The Trial of Catarina de Orta by the Goa Inquisition was originally published in 2018, with a second edition appearing in the following year. The authors, Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço, Susana Mateus and Carla Vieira, are all researchers at the Alberto Benveniste Chair of Sephardic Studies (Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras). Through this book, the authors have presented the first results of the Chairis project entitled ‘Monsoons’, an initiative aimed at studying the lives of New Christians (people of Jewish descent from the Iberian Peninsula) living in the Portuguese Empire in Asia and beyond.
The original edition of the book also launched as the ‘Serie Goana’, a collection at the Alberto Benveniste Chair of Sephardic Studies (CESAB, in its Portuguese acronym) was created to publish analytical editions of the trials and denunciations carried out by the Goa Inquisition against these New Christians. These books aim to present a transcription of the trial, together with annotations and an introduction. The annotations are considered to be one of the most important aspects of the book, as the social, cultural and religious settings of Goa are quite unique from other contexts in which the Portuguese Inquisition operated.
The English edition of the book was the brainchild of Dale L Meneses, which was materialized with the enthusiastic commitment of Leonard Fernandes and Queenie Rodrigues who helped with publishing it. “It took us two years to complete,” saysMiguel Rodrigues Lourenço, one of the editors of the book.
The edition in English had to be rendered comprehensible, which meant introducing punctuations which were otherwise absent in the original Portuguese edition. Since the source material is a legal document, he had to preserve its original codification, and that meant creating formulas in English that would capture the meaning of the source. Translating from ancient Portuguese presents its own challenges. The document published in this edition is the trial: the trial is made up of various sessions (interrogations) and other interactions between the accused (Catarina de Orta) and the inquisitor (Aleixo Dias Falcão).
“In order to maintain the codification of the legal language from session to session, and to ensure that the same formula was used each time, our translator would translate one session at a time, send it to us, then we would send our observations back, and so on, until each session was completed. Then we would move on to the next session,” explains Miguel.
This went on for two years. It was quite an arduous undertaking, but it is the first time that a trial of the Goa Inquisition has been made available in English. Catarina de Orta, and her brother, Garcia de Orta, who is counted among the famous Renaissance scholars of Portugal, were New Christians, i.e. Iberian Catholics with Jewish ancestry. Catharina was accused by the Goa Inquisition in 1569 of allegedly practicing Jewish rites, for which she was burnt at the stake, a punishment carried out on rare occasions in Goa. Catarina's is one of the few trials, to have survived. Thus, the exceptional nature of the case and the archival document makes this book, a very important contribution to the subject of the Goa Inquisition.
Susana Mateus, another editor of this one of its kind pieces says, “There were several challenges faced until the completion of this exemplary work. Firstly, the scarcity of documentary sources beyond the copy of the inquisitorial trial are to be mentioned. As a result of this scarcity, there has been greater difficulty in the reconstruction of various aspects of the history of this character and her family, both before and after her time in Goa”. Secondly, for the publication of the book, it was also an extremely important task to explain the less understandable terms and to create a context that would allow readers more or less familiar with the subject to read the book with profit. In many instances, even the identification of a toponym, a commodity or an object has not been an easy task.
‘Nevertheless, I found it fascinating to be able to recover the story of this woman who had not received much attention from researchers,” she says. The authors have tried their best to show a little of the World in which Catarina de Orta lived, and at the same time follow the course of her life. By analyzing the first inquisitorial trial she underwent as a young woman in Lisbon, they were able to follow her life from the beginning to the moment of her death in Goa in 1569. “Part of the spirit we have tried to give to this book and to our research is precisely to recover life stories that are virtually hidden in the archives, and thus to provide a better understanding of the complexities of past societies,” she adds, further pointing out to the fact that women are generally less represented in modern documentary sources. Documents such as this inquisitorial trial open windows to a better understanding of these women's experiences, their daily lives and agonies.