The Devil’s ‘Advocate’: Black Women’s Domestic Devotions in the Early Spanish Atlantic

• In Event: The Fluid Lives of Objects: Diasporas of Black Sacred Material Culture

Description for Program

In 1593, the Inquisition in New Spain condemned the “mulata” Inés de Villalobos for practicing
sorcery—in this case, invoking Saint Martha to prevent her husband from beating her to death. Inquisitors confiscated a watercolor of Saint Martha that Inés owned and used as an amulet. Inés’ image formed part of a subversive transatlantic spiritual network shaped and sustained by women, often of African descent. Women across the Spanish empire beseeched Martha to pursue desires that fell outside of—and often challenged— Catholic orthodoxy. At least two additional seventeenth-century Martha images are preserved in Inquisition records housed in the Canary Islands, one owned by a woman of African descent, the other by a white female ritual expert in circum-Atlantic rituals.

This paper analyzes these images as counter-archives that show how women of African descent reconfigured the sacred to generate new forms of power. But within the courtroom, these works on paper assumed new roles as mediators of asymmetrical debates regarding the value, truth, authority, and efficacy of sacred images. In their attempts to frame the images as merely material aberrations, Inquisitors simultaneously acknowledged their power and offered a window into overlooked spiritual practices of the early modern Spanish Atlantic.

Author

• Nathalie Miraval, Yale University