ABSTRACT
In his seminal study The Cheese and the Worms, Carlo Ginzburg reconstructs the life of Domenico Scandella – known as Menocchio –, who was prosecuted and ultimately executed by the Inquisition for the crime of heresy. In one purported conversation between Menocchio and another man known as Pighino, they bring to light certain moral issues surrounding the concept of religious conversion. 2The apparently voluntary religious conversion of Christian slaves to Islam is a thread unifying numerous seventeenth-century Spanish broadsheet ballads, known in Spanish as relaciones de sucesos or pliegos sueltos. As if the female renegade’s crime of apostasy and voluntary religious conversion to Islam were not enough to jeopardise her redemption and reintegration into Christian society, she commits crimes that run the gamut from illicit sexual relations, to murder, to vivisection, to robbery, to cannibalism, and finally to suicide.
