Through Cracks in the Wall

Lúcia Helena Costigan, Ph.D. (1988) in Spanish, University of Pittsburgh, is Associate Professor of Spanish and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Cultures at the Ohio State University. She has published extensively on Colonial Latin American Literatures, and on Early Modern Luso-Brazilian and Peninsular literatures and cultures.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Portugal, Portuguese America and New Christians: A Missing Link in Iberian and Colonial Latin American StudiesI. The Modern Inquisition in Portugal: A Spanish ImpositionII. New Christian letrados and the Inquisition in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas1. Luis de Carvajal, the Younger, and the Inquisition in New Spain Under Philip III. From Victim of the Holy Office to Transformed SubjectII. Carvajal’s Stand and Mediated Voice in the First Trial ProceedingIII. Self-Fashioning and Public Voice through Literary DiscourseIV. Carvajal’s Second TrialV. Carvajal’s Letters and Testamento2. Bento Teixeira: A New Christian Caught by the First Visit of the Inquisition to BrazilI. From Poet and School Teacher to Prisoner of the Holy OfficeII. In the Cells of the Lisbon InquisitionIII. Bento Teixeira’s Prosopopéia: Text and Context3. Ambivalent Acts of the Inquisition toward New Christians in the Seventeenth-Century Iberian DomainsI. Spanish Conversos and Portuguese cristãos-novos in Seventeenth-Century Portuguese America and the Spanish American ColoniesII. Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão and his Diálogos das grandezas do BrasilIII. Dawn and Dusk of Brazil as Terra da PromissãoIV. Manuel Beckman and the Levante do Maranhão4. The Inquisition and Eighteenth-Century Portugal: The Case of Antônio José da SilvaI. Framing Antônio José da Silva’s CaseII. Glimpses of Antônio José da Silva’s life through his First TrialIII. Embracing Literature and Theater after His First TrialIV. From Abjuration to Second IncarcerationV. Resistance Through WritingVI. In Search of Possible AnswersAfterwordManuscript SourcesBibliographyIndex

"A work brimming with insights and helpful perspectives." Jonathan Schorsch, Hispanic American Historical Review Vol. 91, No. 4 (November 2011) pp. 181-183.This book adds a new dimension to Inquisition studies and historicized analysis of New Christian literature in Latin America and the author does a good job of offering historical contextualization of the literature, some of it published, some of it manuscript and largely forgotten, placed in archives. The book will appeal to colonialists, both historians and literary scholars, and should have some good use in graduate seminars on topics related to colonialism, the Atlantic world and the Inquisition.Martin Nesvig, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume LXXXVIII, No. 4 (June 2011), pp.617-618