International Seminar – History of the Inquisitions
21, 22 and 23 October 2026
Centro de Arte e Cultura da Fundação Eugénio de Almeida, Évora, Portugal
Foundations, Adaptations and Rootedness
On the occasion of the 490th anniversary of the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition, the International Group “History of the Inquisitions” invites professors, researchers, and graduate students to submit paper proposals for its international seminar, dedicated to the theme “Foundations, Adaptations and Rootedness,” to be held in an exclusively in-person format at the Eugénio de Almeida Foundation Art and Culture Centre, in Évora, Portugal, from 21 to 23 October 2026.
Taking 1536 – the founding year of the Portuguese Inquisition – as its starting point, the 2026 edition of the “International Seminar ‘History of the Inquisitions’” focuses on reflecting upon the challenges involved in the creation and implementation of the tribunals of the Holy Office. This reflection is not limited to the foundational moments of the different Inquisitions but rather seeks to question the dynamics of institutional rooting and the constant adaptations required by their insertion into European and extra-European contexts from a long-term perspective.
The establishment of the Spanish, Portuguese or Roman Inquisitions did not merely produce a judicial-bureaucratic apparatus. Their creation presupposed a project of political and social adhesion that was intended to shape collective attitudes towards dissenting religious and social ideas, thoughts, and behaviors. The Inquisitions represented a societal readjustment marked by moments of varying intensity that were articulated in partnership with central powers.
The creation of district tribunals, the carrying out of visitations, and the presence of their agents in each territory (comissários, familiares, vicars and others) represented the visible enforcement of a new normative and ideological reality in the daily lives of populations. These new social environments had long existed in progressive expansion, and therefore were not free from resistance nor, conversely, from enthusiastic adherence. From its host cities to the rural outskirts of the provinces of Trás-os-Montes in northern Portugal or Charcas (today Sucre, Bolivia), the territorialization of the Inquisitions paved the way for new social dynamics and equilibria between individuals, groups or ethnicities.
This edition of the “International Seminar ‘History of the Inquisitions’” aims to analyze the founding moments of the Holy Office across the different societies under its jurisdiction: from the very first public reading of an edict establishing the Inquisition to the creation of a commissariat in Tete, Mozambique, or the proposals to create new inquisitorial districts in Guatemala or the Philippines.
The objective is to understand the dynamics of how various social sectors accepted or rejected the new institution, its processes of consolidation and rooting, as well as the transformations initiated by its regular presence without overlooking the different motivations that drove certain social sectors to seek a more capillary presence of the tribunal in distinct territories.
The seminar thus approaches the Inquisition as a broad topic with multiple analytical perspectives and lines of inquiry, taking as its starting point the founding moments of the tribunals, their subsequent growth, and eventual rootedness in the different spaces where they operated.
Potential topics include:
- Processes of foundation, diplomacy, and negotiation of the Iberian and Roman Inquisitions.
- Logics of territorialization: creation and adaptation of new district tribunals.
- Possible resistance to the establishment of district tribunals.
- Socioeconomic composition of the agents of the Holy Office.
- The modern Inquisitions and non-European populations.
- Debates on the creation of tribunals in colonial worlds.
- Crimes, behaviors and changing temporalities.
- Surveillance of ideas.
- Social and economic impacts of the Early Modern Inquisitions.
- The “modernity” of the new Inquisitions.