Suicide and Sexual Reputation in Eighteenth Century Cartagena

This microhistorical paper explores the downfall of Esteban de Sobrino, a friar in the Mercedarian order, who committed suicide in the secret jails of the Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition in late eighteenth-century Cartagena. Four women claimed that Fray Esteban solicited them in the confessional while he worked in Central America, but rumors of suspicious sexual behavior followed him back to Cartagena, where he was sent by his order as punishment.  Although he was imprisoned in his convent, tales of “unnatural” sex—acts that were deemed “against nature” (contra natura)—surrounded Fray Esteban de Sobrino, with insinuations that a number of men had repeatedly visited him in his cell. As the rumors persisted, the Holy Office of the Inquisition imprisoned and subsequently interrogated Fray Esteban de Sobrino. For reasons that we can glean through the incomplete records of his Inquisition trial, the pressure became unendurable, and he hanged himself in his cell. This paper focuses on what the friar endured during his hearings (audiencias) with inquisitors leading up to his death, and what final stresses led him to the final act of self-destruction—an act that rendered the body of the priest doubly “unnatural,” through rumors of his sodomitical proclivities and the act of suicide.