Sara Tilghman Nalle

Bartolome Sanchez was an unrepentant heretic who condemned the Roman Catholic clergy, scorned the holy relics, denied the accepted Trinity, and even claimed himself the Messiah. That Sanchez lived in the Spanish village of Cardenete during the sixteenth-century should, it seems, have sealed a horrible fate for the impoverished wool carder. Even today the phrase “Spanish Inquisition” conjures images of vicious cruelty, ghastly torture, and church-sanctioned murder, and during this period the Holy Office was at the height of its power. Yet, remarkably, Sanchez did not die at the hands of the Inquisition. Sara Tilghman Nalle’s compelling Mad for God: Bartolome Sanchez, the Secret Messiah of Cardenete provides a fascinating insight into sixteenth-century Catholic theology, the Inquisition, and medieval views of insanity.
Sanchez’s heresy certainly did not go unnoticed by the Inquisition. “After Sanchez had spent some two months hereticizing,” Nalle reveals, “the village priest . . . sent a denunciation to Inquisitor Pedro Cortes at the local tribunal of the Holy Office in the city of Cuenca.” Sanchez’s arrival in Cuenca began a long and elaborate series of epistemological debates between the elderly Inquisitor and his obstinate prisoner. The wool carder’s case truly dumbfounded Cortes, who spent months trying to convert Sanchez to the true faith. Despite the Inquisition’s bloodthirsty reputation, it soon became obvious that, despite the peasant’s ever-bolder heresies, Cortes had little stomach for executing Sanchez. That is not to say that the cruelties of the Inquisition were imaginary. Especially vulnerable to the very real torture and killing meted out by the Holy Office were the “conversos,” converted Jews who were commonly suspected of profaning Christian symbols, and even sacrificing Christian children in their “secret rituals.”
Bartolome Sanchez did not burn at the stake because Inquisitor Cortes, and later other Inquisition prosecutors, became convinced that Sanchez was insane. The early modern Spanish conception of mental illness was startlingly enlightened. “If Sanchez actually were insane,” Nalle writes, “no court in Spain would find him guilty of any crime, whether it was heresy or something else.” Although Sanchez did suffer punishments that were appallingly draconian by modern standards, in the end the stubborn heretic was able to walk away from the Inquisition’s prison and fade into obscurity. There he remained until resurrected by Sara Nalle in her intriguing and tightly focused 2001 study.
Nalle’s only source on the life of Bartlome Sanchez was the transcript from the wool carder’s Inquisition trial conducted over the course of seven years. However, in the tradition of Laura Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale, Nalle is able to paint an extraordinary picture with the tiny brush afforded her by the transcripts. Sanchez’s story, in Sara Nalle’s capable hands, is riveting. But Nalle is able to use the genre of microhistory to, incongruously, tell a story much larger than “one man’s descent into religious madness.” Against all expectations, the sixteenth-century Spain that emerges from the Inquisition records is a place populated by “Inquisitors who worry about the nature of forensic evidence and their retirement pensions, and physicians who believe that mental illness is caused by some organic imbalances within the body.”
“Spanish society was far more complex,” Nalle argues, “than the simple assumptions of the Black Legend.” Indeed, Pedro Cortes, the face of the Inquisition in Nalle’s study, emerges as a patient, even humane, figure. The theological contests between the learned Cortes and his uneducated, but remarkably intelligent, prisoner provide a fascinating insight into the teachings of the Church and the widely disparate beliefs held by much of Catholic Spain’s rank and file. Contemporary views of madness, religious dissent, and criminal responsibility are all illuminated, often in unexpected ways, by Nalle’s balanced and thoughtful treatment.
Microhistory does, however, have its limitations. One who attempts to draw overly broad conclusions from Nalle’s book does so at his or her own peril. The Inquisition appeared in a multitude of forms throughout Spain and much of Western Europe. The Inquisitorial practices at Cuenca were not necessarily representative of the institution’s modus operandi elsewhere. And, despite the findings of much of recent scholarship that has tended to “mitigate the Inquisition’s fearsome reputation,” the Holy Office was, even by the most sympathetic accounts, capable of unspeakable, and well-documented, cruelty. Mad for God reveals a slice of sixteenth-century Spanish life – a deeply satisfying slice, to be sure, but much remains to be digested.… (mais)