Syntactic Trees

Letter from Pero de Araújo, a friar, to Estêvão Magro, a priest.

The author sends money and news from the Bishop of Guarda.

In 1590, Joana de Mendanha, a single woman of 40 living in Covilhã, was arrested after months of investigation by the Inquisition, accused of pretending supernatural gifts; her confessor, the priest Estêvão Magro, defended her cause since he believed she was genuinely illuminated, the reason why she intuitively knew Latin and spoke it in her ecstasies. Nevertheless, Joana de Mendanha was found guilty and sentenced to a confinement in a monastery for four years. The private correspondence that was included in her proceedings was kept by Estêvão Magro, but found its way to the Inquisition because the priest died in 1592. By this time, the Inquisition was prosecuting several cases of the same nature, committed as the Inquisitors were to end what they called the excesses in the nuns' monasteries.