Male Violence and Female Resistance in the Sacrament of Penance: Accounts Before the Inquisitorial Tribunals in Colonial America (Seventeenth Century)

This text analyzes the narratives of resistance that solicited women developed before the inquisitorial tribunals of Hispanic America in response to the abuses of their confessors. Solicitation trials and causal relationships are addressed in the three inquisitorial tribunals in America (Mexico, Lima, and Cartagena de Indias) during the seventeenth century, after the reception of the Hispanic-American ecclesiastical authorities of Gregory XV's papal brief on Solicitation. Women's formal use of ecclesiastical justice demonstrates the improper and extra-sacramental usage of the confessional space in male seduction and violence strategies. This study argues that females based their actions on informal knowledge about what was acceptable in the context of confession and that their expressions and actions against the sexual demands of men of God can be interpreted as forms of everyday resistance, mostly unorganized.