I enjoyed this book a lot more than I had thought I was going to. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I guess it was something that would have been a lot more stodgy and unentertaining. I'm sure the account would have seemed even more fascinating had I been more familiar with the politics of the day and more of the backstory of the area. The book is really intended for more professional historians which would have had the breadth of knowledge to more readily place the account into a correct historical context. As merely an interested party, I left the book with a desire to learn a lot more about the times (which is high praise by my standards.)
I thought the story was quite fascinating. The fact that Maria and her husband had written of their experiences before the inquisition was quite interesting. It sounds like Maria had quite an interesting time with the visions and her story adapting over the years.
I was very interested to see the very large number of footnotes included in the book. This is one of the things that always makes me more likely to appreciate an author. I like to see that they've done their homework. I was also very impressed at how many different subjects seemed like they had direct bearing on the subject matter.
One of the things that really impressed me was the Inquisition. I guess I had never really thought about it before, but they took their religion and revelation so seriously that they were able to muster a police force for ideas or heresy. While I'm not sure I'd buy into their interpretations of everything, I can at least respect that they were serious enough about their beliefs to invest the time and energy to work to ensure that it stayed pure.
I was also very interested to read the level of animosity that Islam had already garnered among the Inquisition. Modern history seems to neglect the historical reputation that Islam has won for itself, but to see the level of animosity towards the heresy of Islam as such a hard line in the church in Portugal was a refreshing lack of political correctness.
I found the criticism of Maria's story based on aspects of it which were too fantastic to be believed to be quite fascinating. I was intrigued to read of the doctrinal allegations that the Inquisitors made against Maria and her husband.
I guess I say all of that because one of the thrilling aspects of the book was that so much of it seemed to have some tie-in to the things that are going on in our world today. A battle with Islam was underway; a hope was there for their country to manifest its own identity, a search for freedom and self-determination all played together to give this account a flavor of modernity that is fascinating. It was interesting to me that the Sebastianism of their day seemed to bring with it the dead weight of doing nothing since a return of a Messianic person was imminent and there was nothing that needed to be done; much like the modern church and their conviction that Jesus' return is imminent and little needs to be done because none of it will matter when He returns.
I think one of the "joys" of history is that so many of the same issues and concerns come to play in such an amazing array of locations and people and times. It makes it easy to understand why the Biblical Solomon would say that "there's nothing new under the sun" even thousands of years ago.
I was going to give this four stars because there's not a 4 ½. I really would have enjoyed more of the historical context, but knowing that I'm not really part of the intended audience, it didn't seem fair to dock that star.
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