Food fight: Taste in the inquisitorial trials of Ciudad Real

My dissertation alleges that, by using culinary evidence to identify Crypto-Jews, Inquisitorial agents legislated a community of taste. It then examines the rhetorical responses of the defendants whose gustatory proclivities barred them from participation in the nascent community. In each case, testimony is considered simultaneously unique—the tactical response of an individual facing annihilation—and emblematic of larger cultural trends, which are substantiated with examples taken from contemporary literature. The first chapter lays the groundwork for understanding Inquisitorial proceedings as part of a larger discourse on food. It investigates the role of kashrut in Iberian community formation from the fourth through seventeenth centuries, with an emphasis on fifteenth century Ciudad Real and the descendants of forced converts who used food tactically to maintain a communal identity. The chapter concludes by demonstrating that the first Inquisitors appropriated this tactic when they forged their own gastronomically restricted community. The Tribunal's position on taste is elucidated in the second chapter, which focuses on the testimony of a Converso courtier named Juan González Pintado who subtly mimicked Inquisitorial culinary rhetoric in order to advocate an expansion of the proposed national community. A far more radical challenge emerges in chapter three's analysis of the testimony of Juan de Chinchilla, a penurious tailor who calls into question the possibility of Inquisitorial knowledge. By claiming that he had once feigned fasting, he undermines the reliability of witness testimony and exposes the limitations of the Tribunal's gaze. Marina González, the protagonist of the fourth chapter, further unsettles Inquisitorial pretensions through repeated, escalating insistence on alternate interpretations of her diet. Ultimately, she shows that even given perfect knowledge of dietary routine—an obviously unattainable goal—the Inquisitors would be incapable of fixing its meaning. Because of the Inquisition's privileged role in the centralization of the Spanish state, its problematic relationship with taste—its own favored mechanism of distinction—haunted the early nation. Well into the seventeenth century, Cervantes, whose work concludes my dissertation, dramatized the fragility of Spanish identity by having his gracioso slip pork into a cazuela mojí in order to prove his fidelity to the emergent nation.