WEB SERIES: The Goa Inquisition: New Scholarship on the State and Religious Violence

Nearly 500 years after it was set up and 200 years after it was abolished, the Goa Inquisition remains a much debated yet poorly understood topic today. What exactly was the Inquisition? Why was it set up in Goa? Who were the people tried and judged by it? Was it linked to religious conversions? Who were the heretics and what was their heresy? What was the nature of the violence associated with the Inquisition? And why was this institution finally shut down? These are some of the questions that plague the mind of many a modern Goan, but to which no clear answer is usually and easily available.

To answer these (and many other) questions, so that Goans, and others, have the resources to develop a more informed understanding of the past, the Al-Zulaij Collective, in collaboration with a number of international academic institutions and globally recognized scholars, conceived of an educational project on the Goan Inquisition. This project aims to not only provide rigorously researched information to the public on this topic, but also to discuss how this research is carried out. It focuses on the methods and the sources needed for serious investigation of this history, and what a historian needs to do when there are only fragmentary sources available, as is usually the case. The fruit of this project is a forthcoming web series called The Goa Inquisition: New Scholarship on the State and Religious Violence.

Most of the best contemporary scholarly works on the Goan Inquisition till date are available only in the Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and French languages, and in academic institutions; this will thus be the first time that this research is being made available to a wider public and in English.

The web series is supported by the Alberto Benveniste Chair of Sephardic Studies at the University of Lisbon, the Center for Religious History Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal, and the History of the Inquisitions Group, a group of scholars across the world who study the Inquisitions.  The host is Dale Luis Menezes, member of the Al-Zulaij Collective and PhD candidate at Georgetown University, Washington DC.

Each episode will air at 6 pm IST, and available for viewing later too. The series will be initiated on Al-Zulaij’s YouTube channel from 13th March 2022. It comprises of eight segments, released every Sunday.

The interviewed experts include, in order of their presentations:

Bruno Feitler (Professor of History, Universidade Federal de São Paulo), Ângela Barreto Xavier (Professor of History, Institute of Social Science, University of Lisbon), Ana Cannas da Cunha (Director, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon), José Pedro Paiva (Professor of History, University of Coimbra, Coimbra), Miguel Rodrigues Lourenço (researcher at the NOVA University, the University of Lisbon and the Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon), Célia Cristina Tavares (Professor of History, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro), Patricia Souza de Faria (Professor of History, Federal Rural University, Rio de Janeiro), Susana Bastos Mateus (researcher at the University of Lisbon) and Carla Costa Viera (researcher at the NOVA University, Lisbon).

The Al-Zulaij Collective would like to thank these participating scholars for generously sharing their knowledge and insights, the collaborating institutions for their invaluable support, and also Paolo Aranha, scholar of early modern Catholicism in India, for his enormous help in putting the series together.

Like our Facebook page and YouTube channel for more updates every week!

Share this...

Facebook

Whatsapp

Print

Email

Twitter

Reddit