“Salido a la vergüenza” - Inquisition, Penality, and a Cervantine View of Mediterranean ‘Values’

Aug 28, 2026

Uploaded by Jacob

Analyzes the Spanish Inquisition’s auto de fe through an affective and rhetorical lens, centering on how emotions such as honor, shame, love, respect, and fear were publically staged and then internalized by spectators. Uses Fernando de Acevedo’s account of a late royal suspension in Triana (1604) to show how cancellation intensified feelings of offense and moral entanglement. Traces Cervantes’s Don Quijote to identify an inquisitorial discourse in the protagonist’s encagement and to reinterpret shame’s early modern functions within Mediterranean “values.”

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages22

Reading Time55 min

AccessFree to download

Triana’s 1604 auto de fe and the emotions of suspension

Honor, shame, and the emotional habitus

Rhetorical appropriation of collective feelings

Shame in Don Quijote’s enjaulamiento (1605)

“Salido a la vergüenza”: Inquisition, Penality, and a Cervantine View of Mediterranean ‘Values’ Paul Michael Johnson University of California, Irvine The seventh of November, 1604 was to have been a memorable day for the residents of Triana, an arrabal along the banks of the Guadalquivir which had hosted the headquarters of the Spanish Inquisition since the year 1481. Preparations for an auto de fe scheduled for that day were nearly complete, and, on the eve of the infamous act’s celebration, throngs of ardent spectators filled the streets to witness the procession of the Green Cross, all while the prisoners awaited their fate in the town’s castle. As Fernando de Acevedo—a canon, inquisitor, and statesman for King Philip III—described the scene, “estaba todo el arsenal [sic, arenal] de Sevilla y Triana y el castillo lleno de gente, y que eran las once de la noche, y todos esperando ala mañana, para ver salir los presos al auto, y la Cruz puesta en el cadahalso, y doce religiosos velándola”(109) . And then, around the same time that night, an urgent royal decree was received to suspend the auto de fe: “Cuando está Sevilla y toda su comarca esperando la celebración del auto, oyen la voz de un pregonero diciendo que por justos respetos se suspendía y luego comenzó un sentimiento grande en todos, una tristeza interior como si cada uno fuera el agraviado… conocióse en este sentimiento y suceso el amor y respeto junto con temor que a la Inquisición se tiene”” (Acevedo 108) .1 As the most visible face of the Inquisition’s varied activities, the public auto de fe general capitalized on its increasingly theatrical qualities as a Baroque spectacle to become a potent force in the imagination of the Spanish populace, a source of public fervor as well as a repository into which it was strategically channeled. But Acevedo’s account also poignantly illustrates the range and intensity of the emotions that such a spectacle (or, in this case, its last-minute cancellation) could stir in its attendees, from a general feeling of affliction and internal sadness to seemingly contradictory sentiments of love, respect, and fear. The observation that each jilted bystander felt as though he or she were the “agraviado”, by internalizing the feeling of offense typically reserved for the accused, suggests at least two more: honor and shame, concepts which have been identified as largely accounting for the general effectiveness of inquisitorial practice in the early modern Mediterranean. Although the aggrandizing or propagandistic identification of ‘love’ and ‘respect’ for the Inquisition in Acevedo’s description would likely contrast rather starkly with the affective associations of many everyday citizens with the institution, this disparity alerts us to the rhetorical, discursive, and performative praxis of inquisitorial attempts to appropriate and exploit certain collective emotions toward politico-religious ends. In Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, honor and shame thus constituted an emotional “habitus” that structured social and political practices, actuated through a kind of recursive function or feedback loop in which the affective content of lived experience was absorbed and instrumentalized by an institution such as the Inquisition only to percolate back down to inform the feelings of everyday life. This phenomenon is perhaps most clear in the morphological distinction between shame as a noun (the feeling of being ashamed) 1 I have modernized the spelling of these citations from Acevedo. After the intervention of the Grand Inquisitor before Philip III himself, the auto de fe was eventually rescheduled and carried out, much to the satisfaction, according to Acevedo, of the population of Triana, “que se alegró y consoló al doble del desconsuelo que habían recibido del lance pasado”(111) . For the reasons behind its original suspension, see Domínguez Ortiz 86. eHumanista/Cervantes 2 (2013) and shame as a verb (the action of shaming), one which

FAQs

What event in Triana (1604) provides the essay’s starting point?

A scheduled auto de fe was nearly complete when an urgent royal decree suspended it at the last moment, prompting intense public emotion among residents of Triana.

How does the essay connect honor and shame to inquisitorial effectiveness?

It argues that honor and shame operate as an emotional “habitus,” shaping social and political practice through feedback between lived experience and institutional use.

What argument does the essay make about Don Quijote’s enjaulamiento?

It proposes that the encagement reflects an inquisitorial discourse, influenced by early modern practices of dealing with criminality and public shaming, beyond earlier readings focused on madness or chivalric romance.

Aug 28, 2026

Uploaded by Jacob