Moderator: Clara Keating (FLUC/CES)

About

On the first day of August 1568 - it was a Sunday - Maria Antónia, Teodora Henriques, Antónia Nunes and Filipa Lourenço were tried by the Court of the Holy Office of Coimbra. They would hear together the reading of the auto-da-fé [act of faith] that condemned them.

Maria, who was Jewish, was only released so that she could look after her sick husband for two months in Buarcos, and was immediately sent back to prison in Coimbra. Teodora, from Condeixa, would be instructed in the Catholic faith. Antónia, accused generically of blasphemy, had to hear her punishment with a burning candle melting in her hand. Filipa, condemned never to leave Coimbra again, was living in Lamego in the north of the country; she would no longer see her friends, neighbours or family. In her file, there is the following note: "She had a book of poetry inside". Just as there is no silent history, there is no silent archive: Maria, Teodora, Antónia and Filipa are not a fiction. They represent a factual cross-section of women in the Coimbra Inquisition's files at the National Archive of Torre do Tombo (ANTT).

Covering the period from 1541 to 1821, the more than 10,000 cases of the Coimbra Inquisition in the custody of the ANTT are described and made available online. From the analysis of about 500 documents, representative profiles of sentenced women were selected, looking for more than just paper in this survey. The notion of network is our means of transport.

Started in 2020, Autos sem fé is a research project based on artistic experimentation that is structured in three points: (1) theoretical, by the historical-critical-feminist perspective followed by a discussion on the materiality of culture and the digitisation of the humanities; (2) methodological, by archival research, information extraction and data manipulation; (3) and artistic, by the vocalisation of the archive through a series of staged readings, simultaneously participatory and interventional, in the public space - so far the project has three sessions, two of them with co-production TAGV and 23 Milhas. This project is part of MatLitLab, the Humanities laboratory of the doctoral programme in Materialities of Literature at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra.

Bio notes

Elizama Almeida is a PhD student in the Materialities of Literature programme at the University of Coimbra. She is a member of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and of the scientific council of the General Library of UC Coimbra. She is a researcher at the Moreira Salles Institute and is part of the study group Lacuna no Arquivo.

Mafalda Lalanda is motivated by research projects based on artistic and interdisciplinary experimentation. She is a PhD candidate in Materialities of Literature at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra. As an FCT scholarship holder, she has sought to listen to literature and think with her ears. Her inter-arts career includes dance, music conservatory, radio and book publishing.

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