History 465- Week 14 Post-Inquisition

I’ve found our discussion of the Inquisition the past week to be both enlightening and a little disturbing. To me, what exactly the Inquisition involved has always been somewhat of a mystery, and it was interesting to learn about how this famous event was carried out in Latin America. The Inquisition might have resembled in some regards a court case with religious overtones, but as we looked at it I couldn’t but help notice how different the process was compared to the judicial one.

It’s somewhat frightening to think that the Inquisition could apprehend someone that they were simply suspicious of. Just like that a person could disappear, spending weeks, months, and in some cases years in entirely secret prisons. The idea that a person’s life could be controlled in such a way is frightening both because there was such a lack of rights for the person being taken, and because it shows how much control the Church had in the daily lives of the people in Latin America. I have observed before how interrelated the Church and the daily lives of people were at this time, but this is evidence of an even deeper amount of control that I had not realized before. The fact that a person could be locked away without even being told what they were accused of shows a frightening level of Church control.

The case of Marina de San Maguel that we spent so much time on displays this perfectly–a 52 year old woman was taken without being told what she was accused of, and was imprisoned for months while being forced to divulge anything in her life that was sinful. In the process, she pretty much had to tell all the private things in her life in an attempt to figure out whatever the Inquisition was waiting for her to say. Even more horrible, after this long drawn out trial, she was thrown in prison for two years, then paraded around naked, given 100 lashes, and sent to a “plague hospital”. The victim had no rights at all in these situations, and this instance where 9 confessions were taken is probably just an example of the many things that went on with the Inquisition. What I gather from cases like this is the extreme lack of rights people had in this society. The fact that they could be taken and thrown into a secret prison for simply being suspected of religious heresy is disturbing.