The Inquisitorial Trial of A Cross-Dressing

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The Inquisitorial Trial of a Cross-Dressing

Lesbian: Reactions and Responses to
Female Homosexuality in 18th-Century
Portugal
a
François Soyer PhD
a
ARC Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions, School of
History & Politics, University of Adelaide, Australia
Accepted author version posted online: 14 Jul 2014.Published
online: 11 Sep 2014.
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To cite this article: François Soyer PhD (2014) The Inquisitorial Trial of a Cross-Dressing
Lesbian: Reactions and Responses to Female Homosexuality in 18th-Century Portugal, Journal of
Homosexuality, 61:11, 1529-1557, DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2014.944044
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DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2014.944044
The Inquisitorial Trial of a Cross-Dressing

Lesbian: Reactions and Responses to Female
Homosexuality in 18th-Century Portugal
FRANÇOIS SOYER, PhD

ARC Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions, School of History & Politics, University of
Adelaide, Australia
This article analyzes the inquisitorial trial of Maria Duran, a

Catalan novice in the Dominican convent of Nossa Senhora do

Paraíso in Portugal. Maria Duran was arrested by the Inquisition
in 1741 and, after a lengthy trial, condemned in 1744 to a public
lashing and exile. She was suspected of having made a pact with
the Devil and was accused by many female witnesses of possessing a
“secret penis” that she had allegedly used in her amorous relations
with fellow nuns and novices. Her voluminous trial dossier offers
a rare and fascinating documentary insight into the often extreme
reactions that female homosexuality provoked from both men and
women in early modern Portugal. Using the evidence offered by the
18th-century trial of Maria Duran, this article highlights female
bewilderment when faced with female-on-female sexual violence
and the difficulty that men (in this case, churchmen) had coming
to terms with the existence of female homosexuality. It also discusses
the case in light of the acts/identity debate among historians of the
history of sexuality.
KEYWORDS female homosexuality, lesbianism, Inquisition,

Portugal, Early Modern
I would like to thank my colleague at the University of Adelaide, Dr. Katie Barclay,
who generously read a draft of this article, for her many useful suggestions and constructive
criticism. All errors are, of course, my own.
Address correspondence to François Soyer, ARC Centre of Excellence in the History of
Emotions, School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia. E-mail:
francois.soyer@adelaide.edu.au
1529
1530 F. Soyer
In February 1741, officials of the Inquisition arrested 30-year-old Maria

Duran, a novice in the Dominican convent of Nossa Senhora do Paraíso
in the Portuguese town of Évora. A Catalan by birth—she was born in the
remote Pyrenean village of Prullans around 1711—Maria was accused of hav-
ing had sexual intercourse with a number of women and of having made
a pact with the Devil that enabled her to make use of a fully functioning
male penis. Her alleged sexual partners included not only her fellow novices
and nuns but also women in various recolhimentos (hospices or conservato-
ries for destitute or “vulnerable” girls and women) in Lisbon, where she had
previously resided. The trial of Maria Duran was an extended process that
lasted from her arrest and imprisonment in February 1741 until her sentenc-
ing in Lisbon in June 1744. The surviving trial dossier—367 folios long—is
preserved in the Portuguese National Archives and contains a veritable trea-
sure trove of historical information pertaining to female homoeroticism and
homosexuality as well as both female and male responses to it.1
The study of female homoeroticism and homosexuality and the reactions

that it elicited in early modern Europe has been greatly hampered by a lack
of documentary evidence. This state of affairs has meant that recent studies
have focused either on evidence of female homoeroticism in literature and
artistic works or, alternatively, on the handful of surviving records of judicial
cases in which women who had sexual relations with other women were
arrested and prosecuted by the secular and religious authorities.2 The situa-
tion in the Iberian Peninsula, where the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions
operated, has only recently begun to receive serious scholarly attention.
Studies by Sherry Velasco on Spain and Ligia Bellini, Ronaldo Vainfas, Paulo
Drumond Braga, and Ana Maria Brandão on Portugal and its Brazilian colony
have all faced the same problem of documentary scarcity (Velasco, 2000,
2011; Vainfas, 1989; Bellini, 1989; Braga, 2010; Brandão, 2010).
To refer to Maria Duran as a lesbian is problematic on a number of
different levels. Social constructionists argue that the use of such a term in
the 18th century (or before) is anachronistic. This is because lesbian was
not a term that was used in Portugal (or elsewhere in Europe) at the time,
and, moreover, to use it assumes that Maria possessed a distinct identity
and sense of her sexual orientation linked to her sexual practices. On the
other hand, some modern scholars (including Valerie Traub, Alison Oram,
Annmarie Turnbull, and Judith Brown) have argued that lesbian may be
used historically as a discursive construct that is distinct from its modern
usage (Gonda & Benyon, 2010, pp. 1–7; Brown, 1986, pp. 172–174). Alison
Oram and Annmarie Turnbull have underlined not only the complexity of
the dilemma but also the necessity for a degree of historical pragmatism:
Nor can we simply apply our categories to the past. Until the mid
twentieth century, lesbians rarely identified themselves as such. ‘Lesbian
identity’ is a late-twentieth-century concept and the historical past was a
Female Homosexuality in 18th-Century Portugal 1531
very different sexual place. In the past women who loved and/or had
sex with other women, or who cross-dressed, or who resisted hetero-
sexuality, did not necessarily have a language to describe themselves
as lovers of women, or to claim any particular identity based on their
sexuality. They could only understand their desires, behaviour and expe-
riences within the social context of their own times. (. . .) If women leave
evidence that they are conscious of the power of their feelings for and
attractions to other women, we can be more confident in our attempts
to identify, albeit partially, their lives as lesbian lives. (Gonda & Benyon,
2010, pp. 1–2)
Maria Duran certainly appears to have deliberately sought to have sexual

intercourse with other women and, if credence can be given to the testimony
of the many witnesses who testified against her, was prepared to use physical
force to achieve sexual fulfillment. Under inquisitorial interrogation, Maria
admitted that she had penetrated some of her (allegedly reluctant) partners’
vaginas with a dildo (or a similar instrument) and that she had also engaged
in non-penetrative tribadism. In this article, I have therefore chosen to limit
my use of the term lesbian to the title of this article and a few occasions in
the text itself and then always historically, as a discursive construct.
The use of the term homosexual is just as contentious as that of lesbian.
Early modern Portuguese legal documents and legal institutions, including
the Inquisition, did not use the terms homosexuality or homosexual, and
these terms simply did not exist. Instead, they referred to homosexual inter-
course either as “sodomy” (sodomia) or by using the euphemism pecado
nefano (which can be translated alternatively as “the abominable sin” or “the
unmentionable sin”). As will become clear below, the term sodomia was also
used to refer to sexual relations between women, and this use had been offi-
cialized as early as the 13th century, when Saint Thomas Aquinas included
sexual relations between women in his definition of the “vice of sodomy”
in his Summa Theologia (On unnatural Sex II-II, 154, 11). Overall, how-
ever, I have decided to use the expression female homosexual (or female
homosexuality) rather than female sodomite to refer to women who had sex-
ual intercourse with other women for the same pragmatic reasons that I have
used lesbian and always without making any assumptions about the sexual
identity of Maria Duran or her (often unwilling) sexual partners. While the
alternative expression of female homoeroticism is currently favored by some
historians of female same-sex love in Portugal and could also have been
used, I have favored the use of female homosexuality because of its clear
evocation of physical sexual intercourse rather than mere sexual attraction
(Coelho, 2009, pp. 30–31). Moreover, as will become obvious in the fol-
lowing pages, many (perhaps even most) of Maria Duran’s sexual partners
claimed to have been forced into sexual intercourse, and, as such, their own
sexual orientation is impossible to identify.
1532 F. Soyer
The trial of Maria Duran offers extraordinary evidence of male and

female reactions and responses to nonconformity in an early modern Iberian
society: first to the transgression of gender norms and ambiguous gender
and, second, to female homosexuality. This article will focus on the latter of
these two aspects as the former has already been studied elsewhere (Soyer,
2012, pp. 210–285). After providing a concise description of official legal
responses to female homosexuality and the trial itself, this article will use the
trial of Maria Duran as a source of historical evidence with which to con-
sider the following questions: How can an inquisitorial trial provide insight
into male and female attitudes into female homosexuality in 18th-century
Portugal? How did prevalent gendered preconceptions about violent sexual
agency and the debates concerning the ability of the Devil to alter human
bodies influence these responses to female homosexuality? To what extent
is it possible to trust such a source and use it as a historical document about
attitudes to female homosexuality?
FEMALE HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE LAW IN MEDIEVAL AND

EARLY MODERN PORTUGAL
In Portugal, the legal authorities began to pay attention to female

homosexuality only at the end of the 15th century. Medieval Portuguese
legislation, such as the Ordenações Afonsinas—a legal compilation ordered
by King Afonso V (1438–1481)—does not mention female homosexuality.
The first reference to female homosexuality appears not in a legal docu-
ment but rather in the 1489 Tratado de Confissom, a manual for confessors
and also the first book to have been printed in vernacular Portuguese. The
Tratado refers to female homosexuals and their use of dildos and advises
confessors to assign appropriate penances to “the woman who climaxes
with another woman using an instrument [of the kind] that women tend to
use.” Confessors were also advised to issue harsher penances to the “active”
woman (who handled the dildo) rather than the “passive” one (whose vagina
was penetrated by the dildo; Machado, 2002, Vol. 1, p. 16).
The first royal edict to explicitly target female homosexuality was pro-
mulgated on 20 December 1499, during the reign of Manuel I (1495–1521).
The Portuguese monarch, having received advice from his councilors and
lawyers, decreed that convicted female homosexuals were to suffer the same
sentence as male homosexuals, namely the death penalty:
Sitting in judgment, the King, our lord, was informed that there existed
some doubts amongst lawyers whether when a woman slept with another
woman as if [one of them] were a man, she should be sentenced like a
man who has committed the sin of sodomy in accordance with the Law.
A gathering of lawyers who were present determined that the sentence
should be the same as that of a man who commits such a sin with another
man (. . .). This applies just as much to the woman who is [active] like
a man as the one who consents [to be passive] like a woman. (Aguiar,
1930, p. 15)
To date, there is only very limited documentary evidence that this law
was ever implemented. A year or two before 1551, a resident of Lisbon
named Branca Freire who had been convicted of having eloped with another
woman, named Joana Fernandes, was condemned to a sentence of seven
years of exile in one of the Portuguese outposts in North Africa. Branca Freire
claimed after her arrest to have been deceived by her lover and accused
Joana Fernandes, whom she blamed for having “seduced” her and who she
claimed was a “bad woman” (maa molher), a witch and a sorceress. On the
basis of these claims, Branca Freire received her sentence of exile while
Joana Fernandes appears (although this is, unfortunately, not explicitly spec-
ified) to have been burnt. On appeal, King João III (1521–1557) reduced the
sentence of Branca Freire and eventually limited it to the payment of a fine
(Braga, 1996).
At the very least, the decree of King Manuel certainly demonstrates
that lawyers and jurists, while initially perplexed by female homosexuality,
decided to classify it as a crime in the same legal category as male
homosexuality. The decree was later incorporated into the legal compila-
tion (Ordenações) of King Manuel, and the sentence imposed on female
homosexuals was officially to be death by burning at the stake, the scatter-
ing of their ashes, as well as the confiscation and division of their property
for the benefit of the Crown and those who denounced them. After Portugal
came under Habsburg rule in 1580, these laws were incorporated into the
Ordenações Filipinas, and it was specified that female homosexuals were
to be burnt at the stake like male homosexuals since those women “com-
mit a sin contra natura with others and in the same way that [homosexual]
men do.” The only change was that the burden of proof to secure a con-
viction for all tribunals, including the Inquisition, was set at a minimum of
two witnesses offering testimony regarding two separate homosexual acts
(Ordenações Filipinas, libro V, título 13). It is important to note, however,
that none of these royal decrees sought to define with a greater degree of
exactitude what constituted “female sodomy” and how such a crime could
be committed without a penis.
The attitude of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Portugal toward the
prosecution of female homosexuals was far from clear until the middle of the
17th century. Documentary evidence of female homosexuality in continental
Portugal itself is extremely rare, and what exists suggests that, despite the
decree of King Manuel, the inquisitors used their discretion in determining
their sentences and did not apply the death penalty in such cases. In 1555,
the inquisitorial tribunal of Lisbon prosecuted a young mulata washerwoman
1534 F. Soyer
named Clara Fernandes, who was married and a resident of Lisbon, for
having engaged in “the sin of sodomy” (peccado de sodomia) with a younger
teenage woman. According to the transcript of her trial, the two women
kissed, hugged, and Clara “placed herself on top on the other woman like
a man places himself on top of a woman” (em cyma da outra como hum
homen em cyma de huma mulher). Clara Fernandes defended herself by
claiming not to possess a penis (and thus unable to commit “sodomy”) but
was eventually condemned by the inquisitors to suffer a lashing, the loss of
her property, and life imprisonment.3
During a visitation of the province of Entre-Douro-e-Minho in northern
Portugal in 1570, a priest denounced two of his female parishioners because
“they have been sinning the sin that is contra natura with one another for
five years, embracing, kissing and placing their hands on their vaginas to
fondle each other.” As the information, to the visiting inquisitor’s disgust,
was revealed to be the result of confidences made by the women during
confession and thus not legally receivable, no action was taken against the
women, and the priest was sternly reprimanded for his failure to keep the
secret of the confession (Rosário, 1978, pp. 48–49). The few cases of women
put on trial by the Inquisition for “female sodomy” in continental Portugal
during the first half of the 17th century actually involved women accused
of engaging in heterosexual anal intercourse. They were always prostitutes
or “vulnerable” women, such as destitute widows or abandoned wives, who
defended themselves by claiming to have been forced to have anal inter-
course by their male partners.4 The largest haul of documentary evidence
resulted from a “visitation” of Brazil in the 1590s conducted by an inquisitor
from Lisbon, when 29 women were either denounced or willingly confessed
to committing homosexual acts (Bellini, 1989; Vainfas, 1989, pp. 176–181).
Occasionally, it is difficult to distinguish what may have been homo-
erotic behavior from extreme religious fervor. In June 1574, the inquisitorial
tribunal of Lisbon received a denunciation concerning an unusual religious
ritual of two nuns of the convent of Santa Marta in Lisbon. The friar who
denounced them, after having been informed of these events by the Mother
Superior of the convent, claimed that Sister Maria do Espírito Santo, the old-
est of the two, had told him that she had been moved by her religious fervor
to consider the younger nun, Sister Camila de Jesus, as her spiritual daugh-
ter. In accordance with her maternal feelings, she had breastfed the younger
nun during six months. This was an act, she claimed, which offered her an
inner grace (graça enterior) but no sensual pleasure. The scandalized friar
apparently believed that such behavior exceeded the boundaries of accept-
able religious practice and feared that such sensuality was inspired by the
Devil. The Inquisition was prepared to consider such acts as the result of the
“ignorance, imagination and false delusions” of the two young women (who
were still in their early 20s). Accordingly both women received relatively
light sentences in 1575, but, to ensure they did not repeat such behavior,
they were ordered never to have any further dealings with each other in
perpetuity (Baião, 1909, pp. 156–159).5
The successive printed guides of procedural rules (regimentos) of the
Portuguese Inquisition, essentially the judicial protocol by which the insti-
tution regulated itself, are ambiguous. The regimento published in 1640
instructed inquisitors to sentence any woman “convicted of sodomy” (com-
preendida de sodomia) to terms of exile in either the archipelago of São
Tomé and Príncipe (off the coast of western Africa) or Angola (southern
Africa). It was advised, however, that such women were preferably not to be
sentenced in a spectacular public sentencing (the infamous inquisitorial auto-
da-fé) but rather within the inquisitorial palace because of “the great scandal
and damage that could result from their appearance in a public auto for
such crimes” (pelo grande escándalo e dano que pode resultar de se levarem
a auto público semelhantes culpas). This concern to avoid a public scandal
led the regimentos to prescribe appearances at public auto-da-fés only in
particular cases when special considerations justified them and that on those
special occasions the women concerned were to be flogged to ensure their
public humiliation. Unfortunately, the regimentos are not explicit enough
to be certain whether or not these stipulations were intended to refer to
female homosexuals or to women who had heterosexual anal intercourse or,
indeed, to both kinds of “female sodomy” (Castro, 1640, livro III, título 25,
article 13).
Although the Inquisition does not appear to have shown any interest in
prosecuting female homosexuals, the issue of whether or not it should even
do so was debated toward the end of 1644 and the beginning of 1645, when
a query from the inquisitors of the tribunal based in Goa in Portuguese India
arrived in Lisbon. The Goan inquisitors inquired from the General Council
of the Portuguese Inquisition whether the prosecution of women who had
vaginal or anal intercourse with other women, including instances when
a dildo was used, fell within the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. In a clear
sign that the Portuguese Inquisition had no established procedure regard-
ing female homosexuals, the members of the General Council convened a
group of three inquisitors and four theologians to consider the question.
After conducting an extensive survey of the existing literature and citing
no fewer than 15 respected authorities, the group recommended that the
Portuguese Inquisition should not conduct any further investigations into
cases of purported female homosexuality unless the papacy issued a new
decree on the subject. They neatly summed up their argument by stating
that the whole business “was dubious” (sendo a materia duvidosa).6 Even
though the Portuguese Inquisition officially no longer prosecuted female
homosexuals from 1645 onward, the new inquisitorial regimento composed
in 1774 still contained a clause referring to the sentences due to women
guilty of “female sodomy” that was identical to that in the regimento of
1640. While this may have been an oversight, it seems more reasonable to
1536 F. Soyer
conclude that the sentence was now certainly intended for woman convicted
of committing heterosexual anal intercourse (Cosme da Cunha, 1774, título
22, article 12).
Royal decrees, laws, and inquisitorial regulations offer interesting
evidence of how the secular and legal authorities reacted to female
homosexuality but fail to provide any sense of the mental and emotional
responses of men and women to it. The type of document that would offer
this, actual trials of female homosexuals, is, unfortunately, cruelly lacking.
This article, however, seeks to bring to light just such a document from
the 18th century and analyze its usefulness in reconstructing responses to
female homosexuality. Given that the Portuguese Inquisition decided to no
longer investigate female homosexuality in 1645, it may come as a surprise
to find out that the best-documented case of a lesbian arrested and actually
prosecuted—that of a Dominican novice named Maria Duran—took place
nearly a century later.
THE TRIAL OF MARIA DURAN: A SUMMARY
The arrest of Maria Duran was brought about by a letter sent by the Prior of
the Dominican monastery of São Domingos in the Portuguese capital to the
inquisitorial tribunal of Lisbon on January 28, 1741. Father Pedro de Santo
Tomás informed the inquisitors that he had received disturbing news con-
cerning a novice in the convent of Nossa Senhora do Paraíso, a Dominican
nunnery situated in the town of Évora, for which he was responsible as the
head of that Order in Portugal. He had received the testimony of numerous
women stating that they had engaged in sexual intercourse with Maria Duran,
whom they swore under oath to be a man in possession of a penis (membro
viril). A physical examination had been conducted by a qualified surgeon,
and, in accordance with Galenic medicine’s “one-sex” anatomical theory that
vaginas were just inverted penises and its premises regarding bodily thermo-
dynamics, Maria Duran had been made to stand in a tub of hot water so that
any organ or organs concealed within her body would appear. Since Galenic
medicine held that the body temperature of women was lower than that of
men, it appeared logical that any male sexual organ retained within Maria
Duran’s body would be forced to emerge if her body temperature was thus
raised. The experiment was a failure, however, and no evidence that Maria
Duran was anything other than a woman was discovered.7 Consequently, the
prior concluded his letter to the inquisitors by stating that there existed grave
fears that Maria Duran had made a pact with the Devil and that she must
possess a secret penis that enabled her to have intercourse with women but
that mysteriously disappeared so that she appeared to be a woman when
she was physically examined.8
Upon her arrest, Maria Duran was transferred from Évora to Lisbon
so that her trial could take place there. The inquisition gathered testimony
from as many witnesses as possible and focused particularly on those who
claimed to have had sexual intercourse with Maria both in the convent in
Évora and in the various recolhimentos in Lisbon. The women interrogated
provided copious testimony regarding their relations with Maria Duran and
their opinions of her. These witnesses alleged under oath that they had
sexual relations with Maria Duran, and that, to their surprise, she had offered
all the signs of possessing the sexual organs of a man. The following excerpt
from the testimony of one of the women from the Lisboan recolhimento of
Nossa Senhora da Encarnação—Maria de Jesus, who was married9 and aged
36—is typical of the confusion surrounding Maria Duran’s gender:
It was certainly the case that, on the night in question [when Maria Duran
attempted to seduce the witness], she took off Maria de Jesus’ clothes and
the witness felt a bulge rub against her thigh that seemed to her to be a
penis even though she did not observe it. (. . .).10
If the testimony of the witnesses is to be believed, Maria Duran’s sex-

ual advances generally began with endearments (palavras amatorias) and
attempts to persuade them that she was a man. She could, however, also
rapidly become violent, as another recolhida, this time a woman of Italian
origin named Vitória da Rosa and aged 28, alleged in her testimony:
After they had both entered into the cell, [Maria] closed the door and
punched the witness. [Maria] dragged [the witness] to the bed and threw
her on it. Following this, [Maria] took her robes off and heaved herself
on top of her like a man and wished to have carnal intercourse with the
witness, touching [the witness’s] private parts with her penis. The witness
clearly felt that [Maria] had a [penis]. [Maria] did not consummate the
act because the gong rang [for dinner] in the refectory and people were
heard coming [down the corridor outside of the cell]. This is the reason
why Maria let her go.11
After having sexual relations, Maria Duran usually told the witnesses to keep
these relations secret and not to tell anyone else in the convent or recolhi-
mento, including their confessors. She also regularly made threats of physical
violence, either explicit or implicit, to ensure the witnesses remained silent
and did not betray her.
The first interrogation of Maria Duran was held on the morning of
March 13, 1741. Maria revealed that she had previously been married in
her native village of Prullans and had borne a son who had died in infancy.
Questioned about her marital life, Maria asserted that she had fled her hus-
band because of her fear of contracting syphilis through him and had taken
1538 F. Soyer
to an errant life, dressing as a man while traveling through southern France

and Catalonia before serving in a regiment of dragoons of the Spanish royal
army. To confirm the veracity of these claims, the inquisitors of Lisbon wrote
to their counterparts of the inquisitorial tribunal of Barcelona. In due course,
a letter from Barcelona, including sworn witness testimony, was received
that not only confirmed these statements but yielded further information that
Maria Duran’s crossdressing had been exposed in Barcelona and that she
had served in various regiments of dragoons of the Spanish royal army.12
When questioned about the accusation that she was a man, possessed
a penis, and had engaged in carnal intercourse with a number of women,
Maria Duran steadfastly denied these claims. She admitted only to having
engaged in “disgusting relations” (comunicação torpe)—thus explicitly con-
fessing her participation in female homosexual acts—with many women,
providing the names of many of the witnesses who had testified against
her. Maria emphatically confirmed that she was never the passive partner
(paciente) during intercourse and that she masturbated herself during inter-
course, using one of her own fingers because she did not want the other
women to touch her vagina.13 When the inquisitor ordered Maria to pro-
vide a description of her “lascivious actions and obscene fondlings” (acções
lascivas, e tocamentos obcenos), she did so in the following terms:
The manner in which these obscene fondlings occurred is that [Maria

Duran] penetrated [the women] with the thumb of her right hand, some-
times wrapped in the folds of her shirt, but sometimes without any cloth
wrapping it. At the same time, she masturbated herself with the other
fingers of that [right] hand. She never consented that any of her friends
fondle her genitals or penetrate her as she did to them. All her repulsive
deeds took place in the same manner.14
Maria also acknowledged that she had occasionally used a dildo, which she
described as a small “pincushion” (agulheiro) that she had manufactured
from cloth.15 She added that she had quarreled with the women with whom
she had had sexual relations in such a fashion and was adamant that it was
this lingering ill-feeling that was causing the same women—such as Maria
de Jesus, for example, and to whom Maria Duran referred collectively as
“dissemblers” (embusteiras)—to bear false witness against her.16
For the remainder of the trial of Maria Duran, the inquisitor interrogating
her (and his colleagues) attempted to make sense of the radical contradiction
that existed between the sworn witness testimony that Maria Duran had a
penis and the categorical results of the repeated physical examinations that
Maria Duran underwent and that were conducted by the leading experts in
Lisbon, including the famous Italian anatomist Santucci. In their exasperation,
the inquisitors had Maria tortured on April 15, 1744. She was attached to
the potro (the rack) and ropes fixed around her limbs were progressively
tightened, but her torment yielded nothing more than screams of agony
that were recorded by the inquisitorial notary, and she did not confess to
possessing a penis or having concluded a demonic pact.17
Unable to make any headway, the inquisitors gathered with their
deputies on May 11, 1744 and reviewed the case.18 In spite of the absence
of any physical evidence of a penis, they decided that the burden of evi-
dence from the witnesses’ testimony was sufficient to warrant a conviction
for the charge that Maria Duran was guilty of suspicion of heresy since
“being a woman and without the assistance of a male sexual organ” (sendo
a R. verdadeira mulher sem participação de sexo mascolino) she had made
a pact with the Devil permitting her to deceive her partners into believ-
ing that she had a male sexual organ. They nevertheless sentenced her to
suffer a relatively light sentence: to abjure her sins in a private auto-da-fé
held in the building occupied by the Inquisition and perpetual exile from
Portugal, which she was to leave within 15 days. The verdict was not, how-
ever, unanimous. One inquisitor expressed the conviction that there was
not sufficient physical evidence to justify a conviction. The General Council
of the Portuguese Inquisition gave its formal approval to the sentence on
May 22, 1744, although it modified the sentence to include a public flog-
ging in the streets of Lisbon and the abjuration of her sins in a public
auto-da-fé.19
Maria Duran appeared at the auto-da-fé held in Lisbon on June 21, 1744.
Along with the other prisoners—22 men and 11 women accused of diverse
crimes against the Christian faith—she was paraded through the streets of
Lisbon.20 She was described in the official sentence as being guilty of having
made a pact with the Devil, and it was specified that Maria “committed acts
that were naturally repugnant and contrary to the normal order of Nature”
(obrava factos naturalmente Repugnantes e Contrarios a ordem commũ da
natureza). The rationale for the sentence was expressed in the following
manner:
The accused [Maria Duran] did not make a full and frank confession of
her crimes, but from the evidence of the prosecution it was abundantly
clear that in the guise of a man she practiced and encouraged such
disgusting behavior in spite of the fact that she was a woman. This could
only have happened by means of an explicit pact with the Devil, as was
confirmed by the miserable wretches with whom she committed [these
crimes], whom she swore to secrecy.21
MARIA DURAN AND FEMALE REACTIONS TO HOMOSEXUALITY
The interrogations that Maria underwent and the detailed witness testimony
collected by the inquisitors offers modern historians a rare insight into both
1540 F. Soyer
male and female attitudes toward female homosexuality. The female wit-
nesses who had sexual relations with Maria, and who claimed that she was
a man, offered incredibly detailed testimony to support these claims, and it
is this testimony that constitutes one of the most historically valuable aspects
of the trial. In total, the Inquisition collected the testimony of 12 women,
both inmates of the recolhimentos in Lisbon and nuns or novices from the
Dominican convent in Évora, of whom six admitted to having consummated
sexual relations with Maria Duran. These six women—the recolhidas Maria
de Jesus, Vitória da Rosa, and Verónica Maria as well as the nuns Teresa Maria
Evangelista, Isabel Elena dos Anjos, and Agostinha Teresa da Purificação22 —
each stated categorically and under oath that Maria Duran had initiated and
engaged in sexual relations with them, and in many cases had sexually
assaulted them at times when they were alone with her. Furthermore, these
witnesses were adamant that Maria Duran’s sexual behavior was characteris-
tically masculine and that Maria Duran had a penis. Crucially, however, none
of the witnesses actually claimed to have observed the penis of Maria Duran
but swore that they had sensed an erect organ either penetrating them or
rubbing against them during intercourse and also to have discovered traces
of semen after coitus.
These allegations were not expressed in vague or general terms
but always conveyed in remarkably—indeed, sometimes excruciatingly—
detailed testimony. It would be impossible to cite the entirety of the
voluminous witness testimony in this short work, but a few choice passages
will be sufficient to illustrate the tenor of these declarations. The recolhida
Maria de Jesus, for example, vividly recalled her sexual relations with Maria
Duran and specified that she “believed that [Maria Duran ejaculated] since
[afterwards] she found one of her thighs to be wet.”23 Likewise, when an
official sent by the Inquisition interrogated the nun Teresa Maria Evangelista,
she described her sexual relations with Maria Duran in a very similar fashion:
[Teresa Maria Evangelista] stated that she had some confidences and inti-
mate relations with [Maria Duran]. During these, in the midst of many
embraces and fondlings, the aforesaid [Maria Duran] twice persuaded her
to have carnal intercourse during which she, the witness, adopted the
posture of a woman and Maria [Duran] that of a man. [In this manner,
Maria Duran] touched her private parts and the area around them, she
is not very certain about exactly where because she pulled her body
away so that [Maria Duran] could not penetrate her and [Maria Duran]
did not [penetrate her]. During these fondlings, it seemed to her that
[Maria Duran] was a man and possessed a penis from which she ejacu-
lated semen over those parts of [Teresa Maria Evangelista] that came into
contact with it. On one of those occasions they were both on a bed and
on the other they were not but their [lovemaking] position remained the
same. [Teresa Maria Evangelista] never saw nor palpated the private parts
of Maria Duran and as such does not know whether or not she possesses
both [female and male] sexual organs. She only heard [Maria Duran] claim
on a number of occasions that she possessed both of them. Since [Teresa
Maria Evangelista] did not observe them or palpate them, she does not
know whether one of them is concealed or, if this is the case, how it is
hidden.24
Even though Teresa Maria Evangelista had not seen or carefully palpated
Maria Duran’s genitals, she was nevertheless adamant that during Maria
Duran’s sexual advances, “it seemed to her that [Maria Duran] was a man and
possessed a penis from which she ejaculated semen on those parts of [Teresa
Maria Evangelista] that came into contact with it.” The detailed nature of the
testimony and the determination of the witnesses in their claims that Maria
Duran was a man without having actually observed a penis are particularly
striking. As will be discussed below, it strongly suggests that these women
found themselves in a state of denial and bewilderment when suddenly
confronted with the violent homosexual desires of Maria Duran.
Some of the women reported disturbing rumors that circulated either in

their recolhimento or in the Dominican convent according to which Maria
Duran had made one of her conquests pregnant (though the latter had mis-
carried) and had made a pact with the Devil. A few witnesses maintained
that Maria Duran had herself made such claims. The only physical evidence
of such an alleged pact was some mysterious scratches that appeared on
Maria Duran’s body, which had been seen by some of the witnesses. It is
clear that Maria Duran actively helped to spread these rumors. By way of
illustration, it is possible to cite the testimony of one recolhida named Josefa
Maria Xavier:
She adds that she heard Maria Duran say on a number of occasions that
the Devil came to persecute her at night and that one day, in the morning,
[Maria Duran] showed scratch marks on her arms to [Josefa Maria Xavier],
telling her that the Devil had made them during the previous night. She
has always presumed the worst about [Maria Duran] because she has
never seen her perform a virtuous action and came to wonder whether
what [Maria Duran] was telling her was the result of [Maria Duran] having
made a pact with the Devil.25
Another recolhida, Vitória da Rosa, made a similar claim:
She adds that when the aforesaid [Maria Duran] committed acts of carnal
intercourse with her, which was during a space of twenty to twenty-five
days, [Maria Duran] frequently told her after waking up in the mornings
that she had slept very badly. [Maria Duran] showed her scratch marks
and bruises all over her body except on her arms and face, upon which
the witness did not observe any similar marks. When she asked [Maria
Duran] what this was and how these had occurred, [Maria Duran] always
1542 F. Soyer
replied that she had gone about with witches during the night and asked
the witness not to speak of this or reveal it [to anyone].26
Later in her trial, Maria Duran admitted to having made these claims but
dismissed them as “jokes” (galantarias) that had never been meant to be
taken seriously.27
It is striking that the female witnesses who had sexual relations with
Maria Duran refused to believe that she could have been a woman. They
claimed that she was either a man or a hermaphrodite or that she had con-
cluded a pact with the Devil that gave her a concealed penis. How can
we make sense of such extreme reactions? The possibility that Maria Duran
could have been the victim of a conspiracy appears difficult to sustain. The
witnesses came from different institutions (the recolhimentos in Lisbon and
the Dominican convent in Évora), and there is no indication of any exist-
ing communication or links between these institutions and their residents.
The inquisitors certainly never considered such a possibility to be credible,

although they were clearly at a loss to reconcile such detailed testimony
with the result of the physical examinations carried out at their behest. The
inquisitors believed that they could not dismiss matching testimony from
so many witnessed that was so detailed. Indeed, in a report submitted to
the General Council of the Portuguese Inquisition in August 1741, inquisitor
Trigoso and his colleagues declared that they considered it “morally impossi-
ble” (moralmente impossivel) for so many witnesses to have been mistaken.
Finally, they also noted that one of the witnesses, the recolhida Maria de
Jesus in Lisbon, was a married woman and as such could be expected to be
able to distinguish between heterosexual and homosexual female intercourse
through her personal past sexual experience with her husband.28
The witnesses accounted for their conviction that Maria Duran was a
man by stressing sensory evidence. One woman claimed to have felt a “pro-
tuberance that seemed to be a penis” (vulto que lhe pareceo ser membro
viril), while another swore that she had felt Maria Duran ejaculate “male
semen” (semen de membro viril) and categorically discounted the possi-
bility that the fluid could have been some “female humour” from Maria’s
vagina.29 Similarly, one of the nuns interrogated assured the inquisitorial
official collecting her testimony of her conviction that a white substance she
had discovered on the bedsheets was male semen belonging to Maria Duran
and not vaginal secretions “since the witness recognised it to be human
semen and not some other bodily fluid because of its colour and foulness.”30
When Inquisitor Francisco Mendo Trigoso suggested to one of the witnesses,
Verónica Maria, that she might have mistaken a finger or dildo for a penis,
Verónica firmly denied this as “it appeared to her to be a human penis
because she felt it within her.”31
To this sensory evidence, the witnesses added claims that Maria Duran’s
behavior and appearance corresponded to masculine norms rather than
female ones. One witness, for instance, stated that Maria had approached her
with tender words “as if she was a man courting a woman” (palauras amato-
rias como se fossem de homem que solicitava mulher), and the defendant was
also accused of being a man dressed up as a woman but whose everyday
deportment was masculine (era homem vestido em traje de mulher, assim
porque em tudo o parecia nas acçoes). Finally, Maria Duran was accused of
possessing the ultimate characteristic of masculinity: the trace of a beard or at
least stubble. One witness maintained that Maria Duran’s face made it clear
that she shaved every day since, when she had touched it during intercourse,
it felt rough. Moreover, rumors circulated in one of the Lisboan recolhimentos
where Maria Duran resided that she owned a box full of shaving implements
as well as a male outfit and a sword.32
The testimony of the witnesses was not, however, always unanimous in
relation to Maria Duran’s conduct. Some contradictory testimony only added
to the complexity of the case and the confusion of the inquisitors. While one
of the women interrogated vouchsafed that she had observed Maria Duran
adopt the female position of crouching down to urinate, and two witnesses
had observed evidence of menstruation—in the form of soiled chemises
bearing bloodstains—another witness was adamant that Maria Duran always
urinated with the posture and method of a man, presumably a reference
to the male habit of standing up while urinating. Moreover, she added that
she had never observed any evidence that Maria experienced the monthly
“complaint” (queixa) that women generally suffered.33
Finally, the witnesses almost always pointed to Maria Duran’s conduct
during intercourse as evidence of her masculinity. The trial reveals the exis-
tence of strongly gendered norms and preconceptions regarding the manner
in which sexual intercourse was supposed to take place. The nuns in Évora
and inmates of the recolhimentos in Lisbon swore under oath that Maria
always made love “like a man” (como homem), referring to the “missionary
position” in which the one partner lies on top of the other.34 The recol-
hidas and nuns clearly expected men to play the dominant/active role in
lovemaking, and that, in addition to this, heterosexual sexual intercourse
usually took place in the “missionary position”—in which a male partner
lays on top of the female, facing her—which was apparently understood to
be a quintessentially heterosexual position for sexual intercourse. When the
female witnesses, both those who had engaged in sexual relations with Maria
and those who had not, spoke about these sexual relations, they alluded to
them with a variety of euphemistic expressions such as “illicit friendship”
(amizade illicitta), “illicit dealings” (trato illicit), or, more explicitly as “filthy
actions” (actos torpes) and “carnal delectations” (deleytações carnaes), but
the actual expression “tribadism” was not used.
From a 21st-century perspective, the reactions of the recolhidas and
nuns seem to be those of victims in the face of homosexual sexual vio-
lence who responded to it by seeking refuge and comfort in denial.
1544 F. Soyer
Eighteenth-century Portugal, like the rest of Europe, was a profoundly phal-

locentric society in which a penis was deemed to be the essential active
element in sexual intercourse, and rape, as well as other forms of sex-
ual violence, was commonly understood to be an exclusively heterosexual
phenomenon inflicted by men upon women. Medieval and early modern
Portuguese legislation paid close attention to heterosexual rape and sexual
violence, described as estupro or rapto. The 15th-century royal law code of
King Afonso V (the Ordenações Afonsinas) established the death penalty for
men guilty of raping women irrespective of context but required a woman
to report the assault immediately. Although the law did not allow for any
exceptions, it implicitly did so by stipulating that the death sentence could
not be commuted when the raped woman was married, a nun, a widow, or a
virgin. Thus, it would seem, the law offered rapists the opportunity to nego-
tiate a settlement with the aggrieved family of a woman who did not belong
to one of these categories. The 16th-century Ordenações Manuelinas and
later the 17th-century Ordenações Filipinas similarly punished any man who
forced a woman to “sleep” (dormir) with him with the death penalty and
extended the sentence to include the rape of slave women and prostitutes
(Ordenações Afonsinas, livro V, título 6; Ordenações Manuelinas, livro V,
título 14; Ordenações Manuelinas, livro V, título 18).
Portuguese churchmen and especially the authors of confessors’ man-
uals sought to establish a distinction between fornication and rape in order
to help confessors determine the level of personal responsibility borne by
a raped woman seeking absolution (Mendes de Almeida, 1994, pp. 91–93).
In stark contrast to this, woman-on-woman sexual violence was not an even-
tuality that was addressed either in Portuguese legislation or by Portuguese
theologians. As we have seen above, it was not until 1499 that a law was
passed against female homosexual intercourse, but this law—and all the oth-
ers that followed it—never considered the possibility that intercourse might
have been forced by one woman upon another and not voluntarily. The
reason for this oversight might well reside in the fact that female-on-female
sexual violence, in stark contrast to heterosexual rape, did not present the
same risk of unwanted pregnancy, doubtful paternity, and, ultimately, in a
society that perceived women as subject to the authority of their husbands
or fathers, sullied family honor.
This legal discourse of sex in which women were consistently repre-
sented as the passive victims of male sexual aggression also helps to account
for the consistent manner in which the women who had sexual relations
with Maria Duran presented themselves as victims. Their testimony reflects
a social environment in which it was expected that violent sexual agency
would always be male, and the testimony of the witnesses was therefore
framed in such a manner as to conform to (and confirm) the preconceptions
of both the witnesses and the inquisitors. It is worth noting how similar this
is to the situation in early modern England, where in the words of Laura
Gowing, “in court, women’s stories of their sexual experiences emphasised

one thing above all others: passivity” (Gowing, 2003, pp. 85–90).
Taking this into consideration, the reactions of the nuns and recolhidas
must be understood as their attempts to rationalize both an unexpected and
sometimes traumatic sexual experience by identifying Maria Duran as male
and by presenting themselves as the victims of a heterosexual assault. The
silence surrounding female homosexual rape in early modern Portugal—
whether it was the result of a taboo or because it was so unusual—left
the victims of Maria Duran unprepared and unable to understand what was
happening to them. It is worth noting that, even today, recent studies of
woman-to-woman sexual violence are relatively few in number. Those that
exist confirm that victims of this form of sexual violence usually react with
disbelief that a woman could be a sexual abuser, a role that remains tradition-
ally ascribed to men. A 2002 study of 70 women sexually assaulted by other
women highlighted the trauma and denial suffered by the victims of female-
on-female sexual violence as well as their perception of sexual violence as

an essentially heterosexual phenomenon (Girshick, 2002, pp. 63–99).
MALE ATTITUDES TO FEMALE HOMOSEXUALITY: THE

INQUISITORS AND MARIA DURAN
If the attitudes and reactions of the female witnesses may be understood

as an extreme response to female-on-female sexual violence, the responses
of the inquisitors who were responsible for the trial of Maria Duran are
no less interesting. The trial dossier provides a rare insight into the different
responses of two inquisitors of the Lisboan tribunal: Francisco Mendo Trigoso
and Simão José Silvério Lobo.
Francisco Mendo Trigoso was the main interrogator of Maria Duran
during her trial. He was born in Matacães, a village in central Portugal,
in 1692 and ordained on December 21, 1720. The careers and biogra-
phies of Portuguese inquisitors are still to be studied in detail, but what
is known about inquisitor Trigoso is that, after serving as inquisitor in the
tribunal of Évora from 1730 onward, he was eventually transferred to that of
Lisbon. By 1741 he was an experienced inquisitor, and he eventually rose in
the ecclesiastical hierarchy to join the General Council of the Portuguese
Inquisition in 1745 before he finally became bishop of Viseu (northern
Portugal) from August 1770 until his death in September 1778. His colleague
Simão José Silvério Lobo had become an inquisitor in Lisbon in 1739 and
eventually rose to take a seat on the General Council of the Portuguese
Inquisition in 1752. As yet, little more is known about these inquisitors
beyond these factual biographical details, but there is no cause to suspect
that the training and schooling of either of these men was anything except
the standard one of 18th-century Portuguese ecclesiastics. As will be clear
1546 F. Soyer
below, neither inquisitor Trigoso nor Lobo had certainly ever been prepared
to deal with the aggressive sexuality of Maria Duran (Fortunato de Almeida,
1968, vol. 2, p. 678; 1970, vol. 3, p. 591; Farinha, 1990, pp. 312, 320, 333).
The attitude of the church hierarchy, and thus of the inquisitors, toward
female homosexuality was characterized both by a lack of understanding
and a tendency to perceive it as less dangerous than male sodomy. Biblical
condemnation of female homosexuality existed in the form of a single refer-
ence to it in Romans 1:24–26, and later Christian authors explicitly associated
it with male homosexuality. Saint Thomas Aquinas, in his examination of
anal intercourse (Summa Theologia, On unnatural sex II-II, 154, 11), con-
demned female homosexuality alongside male homosexuality as the “vice
of sodomy.” Such an unambiguous condemnation did not, however, always
result in male and female homosexuality being treated as equally grave.
In the 16th century, the Spanish jurist Gregorio López considered it to be a
grave vice but nonetheless less serious than male homosexuality. Quoting
the 15th-century biblical exegete Alonso Tostado, Gregorio López main-

tained that sexual intercourse between women could not “be compared to
the abominable vice of sodomy committed between men. Sodomy between
men perturbs the Order of Nature far more than sodomy between women”
(López, 1844, p. 476).
The first serious attempt by a theologian to examine the problem of
“female sodomy” came in the form of the work titled De Delectis e Poenis,
published in 1700 and written by an Italian Franciscan and inquisitorial advi-
sor named Ludovico Maria Sinistrari d’Ameno (1622–1701). Sinistrari admitted
in his work that he had approached a considerable number of “learned men”
who all candidly confessed to him that they were “completely ignorant as
to how [female homosexuality] can be different from the pollution produced
by rubbing their private parts together.” Fray Sinistrari argued that “female
sodomy” (as opposed to tribadism) could only take place, and be punished
with the death penalty, in exceptional cases when the vagina and the anus
of two individuals came into physical contact and the abnormally developed
and long clitoris of one woman penetrated the other’s anus. The Franciscan
friar discounted the use of dildos and fingers for anal or vaginal penetration
as legally constituting an act of “female sodomy.” The work of Sinistrari does
not, however, appear to have circulated widely in the Iberian Peninsula, and
he was not mentioned during the deliberations of the inquisitors and their
deputies in the trial of Maria Duran (Sinistrari d’Ameno 1700 and 1958).
The transcriptions of the interrogation sessions conducted by Francisco
Mendo Trigoso, and of the deliberations that he held with his fellow inquisi-
tors and deputies, are less explicitly revealing than the witness testimony but
still offer precious insights. While the female witnesses explicitly described
their reactions, the inquisitor’s attitudes must be sought within the subtext
of the questions he put to Maria Duran. The lines of questioning as well
as the tenor of the questions and deliberations expose the mental outlook
of these men and their understanding (or rather lack of understanding) of

female sexuality.
The detailed transcription of the second interrogation held by inquisitor
Francisco Mendo Trigoso on July 8, 1741 allows us to perceive the reac-
tions of the inquisitor when he was confronted with female homoeroticism
and homosexuality. The resulting picture is that of a man of the church
who held conventionally misogynist views about women and female sex-
uality. Particularly striking was his refusal to accept the possibility that a
woman could remain chaste when presented with the opportunity to forni-
cate. These views were articulated when Trigoso interrogated Maria Duran
about her crossdressing in an attempt to prove that she could not have
successfully passed herself off as a man unless she actually was one. The
inquisitor asked Maria probing and leading questions about her crossdress-
ing and then refused to accept her claims that she had dressed in male attire
to avoid unwanted male attention during her itinerant life in southern France
and Catalonia. Trigoso stated the opinion that it was “morally impossible”
(moralmente impossivel) for a woman not to fornicate with a man given
such an opportunity. The questions sought to pressure Maria Duran into
admitting her guilt by presenting female licentiousness as a manifest, almost
scientific, fact that it was pointless to seek to refute. This fascinating passage
in the interrogation is worth quoting in full:
She was asked why, if she was in fact able to preserve her honor during
her travels throughout Catalonia as she claims, she then chose to change
[into male clothing]. For it follows that such a change did not originate
for the reasons that she claims but rather for other reasons that she is
patently hiding.
She says that she did not have other motives [to wear male clothing] than
those she has described
(. . .)
She was asked [the following question:] if she is speaking the truth, then
it is clear that she cannot be a woman but rather a man. If she had been
a married or widowed woman, as she claims, it would have been morally
impossible for her not to commit sin with the male friends next to whom
she slept [in the inns where she stayed].
She says that she never sinned with any man because God forbade it.
She was asked [the following question:] if chastity is a virtue, only

preserved by means of mortification and penances and with extreme
difficulty, as it is clear from the experiences and testimony of the Saints
in their biographies then who can believe that [Maria Duran], who is not
1548 F. Soyer
a Saint but a perverse individual, was able to preserve her honor whilst
always living amongst depraved men and without any restrictions on her
freedom as well as being in the prime of her life?
She says that at the beginning, whilst in the company of so many men,
she found it very difficult not to sin but that God always moved her not
to sin and in order to resist her evil thoughts she regularly disciplined
herself.
She was asked whether the true reason why she did not sin with so many
men is that she is not a woman and that she is lying.
She says that she has spoken the truth, that she is a woman and does not
have any of the physical attributes of a man.
She was asked whether, during her travels, she had lascivious relations
or carnal intercourse with any women, penetrating their vaginas with her
penis, causing reciprocal pleasure.
She says that she never did, nor could have, because she is not a man
but a genuine woman.35
The questions of the inquisitor betrayed a profound misogyny and deeply

ingrained prejudices about female sexuality. Francisco Mendo Trigoso could
not believe that women were able to resist the temptations of the flesh and
that they were restrained from succumbing to these only because of the
constraints placed on them by male society. How could Maria, traveling by
herself and far from her husband and village or, as the inquisitor put it,
“voluntarily placing herself in situations where she was close to sinning”
(pondose voluntariamente em occasioens tão proximas de pecar), not have
fornicated with the men she met during her perambulations in southern
France and Catalonia?
Beyond such pronounced misogyny, the inquisitor also revealed striking
gendered preconceptions about sexual intercourse when he then ordered
Maria to explain why she had always been the “active” partner and had never
consented that her female partners fondle her genitals. To this question,
Maria answered that her behavior was simply because she had never wanted
to be “passive” (paciente) during intercourse. Clearly the inquisitor, like the
recolhidas and nuns, believed that only men could be the “active” partners in
sexual intercourse and that women were always the “passive” sexual partner.
In his question, and obviously also in his mind, was formulated the firm
belief that Maria’s claim to be a woman could not be reconciled with typically
“male” sexual behavior and that she must therefore be concealing the truth.36
None of the inquisitors and deputies who debated the weight of evidence
against Maria Duran prior to her sentencing ever seriously considered that
they might be faced with an instance of female homosexual violence. Their
inability to comprehend the violent, even predatory, sexual behavior of Maria
Duran led them to seek to account for it by understanding it as the result of
a demonic pact.
When the final deliberations took place and the inquisitors and deputies
debated the appropriate sentence to pass, Inquisitor Simão José Silvério Lobo
and the deputies Manuel de Almeida de Carvalho, Fray Sebastião Pereira de
Castro, and Diogo Lopes Pereira stated that they believed that Maria Duran
should be absolved of the charges against her. They stated their firm opin-
ion that Maria Duran was guilty only of the sin of lust (luxuria), which she
had already confessed.37 The dissenters argued that there was insufficient
proof of a demonic pact and that the Holy Office could not claim jurisdiction
over Maria Duran’s “execrable dirty deeds” (execrandas torpesas) and lustful
behavior toward her fellow recolhidas and nuns since such a move would
directly challenge the decision on the non-prosecution of female homosex-

uals that had been adopted by the General Council of the Inquisition in the
middle of the 17th century. They further maintained that the results of the
multiple physical examinations—which had found no evidence of any male
genitalia on her body—nullified the validity of the witness testimony. Citing
the works of the eminent medical experts Jean Riolan (1577–1657),38 Matteo
Realdo Colombo (1516–1559),39 and Paolo Zachias (1584–1659),40 these dis-
senters argued that if Maria did possess a penis concealed within her body,
then it must be a rare natural occurrence rather than due to demonic agency
and deception.41 Inquisitor Simão José Silvério Lobo declared that he did not
believe that the Devil possessed the powers to grant an “animated organ”
(membro animado) to a woman. Instead, he thought that the seemingly
contradictory evidence from the physical examinations and the witness testi-
mony could be reconciled if Maria was a hermaphrodite with visible female
genitals and male genitalia that was concealed deep within her body but
emerged from it when she was in a state of sexual arousal.42 Silvério Lobo
and the dissenting deputies made a trenchant comparison with those men
and women accused of using sorcery (feitiçaria) to cast curses to kill another
person. In such cases, they argued, it was the rule that the prisoner was not
to be convicted of concluding a demonic pact because it could not be con-
clusively proven that the death had resulted through demonic involvement
or natural causes. They thus argued that Maria Duran could well have had
sexual relations with all of the witnesses accusing her without the aid of a
demonic pact.43
The line of thought adopted by Inquisitor Simão José Silvério Lobo in
his clash with his colleague Francisco Mendo Trigoso logically led him to
examine and question the nature of the sexual acts that had taken place
between Maria Duran and the women accusing her. He called into question
the credibility of witnesses who were prepared to allege under oath that
1550 F. Soyer
Maria Duran had a penis but, at the same time, also admitted that they had
neither actually seen nor handled it. Inquisitor Silvério Lobo reminded his
colleague of the fallibility of the senses by pointing to the biblical precedent
of Jacob and Esau and asserted that the evidence would have been of dubi-
ous credibility even if the witnesses had touched or fondled Maria’s alleged
penis. In the end, the General Council of the Portuguese Inquisition was
consulted and sided with inquisitor Trigoso and his supporters.44
Inquisitor Mendo Trigoso and the majority of his colleagues were not
alone in their inability to understand or make sense of the intricacies of
the case of Maria Duran and in their desire to ascribe her behavior to
demonic agency. An interesting comment on the case was made by the
Jesuit Father Miguel de Almeida, who walked in the auto-da-fé procession
from the inquisitorial palace to the church of São Domingos on the morn-
ing of June 21, 1744. His task at the auto was to attempt to persuade one
of the prisoners condemned to death to abjure his heretical views, and he
subsequently penned a description of the auto-da-fé in two separate private

letters. In each one of these letters, Father Almeida mentions the sentence
of Maria Duran that was read out to the vast throng that had gathered in the
church but claims that he was prevented by his pastoral duties during the
auto-da-fé from being able to attentively listen to it. This certainly appears
to have been the case as he remembered numerous details about the case
incorrectly, and he seems to have mistakenly believed that the inquisitors
did not find Maria Duran to be guilty of making a pact with the Devil,
which they most certainly had. Indeed, the official (and public) printed list
of the sentences imposed on those convicted on June 21, 1744 informed
its readers that Maria Duran was convicted of “sorcery and the presump-
tion of having made a pact with the Devil.”45 Nonetheless, his reaction
offers further evidence of the bafflement that the case generated and the
readiness with which an observer, especially one that was both male and
ecclesiastical, was prepared to associate female homosexuality and demonic
intervention.
In the first letter, Father Miguel de Almeida offered the following com-
ments, noting how the case of Maria Duran had attracted public attention
despite her secret inquisitorial trial:
The famous novice, who was in the convent of Paraizo in Évora and
who was [apparently] married and had two children was paraded [in the
auto-da-fé]. She came third-in-line amongst the women. I was not able
to listen to her sentence because it was read out at a time when I was
accompanying my charge (. . .). They told me that the sentence referred
to the fact that she had relations [with women] as if she was a man with
the power to procreate [like a man] and that she claimed to have done
this through some trick. Nevertheless, I cannot understand how this can
be. (Braga, 1992, p. 288)
In the second letter, Father Almeida provided a little more insight into his
opinions of the case:
For a woman to have relations with another and have the power of
impregnating her by means of demonic artifice does not surprise me as
I have often heard of such occurrences and read about them in books.
(. . .) When Maria Duran’s sentence was read (I was not able to listen to
it as I was occupied with my charge) it was proclaimed that she did not
exhibit any trace of being a man, and that she confessed to having had
a son with another woman, by means of deception. I do not understand
that she could have done this by means of natural deceit, but I am only
able to believe that she accomplished this due to demonic deceit. (Braga,
1992, p. 289)
Like the inquisitors, Father Almeida manifested a clear fixation with the
claims surrounding Maria’s possession of a penis that could not be detected

by medical professionals and the claims that she had used it to father chil-
dren. Similarly, led by what he had heard and read in books that he does
not identify (não he para mim couza nova, porque muitas vezes ouvi, e li
em outros autores), he apparently did doubt the nature of these stories and
could not conceive of any other credible explanation but that of a pact with
the Devil.
CONCLUSION
Maria Duran was not arrested or convicted by the Inquisition because of her
homosexuality but rather as a result of the extreme reactions that her sexual
behavior caused among the women with whom she had intercourse and
the mindset of the male inquisitors who judged her. As a result of the deci-
sion made by the Portuguese inquisitors in 1644–1645 to no longer examine
cases of female homosexuality, the inquisitors were not interested in seek-
ing to prove that homosexual intercourse had taken place between Maria
Duran and her (willing or unwilling) partners. Maria Duran herself admitted
to having penetrated the vaginas of the women either with her thumb or a
dildo as well as to committing other acções lascivas and tocamentos obcenos.
Sexual behavior deemed to be “lustful” (luxuria) was a matter for the prior
of the Dominican monastery of São Domingos in Lisbon and, ultimately, for
the episcopal courts but was not within the purview of the Inquisition.
In spite of the admission of Maria Duran, at no point did the inquisitors
seriously consider the possibility that their prisoner’s sexual behavior might
be rationalized as that of a homosexual sexual predator who forced her-
self on the women she desired. Such a scenario was one that simply could
1552 F. Soyer
not be fathomed by the men who considered her case, and the inquisi-
tors and deputies were merely mirroring prevalent social discourse about
male/female agency in sexual violence. This mindset was apparently shared
by the various women with whom Maria Duran had intercourse, whether
willingly or, as seems to have mostly been the case, under duress. It was
inevitable that, in such conditions, the majority of the inquisitors, deputies,
and women involved in this case turned to the supernatural to make sense of
it. While skeptics such as inquisitor Simão José Silvério Lobo and the deputies
who supported him in the final deliberations challenged these supernatural
explanations, they nevertheless did not seriously question the existence of
the “secret penis.” Rather than question the trustworthiness of the witnesses’
testimony, they preferred to argue (and believe) that any concealed penis
was probably a natural aberration and not demonic in origin.
The primary objective of the inquisitors was, therefore, to establish a
credible explanation reconciling the witness testimony and the results of the
anatomical examinations. The only hypothesis that appeared plausible to

most of them was that Maria must have concluded a pact with the Devil that
enabled her to deceive her partners into genuinely believing that she had
a penis when in reality she did not. This hypothesis was selected despite
the fact that (1) the witnesses’ testimony offered only slender evidence of
such a demonic pact beyond vague rumors and accounts of unexplained
scratches on Maria’s body and (2) the inquisitors were not able to obtain a
confession despite resorting to torture. It is perhaps ironic that when they
were unable to prove the existence of a concealed penis within Maria Duran,
inquisitor Trigoso and the deputies siding with him decided that its very
absence was, in itself and in the light of the witness testimony, sufficient
to convict her of associating with the Devil. It is difficult not to come to
the conclusion that the final conviction and sentence of Maria Duran was
a consequence of the misogyny of the inquisitors. Portugal was spared the
horrors of the witch crazes that caused the death of thousands of women in
northern and central Europe, but the Portuguese Inquisition did prosecute
individuals who, like Maria Duran, were suspected of practicing sorcery or of
making pacts with the Devil. These prosecutions disproportionately targeted
women in Portugal, just as they did in the rest of Europe. José Pedro Paiva’s
exhaustive analysis of witchcraft prosecutions by the Inquisition in Portugal
during the 17th and 18th centuries has highlighted the fact that nearly all
of them—83%—were against women and that a similar gender imbalance is
visible in prosecutions by the episcopal courts (Paiva, 1997, p. 162).
A striking proof of this difference in treatment was the very different
sentence handed down against Father Pedro Furtado, a priest in the village of
Sambade in northern Portugal. In a case that has many parallels with that of
Maria Duran, Father Furtado was arrested and prosecuted by the inquisitorial
tribunal of Coimbra in 1699–1701. His arrest by the Inquisition resulted from
a number of denunciations that were received in the preceding years from
men (both some of his parishioners but also men who had known him prior
to his move from Lisbon to northern Portugal) who confessed to having
had sex with him and accused him of being a woman. There was evidence
that Father Furtado himself helped to spread the false rumors about his
gender, and some of the witnesses claimed that he engaged in the practice
of sorcery. Confronted with a seemingly irreconcilable divergence between
the witness testimony and the results of the physical examinations that they
ordered (which discovered no trace of female genitalia), the inquisitors found
Father Furtado innocent of any demonic pact and convicted him only of the
charge of leading his parishioners into doctrinal error by implying, through
his ambiguous behavior, that women could be ordained priests.46
Though her sentence was not exactly a particularly lenient one and
the fruit of inquisitorial misogyny, Maria Duran was nonetheless more fortu-
nate than women convicted of homosexual intercourse elsewhere in Europe.
As we have seen above, secular legislation theoretically condemned homo-
sexual women to death, and the death penalty was also prescribed in other
European jurisdictions (Crompton, 1980). There exist some intriguing par-
allels between the cases of Maria Duran and Catharina Margaretha Lincken
(also known as Anastasius Lagrantinus Rosenstengel) in Germany. Just over
two decade earlier, this crossdressing lesbian served as a soldier and was
arrested and put on trial with her lover in 1721. In Catharina’s case, how-
ever, the full rigor of the law was brought to bear, and she was condemned
by the secular courts to be beheaded for female sodomy while her lover
received a sentence of life imprisonment (Eriksson, 1981).
Paradoxically, the trial of Maria Duran reveals more about the attitudes
and reactions of her male interrogators and the female witnesses against her
than it does about Maria herself. The transcript of her trial leaves some ques-
tions unanswered: What did Maria think of her sexual relations with other
women? Were her sexual relations with other women motivated by desire
or rather, as her use of physical violence may suggests, were they based
on a need to compensate feelings of inadequacy through rape or perhaps
the need to assert of a sense power over the women she assaulted? Only a
detailed autobiographical account from Maria Duran herself could permit us
to speculate about her motivations. There is one important question about
Maria Duran, however, to which a reply may be made: Was she conscious
of having a specific sexual preference for women, or would such a notion
have been an alien one to her, as Foucault claimed when stating that sexual
identity is a modern construct (Foucault, 1980, p. 43)?
Foucault’s claim that early modern same-sex sexual acts do not offer
evidence that permits us to discern an individual’s sexual identity has been
taken to task by numerous historians.47 When considered in the context of
the trial of Maria Duran, it is highly problematic. Indeed, the one certainty
about Maria Duran that emerges from her trial is that she deliberately sought
sexual relations with women and avoided heterosexual sexual relations.
1554 F. Soyer
With the exception of her husband, whom she married at a very young
age—presumably as was expected of her in her small Pyrenean-village
community—and then abandoned, Maria claimed to have had sexual rela-
tions only with women. Her claims were not contradicted either by the
Inquisition or by witnesses. The inquisitors of Lisbon and their colleagues
in Barcelona did not find any evidence of heterosexual relations with men.
Had they done so, they would have used it as evidence to support the results
of the medical examinations and to discount the witness testimony regarding
her alleged penis. It is sadly ironic that when she was questioned by inquisi-
tor Trigoso about her travels in southern France and Catalonia while dressed
as a man, Maria Duran steadfastly denied having heterosexual sexual rela-
tions with her male traveling companions even though such an admission
might actually have helped her case and dispelled the claims than she pos-
sessed a concealed penis or had made a pact with the Devil. In the face of
such evidence, I would argue that a strong case exists in favor of describing
Maria Duran as an individual with a strong consciousness of her sexual pref-

erence for women. In this, like the women explored by Oram and Turnball,
we might be tentatively able to suggest that Maria’s was a lesbian life.
NOTES
1. Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (henceforth A.N.T.T.), Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦
9,230. I am currently preparing a biography focusing on the life of Maria Duran and attitudes toward
crossdressing and female homosexuality in early modern Spain and Portugal based on her trial and other
extant documents.
2. See, for instance, the magisterial study of Traub (2002) and the studies gathered in Delgado and
Saint-Saëns (2000).
3. See Braga (2010), chapter 2; A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ . 12,418.
4. See, for example, A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processos n◦ s. 1,942; 5,127; 11,458, and 11,459.
5. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processos 3,185 and 3,185-1. In my earlier work on ambiguous
gender in early modern Spain and Portugal, before I was aware of the existence of these two trials, I
incorrectly claimed that the Inquisition had not taken any action against these women.
6. A.N.T.T., Conselho Geral, livro 123. See Bellini (1989), p. 62.
7. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ 9,230, fols. 35r–37v
8. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ 9,230, fols. 4r–4v.
9. See footnote 28 for an explanation of why a married woman would have been staying in a
recolhimento.
10. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ 9,230, fol. 16r.
12. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ 9,230, fols. 88v–91v and 125r–138v.
13. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ 9,230, fols. 107v–108r.
15. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ 9,230, fol. 106v.
16. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ 9,230, fols. 295r–297r and 299r–301v.
17. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ 9,230, fols. 316r–328r and 356r–356v. On Bernardo
Santucci, see the remarkable biography of Franco (1925).
18. The deputados were junior members of the tribunal, churchmen who participated in the delib-
erations regarding trials and assisted the inquisitors to select the proper sentence to inflict on a convicted
prisoner.
19. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ 9,230, fols. 358r–361r.

20. Biblioteca Pública de Évora (B.P.E.), Codex CVI, n◦ 6.
22. Agostinha Teresa da Purificação had moved from her Lisboan recolhimento to the convent of
Nossa Senhora da Conceição in the town of Beja by the time of her interrogation.
25. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ 9,230, fols. 8v–9r.
26. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ 9,230, fols. 23v–24v.
28. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ 9,230, fols. 117r–117v. The reason why Maria de Jesus
was residing in the recolhimento while married is unclear. It was, however, not unknown for husbands
to place wives or daughters in the recolhimentos during prolonged absences to “safeguard their honor.”
30. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ 9,230, fols. 202r–207r.
31. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ 9,230, fols. 31v–33v.
34. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ 9,230, fol. 20r; The expression “missionary position”
was only coined by the American sexologist Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956) in 1948 and was never used in
this earlier period.

35. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ 9,230, fols. 96r–103r. See Soyer (2012), pp. 313–314.
38. Jean Riolan was an antomist and a member of the Medical Faculty of the University of Paris.
39. Matteo Realdo Colombo was a surgeon and professor of anatomy at the renowned university
of Padua. He was the author of De Re Anatomica, a manual of anatomy published in 1559 that is
remembered chiefly for its examination of female genitalia, especially the clitoris.
40. Paolo Zachias, rose to prominence in Rome as the personal physician of the Popes Innocent X
and Alexander VII. See Laqueur (1990), pp. 140–142.
44. See Genesis 27:1–40. Jacob laid goatskins on his arms to pass himself off as his brother Esau to
deceive their blind father, Isaac, and receive his blessing instead of Esau.
45. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, maço 31.
46. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Coimbra, processo n◦ 7, 622.
47. See, for instance, Halperin (1998) and other historians whose opinions are summarized in
Crawford (2007), pp. 200–202.
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The Inquisitorial Trial of a Cross-Dressing

FRANÇOIS SOYER, PhD

This article analyzes the inquisitorial trial of Maria Duran, a

Catalan novice in the Dominican convent of Nossa Senhora do

KEYWORDS female homosexuality, lesbianism, Inquisition,

In February 1741, officials of the Inquisition arrested 30-year-old Maria

The study of female homoeroticism and homosexuality and the reactions

Maria Duran certainly appears to have deliberately sought to have sexual

The trial of Maria Duran offers extraordinary evidence of male and

FEMALE HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE LAW IN MEDIEVAL AND

In Portugal, the legal authorities began to pay attention to female

THE TRIAL OF MARIA DURAN: A SUMMARY

If the testimony of the witnesses is to be believed, Maria Duran’s sex-

to an errant life, dressing as a man while traveling through southern France

The manner in which these obscene fondlings occurred is that [Maria

MARIA DURAN AND FEMALE REACTIONS TO HOMOSEXUALITY

Some of the women reported disturbing rumors that circulated either in

Another recolhida, Vitória da Rosa, made a similar claim:

The inquisitors certainly never considered such a possibility to be credible,

Eighteenth-century Portugal, like the rest of Europe, was a profoundly phal-

Gowing, “in court, women’s stories of their sexual experiences emphasised

on-female sexual violence as well as their perception of sexual violence as

MALE ATTITUDES TO FEMALE HOMOSEXUALITY: THE

If the attitudes and reactions of the female witnesses may be understood

the 15th-century biblical exegete Alonso Tostado, Gregorio López main-

of these men and their understanding (or rather lack of understanding) of

She was asked [the following question:] if chastity is a virtue, only

The questions of the inquisitor betrayed a profound misogyny and deeply

directly challenge the decision on the non-prosecution of female homosex-

subsequently penned a description of the auto-da-fé in two separate private

claims surrounding Maria’s possession of a penis that could not be detected

anatomical examinations. The only hypothesis that appeared plausible to

Maria Duran as an individual with a strong consciousness of her sexual pref-

19. A.N.T.T., Inquisição de Lisboa, processo n◦ 9,230, fols. 358r–361r.

this earlier period.

Aguiar, A. A. De. (1930). Crimes e delitos sexuais em Portugal na época das

Braga, P. D. (1996). Dois casos de homossexualidade feminina no Portugal

Machado, J. B. (2002). Tratado de Confissom: edição semidiplomática, estudo

Traub, V. (2002). The renaissance of lesbianism in early modern England.

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