In fact, Céspedes would later tell inquisitors that she was a hermaphrodite, having both sets of sexual organs. Standing before the tribunal, which charged Céspedes with sorcery and "disrespect for the marriage sacrament," Céspedes would argue that this unique gender status allowed her to live as a man or a woman — in God's service, and without the Devil's dark magic.

Yet, after a year, a royal official, acting on a neighbor's tip, arrested the couple for committing "the nefarious crime of sodomy," a capital offense. Céspedes claimed innocence, saying she was male when she married.

The vicar and his associates took Céspedes to a nearby house, where they inspected Céspedes from the front. The men testified that the prospective groom appeared to be a man. The marriage went forward, the veiling celebrated in Ciempozuelos.

"When I asked for María del Caño's hand in marriage, and it was given to me, I went to Madrid to ask the vicar for a license to marry and post banns" [publicly announce the wedding], Céspedes told inquisitors. "The vicar, who saw that I was beardless and hairless, asked me if I was a capon. I told him I wasn't, and that he should look at me to see that I wasn't."

Céspedes, a former slave of Moorish descent — and sometime tailor, hosier, mercenary soldier, and licensed surgeon — was also known as Eleno. She had married twice — initially, as a girl of 16 to a man who abandoned her after she became pregnant. (Her husband later died, she said.) More than two decades later, and just 15 months before her trial, she married again.

"My name is Elena de Céspedes," she said. "I was born in Alhama and I'm forty-one or two years old."

O n the morning of July 17, 1587, a woman in men's garb was escorted from her jail cell to stand before Lord Inquisitor don Lope de Mendoza. In the Tribunal of Toledo, one of the busiest courts of the Spanish Inquisition, the prisoner swore an oath to tell the truth.

The Spanish Inquisition is not an institution customarily associated with autobiography. . . . Rather, the Holy Office, as the Inquisition is also known, evokes the darker side of life — arbitrary justice, racial hatred, and religious persecution, along with images of dreary prisons, torture, and human suffering. — Richard L. Kagan and Abigail Dyer, Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews & Other Heretics

A new book co-edited by Johns Hopkins historian Richard Kagan offers a rare glimpse into the lives of six prisoners — non-conformists of their time — who got caught in the prosecutorial web of the Spanish Inquisition.

For their book, Kagan and Dyer translated and annotated the autobiographies of six prisoners, five of whom were tried in Europe and one in the New World. These cases are not representative of typical Spaniards or Spanish émigrés of the day but instead reveal the type of individuals — and the range of social and religious issues — of concern to Spanish authorities in the 16th and 17th centuries. The researchers focus on what is considered the early modern period, in which medieval feudal societies were replaced by the larger nation-states that preceded today's political and social structures.

Kagan, who has taught at Hopkins since 1972, has studied and written about various facets of early modern Spain, including the history of women, the architecture of cities, and university and legal culture — remarkable range for a historian. Notes Ruiz: "He can imbed the Inquisition into the broader social context of early modern Spanish society."

Teofilo F. Ruiz, professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), has been following the researchers' work. Kagan and Dyer "look at the Inquisition from rather a new perspective, emphasizing the role of women as victims of the Inquisition, raising questions about sexuality, honor, and shame," Ruiz says.

In the mid-1990s, Kagan and Columbia University PhD student Abigail Dyer, who had heard of Kagan's work, started delving deeper into such stories. Among other resources, they scoured 400-year-old Inquisition trial records, stacks upon stacks of yellowing rag paper now housed at Madrid's Archivo Histórico Nacional, Mexico City's Archivo General de la Nación, and in regional Spanish archives. The resulting book, Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews & Other Heretics, was published earlier this year by the Johns Hopkins University Press .

Richard L. Kagan, professor and chair of the Johns Hopkins History Department , came across the Inquisition narratives back in the mid-1980s, when researching the life of one of the Inquisition's most fascinating victims for his book Lucrecia's Dreams: Politics and Prophesy in Sixteenth Century Spain. Kagan, who teaches a popular undergraduate course in historical autobiography titled Visions of the Self, notes that these examples of social deviance, as well as outright challenges to church or secular authority, are ironically preserved via the official Inquisition records. "Usually, we view history through the eyes of elites, such as kings and queens. Yet it is interesting to see how other people navigated their lives," Kagan says. "This is living history, and it opens up whole new dimensions of the historical past."

That's because a lesser known aspect of the bureaucracy of the Spanish Inquisition was its penchant for documenting the institution's feared secret trials, including prisoners' personal testimonies that often were recorded, nearly word for word, by inquisitorial scribes. The result: a surviving written record of autobiographies that offer a glimpse into the lives of real people caught in the Inquisition's prosecutorial web.

During Céspedes' trial, which lasted several weeks, Holy Office judges would press for a confession. And they would try to keep her out of the public eye during the remainder of her lifetime.

The punishments of the accused — an estimated 40,000 appeared before the Spanish Inquisition during its 350-year history — usually ranged from prayers of atonement, to public lashings, exile, prison, or, in the case of heretics who refused to recant, burning at the stake.

"In 1642 they made the tactical error of welcoming into their community an Inquisition spy who was posing as a secret Jew," Kagan and Dyer write. "The Mexican Inquisition arrested Blanca and all her daughters a few months later."

Consider the trial of Doña Blanca Méndez de Rivera, who fled inquisitorial investigators in 1621 with her husband and five daughters. According to her trial narrative, detailed in Inquisitorial Inquiries, the family emigrated to Mexico City. Méndez de Rivera, soon widowed, and her five daughters became the center of a small Jewish converso community in Mexico.

When the Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition was authorized by papal bull, it was also just 14 years before Columbus would cross the Atlantic to the New World, spreading the missionary zeal of religious conversion. Spain's imperial expansion and goal of religious dominance, in the Western Hemisphere and worldwide, would lead to other inquisitorial persecutions.

Before his case was resolved, Ysla reportedly died in prison — just months after turning himself in.

After traveling in Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and various countries in the Middle East — and switching back and forth between Judaism and Christianity, depending on the community he landed in — Ysla finally returned to Toledo in 1514. He was advised by friends that he should voluntarily confess his "sins" to avoid arrest. He said he was a committed Christian. The inquisitors "took no immediate action on his case," pending more information.

Take the case of Luis de la Ysla, born Abraham Abzaradiel in Illescas, a Castilian town near Toledo. Ysla was among thousands of Jews exiled from Spain in 1492 by order of the monarchy. As the authors write: "As part of the great Mediterranean diaspora, Abzaradiel, only eight years old at the time of the expulsion, found his way to Italy, where just shy of his thirteenth birthday, he was baptized [and] converted to Christianity."

In the late 1470s, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had launched the Spanish Inquisition to combat perceived political threats and to unify a nation under one religion. Spain's Jews would later be forced to convert to Catholicism, or face exile. Among the Jewish community, or conversos, who would remain were people known as "Judaizers," converts who secretly practiced Jewish rites to maintain an embattled faith. The Inquisition, which had jurisdiction only over those who claimed to be Catholic, was thus able to target Jews.

Consider, for example, some of the prisoners featured in the book: a female convert to Catholicism who secretly serves as a rabbi in Mexico; an Islamic convert, known as a Morisco, who claims he was circumcised against his will (a claim meant to defend him from charges he practiced Islam); and a self-proclaimed prophet who threatens the status quo by predicting the fall of the Spanish monarchy.

"Early modern people didn't have as many limits as historians tend to imagine they did," Dyer notes. "Their imaginations were fantastic and they used resources with tremendous creativity."

Most of the narratives have never been published, let alone translated into English. In the late 1990s, Dyer reviewed archival records and microfilm, painstakingly transcribing and translating the cryptic shorthand used by court scribes. Dyer, now an independent scholar in New York and a soprano with the Amato Opera company, says she found the stories of 16th- and 17th-century Spaniards to be illuminating.

"In a sense, are recent biographies any more truthful?" Kagan asks. "People are essentially trying to say, 'Understand me, understand my life.'"