Agents of Orthodoxy: Honor, Status, and the Inquisition in Colonial Pernambuco, Brazil

The Portuguese Inquisition is often portrayed as a tyrannical institution that imposed itself on an unsuspecting and impotent society. The men who ran it are depicted as unprincipled bandits and ruthless spies who gleefully dragged their neighbors away to rot in dark, pestilential prisons. In this new study, based on extensive archival research, James E. Wadsworth challenges these myths by focusing on the lay and clerical officials who staffed the Inquisition in colonial Pernambuco, one of Brazil's oldest, wealthiest, and most populated colonies. He argues that the Inquisition was an integral part of colonial society and that it reflected and reinforced deeply held social and religious values that crossed the Atlantic, recreated themselves in colonial Brazil, and became powerful tools for exclusion and promotion in Brazilian society. The Inquisition successfully appropriated widely held social norms and manipulated social tensions to create and recreate its own power and prestige for almost three hundred years. It finally declined only when its capacity to socially promote its officials diminished in the late eighteenth century. Agents of Orthodoxy places the men who ran the Inquisition in historical context and demonstrates that they were often motivated by social aspirations in seeking inquisitional appointments. Beautifully written and extensively researched, this book sheds new light on a long-standing institution and its participants.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Chapter 1: In the Name of the Holy Office Chapter 2: The Inquisition at Work in Pernambuco Chapter 3: Qualifying for Office: Procedures and Costs Chapter 4: Qualifying for Office: The Problems of Honor Chapter 5: Genealogical Fraud and Political Reform Chapter 6: Nobility of Blood Chapter 7: Corporate Privilege: The familiars do número Chapter 8: Corporate Institutions: Brotherhoods and Militias Chapter 9: Impostors, Abusers, and Obstructers Chapter 10: Decay and Decline Conclusion

About the Author :
James E. Wadsworth is professor of history at Stonehill College. He is theauthor of In Defence of the Faith: Joaquim Marques de Araújo, a Comissário in the Age of Inquisitional Decline, Columbus’s First Voyage: A History in Documents, and The World of Credit in Colonial Massachusetts: James Richards and His Day Book, 1692–1711.

Review :
This is a valuable book based on a significant research effort. . . . [that] expands our knowledge of the Iberian Inquisition and its workings in Brazil. It is an important guide to the internal structure of the Inquisition and its bureaucrats. Wadsworth's analysis of those Pernambucan agents of orthodoxy is an important contribution to the literature. James Wadsworth has undertaken wide-ranging archival research in order to produce this new perspective on the Portuguese Inquisition by focusing on the lay and clerical officials of the Inquisition in wealthy and well-populated Pernambuco. James E. Wadsworth's Agents of Orthodoxy is an engaging and well-documented book, one that makes a truly important contribution to the history of the Inquisition in Brazil, and more broadly, throughout the entire Iberian world. It also offers new insights into the complex array of social and political factors that contributed to the abolition of the Portuguese Inquisition in 1821. Original in approach and revisionist in its findings, this book is one of the best studies on New World inquisitions currently in print. Agents of Orthodoxy is an innovative contribution to the still imperfectly known history of the Portuguese Inquisition. It argues that the Holy Office was an active institution in colonial society whose role wasn't confined to the persecution of religious and moral deviants. In fact, Wadsworth's extensive research and sharp analysis shows how deeply the Inquisition, by its system of appointment and local structure, could pervade society, even in distant Pernambuco. It worked as a strong instrument of social exclusion and promotion until the final decades of the eighteenth century.