Abstract
The title of this essay derives from Luis García Berlanga’s satirical film ¡Bienvenido, Mr Marshall! (1953), in which the inhabitants of a Castilian town, having heard a rumor that George Marshall, of the Marshall Plan, is to pass through on his way to Portugal from France, fantasize about the advantages his aid will bring.1 Believing the US delegation will expect all Spaniards to behave like the romantic gypsies of Andalusia, they prepare for his anticipated arrival by redecorating the town and dressing up in costumes, transforming even their speech and behavior to resemble the B-movies starring Lola Flores. Berlanga’s subtle film is simultaneously a parody of that gypsy/flamenco genre of Franco-era cinema, a denunciation of socioeconomic conditions in rural Spain, a critique of US foreign policy, and a multilayered analysis of the ways the expectations of various agents converge in the representations that shape their perceptions of themselves and reality. These processes become visible through the anticipated presence of an authority figure, whose power enthralls the local population, leading them to perform their identities in a way they never would otherwise. In the sixteenth century, the arrival of the inquisitor on his visit to the towns of his jurisdiction produced a similar effect, which is to say, a vivid dramatization of the disequilibrium in power relations constitutive of intercultural phenomena.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
In these formulations, readers familiar with postcolonial theory may recognize echoes of such theoretical notions as “hybridity,” as discussed in Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 159–174.
Miguel Jiménez Monteserín transcribes instructions for carrying out visits and copies of the Edict of the Faith in his Introducción a la inquisición espanola (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1980), 291–295, 497–541. I.
Villa Calleja describes the procedure of proclaiming the edict and conducting a visit in “Edictos de Fe (siglos XV–XIX),” in Historia de la Inquisición en España y América, dir. Bartolomé Escandell Bonet and Joaquín Pérez Villanueva, vol. 2, Las estructuras del Santo Oficio (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos and Centro de Estudios Inquisitoriales, 1993), 301–333.
See Bartolomé Bennasser, “Confesionalización” de la monarquía e Inquisición en la época de Felipe II: dos estudios (Valladolid: Secretariado de Publicaciones e Intercambio Editorial, Universidad de Valladolid, 2009).
The role of the Inquisition in confessionalization under Philip II is specifically discussed by José Martínez Millán, La inquisición española (Madrid: Alianza, 2007), 121–154.
Two of the best studies of how the Spanish Inquisition displaced popular/ local belief systems to impose conformity with the Counter-Reformation remain William A. Christian’s Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981)
and Sarah T. Nalle’s God in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500– 1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). See also my own Transnational Cervantes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 4–14.
Aníbal Quijano theorized this cultural ambivalence under the heading “coloniality of power.” “Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina,” Anuario mariateguiano, 9 (1997): 113–121.
Inquisitorial visits have not been much studied as such. In English, a brief introduction to the subject can be found in Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition. An Historical Revision (London: Weidenfeld and Nicohlson, 1997), 179–181.
Jean-Pierre Dedieu describes the typical inquisitorial visit in L’administration de la foi. L’Inquisition de Tolède (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 1992), 183–190. In her recent book, Kimberly Lynn devotes a chapter to the visit, viewed exclusively as an activity of the Inquisitor, with no interest in the agency of those who testify. She briefly mentions the libros de testificaciones from the Toledo tribunal, to which she refers, in keeping with the Inquisitor’s perspective, as “visitation books.” Between Court and Confessional. The Politics of Spanish Inquisitors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 52–64.
To date, the libros de testificaciones have been grossly neglected by scholars, though that is beginning to change. The libros de testificaciones for the tribunal of the Canary Islands, housed in the Museo Canario, are quite voluminous and have been employed in studies of that tribunal, as Francisco Fajardo Spínola explains in “La actividad procesal del Santo Oficio. Algunas consideraciones sobre su estudio” Manuscrits, 17 (1999): 97–117. He describes their value in the following terms: “Mucho podría decirse sobre el valor de los libros de testificaciones como fuente que refleja, mejor que otro tipo de documentos inquisitoriales, la realidad social sobre la que el Santo Oficio actuaba, tanto porque muchas denuncias no daban lugar a un proceso, sino que eran archivadas, cuanto por la inmediatez y frescura de estos documentos; e incluso porque muestran la acción del Santo Oficio en su base, al nivel de los comisarios de los pueblos” (108).
A recent publication makes use of libros de testificaciones from the Valencia tribunal, some of which are housed in the Archivo Histórico de la Universidad de Valencia: Juan Antonio Barrio Barrio, “Prácticas y procedimientos jurídicos e institucionales de la Inquisición Real de Valencia. Los edictos y las testificaciones a finales del siglo XV,” in En el primer siglo de la Inquisición Espanola. Fuentes documentales, procedimientos de análisis, experiencias de investigación, coord. José María Cruselles Gómez (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2013), 145–166. I am currently collaborating with an international group of some half dozen scholars undertaking a large-scale survey of the libros de testificaciones and similar inquisitorial documents, such as the cadernos do promotor used in the Portuguese and Brazilian tribunals.
José María García Fuentes, Visitas de la Inquisición al Reino de Granada (Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2006).
Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Black British Cultural Studies. A Reader, ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 16–60.
The theoretical statement that unlocked this critical doorway was Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 128–138.
Two breakthrough studies in this vein were David Morley, The ‘Nationwide’ Audience: Structure and Decoding (London: British Film Institute, 1980)
and Ien Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (London: Methuen, 1985).
General treatments of beatas and their social and religious contexts in early modern Spain can be found in the following studies: Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990);
Adelina Sarrión Mora, Beatas y endemoniadas. Mujeres heterodoxas ante la Inquisición. Siglos XVI a XIX (Madrid: Alianza, 2003);
Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005);
Lisa Vollendorf, The Lives of Women. A New History of Inquisitional Spain (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005);
and Alison Weber, “Locating Holiness in Early Modern Spain: Convents, Caves, and Houses,” in Structures and Subjectivities: Attending to Early Modern Women, ed. Joan Hartman and Adele Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 50–74.
Of course, the relation between Morisco customs and Islam, especially in the case of the Granada Moriscos, was a fraught question in the late sixteenth century. As is well known, Francisco Núñez Muley, in the face of royal suppression, argued cogently that Moriscos’ customs were not intrinsically Islamic in nature, but compatible with Christianity. Francisco Nuñez Muley, A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audience and Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada, trans. Vincent Barletta (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
The leading study of the consequences of this ambiguity between culture and religion for the Inquisition’s persecution of Moriscos remains Mercedes García-Arenal, Inquisition y moriscos. Los procesos del Tribunal de Cuenca (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1978). This magisterial work is based entirely on trial records, however, and does not take evidence from the libros de testificaciones into account.
The customs of shrouding the dead and marriage feasts as practiced by Moriscos are discussed by Pedro Longás, La vida religiosa de los moriscos, facsimile edition, preliminary study by Darío Cabanelas Rodríguez (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1998), 277–283, 287–288.
ADC, Inquisición, libro 326, fols 207–208. One of the songs he said he learned from them was “Alhambra hanina,” which he says was a song “about certain Moorish captives.” This is undoubtedly a version of the lament of the Moriscos of Granada, “Alhambra hanina gualcoçor taphqui,” documented by sixteenth-century Sevillian historian and literary scholar Argote de Molina in his Discurso sobre la poesía castellana (Madrid, 1575). Argote de Molina’s use of this poem is briefly discussed by Leah Middlebrook, Imperial Lyric: New Poetry and New Subjects in Early Modern Spain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 43n.31.
Examples include “The Subject and Power,” the afterword to Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 208–226; The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990); and Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979), from which I have chosen this passage in particular: “The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of society; but he [sic] is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called ‘discipline’. We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him [sic] belong to this production” (194).
In a similar vein, Anthony J. Cascardi has theorized Spanish baroque culture’s generation of subjects desirous of control in “The Subject of Control,” afterword to Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain (Hispanic Issues 7), ed. Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 231–245.
William Childers, “The Baroque Public Sphere,” in Reason and Its Others: Italy, Spain and the New World, ed. David R. Castillo and Massimo Lollini (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 165–185.
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd edn (New York and London: Routledge, 1994).
For a recent discussion of the late nineteenth-century establishment of a biracial caste system in the United States through the reduction of multiple categories of race to the binary black/white opposition, see Emily Epstein Landau, Spectacular Wickedness: Sex, Race, and Memory in Storyville, New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 45–76.
See, for example, De la edad conflictiva, 3rd edn (Madrid: Taurus, 1972). Equally important for understanding the political significance of this precocious racial ideology are two articles by historian Juan Ignacio Gutiérrez Nieto, “La discriminación de los conversos y la tibetización de Castilla,” Revista de la Universidad Complutense, 22 (1973): 99–129 and “Limpieza de sangre y antihidalguismo hacia 1600,” Homenaje al Dr. D. Juan Reglà Campistol, vol. 1 (Valencia: Universidad de Valencia, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, 1975), 497–514.
For Moriscos’ cultural contributions, see my previously cited article, “Manzanares, 1600.” I have published an initial study of the lawsuits claiming Old Christian status titled “Disappearing Moriscos,” in Cross-Cultural History and the Domestication of Otherness, ed. Michal Jan Rozbicki and George O. Ndege (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 51–64.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2015 Michal Jan Rozbicki
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Childers, W.P. (2015). Bienvenido, Mr. Inquisitor: On the Sociocultural Dynamics of Inquisitorial Visits. In: Rozbicki, M.J. (eds) Perspectives on Interculturality. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484390_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484390_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-50416-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-48439-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)