Monasterios femeninos e inquisición en Chile: una pregunta pendiente. El caso de la agustina Jacoba y el comisario Melchor Calderón (1596)

This work intends to analyze a case that occurred at the end of the 16th century in Santiago of Chile, when the first female monasteries were just beginning to be installed. Specifically, it deals with the tribulations of a young nun of white veil from the Monastery of the Augustinians of the Clean Conception, who was in risk of being judged by the Inquisition. In this context, this research proposes a historical approach to an entire source recently discovered in the National Historical Archive of Madrid. Thus, it is a matter of making the inquisitorial record known and valued due to its novelty and uniqueness, and because it is a specific case, in which a commissioner of the Inquisition is directly related to a cloistered nun: the Augustinian Jacoba of San José. Although the historian José Toribio Medina alludes to the case in History of the Tribunal of the Holy Office in Chile, he makes only a partial transcription of the document. For the same reason, this work seeks to appraise its true dimension from an approach in two converging levels: cloistered life and Inquisition. In addition, the fact of having the complete document is particularly relevant also because it is one of the few direct sources of the first years of life of the Augustinian nuns of the Kingdom of Chile.