Dear MEMHS Colleagues,

<DRAFT – PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE> JUNI – MEMHS, February 23, 2021

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Dear MEMHS Colleagues,

My dissertation, “The Politics of Biography: Inquisition, Empire, and Identification in the

Spanish Atlantic (1570-1610),” explores the origins, implementation, and implications of what I

call the ‘biographical turn’ in Spanish Inquisitorial procedure and consists of four chapters:

Chapter 1, “Biography and Calidad in the Long Sixteenth Century,” traces the social,

political, and cultural developments amidst which Inquisitors began collecting and recording

suspected heretics' biographical sketches, situating the phenomenon within its sixteenth-century

Atlantic, Imperial, and counter-Reformation contexts.

Chapter 2,"Empiricism, Empire, and Race," turns a critical lens to the questionnaire that

Inquisitors devised to catalogue suspected heretics' biographical profiles and, drawing on a

systematic analysis of Inquisitorial trials conducted by Mexican Inquisitors between 1571-1610.

This chapter will demonstrate how Inquisitors' differentiated administration of their biographical

questionnaires to Conversos and Africans elaborated a biographical hierarchy of social

difference that better enfranchised Conversos while marginalizing and stereotyping Africans.

Chapter 3, “"The Biographical Defense," shifts focus from the Inquisitors to the

suspects, illustrating the ways in which they could harness biographical thinking and the

discourse of calidad to their advantage, using the trial of the Converso Luis de Carvajal de la

Cueva, who was the governor of Nuevo Leon and was arrested by the Inquisition in 1589 and

tried as a Judaizer.

Chapter 4, “Into the Public Sphere,” explores the role of biographical discourse within

this public face of Inquisitorial activity in New Spain through an examination of the evolving

textual structure of the sentences that were pronounced at public autos de fe in Mexico City

during this period.

Below you will find a draft of Chapter 1 (“Biography and Calidad in the Long Sixteenth

Century”). Thank you for taking the time to read and engage with my work and I very much look

forward to our conversation on the 23rd!

Mayer


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Chapter 1: Biography and Calidad in the Long Sixteenth Century

In the summer of 1568, amidst a larger overhaul and expansion of Spain’s Holy Office,

the Supreme Council of the Inquisition issued its first printed procedural manual: El orden que

comunmente se guarda en el sancto offico de la Inquisición.1 Among many other features, this

manual – which was came to be called Orden de processar – provided Inquisitors for the first

time a fully formulated template for documenting an Inquisitorial trial.2 The manual was

systematically distributed to all district tribunals with orders signed by the Supreme Council of

the Inquisition requiring that henceforth all trials be conducted and recorded in accordance with

the Orden de processar’s instructions and templates.3 This uncharacteristic embrace of print by

an institution that typically relied on manuscript missives to regulate internal procedures was

thus undertaken as a means of comprehensively standardizing Inquisitors documentary practices

that coincided with the establishment of Inquisitorial tribunals in the Mexico City and in Lima in

1570.4 Consequently, the Mexican Inquisitorial archive forms a primary site for exploring how

1 El orden que comunmente se guarda en el sancto offico de la Inquisicion, acerca del processar en las causas que en el se tratan conforme a lo que esta proueido por las instructiones antiguas y nuevas (Madrid, 1568). For a general overview of the restructuring of the Spanish Holy Office during this period see Henry Kamen, The Inquisition: A Historical Revision, 4th ed., (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 186-196. 2 Gonzales Novalin, Jose Luis, “Las Instrucciones de la Inquisición española: de Torquemada a Valdes (1484-1561),” in Perfiles Jurídicos de la Inquisición Española, Escudero, José Antonio, ed. (Madrid: Instituto de Historia de la Inquisición, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1989), 91-109. The manual reappeared in Madrid under the original title in 1591, 1607, and 1622. An enhanced edition that included Gaspar Isidro Arguello’s detailed topical index appeared under the title Orden de processar, recopilado de las instrucciones antiguas y modernas (Madrid, 1628). A subsequent 1736 edition printed in Valencia and similarly appended with Arguello’s index re-took the original title. H. C. Lea collectively referred to all editions of this text by the homogenized short title ‘Orden de procesar’ (A History of the Inquisition of Spain: Origin and Establishment. Relations with the State (Macmillan, 1906), 352) and that convention has been followed by many modern scholars; see, for instance, Jimenez Monserin, Introducción a la Inquisición Española, 382. Lea’s imprecision can be traced back to Llorente who erroneously ascribed the 1628 title to the original 1568 edition; see Juan Antonio Llorente, Historia Crítica de la Inquisiciòn, Vol. V (Madrid, 1822), 48-49. This bibliographic confusion stems in part from the fact that even in the earliest editions in the body of the text there are headers that read ‘Orden de processar en el sancto officio de la inquisicion.’ For a broad bibliographic overview of the production of Inquisitorial manuals during this period, see Robin Vosse, “Introduction to inquisitorial manuals,” Online. 3 Archivo Histórico Nacional – Madrid, Inquisición, Libro 497, fol. 106. 4 For the Spanish Inquisition’s general reliance on manuscript circulars, rather than print, as a means of regulation see Gustav Henningsen, “La legislación secreta del Santo Oficio,” in Perfiles jurídicos de la inquisición española, José Antonio Escudero López (ed.), (Madrid: 1986), 163-172. Fort the explicit link drawn by the Crown’s counsellors between the circulation of this manual and the plans to establish the American tribunals, see the


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these new procedures were first implemented since from the onset the Mexican tribunal quickly

adopted and implemented the newly issued regulations.5

Title Page: El orden que comunmente se guarda en el sancto offico de la Inquisicion (Madrid, 1568)6

surviving protocols from Junta Magana that was held in September of 1568 and are transcribed in Vidal Abril Castelló and Miguel J Abril Stoffels eds., Francisco De La Cruz, Inquisición, Actas II (Madrid: CSIC, 1992), 149-152. 5 Much of the Lima Inquisitorial archive has been lost or destroyed. In contrast, the Mexican Inquisitorial trials are largely preserved in Mexico’s Archivo General de la Nación (Ramo Inquisición) while additional materials are held is several archives in the U.S., notably the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, CA the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA. For the afterlives of the Mexican, Peruvian, and Colombian Inquisitorial archives, see Gabriel Torres Puga, “Conservación y pérdida de dos archivos de la Inquisición en la América Española: México, Cartagena y Lima,” in Jaqueline Vassallo, Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço y Susana Bastos Mateus (eds.), Inquisiciones, Dimensiones comparadas (siglos XVI-XIX) (Córdoba, Editorial Brujas, 2017), 45-62. 6 Few copies of this edition have survived, leading some scholars to surmise that it first circulated in manuscript and


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Based on the template provided in the manual, after administering oaths to the suspects,

Inquisitors were to open the proceedings by asking them the following questions during:

What was their name? Where were they from? What was their age and occupation? How

long had they been imprisoned? What was their genealogy? Were they married? Did they

have any children? What was their casta and generación?7 Had they, or any of their

stated relatives been imprisoned, penanced, reconciled, or condemned by the Holy Office

of the Inquisition? Were they Christians, and had they been baptized and confirmed? Did

they hear mass, confess, and take communion during the times that the Church requires?

When was the last time that they had confessed? With whom, and where? Had they

received the Holy Sacrament? Did they know the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, the Creed,

and the Salve Regina? Did they know how to read and write? If so, who had taught them?

Had they studied in a university? If so, with whom? Had they left the kingdoms of

Castile, and if so with which persons?8

Once suspects had answered those specific questions, Inquisitors were to prompt them to narrate

more generally “el discurso de su vida,” or, ‘the story of their life.’ In doing so, Inquisitors were

to ensure that the suspects narrative recounted “extensively and in detail” all the places where

“they were raised and had lived" as well as "the people that they have interacted with” over the

course of their lives.9

was only subsequently printed in 1591; see Miguel Jiménez Monteserín, Introducción a la Inquisición Española (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1980), 383) and Francisco Bethencourt and Jean Birrell trans.. The Inquisition: A Global History, 1478-1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 63. For this study, I examined a rare copy that is currently held by Harvard University’s Houghton Library (Call Number: *CC.In24S.568o). 7 These terms are best translated as lineage and origins, but I have kept these terms in the original Spanish, since there their approximate cognates in English ‘caste’ and ‘origins’ have different connotations that emphasis a racial component, in the case of ‘caste,’ and de-emphasis a biological component in the case of ‘origins.’ 8 El orden que comunmente se guarda en el sancto offico de la Inquisición (Madrid, 1568), 5r-6r. My translation. 9 Ibid, 6r.


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In instituting this routine procedure, Mexican Inquisitors participated in the largest state-

sponsored biographical project of the early modern world. Indeed, over the next two-and-a-half

centuries, Inquisitors on both sides of the Atlantic would go on to collect what likely amounted

to tens of thousands of discursos de vida and their related personal data-sets.10 The cast of

characters whose lives we can catch glimpses of in the surviving trial records is incredibly rich

and varied. Not just formal heretics such as Judaizers, Moriscos, and Protestants, but men and

women from all walks of life captured the Inquisitors’ gaze on account of their allegedly deviant

devotions, beliefs, cultural habits, sexual preferences, witchcraft, or even simply their loose

tongues. And given the Atlantic context from which these biographical subjects were drawn,

they formed an incredibly diverse group of people, including not only Spaniards, Indians, and

Africans, but also other Europeans such as Portuguese peddlers, former English corsairs, and

German sailors, to name but a few.11

As Jean Pierre Dedieu has argued, to a significant degree the investigatory procedure we

are examining in this chapter emerged as part of the Counter Reformation on the Spanish

Peninsula. Based on his exhaustive analysis of the trial records of the Toledo tribunal, Dedieu

shows how ca. 1540 Inquisitors began asking an increasingly wide range of personal questions

that explored suspects' level of religious socialization.12 According to Sara Nalle this gradual

10 James Amelang, “Tracing Lives: The Spanish Inquisition and the act of Autobiography,” in Baggerman et al eds., Controlling Time and Shaping the Self: Developments in Autobiographical Writing since the Sixteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 33-48. In analyzing these documents, I am departing from the tendency to read these primarily as auto-biographical texts. This is most explicit in Richard L. Kagan and Abigail Dyer eds., Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics. 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) where the editors make the dubious choice to recover “the original first-person testimony” by taking the Inquisitorial scribe’s third-person formulations (e.g.,‘he was born in … he lived in …’) and re-phrasing these in the first person (e.g. ‘I was born in …’ I lived in …’), in effect taking what was written and stylized by the scribe for institutional purposes and recasting it as an autobiography dictated by the suspect. 11‘Indios’ were legally exempted from Inquisitorial jurisdiction. However, their ‘Mestizo’ descendants – that is those born from mixed European and Indigenous parentage – were subject to Inquisitorial prosecution and, as I discuss below, the mediation of these categories of difference through the concept of calidad meant that the boundaries between ‘Español,’ ‘Mestizo’ and ‘Indio’ were somewhat fluid. 12 Based on his survey of the Inquisitorial tribunal in Toledo prosecution of "scandalous words," "dishonesty," and


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grass-roots piecemeal development, implemented as it was by individual Inquisitors, set the stage

for the Supreme Council to codify one such questionnaire that had been developed by the

Cuenca Inquisitors in the Orden de processar.13 Indeed, the Tridentine context of this

phenomenon is particularly manifested in the manual's extensive focus on the sacraments of

baptism, marriage, and confession, and specific inquiries regarding fluency in what had become

by that point distinctively Catholic forms of piety: recitations of the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, the

Creed, and the Salve Regina. As such, these modes of questioning formed part of a larger

attempt to track the level of Catholic orthodoxy among the Spanish populace. Furthermore, as

Nalle shows, this new orientation and the expansive knowledge-base that it helped build

ultimately empowered Inquisitors to use their jurisdiction over matters of faith not only to punish

heresy but also to implement programs of indoctrination and religious reform.14

However, if the impetus for Inquisitors to begin paying increased attention to such

matters can be traced to the looming threat of the Reformation, this factor alone does not explain

the full extent of the phenomenon at hand. For by the time these lines of questioning became a

codified as a standardized part of Inquisitorial procedure in the 1560s, the scope of inquiry had

expanded to encompass the general contours of suspects' social, cultural, and economic lives.

And, to boot, the manual required that Inquisitors induce suspects to narrate the entirety of their

life-stories. In this way, investigations into whether suspects had committed a concrete heretical

"blasphemy,” Dedieu found that prior to 1540, the Inquisitors examined suspects’ fluency in Christian doctrine only in 3% of cases. However, between 1540-1550 the rate rose nine-fold to 27%; more than doubling again to 60% between 1551-1555; and reaching 79% between 1556-1560. By 1570, after the Orden de processor was issued, suspects were questioned along these lines in more than 95% of the trials. see Jean Pierre Dedieu and Susan Isabel Stein trans., “’Christianization’ in New Castile: Catechism, Communion, Mass, and Confirmation in the Toledo Archbishopric, 1540-1650,” in Cruz, Anne J., and Mary Elizabeth Perry, eds., Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 1-24. 13 Sara Nalle, God in La Mancha (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1992). 14 Sara Nalle, “Inquisitors, Priests, and the People during the Catholic Reformation in Spain,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 18, no. 4 (1987): 557-587.


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act became coupled with a broader and somewhat open-ended inquiry into their lives as a whole.

Thus, the Inquisitors' attempts to tackle their anxieties over the potential spread of Protestantism

and the inadequacy of Catholic indoctrination were subsumed, within the span of three decades,

within a broader biographical framework.

From the perspective of contemporary criminology, this development seems

unsurprising. After all, as Michael Benson writes, modern criminologists often employ the 'life-

course method' and “assum[e] that trajectories in crime can be better understood if they are

viewed in the total context of the individual’s life development.”15 However, when we consider

that such investigatory practices were enacted by the seemingly anti-modern Inquisition as part

of its campaign to homogenize the religious beliefs and practices of Spanish society and to root

out heresy from the Empire amidst a militant campaign to enforce Tridentine Catholicism, this

biographical turn and attentiveness to suspects' 'discursos de vida' is especially striking.

What led the Inquisition, an institution whose foundation was rooted in anti-Judaic

prejudice and which deployed a pedagogy of fear to quash religious dissidence, to develop such

seemingly modern and fluid conceptions of subjecthood?16 What does this phenomenon reveal

about the place that biographical discourse occupied in a society in which, as scholars have

repeatedly shown, obsessions with lineage, pedigree, and honor persisted as the ordering

principles for social organization? Given this preeminence of limpieza de sangre and the forms

of stereotyping that it entailed, what was the epistemic framework that allowed these concerns to

15 Michael L. Benson, Crime and the Life Course: An Introduction (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), 13. Within its American context, the modern life-course method was first introduced by the sociologist Clifford Shaw in his classic work, The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy's Own Story Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930. For a critical assessment of Shaw’s biographical methods as well as his general overview of the late twentieth-century debates surrounding the merits and limitations of biographical analysis, see Norman K. Denzin, Interpretive Biography. (Newbury Park, Calif: Sage, 1989). 16 For the purported 'modernity' of criminal biography, see Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2nd Vintage ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 250-256 and especially fn. 14.


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coalesce with a growing attention to individuality and the way in which accidental events in

one's life-course shaped them as a person?

To answer these questions and better understand the Inquisitors' deployment of

biographical discourse, and use of biographical analysis as a means of better judging heretics, we

must explore this phenomenon as part of the broader history of identification.17 In our case, this

approach entails expanding the scope of analysis to the underlying conceptual frameworks and

evolving discursive and institutional practices through which identities were constructed,

ascribed, contested, transformed, and deployed during the early modern period.18 Additionally,

even though the pre-conquest origins of Inquisitorial procedure have meant that it is typically

analyzed from a narrow peninsular vantage point, my analysis takes a decidedly Atlantic

approach. As we will soon see, during the early modern period the techniques and frameworks

for the administration of both faith and Empire developed in tandem and were often intertwined.

The framework that I find most useful for exploring Spanish Inquisitors' biographical

practices is the modern scholarly conception of calidad.19 This term first emerged in Latin

American historiography as a revision to the purported sistema de castas and the notion that

identity during the colonial period was patterned along rigid racial lines. Instead, drawing on a

growing body of evidence that points to how the identities of indios, mestizos, mulatos, and

negros could often be indeterminate and fluid in surprising ways, scholars have increasingly

explored the mechanisms through which those identities remained coherent even as they were

17 The distinction between identity as an entity and identification as a process is most clearly presented in Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘identity’,” Theory and Society 29,1 (2000): 1-47. 18 For some exemplary studies of early modern identities that have applied this methodological approach, see Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Valentin Groebner, Who Are You?: Identification, Deception, and Surveillance In Early Modern Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2007). 19 This term means ‘quality’ in English. I have refrained from translating this term in the body of the text, since as I show below scholars tend to use it as period term rather than as an analytical term.


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mutable. Based on these insights and drawing on the fact that in the eighteenth century the term

calidad was often used interchangeably with casta as a marker of social identity (e.g., calidad de

indio), scholars now use this period-term to denote social identity during the colonial period

more generally. Further, although the scholarly conception of calidad first emerged out of an

eighteenth-century phenomenon particular to New Spain, some scholars have applied this kind of

analysis to the dynamics of identity-making across colonial Latin America as a whole.20

Within this historiography, calidad is understood not so much as an identity marker but

as a matrix for identification that formed an “inclusive impression reflecting one's reputation as a

whole” based on their “color, occupation, wealth ... purity of blood, honor, integrity, and even

place of origin.”21 However, while this conceptual framework for understanding and ascribing

social difference is presumed to have been operational during the period as a whole, few of the

studies that have employed the term thus far focus on the sixteenth-century.22 Further, even when

scholars do explore the contours of calidad during this early colonial period, there is a tendency

to assume that these are best traced through the archive by examining the way in which the

concept of calidad was historically applied to individuals of Indigenous and African descent.

Consequently, when the term appears in the colonial archive as applied to Europeans, the

tendency has been to assume that these usages are unrelated to field of meaning of calidad as it

20 Some of the foundational works shaping this historiographical turn include Robert McCaa, “Calidad, Clase, and Marriage in Colonial Mexico: The Case of Parral, 1788-90,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 64, no. 3 (1984): 477–501; Ramón A Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994); Richard Boyer, “Negotiating Calidad: The Everyday Struggle for Status in Mexico,” Historical Archaeology 31, no. 1 (1997): 64-73; Magali M. Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (University of Texas Press, 2003); Andrew B Fisher et al., Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America (Durham ; London: Duke University Press, 2009). 21 McCaa, “Calidad, Clase, and Marriage in Colonial Mexico,” 477-478. C.f. Ramon Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, 191: “When a person's calidad was requested in a legal proceeding, the response was usually the individual's age, sex, place of residence, race, legitimacy, or any combination of these." 22 Matt O'Hara, “Review of Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico: Defining Racial Difference, by Robert C. Schwaller,” Early American Literature 53, no. 2 (2018): 617-619.


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came to be applied in subsequent centuries.23 Similarly, calidad is typically studied from a

narrow colonial perspective, with one scholar even suggesting that the peninsular and colonial

uses of the term were largely unrelated and incompatible.24

This chapter will contribute to, but also complicate, the burgeoning study of calidad by

taking the ‘long sixteenth century’ as its starting point, and by examining the historical usage of

the term from a broader Atlantic perspective. In order to better contextualize the Inquisitors'

biographical turn, I explore the genesis of the multi-valent concept of calidad by linking it during

this early period to Imperial discourses surrounding honor, status, and privilege for both

European and non-European subjects. In doing so, I will show the ways in which calidad was

first developed as a malleable and dynamic identification matrix which could be used to create

new social hierarchies and classificatory frameworks that were not solely based on lineage and

nobility. I will further show how, following the conquest and amidst attempts to consolidate and

administer the Spanish Empire, the Council of Indies and the Inquisition's institutional practices

increasingly implicated non-European and marginalized subjects within this evolving discourse

of social hierarchy and difference. I will also demonstrate how exploring the genesis and

evolution of calidad in the Spanish Atlantic during the sixteenth century requires a meaningful

engagement with several 'Old World' phenomena. Key among these phenomena is the evolving

and contested roles that lineage and blood origins played as an organizing principle for Spanish

society.

Thus, this chapter will begin by tracing the contested significance of lineage within

Spanish schemas for social organization between ca. 1450 and ca. 1600. This context is critical

23 Robert C. Schwaller, Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico: Defining Racial Difference (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 27-28. 24 Norah L. A. Gharala. Taxing Blackness: Free Afromexican Tribute in Bourbon New Spain (Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2019), 79.


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for better understanding the persistent and evolving ways in which lineage remained a central yet

elusive component of the concept of calidad throughout the early modern period. In doing so,

this study contributes to a growing body of scholarship that has begun complicating the tendency

to bookend the study of the Atlantic World at the turn of the fifteenth century.25

Calidad in the Long Sixteenth Century

One of the critical characteristics of calidad is the tension that it places between inherited

traits and origins (e.g., parentage and phenotype) and other social markers that individuals

developed over the course of their lives (e.g., occupation and reputation). And yet, from the

medieval period and continuing through the colonial period, the term continued to function as a

cognate for a series of evolving terms that described a person’s lineage.26 Thus, in order to fully

grasp the evolution of this term into a complex and evolving matrix for social differentiation, I

will begin my exploration of the genesis of calidad by tracing the role that lineage played within

Spanish schemas of social organization over the longue durée.

The importance ascribed to lineage within the Spanish imaginary can be traced as far

back as the division of Spanish society into noble caballeros or hidalgos and plebeian pecheros

during the early periods of the reconquista.27 However, by the fifteenth century, several

theoreticians and polemicists had begun scrutinizing more closely the multiple calidades of

nobility and the causal link between lineage and general calidad. These debates were embedded

in the competing interests between a noble aristocracy intent on protecting its status and

privileges, royal authorities seeking to assert their preeminence and political rights, and plebeians

25 See for instance, Gabriel de Avilez Rocha, “The Pinzones and the Coup of the acedares: Fishing and Colonization in the Fifteenth-century Atlantic,” Colonial Latin American Review, 28,4 (2019): 427-449; Ida Altman and David Wheat, eds., Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). 26 In late colonial period, for instance, the term ‘calidad’ was used interchangeably with 'casta.’ [CITE.] 27 [Put in a good reference on the origins of the nobility.]


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who sought to be ennobled and rewarded for their services to the Crown, much like the ancestors

of their social superiors had been in generations past.

In 1492, around the time that Spain was conquering Granada and as Columbus was first

'discovering' the Indies, a printed tract entitled Nobiliario appeared in Seville. Written by “the

honored cavallero” Hernán Mexía, this printed publication was the culmination of a decades-

long attempt by the author to articulate the essence of nobility and to defend the rights and

privileges of the Spanish aristocracy.28 As Jose Julio Martin Romero notes in his comparative

study of Mexía's work and other fifteenth-century writings on nobility, the consensus among

fifteenth century theorists was that descent from ancient noble lineages was a key parameter that

was correlated with possessing elevated social status and privileges. However, in writing his

treatise, Mexía was polemicizing against an emerging contention that, at its core, nobility was a

legal status that was predicated on the political authority of the royal sovereign who granted the

title and privileges.29

Thus, in defense of the traditional and popular notion that it was the nobility's lineage in

its own right that made its members superior beings who deserved enhanced legal and political

privileges, Mexica offered what Martin Romero describes as the most coherent theoretical

account. In contrast with his intellectual opponents who took a legal-positivistic approach in their

definitions of nobility, Mexía resorted to a naturalizing discourse to put forth the notion that

nobility was an indelible feature of the body that was transmitted biologically. To be noble was

to have been endowed, by the grace of God, with physical characteristics that singled certain

28 Nobiliario Vero, fecho e ordenado e conpilado por el onrrado cauallero Ferrant de Mexía veynte quatro de Jahen (Seville, 1492). For a close analysis of the work’s decades-long authorship, its variant early manuscripts and the revisions it underwent in its final printed version, see José Julio Martín Romero, “Variantes de autor y estadios redaccionales del ‘Nobiliario vero’ de Hernán Mexía,” Revista de Literatura Medieval 29 (2017): 171-195. 29 José Julio Martín Romero, “El origen de la nobleza según el Nobiliario vero de Hernán Mexía,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies Vol. 92, Nº 1 (2105): 1-23.


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people out for preeminence: more valiant, more intelligent, more competent, etc. The formal

status of nobility and its associated privileges, from his perspective, was but a socio-legal

affirmation of the superiority of certain select human lineages.30

My interest in Mexía's work lies less in the theoretical intricacies and analytical merits of

his argument than in the ways in which he uses the term 'calidad' to harness his naturalizing

arguments about the essence of nobility. Of the four "calidades" of nobility, Mexia writes, the

most fundamental is the "claridad del linaje" or the purity of one's lineage.31 However, even in

doing so, Mexía conceded that there were other secondary meanings to 'calidad' that attached to

those who had noble lineage, namely their proper customs, ancestral wealth, and recognition of

their status by the royal sovereigns. Thus, by narrowing the primary salience of the meaning of

calidad while conceding that its field of meaning extended to other related features, Mexía's

treatise on nobility foreshadows the growing multiplicity that the term would develop in the early

modern period.

Mexia's invocation of purity ('claridad’) as a qualifier of 'calidad' and 'linaje', and his use

of naturalizing discourse to maximize the nobility's claims to preeminence and legitimacy,

evokes resonances with the broader reordering and transformation that Spanish society was

undergoing at the time. For centuries, Christian Spain had been defined by religious multiplicity

that saw Christians, Jews, and Muslims living in what scholars have come to call convivencia.32

However, the relatively stable boundaries that had existed among this multi-faith population

during the medieval period began to erode alongside the rise of an increasing missionary zeal

30 Ibid., [Add page #]. 31 Nobiliario Vero, [Add page #] 32 This term was originally coined in the mid-twentieth century by Americo Castro to describe the co-existence of a multi-faith society in medieval Spain as a point of contrast with the more recent past. For a critical assessment of this term, its usefulness as an analytic, and the historiography that it has engendered, see Maya Soifer, “Beyond Convivencia: Critical Reflections on the Historiography of Interfaith Relations in Christian Spain,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 1.1 (2009): 19-35.


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among the dominant Christian population. The pogroms carried out against Jews at the turn of

the fourteenth century resulted in tens of thousands of Jews converting to Christianity, many of

them under duress.33 The trend towards cultural and religious homogenization continued in the

century that followed. This process was ultimately completed through the ramping up of

discriminatory measures targeting non-Christians, further threats of violence, a series of

expulsions, and eventually the forced conversions of Muslim communities in the early sixteenth

century and onward.34

The aforementioned debates over the nature of the nobility and Mexia's writing coincided

with the development of a parallel naturalizing discourse that sought to reimpose categorical

differences between formerly Jewish 'New Christians' and 'Old Christians.' Drawing on the

genealogical framework that underlay the predominant strand of Spanish conceptions of nobility,

a lineage-based classificatory schema began to be articulated as a means of recovering some of

the social, religious, and economic boundaries that had characterized the period of convivencia.

Thus, Mexia's usage of calidad as a marker of natural differences between lineages, and the

increased adoption of this sort of genealogical reasoning within Spanish society more generally,

were interconnected and mutually reinforcing phenomena that set the stage for the development

of a pervasive social discourse of limpieza de sangre.35

33 For a recent and insightful study of these events, see Benjamin R. Gampel, Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 34 See James S. Amelang, Parallel Histories: Muslims and Jews in Inquisitorial Spain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); Mary Elizabeth Perry The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Mercedes Garcia-Arenal and Gerard Albert Wiegers eds., The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain: a Mediterranean Diaspora (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 35 I explore more closely the origins and contours of limpieza de sangre in the next section of this chapter. For the intertwining of nobility discourses surrounding lineage and limpieza de sangre, see Nirenberg, David. “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth‐Century Spain” Past and Present 174.1 (2002): 3-41; Martinez, Genealogical Fictions, [add page #]; Christina Lee, Anxiety of Sameness, 103.


15

However, Mexía's use of calidad to denote natural endowments borne by a person's blood

line stands in stark contrast to the way the term would be employed nearly a century later by a

late sixteenth-century defender of the nobility. In Juan Benito Guardiola's Tratado de la Nobleza

we find a concerted attempt to denaturalize the connotation of the term calidad. In fact,

Guardiola argues that the proverbial association 'calidad' with noble status underscores the way

in which it is not an essential aspect but rather a mutable and constructed aspect. The ‘calidad’ of

the nobility, he insists, denotes not the natural features of their lineage but rather the legal rights

that could theoretically be given to anyone should the royal sovereign choose to do so.36

This extended, century-long debate over the nature of nobility provides a helpful frame

for the rest of our exploration because it helps us isolate the kinds of processes through which an

expansive field of meaning developed around the term calidad. For one, it underscores the

persistence of calidad as a marker of social difference even as its meaning was no longer

understood uniformly. Thus, even Guardiola – who disagrees with the underlying logic that

would allow for calidad to be used as a shorthand for nobility – still employs the term and is

forced to offer a somewhat tortuous justification for doing so. Second, the coincidence of

overlapping, competing, and even contradictory meanings in a single term within the narrow

discursive field of learned nobiliarios is illustrative of how the linguistic ground was laid for

calidad to become a versatile word that could be both an identity label and a conceptual matrix.

Indeed, it is the tension between those two functions and its deep history as a term most-often

associated with noble lineage that gives the modern researcher a sense that calidad in the late

colonial period was both a synthesis of a variety of markers of social difference and somehow

simultaneously a shorthand means of identifying a person's lineage.

36 Juan Benito Guardiola, Tratado de la Nobleza (1591), 6r-9v.


16

Furthermore, this one-hundred-year transition from Mexía’s naturalist conception of

nobility to Guarldiola’s legal-positivistic approach provides the contours for exploring how and

why this change happened over time. To answer this question, we must explore the ways in

which this term was deployed around the Spanish Atlantic during the period of conquest and as

Spain began consolidating its early modern Empire. It was in and across this space that the

prevalent conceptual frameworks and Spanish terms for classifying human difference underwent

an increasingly dynamic and accelerated transformation.

In the rest of the chapter I explore three parallel sixteenth-century developments that

coalesced to further transform the naturalizing term calidad into a more capacious framework for

conceptualizing human subjectivity that increasingly evolved away from the original narrow

association with lineage: 1. The development of a system through which the Crown could rapidly

and profitably incorporate a New World elite who laid the groundwork for the formation and

subsequent administration of the Empire. 2. The splintering of Western Christendom in the wake

of the Protestant Reformation and the implementation of Tridentine Reform. 3. The sustained

trans-cultural encounter with people who had not been part of the Judeo-Muslim-Christian

Iberian past, which broadened the epistemological frame for conceptualizing human difference.

In each of these cases, colonial and peninsular officials developed systems for gathering

information regarding the calidad of relevant individual subjects in ways that extended well

beyond any claims they might have had of descending from noble or Old Christian lineages. This

expansiveness was particularly the case when the term was applied to indigenous people, but the

same was true for European subjects who invoked the term in order to obtain rewards and protect

their privileges. This reworking of calidad provided a framework for capturing a new level of


17

granularity and intra-category distinctions as the state developed increasingly systematized

mechanisms for cataloguing human difference in the Atlantic world.

This Atlantic approach also provides a basis for complicating how scholars tend to

understand the blood purity statutes and restrictions that began proliferating from the mid-

sixteenth century onward, which seemingly reified the primacy of lineage in defining social

difference across Spanish society. However, as we will soon see, there were other powerful

forces in the Spanish Atlantic that were simultaneously broadening and complicating the

prevailing frameworks for understanding human difference.

Let us now turn to examine how the meanings and uses of calidad were first transformed

and expanded within sixteenth-century trans-Atlantic discourse by exploring the usage of the

term within the Crown's regulations for the granting of titles and awards to the first generations

of Spanish colonizers and subsequent European settlers.

Meritocracy and Calidad in the Spanish Atlantic

As Robert Folger notes, the Spanish expansion into the Atlantic coincided with the

gradual development of a new “meritocracy of state functionaries” on the peninsula.37 During

previous generations, the nobility had managed to keep hold of its privileged social, economic,

and political positions based on well-established notions surrounding the primacy of their lineage

and honor. However, over the course of the fifteenth century, the granting of new titles became

tied to what Folger calls an “economy of mercedes,” which functioned as an extractive economy

of services and began redefining the dynamic between the royal sovereign and his most elite

37 Robert Folger. See his Writing as Poaching: Interpellation and Self-Fashioning in Colonial Relaciones de Méritos y Servicios (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 19. See, as well, Luis Miguel Córdoba Ochoa, “Movilidad geográfica, capital cosmopolita y relaciones de méritos: Las élites del imperio entre Castilla, América y el Pacífico,” in Bartolomé Yuns Casalilla ed., Las redes del imperio: élites sociales en la articulación de la Monarquía Hispánica, 1492-1714 (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2009), 359-378.


18

subjects.38 That is, although Spain's nobility continued benefitting from perpetual titles and

privileges, the affirmation of their status became increasingly dependent on the rendering of new

services to the Crown. Furthermore, as a means of fueling this emergent economy of mercedes,

Spain's royal houses increasingly asserted their right to grant titles typically associated with

nobility even to individuals who did not previously have noble linages.

These challenges to aristocratic ideology emerged in a peninsular context, as illustrated in

the examples that Folger provides from soldiers who were granted awards after the conquest of

Granada in 1492. However, with the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the economy of

mercedes began developing at an accelerated rate. As Folger explains, the formation of a Spanish

Empire in the Atlantic over the course of the sixteenth century provided the Crown “a huge

reservoir of tributes, land, labor, and offices.”39 These new political and economic 'opportunities,'

which entailed the expropriation, subjugation, and decimation of indigenous populations and the

enslavement of growing numbers of Africans, attracted many aspiring conquistadors,

encomenderos, and colonial officials.

Because the administration of this trans-Atlantic economy of mercedes was crucial to the

formation of Spain's Atlantic empire, the colonial archive preserves a rich body of sources which

allow us to trace how the legal and terminological parameters through which this economy was

established were modified over time. For our purposes, this documentary record is especially

useful for analyzing the ways in which these trans-Atlantic administrative activities helped

transform the meaning of calidad, and how this was used to displace the preeminence of lineage

within the re-hierarchization of what was quickly becoming a Spanish Atlantic.

38 Folger, Writing as Poaching, 5. 39 Ibid., 22.


19

As early as 1513, an individual's calidad was singled out as the key criterion in justifying

the incipient legislation for the proper distribution of grants, awards, and titles in the Indies. In an

order sent to the governor of Tierra Firme, the Crown used the distribution of newly conquered

lands to establish a socio-economic and topographical hierarchy among Spanish settlers.

Accordingly, different sized parcels were to be apportioned in a way that reflected which

individuals had been more or less active in the early phases of colonization, either as soldiers or

by rendering other services to the Crown. In doing so, the cedula employs the term calidad as a

measure of those military activities and services, stating that smaller lots be given to those who

were of “lesser calidad.”40

If during this early period the Crown mostly delegated the distribution of land and grants

to local officials, by the 1530s this process became increasingly centralized and came under the

administration of the Council of Indies. To a significant degree, this development stemmed from

a shift in the applicant pool for such grants. Whereas previous grants had gone directly to those

who have participated in, or had been present for, the conquest, a growing number of new

applicants began migrating to the Indies in order to position themselves for similar grants and

awards. Eventually, successive ordinances were issued dictating that most awards were only to

be granted directly by the Crown. Furthermore, all applicants were to submit detailed petitions

that proved that they were worthy and deserving of such awards. In the process, the parameters

of calidad became increasingly refined and modified, as the Crown attempted to introduce better

regulation and higher efficiency into a rapidly evolving trans-Atlantic economy.41

40 Cedulario Indiano, I, 63-68. Although this cedula did not invite the direct submission of petitions to the Crown, it is no coincidence that one of the earliest relaciones de meritos y servicios that scholars have found in the archives was sent shortly thereafter from Tierra Firme in 1514 (“Información de méritos y servicios de Pedro Sánchez,” AGI, PATRONATO, 150, N.1, R.1). 41 The earliest reference to this new requirement dates to 1528. See Cedulario Indiano, [add page #].


20

For instance, an ordenanza issued in 1542 described how "when people residing in the

Indies ... petition that grants and awards be given to them in those lands" there is "insufficient

information regarding the calidad of the supplicant, or his merits and abilities, or the awards

which they request." Consequently, applicants would be required to first present their petitions to

an Audiencia in the Indies, thereby allowing local colonial officials to gather information

regarding "the calidad of the person and the specific grant requested." Only then, could they

forward the petition to the Council of Indies along with their recommendations for whether the

petition should be granted, thereby allowing the Crown to have more "insight into what sorts of

grants would best serve its interests.”42

Given the relatively early date of this ordinance (1542), few of the applicants for such

awards would have been American-born. Thus, the invocation of distance as a hinderance for

assessing calidad suggests that the issue at hand was not an applicant’s lineage-based status. If

anything, peninsular authorities, as opposed to colonial oidores, would have had a much easier

time gathering such information about petitioners' places of origin. Rather, in tasking colonial

officials with administering the formation of these informaciones, the Crown was asserting that it

required a means of assessing the way in which applicants' calidad had developed during their

time living in the Indies.

Given the continued importance of rank and honor, this would have certainly entailed an

account of any formal titles and privileges that had been granted to the applicant by colonial

officials under their increasingly limited authority. But it also would have extended more

generally to their activities in the colonies and the reputations that they had developed. This

broader interpretation of the term’s usage is further substantiated in the conclusion of the

42 Cedulario Indiano, I, 8.


21

ordinance. There, the previously differentiated parameters of calidad, merits and ability are

collapsed into a single collective term "calidad de la persona"43 (calidad of the person), making

clear that the term calidad was similar enough to merit and ability to make the terms

interchangeable.

By mid-century, the seemingly endless supply of applicants who had performed such

services in the Indies enabled the Crown to legislate that, in granting new titles, preference

should be given to worthy candidates residing in the Indies and to those "who have served us

there ... pacifying, settling, and ennobling the land, or converting and indoctrinating the

naturals."44 By giving preference to those with proven experience in the Indies, the Crown

further undermined the nobility's traditional blood-based claims to privileges. Instead, a new

Atlantic elite was formed. Individuals’ ascension to this status rested less on their lineage than on

their ability to harness their personal activities as a means of persuading the Crown to grant them

titles and privileges.45

Further, since these were new lands and new titles to which the nobility had no prior

claims, through its administration of the Indies the Crown further consolidated the notion that

grants typically associated with noble lineage were in fact not a right that stemmed from an

inherent and indelible quality that passed from generation to generation. Instead, to the extent

that such awards depended on invocations of a person's calidad, that criterion was to be

interpreted according to the biographical parameters that best suited the Crown's interests. Along

these lines, Phillip II's ordinance of 1571 required that in appointing officials in the colonies, the

43 Similarly, in a cedula reiterating the 1542 provisions made and issued by the regent princess in 1558, the documents that the Crown was demanding be produced by the Audiencias are referred to as "informaciones de sus servicios y calidad." See Cedulario Indiano, II, 177. 44 Cited by Folger, Writing as Poaching, 22. My translation. See as well Cedulario Indiano, I, 11 (1571). 45 Folger, Writing as Poaching, 19-23. See as well, Murdo J. MacLeod, “Self-Promotion: The ‘Relaciones de Méritos y Servicios’ and Their Historical and Political Interpretation,” CLAHR: Colonial Latin American Historical Review 7, no. 1 (1998), 28.


22

Council of Indies diligently seek out candidates who were of "great virtue, science, and

experience" all of which the ordinance went on to assert, "benefit the service of God and Crown"

since these attributes would allow them to govern properly and impartially. While this ordinance

did not employ the term 'calidad,' it nonetheless de-emphasized lineage by appealing instead to

expertise and experience.

We can gain a better glimpse of how this discourse of calidad developed through the

trans-Atlantic tug and pull between the Crown and colonial officials, as the former attempted to

fine tune the type of reports that it received. For instance, in 1562, 1565 and 1566, Phillip II

repeatedly admonished the Audiencia of Peru for not appending their recommendations for

whether the petition should be granted in the informaciones de oficio that they were forwarding

to the Council of Indies. In these reprimands, the Crown insisted that oidores augment the third-

party testimonies that they gathered with their own subjective assessments of an applicant's

merits and de-merits: "services and disservices" to the Crown.46 In this way, the Crown further

elaborated the contours of calidad so that it entailed a more complex and composite accounting

of both their strengths and weaknesses.

In a subsequent reprimand sent to Peru and New Spain, the Crown precluded oidores

from delegating the task of interrogating witnesses to low-level and inexperienced officials, such

as secretaries, since this enabled applicants who lacked "the requisite merits and calidades" to

more easily contract false witnesses to corroborate their claims. Further, reports had apparently

reached the Crown complaining that many of those submitting petitions "held low-level

occupations" or had only recently migrated to the Indies, making the veracity of their claims

especially suspect. Thus, the oidores were tasked with personally conducting future

46 Cedulario Indiano, II, 178-179.


23

investigations and to be more discerning so that they only opened cases when they predicted,

from the onset, that the applicant had the requisite "meritos, calidad, y servicios" deserving of an

award. In the face of a growing pool of applicants, and in response to complaints from those who

had previously been denied awards, the Crown was essentially limiting the universal right of

direct petition to the King, so that only those who by virtue of their occupations, appearances,

and/or reputations were deemed to have calidad.47

Taken as a whole, and read chronologically, the persistent yet evolving use of the term

calidad in this corpus of documents captures its growing usefulness as a concept that could both

elide existing social hierarchies and impose new hierarchies. Calidad first emerged in this corpus

as a means of displacing noble preeminence by democratizing the economy of mercedes while

benefiting the Crown by privileging those who had the best skills as colonists. It then provided a

rationale for managing the pace of migration by limiting this field of opportunity to those who

had independently settled in the Indies. And it was ultimately recast to re-inscribe conventional

conceptions of honor and reputation such that, even if it could no longer be invoked as a

shorthand for lineage, the de-emphasis on individual skills and personal qualifications lent itself

for the balance between those factors to be re-shuffled.

While the cedulas regulating the economy of mercedes envision a system for the

stratification of the European colonizers, some people of indigenous and African descent

nonetheless managed to participate in this discourse of calidad. In this way, the term calidad

further expanded its usefulness as a seemingly universal measure of human difference. Thus,

Juan Garrido and the other 'Black Conquistadors' that Matthew Restall has studied were privy to

the mechanics of the economy of mercedes, and at least some of them are known to have

47 Cedulario Indiano, II, 180.


24

successfully obtained grants through their relaciones de meritos y servicios.48 Even more

common during this sixteenth century was the multifaceted and dynamic ways in which

indigenous people utilized these trans-Atlantic legal instruments. Indigenous elites used such

petitions to fashion themselves as conquistadors who aided the Spanish and were therefore

worthy of being granted a dominion over other indigenous groups. These instruments were also

used by Indigenous actors to protect themselves from the Spanish settlers' encroachment of their

rights and ancestral territories. Others used these legal avenues to draw-in an external arbiter for

what amounted to disputes amongst indigenous people over hereditary titles within their own

domains. These indigenous subjects’ transcultural use of calidad opened entirely new frontiers

for the expansive reach of its usage and would have imbued it with complex links to indigenous

linguistic patterns and cultural forms.49 Thus, the growing number and variety of actors on both

sides of the Atlantic who participated in the economy of mercedes played a key role in

transforming calidad into a rich and capacious field of meaning.

The Inquisitors' Biographical Turn

The biographical dimension of Inquisitorial procedure has been largely overshadowed by

the role that Inquisitors played in crystalizing what David Nirenberg defines as the “genealogical

mentality” of the Iberian world.50 As Nirenberg argues, for nearly a century before the founding

48 Matthew Restall, “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America,” The Americas 57, no. 2 (2000): 171-205. 49 Laura E. Matthew, “Whose Conquest? Nahua, Zapoteca, and Mixteca Allies in the Conquest of Central America,” in Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica, edited by Laura E. Matthew, and Michel R. Oudijk (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 102-126; Ana Díaz Serrano, "La República ce Tlaxcala Ante el Rey ee España Durante el Siglo XVI," Historia Mexicana 61, no. 3 (2012): 1049-107; Caroline Cunill, “El uso indígena de las probanzas de méritos y servicios: su dimensión política (Yucatán, siglo XVI),” Signos históricos 16, no. 32 (2014): 14-47; M. Carolina Jurado, “«Descendientes de los primeros». Las probanzas de méritos y servicios y la genealogía cacical. Audiencia de Charcas, 1574-1719,” Revista de Indias 74, no. 261 (2014): 387-422. 50 Nirenberg, David. “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth‐Century Spain” Past and Present (2002) 174 (1): 3-41. See as well Mercedes Garcia-Arenal’s evaluation of the impact of Nirenberg’s thesis on Spanish historiography in her “Creating Conversos: Genealogy and Identity as Historiographical Problems (after a recent book by Ángel Alcalá),” Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 38, 1 (2013), Article 1, available at <https://digitalcommons.asphs.net/bsphs/vol38/iss1/1>.


25

of the Spanish Inquisition in 1480, Spain experienced a crisis of social classification that was

triggered by the mass conversions of tens of thousands of Jews. The duress under which many of

these conversions occurred had the paradoxical effect of casting doubt over the sincerity of their

conversions. Further, the facility with which these newly enfranchised converts were able to

compete for social, economic, and political benefits limited to Christians caused great concern

for many of their pre-established Christian coreligionists over the course of the fifteenth century.

Thus, it was against this background that a naturalized discourse focused on lineage, which had

long been present on the Peninsula as a means of differentiating between nobles and plebeians,

was applied more generally as means for conceptualizing, justifying, and demarcating social

difference.

While initially the monikers Converso and New Christian were used to describe the

converts’ religious transformations, over time these terms took on an entirely different

connotation as a shorthand for their Jewish origins. By the mid-fifteenth century, the first blood-

purity statutes were implemented in Toledo barring Conversos – many of whom had become

powerful members of the ruling class – from occupying a variety of government posts.51

Similarly, the growing scrutiny and criticism that Conversos were subjected to on a societal level

gave rise to the foundation of an Inquisition. Its primary aim was to extirpate the Judaizing

tendencies that were presumed to be rampant among a significant portion of the Christian body

politic.52 Using what one twentieth-century scholar identified as a 'pedagogy of fear,' the Spanish

Inquisition did in fact induce many thousands of Conversos to confess to having Judaized,

51 Albert A Sicroff and Mauro Armiño, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre: controversias entre los siglos XV y XVII (Madrid: Taurus, 1985). 52 Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 36-73.


26

thereby producing ample evidence confirming the genealogically framed notion that a sizable

portion of the Converso population had heretical tendencies.53

Thus, a cycle that had started with cross-confessional tensions and social anxieties over

rapidly changing religious identities culminated in the formation of a legal institution that

infused a new probative weight into the notion that underlying differences existed between New

and Old Christian lineages. Further compounding these issues and laying the ground for the

perpetuation of this genealogical mentality was the expulsion of Spanish Jewry, which resulted

in a final wave of hasty conversions ca. 1492.54 Although these conversions were seemingly not

performed under the threat of death, the choice between conversion and exile had explicit

economic stakes, such that many of the conversions occurred under economic duress. Even if

one were so inclined, joining the exile entailed liquidating one's assets under unfavorable

conditions, while securing passage and relocating to other lands required disposable capital.55

Thus, a portion of these new Conversos were undoubtedly insincere in their conversions, and the

ground was set for the lineage-based prejudices that had plagued the first generations of

Conversos to be transmuted to a whole new batch of tainted lineages.56

53 Bartolomé Bennassar, “Patterns of the Inquisitorial Mind as the Basis for a Pedagogy of Fear,” in Angel Alcalá ed., The Spanish Inquisition and the inquisitorial mind (Highland Lakes, N.J.: Social Science Monographs, 1987), 177-184; Dedieu, Jean-Pierre, “Denunciar-denunciarse: La Delación Inquisitorial en Castilla la Nueva, Siglos XVI-XVII,” Revista de la Inquisición 2 (1992): 95-108. 54 Haim Beinart and Jeffrey M Green trans., The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2005). Kamen speculates that as many as half of Spain’s Jews converted in order to avoid being expelled; see Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 28-29. 55 Beinart, Expulsion, chapters 3-7. For further analyses of the challenges faced by Spanish Jews in finding safe refuge in the Mediterranean basin, see Reuven Bonfil, “Italia: un triste epílogo de la expulsión de los judíos de España,” in Angel Alcalá ed., Judíos. Sefarditas. Conversos. La expulsión de 1492 y sus consecuencias; Ponencias del Congresso Internacional celebrado en Nueva York en noviembre de 1992 (Valladolid: Ámbito, 1995), 246-68; Jonathan Ray, “Jewish Settlement in the Sixteenth Century Mediterranean,” Mediterranean Studies 18 (2009): 44-65; Nadia Zeldes, “Jewish settlement in Corfu in the aftermath of the expulsions from Spain and southern Italy, 1492–1541,” Mediterranean Historical Review 27.2 (2012): 175-188. 56 Sara Nalle, “A Minority Within a Minority: The New and Old Jewish Converts of Sigüenza, 1492–1570,” in Kimberly Lynn and Erin Kathleen Rowe eds., The Early Modern Hispanic World: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 91-120.


27

It should come as no surprise then that during the early decades of the sixteenth century,

with the expiration of the period of grace granted to new Conversos, the Inquisition's

genealogical orientation was made even more explicit and systematic.57 For instance, we know

that the Inquisitors in Valencia conducted a census in 1506 seeking to document which residents

were New Christians, and whether they or any of their ancestors were penanced by the

Inquisition.58 Furthermore, as Haim Beinart notes, it was during this time that Inquisitors in

Castille first began systematically registering suspects' genealogies as part of their trial

procedures.59

In their inception, these knowledge practices were part and parcel of the Inquisitors'

prejudicial suspicion that heresy was typically linked to, if not a product of, Jewish lineage. Such

initiatives were also likely designed to help Inquisitors keep track of which members of society

should be most carefully scrutinized in matters of faith.60 The formation of comprehensive

genealogical registers also enabled the enforcement of legal disabilities and restrictions on the

descendants of those who were penanced by the Inquisition.61 As such, this knowledge was part

of the systematic public defamation of those penanced and punished by the Inquisition, whether

at the auto de fe or through the display of sanbenitos in local Churches and Cathedrals, and

extended that dishonor to their descendants.62

57 Javier Castaño González, “Las comunidades judias en el obispado de Sigüenza en la Baja Edad Media: Transformación y disgregación del judaísmo en Castilla a fines del medievo” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1994), 319 fn.9 (cited in Nalle, “Minority,” 98). 58 José María Cruselles Gómez, Enrique Cruselles, and José Bordes García eds, Conversos de la ciudad de Valencia: el censo inquisitorial de 1506 (València: Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 2015). 59 Haim Beinart, Conversos on Trial: The Inquisition in Ciudad Real (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1981), 196. 60 For instance, based on her aforementioned study of sentencing patterns over the course of the sixteenth century in the Cuenca tribunal, Sara Nalle shows how Inquisitors tended to treat descendants of the old Converso lineages more leniently than the new Conversos and their descendants. See Nalle, “Minority,” [ADD PAGE #]. 61 Cite Torquemada’s 15th century regulations on disabilities. 62 [Add good citation for the use of sambenitos.]


28

It is common for scholars to draw a direct line between the aforementioned developments

and the growing predominance of a limpieza de sangre discourse and the adoption of blood

purity statutes over the course of the sixteenth century. These classificatory tendencies and deep-

seated suspicions of people with Jewish lineages began coalescing into a regime of wholesale

legal restrictions on people who had stained blood, irrespective of whether they were convicted

Judaizers.63 However, if we broaden our scope of analysis to consider the evolving ways in

which Spanish society construed lineage as a factor in its socio-politico-economic organization

during the foundational period of its rapidly growing Atlantic Empire, a more complex picture

emerges. What scholars to date have overlooked is that this hardening of the category of

Converso/New Christian through legislation that codified lineage-based restrictions coincided

with the undermining of the naturalized prestige previously associated with ancient Christian and

noble lineages.64

During the early decades of the sixteenth century, just as the trans-Atlantic economy of

mercedes was taking shape, and in the wake of the Reformation, the threat of heresy quickly

evolved into a potentially pan-European phenomenon that could hardly be construed as an

exclusively Judaic problem. Furthermore, the formation of a Spanish Empire in the ‘New World’

63 Over the course of the sixteenth century, recurring regulations were instituted to ban Conversos and Moriscos from the Americas and, as a result, migration became increasingly regulated through a system of licensing; see Bernhard Siegert and Geoffrey Winthrop-young trans., Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 82-96; Karoline P Cook, Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 55-60. For an overview of the development of blood-purity statutes during this period, see Albert A Sicroff and Mauro Armiño trans., Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre: controversias entre los siglos XV y XVII (Madrid: Taurus, 1985). 64 Christina Lee has theorized that the proliferation of blood purity statutes coincided with, and was largely a reaction to, Conversos’ increased ability to pass as Old Christians. See her The Anxiety of Sameness in Early Modern Spain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 101-123. For Lee, however, it is because the genealogical framework for conceptualizing difference remained stable, that evidence of passing produced anxiety, which in turn was addressed through legislation (among other measures). While I do not discount the role that Converso’s perceived ‘passing’ played in fomenting these reactions, I contend that these were also a reactionary attempt to reify in law social patterns that had been rooted in a genealogical mentality whose conceptual framework was increasingly undermined at this historical juncture.


29

that was predicated on the incorporation of indigenous naturales through conversion entirely

undermined notions that the hierarchy of the Spanish body politic followed the logical and

natural patterns dictated by different degrees of limpieza de sangre. Thus, the increased rate at

which blood purity statutes were adopted in the ensuing decades should be seen as an indication

of the fragility of a discourse that could no longer rely solely on an underlying conceptual

framework. As is often the case, the turn to law was a means of reifying social hierarchies and

harnessing them in classificatory regimes that were quickly losing their coherence.65

I therefore contend that the aforementioned institution of an ad-hoc genealogical

questionnaire as part of Inquisitors' heresy trials was similarly intertwined with their turn toward

prosecuting cases that involved non-Judaic heresies. Based on his statistical analysis of the

surviving records of the Toledo tribunal, Dedieu notes that until ca. 1510 virtually all those

prosecuted by the Spanish Inquisition were Conversos suspected of Judaizing but, subsequently,

there was a gradual decline in the prosecution of Conversos and a rise in the prosecution of Old

Christians.66 At that point, it would no longer have been self-evident that a person being

prosecuted for heresy was a Converso.

Understandably, and consistent with the genealogical framework within which they had

long operated, Inquisitors would have wanted to ascertain a person’s lineage on a case-by-case

basis. Further, confirming the presence of Jewish ancestry would have been especially useful in

tracing the links among Jewish blood, non-Judaic forms of heresy, and Judaizing. However, as

useful as this information may have been from the Inquisitors' jurisprudential perspective, the

65 [CITE.] 66 Dedieu, Jean-Pierre. “Los cuatro tiempos de la Inquisición,” in Inquisición española: poder político y control social, ed. Bartolome Bennassar (Barcelona: Crítica, 1981), 15-38.


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routinization of the genealogical inquiry within Inquisitorial procedure had the potential of

ultimately producing a destabilizing and opposite effect.

Indeed, beginning in the 1520s the prosecution of Old Christians predominated once the

focused anti-Judaic genealogical framework for Inquisitorial prosecution began expanding in the

wake of the Reformation.67 During this time, the Spanish Crown and Church began paying close

attention to the possibility that Lutheranism might have begun spreading to Spain.68As part of

these efforts, Inquisitors increasingly prosecuted cases related to a wide range of heretically

tinged speech (blasphemy, propositions, scandalous words). Similarly, with the advent of

Tridentine Reform, Inquisitors used their authority to defend the sacrament of marriage by

charging as heretics those who committed bigamy, and even those who claimed that simple

fornication was not a sin. Within the discourses shaping the contrarreforma, many viewed the

influence of doctrinaire Lutherans, and the general failure of the clergy to properly indoctrinate

the masses in the fundamental tenets of the Catholic faith, as the proximate causes for such

widespread unorthodoxy and indiscretions.69

Thus, as Inquisitors increasingly inserted themselves into the Spanish counter-

Reformation, they concomitantly produced a growing body of evidence pointing to the

limitations of the genealogical framework that had long been the hallmark of Spanish

Inquisitorial jurisprudence. By explicitly documenting the Old Christian lineages of suspected

heretics, Inquisitors produced a massive body of data that complicated the presumed link

between Jewish lineage and heretical tendencies. As mentioned previously, Spanish society more

generally was able to limit the effects of this epistemic crisis through the systematic

67 Ibid. 68 Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 92-117. 69 Nalle, God in La Mancha, [add page #].


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implementation of ad hoc legal disabilities. However, as jurists who had to impose penalties

based on the basis of evidence indicating that an individual was a heretic, Inquisitors began

organically devising a dualistic and less systematic framework for construing the heretical

subject.

It was in this context that Inquisitors began paying attention to a broader set of factors

that shaped the subjectivities of potential heretics, a process that culminated in the formulation of

standardized biographical questionnaires. These investigatory methods dovetailed with the rise

of a pastoral approach of sentencing penitents to reforming exercises (attending mass, hearing

sermons, compulsory indoctrination, etc.).70 However, beyond their utility for enabling the work

of enacting ad hoc counter-Reformation measures, from an epistemological perspective these

questionnaires allowed Inquisitors to systematically gather a broad range of personal data on

suspects. This, in turn, could help them identify factors and clues for how and why ‘pure-

blooded’ Christians seemed to be increasingly straying from Catholic Orthodoxy.

This turn to biography constituted a functional recognition of the analytic limitations of

the genealogical mentality that had previously undergirded Spanish Inquisitorial prosecution. So

long as the Inquisition had primarily targeted New Christians, Inquisitors could invoke the

rhetoric of ‘blood purity’ as a means of accounting for why Conversos had strayed from the

proper religious path by backsliding into their blood-borne tendency to Judaize. However, if that

reasoning were to be applied in this new social reality where increasing numbers of Old

Christians with ‘pure blood’ were also guilty of heresy, then the logic of genealogical

determinism would have dictated that Old Christians could similarly bear in-borne tendencies

toward heresy, thus eliding the presumed categorical distinctions between the two groups.

70 [Find a good citation on the pastoral turn. Maybe Dedieu or Nalle?]


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By adopting a conceptual framework that presumed a significant degree of variability

within different lineages, even as vestigial lineage-based stereotypes were perpetuated,

Inquisitors tried to bypass this epistemic quagmire. Henceforth, heretical tendencies could be

more easily adduced to both biographical and genealogical factors. Inquisitors were thus able to

preserve the general salience of their genealogical reasoning even as the degree of its

overwhelming determinativeness was reduced. Taken as a whole, the rhetorical effect of the

questionnaires was to complicate the presumed primacy of blood origins in assessing a person's

character traits by entangling lineage with a broader set of variables that could be drawn from

individual suspects' biographical characteristics.

Thus, by complimenting their traditional genealogical inquiries with a wider range of

vectors, Inquisitors elaborated an early version of what modern scholars have come to describe

as calidad. However, if these steps were taken with an eye toward updating the prosecutorial

framework for combating heresy amongst European Old Christians, then all suspected heretics

became subjects of this sort of biographical scrutiny and evaluation of their calidad. As we will

see in Chapter 2, in the Americas this quickly implicated a wide range of people of Spanish,

Indigenous, and African descent as well as other European foreigners who had managed to

overcome migratory restrictions and settle in the Spanish colonies.71 Furthermore, even when

Inquisitors periodically shifted their focus to prosecuting Conversos suspected of Judaizing, the

Inquisitors standardized procedures ensured that they would be confronted by a more complex

and multifaceted picture of the individual in question.72 And as we will see in Chapter 3,

71 Indeed, the first auto de fe held in Mexico City in 1574 featured dozens of English, German, and French who were accused of being Lutherans and, as former Corsairs, had undermined Spanish sovereignty in the Indies. 72 For a comprehensive analysis of the prosecutorial trends of the Mexican Inquisition, see Solange Alberro, La actividad del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en Nueva España, 1571-1700 (México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1981).


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Conversos who were well versed in trans-Atlantic biographical discourses and the evolving

meanings of calidad could seize on this muddling to try and defend themselves by asserting

control over the Inquisitors’ biographical constructions over the course of the trial.

Atlantic Migrations

The transformation of the Inquisition into an institution that was integral to Spain's

contrarreforma set the stage for the foundation of permanent Inquisitorial tribunals in Mexico

and Peru ca. 1570. In the cedula naming Pedro Moya de Contreras the first Inquisitor of New

Spain, the Crown made explicit its concerns regarding the potential spread of Lutheran heresies

as a justification for this trans-Atlantic expansion of the Holy Office. This, in turn, was coupled

with a colonizing discourse which depicted the recently converted indigenous population as

perfect Christians who were not to be the focus of Inquisitorial prosecution, if only to frame

these converts as particularly impressionable and at high risk of being corrupted by coming into

contact with heterodox European settlers.73 Furthermore, in his ordinances to the Mexican

viceroy to establish the jurisdiction of the new Inquisitorial, the Inquisitor General Diego

Espinosa dictated that the tribunal “should prosecute Old Christians and their descendants and

the other people [that] it is common to prosecute here in Spain.”74 The fact that the American

Inquisitions were consciously established in order to police European Old Christians underscores

how Jewish lineage was no longer seen as the predominant cause for heresy.

When Moya de Contreras along with the prosecutor Alonso Hernandez de Bonilla and

the notarial secretary Pedro de los Rios embarked on their journey to New Spain, the Orden de

73 Cedulario Indiano, I, 46-48. 74 García, Genaro. La Inquisición De México: Sus Orígenes, Jurisdicción, Competencia, Procesos, Autos De Fe, Relaciones Con Los Poderes Públicos, Ceremonias, Etiquetas Y Otros Hechos (México: Vda. de C. Bouret, 1906), 242. My translation; emphasis added.


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processar had already been printed and distributed to the peninsular tribunals. In keeping with

the regulations, they would have carried copies of the manual with them. When reading the

manual’s main text, marginal glosses and annotations, they would have encountered instructions,

protocols and templates, not only for how to conduct the trial, but also for how to document a

heresy trial. And, as we will see in the next chapter, a thorough examination of the surviving trial

records dating from this early period shows how each of these actors were generally diligent in

following the templates and protocols contained in the manual, even if some variations and

departures are present in some of the trial records. Thus, a close examination of the manual’s

materiality and the structure of its contents is useful for gauging the classificatory schema for

identification that these newcomers imported with them when they crossed the Atlantic. In

particular, as I will demonstrate below, the use of the term calidad within the text serves to

illustrate the growing indeterminacy that Inquisitors helped insert into the concept through their

biographical turn.

But first, let us familiarize ourselves with the Orden de processar's complex and

confusing layout, its abrupt breaks, shifts in voice and register, and disaggregated reader’s aids:


35

As we can see in the above image, within the body of the text – towards the top of page

and marked by a pilcrow – the manual begins providing a standardized template for documenting

the Inquisitors’ first interrogations of suspected heretics. The voice of this part of the text is that


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of the prototypical notary who describes in the third person and in the past tense the activities

that he witnessed and whose signed testimony at the conclusion of the proceedings will give the

document legal validity. After listing the place, date, and time when the proceedings took place

and the presiding Inquisitors, the narrator turns to describe how they first summoned the prisoner

to the audience. However, the notary's narration is quickly brought to a halt by the opening of a

new paragraph. This demarcates a shift to the editor's imperative voice which interrupts the flow

of the template to provide a parenthetical instruction for how the previous phrasing should be

modified in cases where the suspect had not been placed under arrest. This alternative phrasing is

then introduced by the opening of a parenthesis that activates the notary's voice again –

"(mandaron traer a ella, a un hombre" – which, without closing the parenthesis, seamlessly

continues with the notary's narration of the opening section of the document, describing the oath

that the suspect was subjected to before the trial could formally begin.

The next paragraph break "Preguntado" however, rather than re-introduce the editor's

voice, demarcates the notary's shift to describing the next legal procedure, which consisted of the

Inquisitors' initial interrogation. After describing the first scripted exchange where Inquisitors

asked for, and the suspects provided, some basic identifying information (their name, place of

origin, age, occupation) and the date of their arrest, the notary proceeds to document the family

tree that the suspect presented. Whereas the suspects’ initial responses are placed in the third

person and attributed to them ("Dixo que se llama fulano etc"), the notary, after maintaining an

introductory third person voice (“Y declaro su genealogia de la forma siguiente”), shifts to an

atemporal voice that is framed by the header "Padres." Then, beneath this, we find a prototypical

entry for a father ("Fulano vezino y natural de ..."). Confusingly, however, it is this entry, as


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opposed to the introduction of the genealogia, that is marked by a pilcrow, which in its earlier

usage on the same page seems to demarcate the opening of a new subsection:

As this close analysis of just seventeen lines helps illustrate, because it was serving both

as an instructional manual and a collection of documentary templates, the Orden de processar

suffered from a confusing presentation style. All of these features would have made it especially

useful for readers to have, not only the occasional in-text pilcrow, but also marginal markings

that, by using the familiar voice of the editor, indexed some of the contents and demarcated

subdivisions. Taken together, and despite the occasional inconsistent application, these markings

provided users with an easier way for mentally mapping the contents of the manual and for

finding the material that they needed to consult and use in what was otherwise an unwieldy text.

Thus, in the previous image the marginal gloss "Primera audiencia" indicates that the

text that is parallel to it contains the language for how to begin documenting the trial's opening


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audience. Similarly, the marginal gloss "Discurso" is parallel to the text where the user could

find the formulation for how to describe the Inquisitors’ prompt for suspects to narrate their life

story, while “Primera monicion” marks the shift to the next phase of the interrogation where

Inquisitors began to administer the first of the required ‘three admonitions’ beseeching the

suspect to confess their heretical misdeeds:

Having seen the general pattern with which such markings are used in these pages let us

return to the first entry of the genealogia where we previously left off:

Here again, we find an imperative model for how the suspect ought to respond to the

prompt by "declaring their [father's] occupation and calidad and whether they are alive or dead."


39

This invocation of calidad in the context of a genealogical tree and the imperative for the

prototypical suspect to differentiate between 'oficio' (occupation) and calidad harkens back to the

narrow link between lineage and calidad that had first emerged out of the nobility discourses we

previously examined. Thus, its usage in the context of a prototypical heresy trial underscores the

fact that, by this time, even people of preeminence were thought of as potential heretics.

However, this narrow conception of calidad is subsequently complicated in a marginal

entry on 6r that reads "Calidad." In contrast to the other indexing glosses that appear on these

pages, this annotation does not appear at the beginning of a section or prompt. Instead, it is

aligned with a prototypical and nondescript answer – ("Dixo, &c. ha de satisfazer a la pregunta

enteramente") – which provides absolutely no details as to what is being indexed:

Thus, a reader who would have begun reading this portion of the text to identify the

scope of the section on ‘calidad’ might respond by looking above the line that is seemingly

demarcated. In which case, they would likely interpret calidad as applying, not only to the

suspects' and their extended families' casta y generacion, but also to a collective history of

previous encounters with the Inquisition including any prior arrests, penances, reconciliations,


40

and punishments that they had experienced. This interpretation, while preserving a link between

lineage and calidad, nonetheless widely expanded the parameters of the term by subsuming

within it something as marginal as a prior arrest of a relative who may well have been absolved

of any charges. Such a usage would imply a conception of calidad that extended to an

individual's personal and familial reputation as much as it did to the noble or Old Christian

attributes of their lineage.

Alternatively, rather than look for a way to decipher the nondescript entry that the

marginal label “Calidad” seemed to be indexing, the flummoxed reader could instead presume

that this entry was slightly misaligned and was intended to demarcate the new section that

immediately followed. If they did in fact interpret it this way, then they would have encountered

the term calidad as indexing the section of the questionnaire where Inquisitors turned to asking

suspects whether they were baptized and confirmed Christians, and whether they attended mass,

confessed, and took communion at the appropriate times. Read this way, calidad would have

been completely detached from lineage, attaching instead to a person's status as a Christian and

their religious habits more generally.75

Furthermore, given that the next questions continued to explore a person’s fluency in

religious rituals, as the reader made their way through the subsequent text they might even go so

far as to interpret that the entirety of what followed (until the next marginal indexing entry) was

labeled as calidad. If so, then they would have encountered an application of the term to a wide

75 These competing interpretations are reproduced in the subsequent editions of the text. The 1628 Madrid edition maintains the original alignment of ‘Calidad’ while shifting down the marginal marker for the ‘Discurso de vida’ from the line that contains the question to the line that contains the initial answer to that question (‘Dixo que nacio en tal pueblo …’). Conversely, in the 1736 Valencia edition, 'Calidad' is placed alongside the prompt to ask about the suspect’s Christian and baptismal status' while the marker ‘Discurso de vida’ is similarly re-aligned with the question that Inquisitors were to use to prompt its narration. See Orden de processar, recopilado de las instrucciones antiguas y modernas (Madrid, 1628), 10r; El orden que comunmente se guarda en el sancto offico de la Inquisicion (Valencia, 1736), 10r.


41

range of social, cultural, and educational experiences and abilities, including fluency in religious

rituals, linguistic abilities, literacy, and university studies; interactions with tutors and professors;

and any foreign travel and the specific acquaintanceships that it led to. Read this way, calidad

would have functioned as a metonym for the experiences that shaped a person.76

In the case of Moya de Contreras, regardless of how he would have interpreted the

editor’s intent in this enigmatic usage of calidad, contemporaneous sources give us a better sense

of the biographical framework through which he would have likely construed the concept of it.77

Around the time that Moya de Contreras concluded his career as Mexico's first Inquisitor to

assume the position of Archbishop of Mexico, Phillip II issued his Ordenanza del Patronazgo

Real in June of 1474. In it, the Crown reasserted its prerogative to administer the Catholic

Church within the territorial domains of the Spanish Empire and enacted a series of reforms for

the appointment and administration of religious functionaries in the Americas. To that end, it

instructed colonial officials to begin composing registers of all the secular and religious priests

and other ecclesiastical functionaries that were present in their domains, and to continually

submit reports that detailed the current members of the clergy along with their ages, calidades,

and the posts and ministries that they occupied. Similarly, reports were to be made describing

those who wished to be ordained, detailing "their kindness, education, adequacy, and calidades

76 In some ways, this approximates Roland Barthes’ biographeme. For a broader exploration of the usefulness of this analytic for understanding the forms of life writing that were prevalent in the Spanish Atlantic, see Alfredo Nava Sanchez, “Los límites de la biografía en Nueva España: Tres biografías de Hernán Cortés y una Relación de Méritos y Servicios como biografema,” Tzintzun - Revista de Estudios Históricos 67 (2018): 9-40. 77 Whether or not Inquisitors assimilated these principles into his jurisprudence is a different matter altogether. According to José María Vallejo García-Hevia, the importance of paying attention to exculpatory biographical factors when prosecuting suspected heretics and rendering verdicts was a recurring point of tension between Moya de Contreras and his fiscal Bonilla. When he was later appointed Inquisitor upon Moya de Contreras ascension to the Archbishopric, Bonilla penned a lengthy letter to his superiors denouncing Moya de Contreras' disinterest in weighing such factors. See José María Vallejo García Hevia, Estudios de instituciones hispano-indianas, Vol. II (Madrid: Boletín Oficial del Estado, 2015), 238-243.


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while describing their positive aspects as well as their deficiencies," along with an assessment of

their competency for holding a variety of ecclesiastical posts.

When redacting his report in March of 1575, Moya de Contreras summarized his task as

follows: “to provide a report of all the clergymen in our diocese, along with their calidades, and

what kinds of mercedes they should be given."78 In the text that followed, he included

descriptions of 157 individuals. Although in many cases he did not satisfy the full extent of

detailed biographical descriptions that the Ordenanza demanded, the report does contain dozens

of nearly completed profiles. Furthermore, even in the briefest of entries, we find some kind of

assessment of the individual's calidad. Thus, among the "good and honest" men and those whom

Moya de Contreras deems most worthy of being granted mercedes, we also encounter those who

are too "distracted by women," or busy "gambling." Others are "uninterested in their

occupations," unbecomingly "proud of their business acumen," "know little and yet are

pretentious," or are "the butt of jokes" because of their pretentiousness. Yet others are "only

somewhat arrogant ... but honest," "have only studied grammar but can understand any subject

matter," or have "given up their studies but only because they are poor."79

Taken together, Moya de Contreras' descriptions of these clergymen and the manual that

dictated how Inquisitors were to assess suspects at the onset of their trials illustrate the range of

biographical sensibilities that were engendered through trans-Atlantic articulations of calidad.

Further, these documents demonstrate the way in which cross-institutional practices could

coalesce to give increased coherence to a term that, by the latter part of the sixteenth century,

encompassed a capacious conception of the multiple ways of measuring and classifying human

difference.

78 Cartas a Indias, 195-220. 79 Ibid.


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Conclusion

In her recent monograph, Joanne Rappaport describes calidad as “the intersection of

multiple axes that plotted individual status according to ethnicity or race, congregation, morality,

privilege, and aspect[; part of] a broader set of classificatory practices that we might think of as

being constituted more by ‘doing’ than by ‘being.’”80 This conception of the term calidad

presents it primarily as an appellation for someone who performs a certain identity. As

Rappaport conceives it, social classification in the colonial period was a product of performance;

it “emerged out of the ways in which one actively engaged one’s birthright or transcended it

through behavior.”81

However, by exploring the deep history of the term ‘calidad’ and its evolution over the

course of the long sixteenth century, this chapter demonstrates the way in which such performed

identities were embedded in conceptual patterns and fields of meaning that were developed

through speech acts. It was the repeated, contradictory, expansive, and evolving use of the word

across the Atlantic that lay the groundwork for calidad to become both a self-evident and

dynamic matrix for conceptualizing the multiplicity of both performed and indelible human

differences. Furthermore, in tracing the usage of the term calidad, I have demonstrated how this

complex trans-Atlantic creative process was fueled by speech acts. Kings, nobles, theorists,

jurists, Inquisitors, conquistadors, colonial and peninsular bureaucrats, Indigenous people,

Africans, priests, heretics, and anyone else who used or encountered this term in every-day

dialogue or formal writing, collectively manipulated the term calidad to transform the means of

constructing social difference in the Spanish Atlantic.

80 Rappaport, Joanne, The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 32. 81 Ibid.

Documents

Dear MEMHS Colleagues,