In the first edition of Inquisitorial Inquiries, Richard L. Kagan and Abigail Dyer collected, translated, and annotated six of these autobiographies from a diverse group of prisoners. Now they add the fascinating life story of another victim of the Inquisition: Esteban Jamete, a French sculptor accused of being a Protestant. Each of the autobiographies has been selected to represent a particular political or social issue, while at the same time raising more intimate questions about the religious, sexual, political, or national identities of the prisoners. Among them are a politically incendiary prophet, a self-proclaimed hermaphrodite, and a morisco, an Islamic convert to Catholicism.
Richard L. Kagan is a professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University and author or editor of a number of books, including Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain and Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, both also published by Johns Hopkins. Abigail Dyer received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and is an independent scholar living in New York.