It was not implausibe for Spanish inquisitors and their wider staff to provoke scandal in their communities through moral, sexual, physical, and financial offenses. The same held true for Spanish Catholic clergy at large. This essay examines the varieties and possible sites of inquisitorial malfeasance, as well as the special legal privileges that constituted one of the main attractions of being employed in an inquisition tribunal. The essay also ponders in particular the crime and heresy of clerical solicitation of female penitents for sexual favors. Those clerical malefactors were sentenced in secret and punished via exile that took them out of their communities. They thus kept their identities and offenses a secret. At the same time, however the Spanish Inquisition offered a legal platform for female complainants to voice their grievances.

The inquisition tribunal in Lima, Peru, has received comparatively less scholarly attention because its sources are scattered and remain relatively incomplete. This chapter examines the inquisitorial jurisdiction in terms both of geography and of the Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans who attracted the inquisitors’ attention. It covers the lives and careers of prominent inquisitors, and addresses the variety of alleged offenders. It identifies different phases of tribunal activity, provides examples of the offenses that Lima’s inquisitors targeted in each phase, and delves into trials of faith for the heresy of crypto-judaism, the so-called “Great Complicity” of 1635–39. Inquisitors in Lima were interested in the same range of offenses as their counterparts in Spain. The tribunal worried about the presence of hidden Jews, Muslims, and Protestants in the Peruvian Viceroyalty and the effects they might have. They also were preoccupied with minor offenders such as visionaries, sorcerers, and bigamists.

This chapter assesses the Spanish Inquisition’s treatment of so-called “Old Christians,” meaning Spaniards who allegedly had no Jewish or Muslim ancestors in their genealogies. While Old Christians convicted of serious heresy could be relaxed to the secular arm and burned at the stake, their ancestry meant that Spanish inquisitors usually interrogated them less stringently, tortured them less frequently, and penanced them more lightly. Moreover, the Spanish Inquisition did not single out Old Christians as a potentially heretical group. Instead, inquisitors typically arrested Old Christians for morals offenses -- which connoted religious error -- as part of a larger effort to discipline Spain’s Catholic population. Speech acts, bigamy, sodomy, bestiality, witchcraft, and magic committed by Old Christians preoccupied Spanish inquisitors. The Inquisition’s attention to a wide range of more prosaic crimes beyond crypto-judaizing rendered the Holy Office a constant presence in the lives of Old Christians.

The Kingdom of Sicily, which belonged to the Kingdom of Aragon, was a challenging environment for Spanish inquisitors. The island was by default a space through which people, goods, and ideas circulated. It also amounted to a frontier zone in the eastern Mediterranean. Inquisitors in Sicily attempted to monitor the ports while attending to the numerous populations of foreigners which resided there; they also focused on the Catholic orthodoxy and morality of the Christian residents. This chapter explores the ways in which the inquisition tribunal on the island continuously came into conflict with other courts, institutions, and powers of the kingdom. It argues that Sicily’s inquisitors were significantly affected by their local environment. While the history of the Sicilian Inquisition demonstrates its ability to adapt to particular social and institutional contexts, as well as political situations, it also reveals resistance to the confessional society that the Inquisition represented and promoted.

The last inquisition tribunal established in the Spanish empire was founded in Cartagena de las Indias, in Colombia, in 1610. It appears that Spanish inquisitors in Cartagena prosecuted and executed far fewer people than their counterparts in Mexico City and Lima, though in contrast to those cities’ archives Cartagena’s records have been curtailed by adverse weather conditions, termites (comejénes), and the destruction of the city in 1697 by the French corsair, Baron of Pointis. As a result, few inquisition trials have survived in their entirety; we primarily know about Cartagena’s prosecutions through the case summaries that inquisitors periodically sent to the inquisition leadership in Madrid. This chapter presents an overview of the crimes, victims, and power dynamics that characterized Cartagena’s Inquisition. It highlights the ways in which the pageantry of public celebrations, the secrecy of the tribunal’s inner workings, and local and metropolitan politics affected rivalries and alliances in the region, and thereby influenced inquisitorial decisions.

This chapter considers how mid to late twentieth-century settler poets were reconceptualising place through bringing regionality to the fore, signalling the particularities of colonisation, and a nascent understanding of Country in the interconnectedness of lands, air and waterways. It argues that writers of this period were becoming aware of the sovereign custodianship in evidence around them and the embodied aspects of subjectivity. The chapter includes a discussion of the resonance of colonial violence and reflexive subjectivity that was appearing in the writing of Douglas Stewart, and the impressionistic locality and implication of their own presence in a poem by David Campbell. It analyses how poets such as Randolph Stow and Philip Hodgins navigate forms of discomfort in occupying violated places. The chapter then turns to the mediation on localities and their knowledge systems in the work of Laurie Duggan and PiO before turned to the representation of the littoral and affect in the poetry of Charles Buckmaster, Robert Gray and Robert Adamson. Lastly, it considers the optic poetics of Grace Perry, Jennifer Rankin and Jill Jones.

This chapter considers how Australian poetry of the 1970s participated in major social changes that were fuelled by a range of factors, including greater access to higher education, the sexual liberation movement, a drug subculture and Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. It traces how Australian writers turned to America for influence and were able to utilise new technologies to generate a vibrant small press culture. The chapter outlines the surge in collaboration, collectives and overlapping literary circles. It also examines a series of anthologies that sought to feature new energies and voices, with some seeking to demarcate such poetry from earlier or more traditional forms. Lastly, it analyses the significance of the poetry workshops based at Melbourne’s La Mama Theatre, little magazines, and the development of small presses that produced poetry collections during the decade of the 1970s.

This chapter begins with reference to Les Murray’s impressiveness as a reader of his own work. It illustrates the distinctiveness and variety of Murray’s poetry, celebrating its avoidance of predictable forms, topics and ideas. The chapter also observes the difference in the reception of Murray’s work in the global North and the global South. It points to the ways in which Murray’s poems don’t seem to end in conventional or predictable ways, but seem unending. The chapter discusses ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ as possibly Murray’s greatest poem, for its all-encompassingness. It cites Murray’s anti-modernism and his membership of the diasporic super-group of English-language poets, including Brodsky, Walcott and Heaney. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how the flavour and nature of Murray’s poetry changed in the last twenty years of his life.

This chapter illustrates the significant role of poetry in both the human experience of the continent of Antarctica and the human response to its unfamiliar icescape. The connections between Australia and Antarctica are geological, historical and cultural, and 40 per cent of Antarctica comprises the Australian Antarctic Territory. Australian poets have figured the continent as blank and cold, while Antarctic explorers have written poetry and held poetry competitions. The chapter discusses the imaginary landscape of Henry Kendall’s seafaring encounter with Antarctica, and Douglas Stewart’s poetic drama about the heroic explorer Robert Falcon Scott. The invitation of Caroline Caddy and Terry Whitebeach to visit Antarctica in the 1990s produced poetry of first-hand experience of Antarctica. Other poets who have written about Antarctica include Dorothy Porter, Les Murray, Anthony Lawrence, Robert Harris and J. R. Rowland.

This chapter begins with reference to the veneration and obscurity that characterises Webb’s reputation. It relates the early Webb’s mentoring by Norman Lindsay and his subsequent rejection of Lindsay’s secular aesthetics and anti-Semitism. Webb’s expatriate years in Canada and then England are discussed as a search for creative independence, although England was the place of his first hospitalisation for mental illness. The chapter observes that some of Webb’s most resonant poems are responses to the East Anglia landscape. It traces Webb’s return to Australia, his continued hospitalisation, and his Catholic devotion. The chapter explores the concept of schizophrenia as a pathology of language to understand Webb’s poetic language, particularly its metaphorical aspects. Lastly, the chapter focuses on Webb’s ‘explorer’ poems, their metaphorics of journeying, and their relationship to Australia’s cultural history, or national mythology, in the late 1950s and 1960s.

This chapter begins its discussion of Australian poetry in the decades immediately following World War II, post-Ern Malley hoax. It identifies the impulse in major poets of this time to establish a canon of Australian poetry that reinforced a strong sense of settler identity. The chapter reflects upon this expansionary period of Australian literary culture, as evidenced by the growth of Australian publishers, literary magazines, government support for the arts, professional networks, and forums for the discussion of poetry. It considers canon-building manoeuvres in light of a deep divide between conservative and left-wing viewpoints. The role of Douglas Stewart and Beatrice Davis, and Angus & Robertson’s Australian Poets Series, is detailed. The chapter also describes the expansion of Australian literary studies as underpinned by the growth of tertiary education. It discusses how a number of poets assumed elevated university positions, encouraging scholarly accounts and criticism of poetry. Lastly, the chapter concludes that the advent of Oodgeroo’s work presented a formidable challenge to this mid century envisioning of a national canon.

This chapter examines the work of a generation of women poets born in the 1860s whose rural childhood became fundamental in shaping their understandings of the intersections between class, gender and nation. Mary Fullerton, Marie E. J. Pitt and Mary Gilmore combined their socialist ideals with first-wave feminism, and Gilmore could become the first woman member of the Australian Workers, Union and participate in the utopic socialist venture to establish a ‘New Australia’ in South America. The chapter critiques the role of nostalgia in the racial blindspots of their vision of social transformation. It also considers the role of literary clubs, feminist periodicals and women’s magazines in encouraging a subsequent generation of women’s voices. With a critique of the institution of marriage, a growing legitimation of professional women writers and the articulation of female desire, there emerged a New Woman who challenged traditional gender conventions and defied divisions of class. The chapter also considers how this newer generation of women revised traditional poetic forms and embraced free verse, but were still limited by what was deemed acceptable for publication.