Goa e a Inquisição: trajetória e narrativas do tribunal português na Ásia

Abstract

The Portuguese Inquisition, extinct exactly two centuries ago, is still part of the present. Not only in historiography, but in terms of memory disputes, related to certain groups and religious affinities, the inquisitorial subject is recurrently recollected years after its extinction; and in the case of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of Goa, the only one of the Portuguese Inquisition to be headquartered in a colonial territory, it was not different. Established between 1560 and 1812, with an extremely diverse jurisdiction over Asian and African societies, and facing a sociocultural reality quite different from the one that was already known in Portugal, the Goa Inquisition presented a series of particularities in its trajectory, which will be detailed in this paper. And, along with this aim, for which the analysis of ecclesiastical documents, provisions and correspondence from the 16th and 17th century is going to be helpful, our objective is also to comprehend the narratives created about the existence of the Holy Office in Goa, as important part of the history of the Portuguese Inquisition, the Modernity and the European colonialism in Asia.