Mad for God: Bartolome Sanchez, the Secret Messiah of Cardenete. (Reviews).

Sara Tilghman Nalle. Mad for God: Bartolome Sanchez, the Secret Messiah of Cardenete

Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001. x + 240 Pp. $49.50. (cl), $15.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-8139-2000-0 (cl) 0-8139-2001-9 (pbk).

In 1583 an Italian miller named Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, was denounced to the Roman Inquisition for mouthing heretical statements against Catholic doctrine. Thanks to Carlo Ginzburg his trial became a matter of historical importance; Ginzburg's Il formaggio e i vermi promoted the study of popular culture by asking how Menocchio's notions differed from informed views. Ginzburg's challenge -- to reconstruct a fragment of that culture in order to understand our own -- has been met brilliantly by Sara Nalle in her study of an early modern Spanish farmer and wool carder. Although it seems, at first glance, that by writing about a heretical villager and his Inquisition trial, Nalle is following in Ginzburg's formidable footsteps, the similarities of the two studies are soon eclipsed by their differences.

Like Ginzburg's Nalle's book has all the trappings of a good story; however, unlike Ginzburg, who was clearly responding to directions he opposed in historical research, Nalle does not steer the narrative toward specific conclusions. In eight chapters, she carefully recreates the dialogues between Bartolome Sanchez and his inquisitors from the transcripts written down by the tribunal secretary. Nalle relates the encounters by means of first-person narration to render an immediacy that is not possible when copying directly from Inquisition documents. While the period during which Sanchez was interviewed intermittently by the inquisitors (1553-1558) serves as the narrative's frame, Nalle seamlessly weaves in earlier moments in the wool carder's life and the history of his town, Cardenete. The result is an extraordinarily powerful story of an ordinary man, whose heretical rantings against the Catholic church soon reveal his strong feelings against the many abuses by the aristocracy and the church, and his desire for social justice. Among the inequities Sanchez condemned were the religious persecution of heretics and a social hierarchy based on religious ancestry.

Although in the introduction Nalle claims she does not wish to reconstruct a life "long ago lost" so much as she means to account for "one man's descent into religious madness" (2), it is impossible, or so it seems to me, to achieve the one without the other. In reassembling the details of the trial, Nalle situates Sanchez statements within the broader context of the various beliefs that circulated as non-doctrinal residue from the earlier and more open decades of the sixteenth century. Thanks to Nalle's abiding interest in literacy, we may include Sanchez among the growing number of peasants now becoming known to us not only as readers, but as actual owners of books. While some of Sanchez's heresies are uniquely his (as he insists), others reflect his acquaintance with various notions held by different religious groups. Sanchez's claim to be the Elijah-Messiah combined a long-standing European spiritual tradition of messianism with the political concerns that exploded in the comunero revolts across Spain.

Another advantage in reconstructing Sanchez's life is the window it offers into the workings of the Inquisition and, most significantly, into the mind of the inquisitor in charge of Sanchez's first trial. Nalle calls the encounters between the two men "interviews" given the unusually open give-and-rake that substituted for more formal interrogation. Nalle's narrative, gleaned from the documents, helps to subvert the usual hierarchical view of the Inquisition by humanizing the relationships between the two men, despite their social differences. The struggle to understand Sanchez is not left solely to the reader: it is clear that the inquisitors did not wish to "relax" Sanchez to the secular authorities without first granting him plenty of opportunities to confess his errors and repent. His later bouts with the Inquisition illustrate the conflicting internal exchanges that often took place among the officials, as Nalle notes the tensions between the prosecutor and judges to reach a fair verdict. By tracking San chez's lengthy debates with his inquisitors, his overtly messianic beliefs, and his final mental breakdown, Nalle's riveting study contests conventional opinion on the solely persecutory nature of the Inquisition while it illuminates one man's fight to assert himself in a society that denounced any sort of difference.