Marina’s 9 Confessions

Obviously this post concerns the case we talked about in class, but moreso through the actual primary document itself. I really had a difficult time reading this. Not because it was uninteresting, but because I cannot imagine what this must have been like for Marina. Basically, the Inquisition was asking all of these open-ended questions to which Marina was supposed to confess as to why they had her in custody. This seems so time-consuming on the Inquisition’s part, in my opinion. I think you could get anyone to say alot of different things about why they were arrested if they did not know the actual reason! I have to imagine Marina’s case was not the only instance of this happening either.

I think her references to spiritual encounters with Jesus, hell and being in purgatory were most likely dreams or fantasies that she had previously had, and she probably thought that someone knew about them, other than herself, so this could have possibly been a reason for her arrest in her mind. After going through nine confession sessions, of course Marina would be coming up with the most bizarre accounts of her imagination in order to explain the possible reason for her questioning. It almost seems that if you were arrested by the Inquisition, you had no hope for getting out without some sort of pentalty due to the “guilty until proven innocent” mentality that is backwards from today. Also, like Marina, people who were held for quite some time in cells would probably come up with some crazy things about their personal past in order to find some closure to what the Inquisition was looking for so they could be freed. I think I could go a little nuts being locked up in a cell myself. You could probably get anyone to say anything if they knew that confessing something would atleast free them from imprisonment.

Again, this just seems too time-consuming for the Inquisition. You would think that they would just tell people what they were accused of and go from there, but I guess the point was that people would tell the truth, and even confess to other “crimes” without knowing the actual, real reason of their first arrest.

Reading cases like this makes me glad for our justice system of today, that’s for sure! Although, because of this questionning style, it has given us very detailed accounts of actual behaviors of people during colonial times. This is probably the only positive coming from such cases.