This book examines the life of Maria Duran, who was born with female genitalia, but was accused of being a man and subsequently put on trial for sorcery by the Portuguese Inquisition during the 18th century. François Soyer uses Maria's story to open a window onto the world of the experience of 'transing' gender, as well as the gendered attitudes and responses to the transgression of gendered norms that were adopted by churchmen, medical practitioners and ordinary lay men and women. Drawing on the surviving (and staggeringly 736-page long) sorcery trial dossier, Soyer analyses the secretive life of an individual who actively and deliberately 'transed' gender. The dossier analysis enables insights into aspects of life so rarely recorded in early modern documents: the transgression of gender norms, transgressive sexuality and sexual violence in female religious institutions, in addition to the fears and debates about the power that the Devil could wield over the human body. The 'Catalan Hermaphrodite' and the Inquisition also reveals how the Inquisition gathered a number of doctors, surgeons and midwives to conduct careful examinations of Maria's body in general and genitals in particular. Their reports and the discussions of the inquisitors are discussed by Soyer and offer further fascinating evidence of attitudes towards sex and gender in early modern Europe.

‘Catalan Hermaphrodite’ and the Inquisition, The: Early Modern Sex and Gender on Trial

History

Soyer, François

Europe

Bloomsbury Academic

In this work, Francois Soyer examines the nature of medieval anti-Jewish sentiment and violence. Analysing developments in Europe between 1100 and 1500, he points to the tensions in medieval anti-Jewish thought amongst thinkers who hoped to convert Jews and blamed Talmudic scholarship for their obduracy and yet who also, conversely, often essentialized Judaism to the point that it transformed into the functional equivalent of the modern concept of race. He argues that we should not consider antisemitism as a monolithic concept but accept the existence of independent, historical meanings and thus of antisemitisms (plural), including "medieval antisemitism" as distinct from anti-Judaism.

Medieval Antisemitism? (Past Imperfect)

Arc Humanities Press

The Persecution of the Jews and Muslims of Portugal (Brill's Paperback Collection)

This book challenges prevalent assumptions concerning the persecution of the Jews and Muslims of Portugal in 1496-7. It pieces together the developments that led to the events of 1496-7 and presents a detailed reconstruction of the persecution itself.

The Persecution of the Jews and Muslims of Portugal: King Manuel I and the End of Religious Tolerance, 1496-7 (Medieval Mediterranean)

Brill Academic Pub

In 1496-7, King Manuel I of Portugal forced the Jews of his kingdom to convert to Christianity and expelled all his Muslim subjects. Portugal was the first kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula to end definitively Christian-Jewish-Muslim coexistence, creating an exclusively Christian realm. Drawing upon narrative and documentary sources in Portuguese, Spanish and Hebrew, this book pieces together the developments that led to the events of 1496-7 and presents a detailed reconstruction of the persecution. It challenges widely held views concerning the impact of the arrival in Portugal of the Jews expelled from Castile in 1492, the diplomatic wrangling that led to the forced conversion of the Portuguese Jews in 1497 and the causes behind the expulsion of the Muslim minority.Originally published in hardcover

BRILL

This book charts the history and influence of the most vitriolic and successful anti-Semitic polemic ever to have been printed in the early modern Hispanic world and offers the first critical edition and translation of the text into English. First printed in Madrid in 1674, the Centinela contra judíos ("Sentinel against the Jews") was the work of the Franciscan Francisco de Torrejoncillo, who wrote it to defend the mission of the Spanish Inquisition, to call for the expansion of discriminatory racial statutes and, finally, to advocate in favour of the expulsion of all the descendants of converted Jews from Spain and its empire. Francisco de Torrejoncillo combined the existing racial, theological, social and economic strands within Spanish anti-Semitism to demonize the Jews and their converted descendants in Spain in a manner designed to provoke strong emotional responses from its readership.

Popularizing Anti-Semitism in Early Modern Spain and its Empire (Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World, 54)