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prison chaplain. (44) Their parody of religion was very entertaining, and it also helped them feel less terror about their own approaching executions. [135] Humor as an expression of bravado can make a statement about power positions when no other statement is possible. The powerful Church in Seville was allied with the secular government, able to call on the powers of that government to restrain its enemies. It was a large landholder and had ties with a fearsome agency, the Inquisition, which was empowered to arrest, imprision, torture, and punish people. It could confiscate property, and it also seemed to hold the power of eternal damnation. A Street thief who shouted from the Plaza de San Francisco that the Church was too powerful would probably get no farther than the gallows, but he would find an appreciative audience in a nearby tavern if he told them the hilarious tale of how he had escaped prison masquerading as a pious priest. To ridicule the Church and its clergy was a popular and practical way to make them seem less awesome and powerful. When underworld people called a rooster "bishop," they may have exerted a form of informal social control on the Church. (45) Underworld burlesques of the clergy may have brought erring members into line in a manner similar to nicknames, popular ballads, and the vito, a form of charivari or "rough music." Church leaders undoubtedly saw the need to correct abuses within the Church without underworld assistance, but underworld burlesques helped to keep the Church open to popular scrutiny. As burlesque, underworld humor could be considered a form of social criticism, but this should be distinguished from political protest. Underworld people were so busy exploiting the existing system that they had no interest in proposing a new system. They liked the bread and soup they got from the monks, and they wanted to use the prison chaplains as intermediaries to their own advantages. They also liked to ridicule this powerful institution. Underworld people could be considered cynics and protesters, but never revolutionaries. Humor helped to defuse the social tensions that grew between the increasingly populous underworld and the powerful Church. [136] As priests began to insist that they would give charity only to the "honorable poor," ruffians might have reacted with an outraged thrust of the dagger into a well-fed cassock. Instead, underworld people made fun of priests and charity. Ruffians hid in the shadows while their women posed as honorable wives whose husbands were in the Indies. Hoodwinking the priests into giving them charity not only avoided a violent confrontation; it also enabled the underworld to use the existing system. Thugs didn't hesitate to use violence, but they became better parasites when they could exploit and ridicule at the same time. The obverse side of the Church's using the underworld to personify evil was that the underworld used the Church as a caricature. All around them the people of the streets of Seville saw an order that was not just or good or rational. Like the modern philosophers, they, too, looked into the abyss. The response of underworld people, however, was not despair, but jokes. They burlesqued the Church because it exemplified so much that was ridiculous: the wealthy ecclesiastical landholder in a city of paupers, the hypocritical preacher asserting that only the honorable poor should have bread, the pious monk urging the prisoner to confess and go meekly to his execution as a lamb to the slaughter. Such absurdity was not to be changed, but to be laughed at and used. Inadvertently, however, underworld burlesques of the Church helped to debunk the old religious myths and prepare the way for the rational and secular myths of the modern period. Poking fun at a priest showed that he was human like other people. Stealing the crown and star from a Virgin and Child in the Cathedral demonstrated that these images had no supernatural powers and little value aside from their jewels and precious metals. (46) Wearing a rosary made from witches' teeth combined the profane with the holy in such a way that the holy would never appear quite the same. (47) In the modern period secular governments substituted national myths for old religious myths, and they replaced traditional
eligious rituals with modern [137] secular rites. The interaction of Church and underworld in early modern Seville suggests some reasons for increasing secularization: the Church had been an unpopular intermediary; it had been exploited as a refuge for both the holy and profane; and it had been the object of raucous, cynical laughter. 1. "Casos raros," Papeles varios, BC, 85-4-11. 2. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:744. See below, pp. 248-262. Notes for Chapter Six 3. "Casos raros," Papeles varios, BC, 85-4-11. See also the discussion of this function of religion in William A. Christian, Jr., "De los Santos y María; Panorama de las devociones a santuarios españoles desde el principio de la Edad Media hasta nuestros dias," in Maria Cátedra Tomás, et al., Temas de antropologia española (Madrid, 1976), pp. 86-87; and Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), p. 152. AMS, Papeles del Conde de Aguila, Sección Especial, Tomo 62, en folio, No. 40; and Miguel de Mañara, "Motibo principal por que zesaron las comedias en Sevilla año de 1679," BC, 80-1-92. 4. Pedro de León, Part II, chapter 14, folio 151 V . 5. Ibid., Part II. C. Chaves, Part II. Rodriguez Marín, La Cárcel, p. 26. 6. This letter is quoted in AMS, Papeles del Conde de Aguila, Sección Especial, Tomo 5, en folio, No. 11. See also Pedro de León, Part II, chapter 16, folio 156 V . 7. Domínguez Ortiz, Orto, p. 43. "Los cargos que resultan de la residencia que se tomO por mando del R rmo señor don Rodrigo de Castro Arçobispo de Sevilla . . . contra don Alonso Faxardo de Villalobos Obispo de Esquilache Arcediano y CanOnigo de Sevilla," BM 28358, folios 133-134; also cited in Pike, Aristocrats, pp. 71-72. Astrain, 5:40-47. 8. AI, Casa de Contratación, Sección 2, Legajo 58, folio 82. 9. AMS, Efemérides, folio 33. Maldonado, BC, 84-7-21, folio 133 V . 10. Kamen, Inquisition, pp. 147-148. See also Morgado, pp. 189-190, for a description of numerous lay officials of the Inquisition in Seville. 11. Astrain, 2:94-98, 3:353-355, 503-504, 698, 723. José Deleito y Pifiuela, La vida religiosa española bajo el cuarto Felipe; Santos y pecadores (Madrid, 1952), p. 47. AMS, Efemérides, "Noticias y casos," No. 1. Menéndez y Pelayo, pp. 99-102. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:517. 12. Marcel Bataillon, El sentido del Lazarillo Tormes (Paris and Toulouse, 1954), pp. 8-10, 12-13, 22. See also Menéndez y Pelayo, pp. 201-2-3; and Deleito y Piñuela, Religiosa, p. 59. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:563-564, discussed the Cardinal Archbishop's reforms. 13. Menéndez y Pelayo, p. 115. 14. See the treatise originally written by Padre Rodrigo Alvarez as "Tratado se las discreciones de espiritus," and copied with additions by Pedro de León in 1576, in Domínguez Ortiz, "Vida," pp. 195- 196. 15. AMS, Efemérides, contains an account of these clerics in a record of an auto de fé in 1624. 16. Menéndez y Pelayo, pp. 236, 243. AMS, Efemérides, "Noticias y casos," No. 1. 17. Cf. Keith Thomas, "Women and the Civil War Sects," Past and Present, No. 13, April 1958.
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