Los «judíos menstruantes» : sangre, bautismo y la rétorica de la evidencia en un tratado de Juan de Quiñones (1632)

The essay highlights a previously neglected facet of the manifold inimical associations that Christian Society drew between Jews and blood and reveals the power of adding a gender perspective. It proposes a discussion of how the concepts of proof and evidence, blood and infamy, took shape in the central years of the 17th-century Spanish Empire. It is based on the affair of the Christ of Patience, a central episode in the wave against the Portuguese conversos and the Olivares policy, and on some contemporary treatises, such as Juan de Quinones's on menstruating Jews (where male blood would represent bodily evidence of guilt) and the physician and humanist Isaac Cardoso's. A detailed analysis of the period's legal and medical treatises and inquisitorial law offers a new interpretation of bodily stigma. It also takes a novel gendered approach to the conceptualization of race in the Spanish empire, particularly about the bodily stigmatization of Jews, Indians, and witches.