MarÍa Josefa De La Encarnación: Posesa, endemoniada y loca frente a los inquisidores de Lima, 1714-1719

This article examines one of the trials of the Inquisition in Lima during the 18th century. In the trial, Maria Josefa De La Encarnacion-a poor, mulata servant-claimed to have a special connection to God. Her case file, which is held in Madrid's Archivo Historico Nacional, relates a series of acts linked not only to the celestial and the spiritual realms, but also to poverty, ethnic hierarchies and typically feminine transgressions. The appearances of the Virgin or the temptations of the devil that Maria Josefa experienced were a reflection of a society that, despite its limits and prohibitions, infringed on reality according to the personal interests of a mestiza society that was unequal and patriarchal. Maria Josefa, for example, was one of those who manipulated situations to her own convenience and, above all, to her own survival; banishment and incarceration were strategies used by the inquisitors to discipline a sex they considered to be weak and incompetent by nature. Therefore, this paper rescues those testimonies, speeches and confessions that allow a recreation and, of course, a historicization of the religious and mystical transgressions of women in the Ancien Regime.