I ran into the Holy Office’s deputy [alguacil], who I asked if they were going to have an auto in Cuenca, and the deputy answered, where was I from and where was I going, and I said that I was Bachelor Diego Martínez’s son and I was coming to Cuenca because they had told us that there was going to be an auto. The deputy said that they weren’t having an auto but the scaffolding was done, and it wouldn’t be long before there was one. I said that I wanted to go back to my house since they weren’t going to do it and I had something else to attend to, and the deputy said that if I wanted to go to Cuenca I was welcome to do so, and to go home also, that I should do what I wanted, and so he went on ahead. I stayed with someone called Medrano, resident of Deza, to give him some letters for the lawyers who were working on the Bachelor’s wife’s case, and I went straight home to Deza, and I neither ran into nor saw the deputy.
Once home, in presence of the vicar, Joanes del Altopica, my father asked me how did it go, if I came alright, and I replied that yes, praised be God, but that I had run into the Holy Office’s deptuy near Arcos, and that’s why I came back. This happened in my house, and after the vicar and other people had gone, my father the bachelor took me aside and said to me, “God help me! What is this? The deputy is coming here to Arcos; he told you he was coming!” I told him yes, but that I also thought that he was going to Deza because the Holy Office’s people never say where they’re going to or where they’re coming from.
Then the bachelor said, “God help me! What is this? That woman [i.e., his wife] has been there so long; I have the strongest feeling that, either because of the amount of time she has been there in order to get out, or because of torture, she has said something about me and has hurt me– I need to get out of here, I can’t live in this place. My wife, come good or bad, yes or no, I need to go. Where do you think I should go? By your life, give me some advice!
I told him that since he had to go that it seemed to me that he should go to some friend’s house around there, and that he could spend the night and the next day there. If it looked like he could come back, good, and if not, then leave, and my father said, “I want to go to Berdejo or Torrelapaja to Mosén Jaime’s house.”1 Then he decided and it seemed better to him to go to Tordesalas2 to Pero López’s house, but since Pero López is a tithes collector and has many guards who would see him enter and ask him where he was going and coming from, since I had told him that it seemed good to me that he go there, and I was telling him what he ought to do, the bachelor was thrown into confusion over if he would go to Portugal or to France. He decided to go to Portugal by going via his wife’s sisters’ homes, because one lives in Peñaranda, and another in Roa, and by the house of one of his sisters who’s in Castromorcho,3 and he decided to go to Bión4 because it was right on the road to the house of one Benito de las Heras, his friend. He said he would spend the night there and the next day, which was Sunday, and at nightfall he would leave.
Now that the bachelor wanted to say goodbye to me, I said to him, “And those children– how are you leaving them?” and the bachelor answered me, “There’s some wheat– I entrust them to you for the love of God, and if their mother comes right they won’t lack for food, and if wrong, then let God do whatever serves him. You have to give me your pony.” I said to him that if I gave him the pony then they would say that I had given him advice and I had given him the pony so he could leave, and they would arrest me. Crying, the bachelor said to me, “Because you are my son, for the love of God, a poor old man like me, where can I go on foot on those roads ahead?” Then I gave him the pony and so he left, and a boy went with him, a son of his called Dickie (Diaguito), and I said to Diego, “Brother, where are you leaving him?” and the boy told me, “I’m leaving him by the Castellan’s meadow” and then I asked him what he [i.e., their father] had said, and the boy said, “he has told me that he will write you around Easter, god willing” and that he told him that if they asked for him that I should said that he was going to Reznos5 and [the next line is garbled but suggests they said their goodbyes]
On Sunday the deputy arrived in the town of Deza, and in the afternoon the deputy, the vicar, and one Diego de Haro went to my house and came inside, but they did not find me there, and without knowing that they were at my house I went home and ran into them there. The deputy asked me where my father was, and I told him that he wasn’t in town, that I believed he was in Reznos or in Miñana.6 I told him by the oath I had taken that he was in Reznos or in Miñana, and if he wasn’t there, then they would pick up his trail there. The deputy locked me up in a room and went on the road to Miñana, and immediately I spoke to the vicar and said, “Sir, I have taken an oath, and my soul is worth more to me than my father or my mother, and for my conscience’s sake, do me the favor of getting a messenger, and I will pay for him.” He singled out one of his friends to go after the deputy, advising him how my father was on the run and the route he was taking, and so went off one Pedro Herrero. Then, since I wasn’t confident about this, I said again to the vicar that he look for another man, that I would pay for him to go to Miñana or Bion after my father and to tell him that the deputy was after him and to come back, and that if he wouldn’t do it that he should take him prisoner. The messenger went off and then the vicar came back again and I told him to send another messenger in case the first one missed the deputy, to tell the deputy my father’s route because the second messenger wasn’t from Bion.
The fiscal’s accusation charges him with advising his father to escape, which he did. The votos are light– reprimanded, 27 January 1533. Ordered to appear in Deza in his shirt without belt or cap, and pay 16 ducats for masses to be said by the Santo Oficio.
Endnotes
1Villages across the border in Aragón, about 10 and 15 miles away, respectively.
2Tordesalas is about 20 miles north of Deza, inside Castile but outside the Inquisition of Cuenca’s jurisdiction.
3Peñaranda de Duero is 100 miles west of Deza on the way to Portugal; Roa is 25 miles beyond that, and Castromocho yet another 60 miles westward.
4Place name as yet unidentified.
5A village about 15 miles to the north of Deza.
6Another nearby village. Here, Francisco gives out the false information that his father told him to say.
Source 2 Translation
Trial of Gaspar de San Clemente
1541
ADC Inq. Leg. 145, exp. 1772 Gaspar de San Clemente
Presented in Sigüenza, January 10,
1540 Gaspar de
San Clemente
to me, Domingo de Arteaga,
by
Confession in Sigüenza
Gaspar de San Clemente, prisoner
[age: 38]
Most Reverend and Magnificent Lords
[first page of the confession is a preliminary statement affirming Gaspar’s desire to confess and blaming his misdeeds on the devil]
Firstly, I say that often I saw and heard my parents in fear of being prisoners of the Holy Office, and my mother, who is called Isabel de la Peña, quarrelled many times with my father because they had come back from Portugal, where they had converted to Christianity, saying that every day she was going around looking for the boogeyman. I heard this more than twenty-two years ago. My mother also very much wanted to go to Portugal and see a brother she had there, who is called Gabriel de la Peña, and I think it was so she wouldn’t be arrested by the Holy Office, because once I heard her say, talking while at home, that she was afraid they were going to arrest them because she had made “desollas de carne” one Friday after they had returned from Portugal, and she regretted it.
Also, she would say to Francisco de San Clemente and her other sons that they should go see her brother in Portugal, and Francisco and Juan de San Clemente went there, and when they came back, they said that my mother’s brother was a bad Jewish man who said and did Jewish things, but not saying or declaring what things.
Many times I saw how Juan de San Clemente dishonored and called my parents heretic Jews, and they were afraid of his blabbing on account of the things he said when they didn’t give him what he wanted.
Also, I remember that my mother and father told me and my siblings that we should believe in the Jewish faith, that it was the good and true one, and that we would be saved in it, and they told us that we should say some prayers that did not seem to me to be Christian ones. At the time that they were doing this, my mother, Ysabel de la Peña, was ill, and I and my siblings were somewhat lukewarm, and they told us so much that they scrambled our brains, and we said, yes, we believed in it. This happened two or three times although I think that before this they had told this to my siblings, since they were older and I was young then. My siblings and I who were there at the time were Francsico, Juan, and Jerónimo de San Clemente, and María de San Clemente, wife of Francisco Jerónimo, and this could have taken place about twenty-four years ago, more or less. And I heard each one of my siblings here named say that they so believed.
Item, at the time when my mother was ill, I saw how they stewed up a pot of beef and they covered the whole top with dough, and they give it to her to eat. I saw this and ate from it, and I don’t know what stew it was other than it seemed to me that it was different from the one we ate on other occasions. Before this, I saw how my mother wouldn’t eat pork fat or fatty meat, only lean, and I saw my mother take the meat in her hands and say, “Get out of here, this meat is really fatty!” and then she would give it to the maids. This was when she was out of bed, because for a long time she was ill, and what I say about the stews, they were adafinas because I heard my parents call them that. By my recollection this would have been about twenty-two years ago.
Item, at my father’s house I remember that when I was young I saw how certain people came inside and prayed Jewish prayers like the ones I declared above, and these people were Pedro de Carrión and Francisco López d’Escoto and Pedro de Carrión’s wife, and Diego de Aguilera and Francisco d’Esguevillas, and the said Gaspar de San Clemente and Ysabel de la Peña, my parents, and Francisco de Vargas. I don’t recall the prayers they said or manner of prayer. [Adds later in the interrogation of Feb. 3 that this happened two or three times in the kitchen, 25 or 26 years ago. Gaspar names many other peopleB his brothers, parents, etc. “Each time this took place my father and the oldest of the people there said certain prayers and I did not understand nor do I know what they were, and they weren’t in Latin or Spanish because I know how to read Latin and Spanish, and they weren’t one or the other; instead they were as different as Basque is from Spanish. When they were praying, sometimes they were sitting down and other times they were praying standing up. They would say them towards a wall, and after they had prayed, some of the people some times, other times other ones would take certain steps backwards and forwards toward the wall…” He saw his brothers Juan and Francisco do the same, but not his other siblings, and his father would preach to them the law of Moses, and the people would affirm it.]
Also, I declare that about sixteen years ago, more or less, a man from Portugal sent by my mother’s brother, Gabriel de la Peña, came to my father’s house, asking him that he send over there one of his sons, and he would give him his estate and he would marry him with one of his wife’s neices. My father told me did I want to go, and I went to Our Lady of Guadalupe, and from there I arrived at the city of Elvas, where my uncle lived, and he welcomed me when I arrived.
The next day was Saturday and he asked me if I ate meat. I said that it wasn’t the custom in my country, and my uncle’s wife said to him, “Aren’t you ashamed to be asking that of a youth like him?” They fed me and a man who came with me, and I was there four days.
I left for the city of Evora and Estremoz to take some letters that I carried from Bishop don Fadrique, who was the bishop of Sigüenza, and the man who had come to Sigüenza with the letter [from his uncle] went with me. While talking on the road he asked me if I liked that country and people, and I told him that it seemed wrong to me because there were and there seemed to be really evil men [_bellaco_Bknave], and this man said to me, “Here they aren’t such good Christians as over there [meaning Spain] because here they aren’t punished and you’re going to get married to your uncle’s niece.” I told him I didn’t know. So we got to the city of Evora and I delivered the letters I carried like I said, and I was there on Saint John’s Day (June 24) in a monastery on the outskirts of the city, and the next Saturday morning I went into the city and that man with me, and he took me to see the
city. Going down a street, he went into a house and I waited for him, and said to him, “Why did you go off, what have you done?” “I came to talk here but since today is Saturday those devils didn’t want to answer much less see us.” The house was open and watered, and I didn’t see anyone in the entryway, and I asked him, “What did you go in for?” “To deliver some letters from a New Christian that they gave me in Elvas,” and then we went for a walk. On Monday we left for Elvas and on the road this man told be about wicked lifestyle of the New Christians in Portugal.
After two days we got to Elvas, and my uncle talked to me about if I wanted to marry his wife’s niece, and I told him that I would go home and tell my father. Then he replied, “If you come here, I will give you everything I own, and when you come again don’t bring with you that youth, who is an Old Christian, just you come by yourself.” I answered that he paid attention, and he said to me, “If he does, then I’m not talking because he is a malicious man, and I am not justifying my life to you.” I told him, “What do you have to justify to me if one had to?” and he, “If I should want to go to Castile, I would go,” and I said, “Why don’t you dare?” and he said because of the Inquisition, which arrested them and took away their property, and I asked who doesn’t do it so that he won’t be arrested, and he said to this, “Over there there are great persecution.” I told him, “I say that although there is persecution, it’s better to be there and be Christian and not to say that.” To this my uncle replied, “Go with God and leave me, because I must die in the faith I was born in, and I too will be saved like you in yours, since you’re a Christian.” Then he told me to tell my father that he asked him to send him his answer if I had to marry his niece or not, and while talking then he told me that if I wasn’t such a kid that he would tell me a little to say to my father. I said, “What did you want [to say]?” and then he told me that the Messiah they waited for had not yet come and they awaited him every day.”
This upset me so much that the next day I left for Medina del Campo where I had to buy merchandise for my father, and since I had come by way of Our Lady of Guadalupe, I got the idea that I would not marry my uncle’s niece because I had the desire not to, for which I give thanks to Jesus Christ Our Lord. When I got back to Sigüenza, my father welcomed me, and a day or so later he asked me if I had liked my uncle’s wife’s niece, and I told him to leave me alone, they could go to Hell, and I wouldn’t marry her because they were evil
men. With that, my father shut up. At this time, Nuño Vaez, the castle warden of Pelegrina, was staying at my father’s house, and I gave him some letters I had for him, and he asked me what I thought, and I told him what was going on and how they were bad people and not for anything in the world would I go there nor marry.
After that, my father asked me again what my uncle had said to me, and I told him what I stated and declared above, and saw how my father rejoiced in the words I told him my uncle had said, and he asked me to go over there to marry.
Also I say that while I was in Portugal in the city of Elvas, I heard my uncle say that he rarely sent for meat from the butcher’s shop, and I asked him what did he eat, and he said that he ate chicken, and when he ate beef, sometimes to avoid going to the butcher, he had it slaughtered at home by a New Christian who did it the way the Jews used to slaughter. While talking about other things, I left the conversation and went for a walk through the city and when I got back to the house, I found there a man with whom my uncle was talking, and as I came in the man left, and I asked my uncle, “Who was that?” and my uncle told me that he was a New Christian by name of Moscoso, who sometimes slaughtered the meat that he was going to eat, and I told him, “I’ve never heard of such a thing in my life!” and the conversation stopped because I didn’t want to say anything more to him. This took place two days before I left his house for Castile.