No one expects...the jokes write themselves

As I mention in the discussion below, given how very little information this article has relating to women's same-sex relations, one might wonder why I bothered to include it. And the answer is, because often negative information is as important to understanding the context of people's lives in history as the positive information is. We often have an impression that women in sexual relationships were in constant danger of persecution and repression. That they must have lived in constant fear of discovery and the consequences thereof. But once you sift through the data in this article (and it's packed full of numbers and pie charts and trend graphs), the take-home message is that in the entire kingdom of Aragon in Spain, for the century and a half when the Spanish Inquisition was most fixated on the sexual lives of ordinary people, only one (1) female couple is recorded as being tried by the Inquisition for the offense of sodomy. And they were punished by exile and being forbidden to live together, not by death or even imprisonment. (Though exile was nothing to sneeze at.) While this data doesn't address how this compared with attention from the secular courts, and while it doesn't give us a baseline for how many women engaged in acts that might have been considered sodomy, we can make some reasonable extrapolations and suggest that legal prosecution of women solely for engaging in same-sex acts was not a major risk factor.

So when you're imagining the lives of your fictional characters and thinking of setting them in 16-17th century Spain, maybe--just maybe--the Inquisition isn't something that needs to be a constant threat looming over their lives. In fact, coming to the notice of the Inquisition must might be more historically inaccurate than otherwise.

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