Catalina de Miranda: the woman tried by the Inquisition in El Tocuyo

Few stories of colonial Venezuela are as extraordinary as that of Catalina de Miranda, a Spanish woman who ended up tried by the Inquisition in El Tocuyo in 1577. Her case —documented in the archives of the Holy Office of Cartagena de Indias and Seville— is one of the most vivid windows into the intimate life of 16th-century Venezuela.

Origin and first steps

Catalina was born in Seville around 1530. The daughter of a humble family, she came very young to the Indies fleeing poverty and an unhappy first marriage. Like so many other women of the 16th century, she took advantage of the enormous distance that separated America from the metropolis to reinvent herself.

She passed through Santo Domingo, Margarita, Coro and Borburata, and ended up settling in El Tocuyo around 1560, when the city was the head of the Province of Venezuela and was experiencing its time of greatest splendor.

Five marriages

Catalina was formally accused of having contracted at least five marriages while her previous husbands were alive —multiple bigamy—. The accusation included:

• A first husband abandoned in Seville.
• A second in Santo Domingo.
• A third in Coro.
• A fourth in Borburata.
• And a fifth, Pedro de Lugo, principal resident of El Tocuyo.

In each new locality she presented false witnesses who claimed she was a widow, and obtained new ecclesiastical dispensations. By the standards of the time, it was a monumental scandal.

Accusations of witchcraft

More serious still for the inquisitors, Catalina was accused of practicing witchcraft, herbalism and "spells to obtain the will of men". The witnesses —envious neighbors, dismissed maids, former lovers— declared that she used:

• Filters and powders dissolved in drinks to make people fall in love.
• Superstitious prayers said in reverse.
• Spells with candles and needles directed at specific people.
• Talismans with writings in Arabic.

In the colonial imagination, witches were considered dangerous because they combined popular European knowledge with indigenous and African knowledge. The inquisitorial repression sought precisely to cut that cultural synthesis.

The trial in El Tocuyo

The ecclesiastical tribunal of El Tocuyo opened the file in 1577. Catalina was confined in a guarded house while testimonies were gathered. The file, partially preserved in the General Archive of the Nation of Colombia and in that of Seville, fills several hundred folios.

The testimonies describe her as a woman:

• Intelligent and eloquent, capable of arguing with the inquisitors.
• Of good appearance and manners learned at the Sevillian court.
• Charismatic, which she herself used as a defense argument.

During the interrogation she denied bigamy (she claimed her previous husbands had died) and witchcraft (she said she was only a midwife and healer).

The verdict

After a process that lasted nearly two years, the tribunal of Cartagena de Indias —superior court with jurisdiction over Venezuela— issued its sentence. Catalina was:

• Convicted of bigamy and light witchcraft (no formal demonic pact was proven).
• Sentenced to public lashes in the Cartagena square.
• And to perpetual exile from the Indies.

She died in Seville, already old, around 1605.

Why does her case matter?

The file of Catalina de Miranda is important for several reasons:

1. It is one of the most extensive Inquisitorial trials of colonial Venezuela and allows the daily life of El Tocuyo in the years 1560–1577 to be reconstructed.
2. It shows how women could use the American distance to escape unhappy marriages, in a world where divorce was unthinkable.
3. It documents the popular magical-religious practices that survived ecclesiastical control, fusing European, indigenous and African elements.
4. Her case was discussed by Mario Briceño Iragorry in his book El Caballo de Ledesma and by the historian Ermila Troconis de Veracoechea, the main researcher of the file.

Memory in El Tocuyo

Catalina de Miranda is considered today one of the most singular female characters in Tocuyo colonial history. She is not a conventional heroine: her story is that of a woman who broke all the rules of her time, in a very small society —El Tocuyo barely had a handful of Spanish residents— where there was no way to go unnoticed.

Her file continues to be the subject of study in colonial history programs and gender studies in Venezuela and Spain.