Placing, putting or hanging the label on someone is an idiom that has been used for centuries to accuse a person unfairly, to point out the discredit that one has earned for a bad action committed or simply to blame someone. That is, it is an expression that is used to negatively label people. We have heard and read this expression on countless occasions and we have surely understood its meaning in the context of the conversation or the text, but we may not know the origin of a phrase that already appears in Don Quixote de la Mancha.
The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) is always a good starting point. If we look for the word sambenito, we find up to four meanings:
The dictionary also shows us the verb sambenitar, which means “to put someone in the name of reconciled penitents”, as well as “to discredit, discredit someone”.
The RAE academics already put us on the track of expression. This comes from the Inquisition, the religious court founded by Pope Gregory IX in the year 1231 that appropriated the exclusive right to persecute, try and condemn heretics.
Manuel Peña Díaz, professor of Modern History at the University of Córdoba, delved into the history of the sambenitos in The Inquisition, memory of infamy, a study on the Holy Office published in the magazine Andalucía en la Historia, published by the Center for Andalusian Studies. The document makes a review of that kind of tunic that the prisoners wore and in which the type of death of the sentence used to be drawn.
The defendants, who received the name of sanbenitados, were forced to wear a habit with the cross of San Andrés for several years every time they left their home. But this macabre clothing was not limited to the iconography of the auto-da-fe. Given the quite frequent practice of the condemned not to wear the habit, maintains Peña Díaz, the Holy Office also ordered the robes to be hung in the church where the condemned man resided.
The display of the sambenitos in the churches only fueled suspicions about the surnames of the condemned, and therefore also of their relatives. It was a time when no one was safe. With the passage of time, the hanging habits were replaced by other fabrics called blankets. This is precisely where the phrase “pull the blanket” comes from, used as a threat to reveal a matter that was kept secret and that could compromise other people.
There is still another colloquial expression that arises as a result of the sambenitos, since this garment was often accompanied by a hood, giving rise to the “fool of hood”.
The custom of the sambenito was gradually disappearing, until in 1789 it was ordered that the tunics stopped hanging in the churches.
Alberto Buitrago, in his Diccionario de dichos y frases hechos, provides two interesting notes on the etymology of sambenito. On the one hand, he assures that the most accepted explanation is that the word derives from the deformation of blessed sack, alluding to the blessed habits of penitents. However, on the other hand, he defends as more logical the origin raised by the historian Américo Castro, who argued that sambenito was “the name given to the great scapular that the Benedictine monks (order founded by Saint Benedict) wore on their habit, that reached from shoulder to shoulder and hung down to the knees. Later, the garments designed by the Inquisition for the condemned were reminiscent of that scapular, which is why they ended up receiving the same name.
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