Good Catholics, Bad Acts: Sacrilege, Blasphemy and Lived Religion in the Early Modern Spanish Empire

Abstract

Histories of the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often view it as a militant champion of Catholic orthodoxy, where the Spanish Inquisition eradicated all erroneous behaviors and beliefs. Thousands of cases of sacrilege and blasphemy complicate this story. This dissertation offers a more complex and varied portrait of religion across the Spanish empire. It shows that theological treatises and official ceremonies admitted religion flourished in “grey” areas between doctrine and everyday practice. Drawing from dozens of inquisitorial cases in Spain and the Viceroyalty of Mexico, my study locates blaspheming against God, physically attacking sacred images and objects, and acts of desecration against the Host within intensely personal religious experiences. Acts such as yelling insults at God, slashing sacred images with a knife, or desecrating the Host reveal a cosmology in which humans interacted with divine powers through a range of behaviors that mixed the orthodox and the heterodox in everyday religious practice.