Book tells how gender transgression by a woman disturbed the Inquisition in Lisbon – Showbiz

The story of Catalan Maria Duran, who fled the village where she was born in 1711, pretended to be a man and ended up being tried – and tortured – by the Portuguese Inquisition is told in a book by historian François Soyer now published.

In the book “A Hermaphrodita e a Inquisição Portuguesa – O Caso Que Abalou o Santo Ofício”, published by Bertrand with translation by Rita Furtado, Soyer tells the story of Maria Duran, who was born in 1711 in the Catalan village of Prullans, where “she was raised as a girl and married a man” at the age of 14, probably in an arranged marriage, with whom she had a son who died before reaching the age of one.

“When the marriage disintegrated, Maria fled the village and began a new itinerant life. Dressed in men’s clothing, she traveled to southern France and eastern Spain, adopting a masculine identity and, at one point, joining the royal Spanish army. When she revealed her female body, supposedly because she wanted to avoid military service in Italy, the army expelled her and she was forced to dress as a woman,” summarizes Soyer.

Coming from Madrid, he arrived in Lisbon with around 250,000 inhabitants in 1738, which was a “multicultural city” due to the coexistence between “native Portuguese (including the descendants of Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity in the last decade of the 15th century, who were suspected of continuing to be Jews, and who were known as New Christians), […] black Africans (both enslaved and free) and well-integrated merchant communities from all over Europe.”

Looking for sustenance, security, without having money or speaking Portuguese in a city where there was “extreme poverty and crime” to such an extent that the king had recently ordered armed patrols to watch the streets, Maria Duran “sought help from a pious cleric” .

Thus, she entered a shelter and, according to the little information available, Soyer writes that, five months after arriving, Maria became close to another woman, with whom she had sexual relations.

Later, in testimony before the Inquisition, this other woman said she believed that Maria was a man, something that would be repeated with other people with whom she had relationships and that would have consequences for the way Maria Duran was viewed. In other words, at the time, they saw her as an agent of the Devil, even though she denied it and had always declared herself a “true woman” before the court that judged her.

“In addition to Maria’s actions, her words also led several women to believe that she was a man. Witnesses pointed to the fact that Maria did not keep a secret about the times she cross-dressed in the past, in addition to declaring that she was a man or a hermaphrodite in the presence of many women,” reported the historian.

The professor at the University of New England, in Australia, highlighted the “trauma of violence” in the perception of Maria Duran as a man, since, in the eyes of a current reader, the Catalan woman’s behavior would be seen as “sexually predatory”. .

“Maria was willing to resort to verbal threats or even physical violence to coerce a woman into having sex with her. After sex, Maria tried to calm the victims, telling them that the sexual acts between them had been heterosexual and, therefore, ‘normal’. […] In a heteronormative culture that stereotypes male sexuality as dominant and aggressive and attributes an idea of ​​passivity to female sexuality, it is easy to see sexual violence as a phenomenon that is, in essence, masculine and heterosexual,” wrote Soyer, a specialist in history of anti-Semitism in early modern Europe and the Iberian Peninsula in particular.

Maria Duran was arrested by the Inquisition in 1741 and subjected to multiple interrogations, and additional information was even requested from her Spanish counterpart about the Catalan’s life in her homeland.

Interrogated and tortured by the Inquisition, she ended up condemned in 1744 for not having respected the precepts of her Christian formation and for having behaved “in ways that were naturally repugnant and contrary to the common order of Nature”. Maria Duran was sentenced to be flogged in public in Lisbon and expelled from Portugal.

The case was mentioned in the press and Soyer references records from a priest present at the auto-da-fé, who brought together dozens of convicts (some of whom would be executed), who reported Duran’s trial to a correspondent.

Unlike other cases, the Inquisition did not fully list the crimes for which Duran was being convicted: “The desire to silence an embarrassing case that could be a source of ridicule is evident. No mention is made of the sexual elements of Maria’s trial: neither the sexual relations she had with women, nor the allegations that she possessed a penis, nor the institutions involved [para lá de Lisboa esteve num recolhimento em Évora]not even the various anatomical exams.”

Maria Duran also had to sign a secrecy agreement, in which she promised never to divulge her process or even what she witnessed in the Inquisition’s prison.

There is no record of Maria Duran’s existence beyond 1744.