ABSTRACT
Scholars disagree as to what extent the records of inquisitorial trials shed light on the religiosity of the deponents. Few disagree, however, that much of the preserved testimony, especially the suspects’ confessions, tends toward the formulaic, and was conditioned by the threat of physical coercion, continued incarceration, destitution, and public disgrace. Among the primary targets of the Spanish Inquisition was a small population of ‘New Christians’ or conversos, the Christianized descendants of Iberian Jews. From 1651–1653, inquisitors in Toledo investigated Maria de Sierra, a 28-year-old New Christian of Portuguese origin who earned her living from a tobacco stand that she and her husband owned and operated in Pastrana, a village in La Mancha. The accusers drew from a trove of medieval anti-Jewish canards that ordinary Iberians shared with their better-educated countrymen, and which had generated major persecutions of conversos since the fifteenth century.
