Melancholy, Demonism, Sex, and Doubt in Colonial Mexico

The extent and character of early modern melancholy remain topics of much historical inquiry, given the widespread conviction that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe experienced a dramatic increase in melancholia. The significance of melancholy to early modern understandings of demonism, sexuality, and doubt has recently been greatly enhanced by the work of Stuart Clark and Walter Stephens. Stephens and others have described how the rise of demonological discussions of sexual congress between women and devils both led to doubt and attempted to dispel doubt. Thus sexuality and religiosity were linked explicitly with melancholy in this demonological discourse. At a less rarefied level, melancholy was seen by churchmen as leading not only to demonic temptation but to a kind of morbid eroticism. Sex, melancholy, and doubt were all linked in to demonic temptation and to one another in ways that expand our understanding of both sexuality and religion. Melancholy thus proves an ideal ground for examination of the connections between sexuality and religiosity.

Despite the key insights produced by recent melancholia research, it has remained focused on Europe and has emphasized philosophical, literary, theological, or demonological sources rather than archival materials. Thus understandings of melancholy in colonial contexts, and particularly among the non-scholarly population, remain relatively unknown. Using materials drawn from Mexican Inquisition dossiers, this paper will first parse Mexican inquisitorial understandings of melancholy and the possible prevalence or scarcity of melancholias in the colony. With particular attention to the role of sexuality, the essay will then study whether scholarly (inquisitorial) understandings of the disease were echoed or contradicted by the experiences and beliefs of witnesses and accused persons who testified before the tribunal. Finally, the paper will summarize the significance of melancholy for our understanding of the relationship between sexuality and religiosity in colonial Mexico.