Vozes da Inquisição:

pregação, antijudaísmo e cultura política nos autos da fé do Santo Ofício português (1605–1673)

Abstract

The article examines inquisitorial parenesis in seventeenth-century Portugal, taking as its central axis the sermons delivered at the autos-da-fé between 1605 and 1673most notably that of Frei Luís da Silva in Lisbon in order to understand how anti-Judaism structured both the discourse and the legitimacy of the Holy Office. Drawing on printed sermons, diocesan constitutions, preaching manuals, and inquisitorial regulations, the study mobilizes insights from religious and social history to situate the preacher within the ecclesiastical field and within broader struggles over prestige, moral authority, and the production of collective images of social “deviants.” The analysis demonstrates how the Council of Trent redefined the role of preaching, subjecting it to strict episcopal norms regarding training, licensing, content, and rhetorical performance, even as religious orders and the Inquisition transformed sermons into powerful instruments of large-scale indoctrination. At the autos-da-fé, this apparatus assumed its most extreme form: the inquisitorial pulpit produced and disseminated a monolithic figure of the “Jew,” associated with rebellion, mendacity, blood perversity, and conspiracy against the faith and the kingdom, thereby displacing critiques of New Christians and of the Tribunal onto the terrain of heresy and the cosmic struggle between Christ and Satan. The article argues that anti-Judaism was not a mere echo of diffuse prejudices but a central mechanism in legitimizing the Inquisition, managing fear, regulating the symbolic economy of honor, and naturalizing social hierarchies construed as immutable. By “listening” to the voices of the preachers, the study engages with recent scholarship on the political-legal and cultural dimensions of the Iberian empires, highlighting the intimate entanglement of theology, governance, and the production of social order in Portugal and across its early modern Iberian overseas empire.