The Inquisition in Malta Relates to How Women Became More Subjective to Witchcraft

The Inquisitor was an ecclesiastic nominated directly the by Pope to protect the Catholic faith and Christian morals of the people. He presided over a Tribunal, with the duty of observing the established rules of procedures.

The Inquisition in Malta forms part of the Roman Inquisition tribunal that started to function as a separate tribunal from the Bishop’s law courts in 1562. It was due to the advent of Mgr. Pietro Dusina, that the Roman Inquisition tribunal became distinctly cut off from the Bishop’s jurisdiction.

The Holy See found a favourable opportunity to establish the third Jurisdictional Institution that is the Inquisitor in Malta in the controversy which raged between G.M. Jean de la Cassiere and Bishop Royas. The appointment of Mgr. Pietro Dusina was made in person on December 1, 1574.

As an Inquisitor Mgr. Pietro Dusina was also given the responsibility of Apostolic Nunciature by Pope Gregory XIII (1572-85). He was empowered to represent the Holy See in Malta, to exercise judical authority in determined degrees of appeal and to handle political affairs.

The Inquisition, held in high esteem by the Holy See. Almost every Inquisitor was promoted to Bishop, Nuncios, Partiarchs after their commencement of their role in Malta. Out of 37 Inquisitors from 1634 to 1798, when Napoleon abolished the Inquisition in Malta, 26 Inquisitors received the Red Hat, whilst both Fabio Chigi, elected Pope Alexander VII in 1655, and Antonio Pignatelli, proclaimed Pope Innocent XII in 1692 reached the zenith of their glory and were crowned to the highest Eclestic rank in the Roman Christian hierarchy.

For both the Bishop and the Knights the presence and juridical powers of the Inquisitor was implantable. Bishop Royas protested because the role of the Inquisitor also curtailed Episcopal rights that were stripped off from his responsibilities. The Knights, also did not like the Inquisitor’s presence because the Inquisitor enjoyed the precedence over the Order and also interfered in their administration.

Once, the Inquisition was established, the question soon arose as to how the Inquisitor and his Officers were to be paid. The Holy See imposed a pension of 400 scudi on the Bishop’s mensa and it was then raised to 1240 scudi in 1678. Revenues coming from fines and confiscation of properties were used also to sustain the cost of operations of the Inquisitor and the Tribunal.

The Inquisition Tribunal operations was in Birgu (Vittoriosa) and this was made up of the Assessor, who collected, examined and presented evidence for the prosecution. The Promoter-Fiscal who represents the witnesses who did not appear in Court for fear of reprisals against them whilst the Consultants were theologians, canonists and jurists who provides their expert opinion on matters of faith, canon and civil laws.

Notaries, Interpreters, Accountant, Doctor, Censors of Books and Cathecist were members of the staff that were assigned with the day to day duties of the Tribunal.

The process before the Tribunal starts with the reading of the indictment. The charges could be heresy, superstition, evil-eye, witchcraft, polygamy, defections of ecclesiastic representatives and other civil or criminal offences.

The accused could be represented by an Advocate or the Procurator of the Poor who stands for the accused who could not afford to pay for advocate fees. The Curator represented those who were under age.

If the indicted person confessed his guilt or abjured his heresy, the tribunal will absolve the sentence of excommunication and submitted salutary penance proportionate to the guilt.

On its part the Inquisition had a policy of publicizing the punishments it inflicted. For this reason penitents were sometimes made to abjure in public during high mass and made to wear placards around their neck with the crime clearly inscribed. The message the Inquisition tribunal wished to convey on such occasions was obvious. It wanted to warn those present what could befall if they engage themselves in similar crimes and ensure that on lookers would in the future refrain from following in the footsteps of the humiliated penitent. Harsher penances were the payment of fines, confinement to one’s home, to a convent, confiscation of property as well as civil imprisonment.

In cases when the accused did not confess, the accused was imprisoned and given torture according to the gravity of the crime. The Capitaneus, or prison director was entrusted with the execution of every Court sentence and in some cases the accused was given the death sentence.

Reference to Inquisition legal proceedings are found in 400 manuscript volumes found in the Inquisitorial Archives. The first crimes of the Inquisition relates in their majority on the menace of Protestantism and heresy crimes.

Their were two facets of the situation which were of chief concern from the outset, the English Protestant reformers struck a heavy blow at the Order of Jerusalem. King Henry VIII in 1537 as well as Elizabeth I in 1557 of England suppressed the English Langue and the confiscation of its property, so much so that in Valletta the Knights did not built an Auberge for the English Langue when they moved their official operations to the new city.

From the inset, there were movements who preached Lutheranism and were therefore inflicted and accused of heresy. Between 1536-46 before the advent of the Inquisition, Bishop Cubelles had dealt with a number of heresy crimes amongst which relates to highly influential lecturers who imbued to their students heretical doctrines.

The French priest Don Gesualdo, who also ran another school in Rabat, was convicted of spreading errors and heresy. Because of his pertinacity in his errors he was sentenced to death and burnt alive in Birgu square.

Despite the Lutheran campaign and the gathering of heretics, by the end of the 16th century the struggle against Protestantism lost much of its dynamism, most probably because the Protestant heresies was largely managed and controlled.

After the devastating plague in the early 1590s the Inquisition began to turn its focus increasingly within its folds, and special emphasis was laid on the purity of the Christian faith amongst its believers.

By the time Protestantism was well entrenched and the two opposing camps become more firmly identified with their respective scopes. The last reference to heresy was inscribed in a document when Inquisitor Lazzaro Pallavicin (1718-19) put to the attention French and English merchant ships not to disseminate or distribute any heretical books and leaflets.

The Church felt duty bound to educate its believers, so much so that the Inquisition was given more power and was reorganized to deal with internal threats, in particular the corruption of the ‘true Christian faith’. The Sixtus V’s bull refers directly to the preoccupation of the Church in this area and hence to the Inquisition to switch its focus and energies from anti-Protestantism to cases related to superstition, evil-eye and witchcraft.

The reasons of how the latter crimes came to an increase and gained popularity, can only be explained through a proper understanding of the historical transformation that was then taking place in Malta.

Amongst theologians, and members of the cultural elite, women were always linked with marriage. This psychological perspective meant woman especially unmarried and those who lived independently without any male protection became the culprits of the situation. Women were thought to be slaves of their sexual urges. Inquisitors along with other judges, in particular, featured women with the framework or fundamental immorality. Seen in this context, women were portrayed as inferior to men and became prone to be the scapegoats of witchcraft accusation.

Gender inequality was a predominant factor that put women to the disadvantage of men and put women more subject to recall to magical assistance, evil-eye, curse and witchcraft rather than to recall to legacy procedures to acquire their rights and gain what they wanted.

Moreover, the majority of accused women were recent settlers in the Harbour cites and they ventured from their rural lifestyle to urbanized settlers in search for better living. The conditions in the Harbour cities were very different. The urban areas were more crowded and in the urban settings neighbors were able to spy on one another through cracks in the wall.

Moreover, the presence of multitude of people having different cultural backgrounds could have induced the Harbour dwellers to develop and contain witchcraft practices that had their distinctively unique characteristics, especially during times when the influx of Muslim slaves outweighs the number of local mails who in their majority were on board ships as sailors and hence absent for long periods of time.

These states of affairs often led women to subject themselves and recall to witchcraft or found it most convenient to turn to some form of prostitution. This reflects in the high frequency of cases were women accusations was related to ‘whore and witch’.

Women were also more likely to engage in witchcraft because of their connections with many areas of life in which magic seem the only explanation of events. Even in the urban Harbour area where the presence of the Order’s hospital meant a concentration of professionally trained medicals, women were the front liners who nursed the sick of all ages, who could die without warning. They cared for children who were even more subject to disease and death than adults, at a time when hygienic conditions were poor and childhood diseases largely uncontrollable.

Women of the lower classes in the Harbour areas were directly associated to white magic for healing purposes and were some of the times even consulted by the higher levels of the Maltese society.

All the above factors had put women in bad light. These situations were variables of a complex equation that exposes the demographic difficulties to women vulnerability especially of unmarried and unprotected women who were in search for a better lifestyle in the urban areas.

In fact, the idea that women were more likely to engage in witchcraft thus appears to gain widespread notion and accepted at grassroots’ level by the community at large during the time of the Inquisition in Malta. The general trend taken by witch hunts, may thus be considered as essentially an attack on the defenseless members of the society. This explains why large numbers of women, were accused ‘en masse’ of witchcraft and their engagement in prostitution activities.

Cultural Perception – Influence In Future Generations

Our perception of the world around us and our personal relationships with objects, people, and nature, can be highly affected by our culture. Sadly there is a percentage of Americans who believe they have no culture (myself formerly included). On the contrary, we all have a culture, and an identity that defines who we are and the choices we make as human beings. Ones culture can also be intersected with the cultures of race, gender, disability, occupational groups, and social-class. As you can see the word culture is rather complicated, making the average person less likely to recognize its influence.

There are two levels of function when it comes to culture, the explicit, and the implicit. Explicit culture refers to cultural expressions, such as Holidays, food, clothing, artifacts, objects, rituals, music and symbols. While implicit culture refers to the values, philosophies and the underlying meaning of these symbols within the cultural context. Although these levels of culture are set in terms they are not limited or frozen in time, they are actually ever changing and evolving as time goes on. Cultural context is an inherited aspect of our lives, that reminds us of our past and represents a model for us to live by. Yet as times change and societies evolve, it is acceptable to adapt your cultural rituals and values to the everchanging social and economical needs you encounter.

Americans tend to take their culture for granted, as we have with the environment. Looking past the need to create an ecologically sustainable world, and onto the day to day grind of our busy lives, Americans have thrown in the towel for the environment and now rely on convenience. The constant push for globalization has us all stuck like a deer in headlights, waiting for the impact of the next big thing. It is sometimes difficult to decipher where we stand when pulled between the need for environmental changes and technology. Unfortunately, this is the society most of us have survived in thus far, and it is now up to us to return to our cultural beliefs, and begin to create our ecological sustainability as a society. Let’s get back to the natural enjoyment of the seasons and the days, and away from society’s concerns about Microsoft’s newest program for your Laptop. The future of our world relies on our ability to take the environment into perspective.

How does culture influence our future generations? Our choices as Teacher’s and Parents are affected by the culture in which we exist. Some of these areas that are affected include child-rearing goals such as: discipline technique, level of independence, sleeping patterns, family responsibility, and emotional development. Our expectations for our children stem from the underlying expectations of our culture. As a teacher it is important to consider learning about the different cultural blends in the classroom, yet at the same time it is important not make assumptions based on this knowledge.

What is Cultural and Linguistic Discontinuity? This is when children and their families feel alienated from school, for one reason or another. It could be that they just moved from one school to the next, from one state to another, recently immigrated, or possibly gained a disability that affects their daily routines at school. Leaving a familiar place and starting anew in an unfamiliar place can be overwhelming. Confusion, cultural disconnection, and displacement are common feelings when it comes to Cultural and Linguistic Discontinuity. Not knowing the language you are being taught in, the school routines and regulations, and having separate cultural views than your peers and elders, makes transition very difficult. Children who are suffering from this may be misinterpreted by their peers and educators who don’t identify with their culture, causing further disconnect.

As a child my family moved us all over the place, from state to state, house to house, I was even born in Germany. Thanks to the United States Army and my Fathers will to serve, we moved at least every year. Although it was difficult for me to adjust I would’nt say I suffered from Linguistic Discontinuity but culturally I was a mess. The culture shock set in within a few days no matter where we moved to. The shock of needing to adjust and make new friends again truly began to wear on me. Although I never recognized these differences as cultural, I noticed them none the less. By the time we moved to Santa Rosa when I was 9 yrs old, I was ready to settle down and stay here. I wanted to find a place where we could just be a family, differences or not. Aware of my cultural differences or not I wanted to be accepted and find diversity all in one town. Santa Rosa was my place. Needless to say, I am still here.

Most children are unaware of their own or others’ cultures, due to the obscure descriptions and abstract view. Most cultural differences go unnoticed and are labeled by young children as simple differences, non-cultural, although culture shapes a child’s expectations of the world at a very young age. Children fortunately can adapt to the demands of cultural differences to allow for their ability to grow socially. A child’s perception of culture differs severely from an adults perception of culture. Children often develop healthier play routines with those children from the same cultural norms. All too often children of the same culture will bind together forming a clique, not allowing children of other cultures to play in their clique. This is a coping mechanism for those children whose culture is not the average or majority in the classroom. Although this is an acceptable way to handle the potential alienation caused by being different, it can also hurt other children and pull away the stitching of a diverse and accepting classroom.

Due to the possibility that most children are unaware of their cultural differences, finding out how children learn, think and feel about these differences has proven to be difficult. There are many ways to elicit information from children, one in particular I appreciated was showing photographs of different daily routines performed by people of various cultures. Showing differences in tools, objects, food, clothing, and relationship, yet at the same time helping the children to see that people of other cultures do the same things we do just in different ways. Using this type of hands on curriculum is very important to me, first because I personally learn more efficiently in this manner and secondly, because I also love Photography. Asking questions, posing different thought schemas for children and allowing them to explore these new cultural aspects will help them open up, feeling more attuned and understanding to the differences.

How can we as educators learn more about our children and their reactions to culture? The absolute sure bet way to gain knowledge about their reactions to culture is observation. We can observe their play, their art, their reactions to other children and new experiences. We can ask questions that open up a range of thinking for the child that may not have been available till now. We can set up events, such as dances, musical arrangements or even just an opportunity to dress up and hold some of the objects associated with the culture in question, may help bridge the gap. Just know that keeping our children focused on the cultural influences we have embedded in our own homes and history, can be an enriching subject for young minds to comprehend. It all relies on the approach of Parents and Teacher’s and the persistence of our pursuit to cultural clarity in the classroom and at home.

My son has been attending a Head Start campus since he was two years old. The campus is located in a diverse area of town and nearly all of his class mates are from a different cultural background, and race as my son, Mikey. This has made him a minority in his class, at the same time enabling him to be emerged in the culture and language of the other children. As a result Mikey, who is now four years old and enrolled in a Kindergarten classroom next year, is partially bi-lingual. He loves to play with the children who appear different from him. Exploring new ideas, values and beliefs with these children keeps his mind expanding. I have just recently enrolled him in a school where 50% of the children are English learners and the other half are non English learners. Mikey will no longer be the minority yet he will still be immersed in a variety of cultures. I think this choice was difficult but worth while. Now from reading about culture I can see how important it is that we have influenced Mikey to become intrigued with others who may be different, culturally. I feel as though I need a good pat on the back. Our family has bridged a gap from one culture to another for our son, and we plan to continue this constant pursuit to cultural clarity at our home and in Mikey’s new school as well.