"Da ignorância e rusticidade":

Abstract

This survey focuses on the interactions between the Inquisition and Indigenous peoples in Portuguese America. Its main goal is to understand some of the assumptions that informed inquisitorial action concerning the thorny challenges posed by the inhabitants of the New World. It presents a broad and pioneering “Gentile cartography” that provides an overview of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century denunciations and judicial proceedings of the Holy Office that involved the Indigenous and their descendants. This study also analyses the way the Inquisition operated and how it often resorted to a civil and canonical legal culture that proposed a more benevolent treatment of populations considered “unprotected”, based on the adapted use of concepts such as “persona miserabilis” and “invincible ignorance”.