Dubbi su Trento.Il pofessore di Coimbra che intrepretava male I decreti conciliari (1579) e le vie di persuasione e di castigo degli errori di fede

Abstract

In 1579, at Braga archbishopric, one interpretation of the Council of Trent decrees proposed by a professor of Coimbra University blasted a vivid dicussion among him and the clerics who were examining his capacities. One of them, a jesuit, considering he was saying heresies, accused the professor to the local archbishop, Bartolomeu dos Mártires, one of the prelates who attended the third phase of the Council. Immediately after, Mártires decided to comunicate the case to the inquisitors. Eight years before, while Bartolomeu dos Mártires was performing a pastoral visitation, some of the visitation witnesses denounced a group of new christians of offending a holy cross. Accordingly to episcopal rules, the archbishop ordered one of his local vicars to arrest the new christians. Yet, instead of starting a trial agianst them in his own court he ordered the case to be presented to the Coimbra Inquisition. This two episodes will be the starting point to analyse and debate two key questions. The first one, the problems triggered by the reception of Council of Trent decrees in Portugal during the late sixtenth century. The second one seeks to evaluate how bishops and inquisitors handled and sentenced people charged of heresy or unorthodox behaviours.