Mexican Inquisition Documents
The Mexican Inquisition Documents (1593-1817), held at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, range over a wide array of canonical offenses including Judaism, clairvoyance, solicitation, superstition and sexual deviance. The sixty one documents were purchased by the Bancroft in 1996.
Isabel and Leonora Carvajal were denounced and accused of practicing Judaism in Mexico City, in 1595. Their trial record is contained in an ancestral form of the modern file folder; occasionally limp leather covers wrap around the documents. Material would be added to a record over time, or removed for use as evidence in other trials. Examination of the physical condition of the documents revealed that the consistent ‘waviness’ of the pages was due not to dampness but to folding by scribes in order to create margins for their notes and later formatting.
Attached to the records was evidence introduced during the trials. Blas de Magallares hanged himself to avoid conviction and the loss of his family lands; the cord he used to hang himself is attached to his trial record. He was accused of not believing in the virginity of Mary. Bernard Ortego was accused of superstition and a leather pouch was attached to his record containing three packages with an unknown powder, a bone and some prayers. To minimize handling, documentary photographs were taken and the objects placed in sealed containers to protect from loss and to facilitate further research. The trial record of Jose Manjarres, also accused of pagan superstition, contained hand-drawn booklets as evidence.
The individual trial records were each sewn to a separate folder, using the original holes, and they were housed in phaseboxes, ordered by date into groups of three or four.
Gillian taught a course on how to construct these historic limp leather folders in Tennessee, at the 2008 Paper and Book Intensive.