Through Cracks in the Wall

Lúcia Helena Costigan, Ph.D. (1988) in Spanish, University of Pittsburgh, is Associate Professor of Spanish and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Cultures at the Ohio State University. She has published extensively on Colonial Latin American Literatures, and on Early Modern Luso-Brazilian and Peninsular literatures and cultures.

All those interested in comparative literature and culture, imperial and colonial studies, modern Inquisitions in the Iberian Atlantic World, Sephardic Jewish and New Christian studies.

"A work brimming with insights and helpful perspectives." Jonathan Schorsch, Hispanic American Historical Review Vol. 91, No. 4 (November 2011) pp. 181-183.

This book adds a new dimension to Inquisition studies and historicized analysis of New Christian literature in Latin America and the author does a good job of offering historical contextualization of the literature, some of it published, some of it manuscript and largely forgotten, placed in archives. The book will appeal to colonialists, both historians and literary scholars, and should have some good use in graduate seminars on topics related to colonialism, the Atlantic world and the Inquisition.
Martin Nesvig, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume LXXXVIII, No. 4 (June 2011), pp.617-618

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Portugal, Portuguese America and New Christians: A Missing Link in Iberian and Colonial Latin American Studies
I. The Modern Inquisition in Portugal: A Spanish Imposition
II. New Christian letrados and the Inquisition in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas

1. Luis de Carvajal, the Younger, and the Inquisition in New Spain Under Philip II
I. From Victim of the Holy Office to Transformed Subject
II. Carvajal’s Stand and Mediated Voice in the First Trial Proceeding
III. Self-Fashioning and Public Voice through Literary Discourse
IV. Carvajal’s Second Trial
V. Carvajal’s Letters and Testamento

2. Bento Teixeira: A New Christian Caught by the First Visit of the Inquisition to Brazil
I. From Poet and School Teacher to Prisoner of the Holy Office
II. In the Cells of the Lisbon Inquisition
III. Bento Teixeira’s Prosopopéia: Text and Context

3. Ambivalent Acts of the Inquisition toward New Christians in the Seventeenth-Century Iberian Domains
I. Spanish Conversos and Portuguese cristãos-novos in Seventeenth-Century Portuguese America and the Spanish American Colonies
II. Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão and his Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil
III. Dawn and Dusk of Brazil as Terra da Promissão
IV. Manuel Beckman and the Levante do Maranhão

4. The Inquisition and Eighteenth-Century Portugal: The Case of Antônio José da Silva
I. Framing Antônio José da Silva’s Case
II. Glimpses of Antônio José da Silva’s life through his First Trial
III. Embracing Literature and Theater after His First Trial
IV. From Abjuration to Second Incarceration
V. Resistance Through Writing
VI. In Search of Possible Answers

Afterword

Manuscript Sources
Bibliography
Index