1619. Carta de Paulo de Pedrosa Meireles, vigário-geral, para um destinatário da Inquisição não identificado.

Private letter from Paulo de Pedrosa Meireles, a vicar, to a non identified addressee from the Inquisition

The author tells the addressee how difficult it has been to find the wife of Diogo Dias, a woman who never obeys the summons. He adds that she had informally testified that her husband’s second wife had asked her to give him “quitação” (a divorce).

Diogo Dias was a barber-surgeon who was sentenced to a Brazilian exile for five years. He had been married for 20 years to Maria Cordeira, mother of his four children, but he remarried in Brazil with Maria Dias. When he was arrested for bigamy, he argued that he had heard that his first wife had died from two diseases: a cancer and the plague. He was found guilty.