Abstract
This article examines one of the trials of the Inquisition in Lima during the 18th century. In the trial, María Josefa De La Encarnación — a poor, mulata servant — claimed to have a special connection to God. Her case file, which is held in Madrid’s Archivo Histórico Nacional, relates a series of acts linked not only to the celestial and the spiritual realms, but also to poverty, ethnic hierarchies and typically feminine transgressions. The appearances of the Virgin or the temptations of the devil that María Josefa experienced were a reflection of a society that, despite its limits and prohibitions, infringed on reality according to the personal interests of a mestiza society that was unequal and patriarchal. María Josefa, for example, was one of those who manipulated situations to her own convenience and, above all, to her own survival; banishment and incarceration were strategies used by the inquisitors to discipline a sex they considered to be weak and incompetent by nature. Therefore, this paper rescues those testimonies, speeches and confessions that allow a recreation and, of course, a historicization of the religious and mystical transgressions of women in the Ancien Régime.
Keywords:
demonic possession; false mysticism; feminine transgressions; the inquisition in Lima; feminine discourses