Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço and Susana Mateus are two editors who have worked on a book called ‘The Trial of Catarina de Orta by the Goa Inquisition’. It is the first time that a trial of the Goa Inquisition has been made available in English. This trial of Catarina de Orta by the Goa Inquisition sheds light on the workings of the Goa Inquisition as also on the social world of New Christians in Goa.
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 materialized with the enthusiastic commitment of Leonard Fernandes and Queenie
Rodrigues who helped with publishing it. “It took us two years to complete”,
says Miguel 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, and then we would send our
observations back, and so on, until each session was completed”, explains
Miguel. Then we would move on to the next session, he says. 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-a-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 is 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.