The Discursos de la Vida in Inquisitorial Documentation: Autobiography between Orality and Memory

From Firenze University Press Journal: Journal of Early Modern Studies (JEMS)

José Luis Loriente Torres, Independent Scholar

This study deals with a kind of autobiography from a time when autobiography did not yet exist and whose protagonists never wished to write. It centers on the life stories of people pro-secuted as heretics, stated orally in response to a direct order from their inquisitors and written down by the scribes who attended the interrogation. These life stories have been referred to as ‘inquisitorial autobiography’ (Kagan and Dyer 2004), or ‘trazas’ (outlines) (Amelang 2011), and, with the exception of these two studies, this historical source has not received much attention from an autobiographical point of view. In procedural documentation they can be found under the name discursos de la vida (García 1591, 10r-10v), especially beginning in 1561 when the General Inquisitor Fernando Valdés established a set of new instructions that systematically required defendants to depose an oral account of their own lives during their initial interrogation (Valdés 1561, 29r). However, some sort of life narrative can be found among the papers of the Spanish Inquisition ever since its foundation by the Catholic monarchs in 1478, and the presence of these narratives seems to be related to the sacrament of confession.This documentation is invaluable. First, because it gives us access to the ‘voices’ of hun-dreds or perhaps thousands of autobiographies of ordinary people,1 at a time when an unusual interest in individual lives and even autobiography seemed to have been emerging (Dülmen 1997). The first objective of this article is therefore to link these self-referential sources to the ‘autobiographical culture’ of the early modern age. Second, all autobiography is conditioned by its audience. In the case of these life narratives this is even more so since we are faced by a type of personal document that, due to the way it was created, can be included under the label of ‘collaborative autobiography’ (Smith and Watson 2001, 53–56; Malena 2012). According to Kenneth Plummer (2001), the best way to approach these ‘documents of life’ is to try to analyze the role of each actor involved in the final result, that is, the text before us. In this case, these actors included the ‘story teller’, who composed, built or even made up his or her life story through a reflexive process; and the ‘coaxer, coacher or coercer’ with the power to elicit — and edit — the story. The latter can be an anthropologist, a journalist, a confessor or, why not, as in the life stories studied here, a courtroom interrogator, all of whom occupied a position of power over the former. Our second objective will thus be to understand how both inquisitors and notaries biased or conditioned these types of life narratives. However, despite the oppres-sive and even alienating context in which they were uttered, one of the most fascinating and surprising elements of these statements is that they reveal how some defendants subtly tried to resist, showing an unexpected agency similar to what have been called ‘the arts of resistance’ (Scott 1990). The ultimate goal of this study is to discuss this agency by exploring some of the strategies based on the selective memory of the narrators and their performance abilities.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/jems-2279-7149-15532

Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-jems/article/view/15532