Blasphemy and the Limits of Legality: Pain and the Enslaved Female Body

Inquisitorial prosecution for blasphemy sheds light on the physical violence that shaped the relationship between enslaved subjects and their masters in Spanish American territories. Although Spanish laws allowed slave owners to punish enslaved subjects who had disobeyed them or had run away, they also encouraged those who suffered extreme punishments to denounce their master’s cruelty to authorities. However, often, under the duress of suffering, enslaved subjects uttered blasphemous statements which pulled them into the orbit of the inquisitorial tribunal. As a result, for several enslaved subjects, blasphemy functioned as a resistance tactic to put an end to their master's punishments despite the implications of going through an inquisitorial trial.

In the context of Cartagena de Indias, during its first years, the tribunal of the Holy Office actively condemned verbal offenses against the Catholic orthodoxy producing numerous cases of blasphemy, which targeted enslaved subjects. Although by the end of the seventeenth century, the violence against enslaved subjects did not deplete, and instead intensified due to the threat of their uprisings and flights, cases of blasphemy sharply decreased. In this paper, I will explore how changes in prosecuting blasphemy speak of some ways in which inquisitorial records documented enslaved subjects' pain resulting from slave owners' harsh punishments. More specifically, my analysis will focus on gendered violence perpetrated in the masters' house and inquisitorial prisons, which reveal the semiotics of female enslaved bodies in pain vis-à-vis the limits of legality.