The essay reviews the ebb and flow of Jewish conversions to Catholicism, as well as the ambiguous process of categorizing religious identity. It examines the types of accusations launched against conversos, as well as the motivations for such accusals and their gendered nature. The essays discusses the truthfulness of surviving Inquisition records. It compares trials from the Spanish Inquisition’s first decades to those of later years, with particular attention to the presence of Jewish converts from Portugal. These trials demonstrate the complicated, ongoing interactions among Jews, New Christians, and so-called “Old Christians” throughout the Spanish Empire and around the world. The end of the chapter notes the decline of trials for Judaizing in the eighteenth century.

This chapter examines the historical development of the Spanish Inquisition in New Spain (Mexico), investigating its processes, targets, and ambitions. It surveys the first inquisition prosecutions there, which were carried out not by inquisitors per se, but by mendicant friars as well as the episcopal court. After King Philip II authorized an inquisition tribunal for New Spain in 1569, inquisitors quickly began to operate in Mexico City. At the same time, Spanish inquisitors in New Spain had no investigative or coercive powers over New Spain’s Indigenous populations, whose religious beliefs and practices were monitored by the episcopal legal jurisdiction. New Spain’s inquisitors prosecuted far fewer serious heretics than their counterparts in Spain itself, though the tribunal was interested in Portuguese conversos, especially when it was encountering financial difficulties.

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 traces the conflicting history of the relationship between the popes and the Inquisitions from the early modern period onwards, with a prologue on the late Middle Ages. Its scope embraces the Roman Holy Office alongside the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, with their offshoots in the colonies, since to suppose that these latter were institutions entirely dependent on the Iberian monarchies is over-simplistic. The Roman court and the Index are treated more extensively, especially since the Holy Office was considered the most eminent Congregation of the Curia. The text also seeks to determine the extent to which the Roman Inquisition impinged on the autonomy of the popes or the development of Catholic dogma and orthopraxy on a global scale. Lastly, it looks at the later evolution of the Holy Office up until its mutation into the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the twentieth century.

The first chapter establishes the groundwork for thinking about social differences in society by reviewing the major political milestones that transformed multi-confessional medieval society. Reaching back to the first fourteenth century pogroms that drove Spanish Jews to convert en masse to Christianity, to be repeated again in the fifteenth century, the chapter explores how the terms “New Christian” and “Old Christian” emerged and later solidified as the primary divisions in sixteenth-century society.