The ones who failed: candidates rejected by the Holy Office in Colonial Minas Gerais

Abstract

This article seeks to examine the candidates rejected by the Holy Office who lived in the society of colonial Minas Gerais analyzing the circumstances that underlined the refusal of these applicants, as well as to understand, to some extent, what this failure represented to these men. By cross-reading the data from the dismissed applications – Habilitações Incompletas from the Court of the Holy Office – with requests to the Conselho Ultramarino (overseas council) and notary sources from the Minas Gerais archives, it focuses on social mobility through the lens of failure. It argues that the access to the positions of agents of the Inquisition, a symbol of prestige in the Portuguese empire, was an important device to consolidate authority and power of command in that society, but when it was not possible to take advantage of this mechanism, due to the dismissal of their applications, these men circumvented the failure in the inquisitorial career and reworked their project of social climbing through other forms of distinction. That seems to have been possible due to the uniqueness of the social criteria of the colonial society, which was less obsessed with the purity of blood. This was even more noticeable in the society of Minas Gerais, whose social fluidity was pronounced.