Stripped of their clothes. Torture and intrigue: the e daily life of the new-Christians in the prisons of the Holy Office of the Inquisition of Portugal, XVII century

Abstract

The article seeks to relate studies of the Inquisition to the history of gender, discussing the violence suffered by women, especially new Christians, upon becoming defendants in the Portuguese Inquisition, incarcerated in secret prisons of the Estaus Palace in Lisbon. The intent is to show the inquisitors’ treatment of women amid the punitive logic of the Inquisition, with its peculiarities, as a typical instrument of the justice of the Old Regime.