Syntactic Trees

Manuel Leitão de Oliveira, the twelve-year-old son of Filipa Grácia and Sebastião Rodrigues de Oliveira decides to write fake letters, on behalf of his father, who was in jail. He claimed he did it to soothe his stepmother, who was always crying and longing to receive news from Sebastião. He also admitted having written the letters expecting to receive some compensation for bringing good news.The Inquisition archives contain, apart from the around 40 thousand individual proceedings ("processos"), a collection of scattered charges, for which the Inquisition "Promotor" had to decide whether or not to prosecute. Complaints, confessions, letters by the commissioners or about different stages of each proceedings are some of the document types that can be found in these books. This letter has been kept among such documentation.