DIGITAL COLLECTIONS AND THE TRIBUNAL DO SANTO OFFICIO: A NEW PRESENCE FROM THE PAST FROM PAULA DE SEQUEIRA AND WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Abstract

This article is divided into two levels. One of them is about los siete libros de diana, written by jorge de montemayor published in 1559 and prohibited by the inquisition. Such publication is in the tie between the english playwright william shakespeare, who used it as the basis for his play “the two gentlemen of verona”, and the lisbon woman paula de sequeira, condemned by the court of the holy office for the crime of “forbidden reading”. The book is the point that unites these two distinct biographies, although contemporary, but the reading diana provokes different results. Approaching these three profiles - paula, shakespeare and montemayor -, the article takes a leap in order to reflect about digital collections and historiography. Currently, different versions of the pastoral novel are available, as well as an extensive documentation regarding the inquisition, especially in the torre do tombo national archives, in which the lawsuit against paula de sequeira can be found. Through the databases, revisiting the past could reactivate characters, but also requires issues about his own technology environment. By making their collections available online, archives and libraries, which for a long time only occupied physical spaces, have reconfigured certain research gestures. One is precisely the conversion of such spaces of memory into spaces for the production of thought and the creation of subjectivities through digitization.