Seja declarado por convicto e confesso no crime de sodomia : uma microanálise do processo inquisitorial do artesão Manoel Fernandes dos Santos (1740-1753)

Abstract

The nefarious sin of sodomy was criminalized in Portugal from the Afonsine Ordinations in 1446. Considered a mixed-crime offense in 1613, it was recorded in the Regiments of the Portuguese Inquisition. In Portuguese America, the First Constitutions of the Archbishopric of Bahia (1707) determined that the Sodomites should be sent to the Kingdom for prosecution by the Court of the Holy Office. In this perspective, the objective of this study is to analyze the inquisitorial process of the craftsman Manoel Fernandes dos Santos, implicated in a crime of perfect sodomy in Recife (1740) and sentenced by the Inquisition of Lisbon in 1748. From a dual micro-historical approach, possible to investigate part of the defendant's life trajectory and the sociopolitical conjuncture in which he was inserted. Among the results, we highlight: the cooperation of the ecclesiastical Justice of Pernambuco in the supply of defendants to the Inquisition, in addition to the work of inquisitorial relatives and commissioners, but by initiative and determination of the ordinary; the circulation of ideas in eighteenth-century Recife that led the artisan to practice the crime of sodomy to transit civil justice to the inquisitorial; the tripartite course for the preparation of the sentence; the mapping of the liturgy of the auto de fé celebrated on October 20, 1748 and, finally, the insubordinate stance of the condemned person who sought in the punitive system "loopholes" that allowed him a new perspective of the future, different from the one imposed on him, get away from the galleys. As a conclusion, we emphasize the elaboration of a biographical fragment that brought to the fore the juridical networks of the Luso-Brazilian world of the Old Regime.