Humanism and Religion in Early Modern Spain brings together twenty-five essays by renowned historian Terence O’Reilly. The essays examine the interplay of religion and humanism in a series of writings composed in sixteenth-century Spain. It begins by presenting essential background: the coming together during the reign of the Emperor Charles V of Erasmian humanism and various movements of religious reform, some of them heterodox. It then moves on to the reign of Philip II, focusing on the mystical poetry and prose of St John of the Cross. It explores the influence on his writings of his humanist learning – classical, biblical and patristic. The third part of the book concerns a verse-epistle by John’s contemporary, Francisco de Aldana. One chapter presents the text with a parallel version in English, whilst two others trace its debt to Florentine Neoplatonism, particularly the thought of Marsilio Ficino. The final part is devoted to the humanism of the poet and Scripture scholar Luis de León, and specifically to the confluence in his work of biblical and classical motifs. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of early modern Spanish history, as well those interested in literary studies and the history of religion. (CS 1102).

This book examines the effects of Jewish conversions to Christianity in late medieval Spanish society. Ingram focuses on these converts and their descendants (known as conversos) not as Judaizers, but as Christian humanists, mystics and evangelists, who attempt to create a new society based on quietist religious practice, merit, and toleration. His narrative takes the reader on a journey from the late fourteenth-century conversions and the first blood purity laws (designed to marginalize conversos), through the early sixteenth-century Erasmian and radical mystical movements, to a Counter-Reformation environment in which conversos become the advocates for pacifism and concordance. His account ends at the court of Philip IV, where growing intolerance towards Madrid’s converso courtiers is subtly attacked by Spain’s greatest painter, Diego Velázquez, in his work, Los Borrachos. Finally, Ingram examines the historiography of early modern Spain, in which he argues the converso reform phenomenon continues to be underexplored.

This in-depth study of religious tensions in early modern Spain offers a new and enlightening perspective on the era of the Inquisition. Traditionally, the Spanish Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries has been framed as an epic battle of opposites. The followers of Erasmus were in constant discord with conservative Catholics while the humanists were diametrically opposed to the scholastics. Historian Lu Ann Homza rejects this simplistic view. In Religious Authority in the Spanish Renaissance, she presents a subtler paradigm, recovering the profound nuances in Spanish intellectual and religious history. Through analyses of Inquisition trials, biblical translations, treatises on witchcraft and tracts on the episcopate and penance, Homza illuminates the intellectual autonomy and energy of Spain's ecclesiastics.

This volume provides the first geographically broad, comparative survey of early modern 'sacred history', or writing on the history of the Christian Church, its leaders and saints, and its institutional and doctrinal developments, in the two centuries from c. 1450-1650. With deep medieval roots, ecclesiastical history was generally a conservative enterprise, often serving to reinforce confessional, national, regional, dynastic, or local identities. But writers of sacred history innovated in research methods and in techniques of scholarly production, especially after the advent of print. The demand for sacred history was particularly acute in the various movements for religious reform, in both Catholic and Protestant traditions. After the Renaissance, many writers sought to apply humanist critical principles to writing about the church, but the sceptical thrust of humanist historiography threatened to undermine many ecclesiastical traditions, and religious historians often had to wrestle with tensions between criticism and piety. Thirteen thematic chapters examine the influence of Renaissance humanism, religious reform, and other political, intellectual, and social developments of these two centuries on the writing of ecclesiastical history in its various forms. These diverse genres, inherited from medieval culture, included saints' lives, diocesan histories, national chronicles, and travel accounts. Early chapters examine Catholic and Protestant traditions of sacred historiography in western Europe, especially Italy and Switzerland. Subsequent chapters examine particular instances of sacred historiography in Germany, central Europe, Spain, England, Ireland, France, and Portuguese India; and developments in Christian art historiography and Holy Land antiquarianism.

Throughout the Middle Ages dialectical disputation was the prevailing method of scholarly inquiry. In the fifteenth century, however, humanists challenged the scholastic method, proposing instead historical and philological approaches. This volume focuses on the polemic over the right approach to biblical studies. It describes manifestations of the controversy, ranging from its beginnings in quattrocento Italy to Germany, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and scholars associated with the papal court in the sixteenth century. Erasmus, the most prominent biblical humanist of his day, served as a lightning rod for many of the controversies discussed here and has also received much attention from modern scholars. The chapters offered here seek to lend a voice also to Erasmus’ critics and to right the balance in a historical narrative that has traditionally favoured the humanists. Contributors are John Monfasani, Daniel Menager, Carlos del Valle Rodríguez, Alejandro Coroleu, Charles Fantazzi, Guy Bedouelle, James Farge, Cecilia Asso, Marcel Gielis, Paolo Sartori, Paul F. Grendler, Nelson H. Minnich, Ronald K. Delph

An up-to-date synthesis of the spread and impact of humanism in Europe. A team of Renaissance scholars of international reputation including Peter Burke, Sydney Anglo, George Holmes and Geoffrey Elton, offers the student, academic and general reader an up-to-date synthesis of our current understanding of the spread and impact of humanism in Europe. Taken together, these essays throw a new and searching light on the Renaissance as a European phenomenon.

Culling genres as diverse as emblem books, poetry, drama, courtesy treatises and prose-fiction, this study extricates the history of masculinity in early modern Spain from the narrative of Spain’s fall from imperial power after 1640. Drawing on recent developments in gender theory, Masculine Virtue shows how the inception of courtiership at the Spanish Hapsburg court generated new models of masculine virtue that continue to resonate today.

Sarah H. Beckjord’s Territories of History explores the vigorous but largely unacknowledged spirit of reflection, debate, and experimentation present in foundational Spanish American writing. In historical works by writers such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Beckjord argues, the authors were not only informed by the spirit of inquiry present in the humanist tradition but also drew heavily from their encounters with New World peoples. More specifically, their attempts to distinguish superstition and magic from science and religion in the New World significantly influenced the aforementioned chroniclers, who increasingly directed their insights away from the description of native peoples and toward a reflection on the nature of truth, rhetoric, and fiction in writing history. Due to a convergence of often contradictory information from a variety of sources—eyewitness accounts, historiography, imaginative literature, as well as broader philosophical and theological influences—categorizing historical texts from this period poses no easy task, but Beckjord sifts through the information in an effective, logical manner. At the heart of Beckjord’s study, though, is a fundamental philosophical problem: the slippery nature of truth—especially when dictated by stories. Territories of History engages both a body of emerging scholarship on early modern epistemology and empiricism and recent developments in narrative theory to illuminate the importance of these colonial authors’ critical insights. In highlighting the parallels between the sixteenth-century debates and poststructuralist approaches to the study of history, Beckjord uncovers an important legacy of the Hispanic intellectual tradition and updates the study of colonial historiography in view of recent discussions of narrative theory.

Immaculate Conceptions examines devotional writings, religious and literary texts, and visual art that feature the mystery of the immaculacy of the Virgin Mary in the culture of early modern Spain. The author’s analysis is motivated by the complexity and multivalent capacity of the doctrine and its icon at a time when the debates around Mary’s conception imbued all levels of religious and social life. She considers the many interests – political, doctrinal, artistic, and gender-driven – that intersect and compete in the exegesis and textual and visual representations of the Immaculate Conception. She argues that the Immaculate Conception of Mary proved to be a fertile conceptual and ideological field wherein the identities of the Spanish state, local communities, and individuals were negotiated, variously defined, and contested. The study’s broader aim is to delineate a speculative category, the religious imagination, defined as a spiritual, intellectual, or artistic pursuit in which the individual is committed to sacred truth yet articulates this truth through contingent, partial, and contextually determined theological propositions. The representational status of the image and its relationship to theories of physical sight and spiritual vision are central to the author’s formulation of this category.

Arguing against historians of Spanish political thought that have neglected recent developments in our understanding of Machiavelli's contribution to the European tradition, the thesis of this book is that Machiavellian discourse had a profound impact on Spanish prose treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After reviewing in chapter 1 Machiavelli's ideological restructuring of the language of European political thought, in chapter 2 Dr. Howard shows how, before his works were prohibited in Spain in 1583, Spaniards such as Fadrique Furi Ceriol and Balthazar Ayala used Machiavelli's new vocabulary and theoretical framework to develop an imperial discourse that would be compatible with a militant understanding of Catholic Christianity. In chapters 3, 4 and 5 he demonstrates in detail how Giovanni Botero, Pedro de Ribadeneyra, and their imitators in the anti-Machiavellian reason-of-state tradition in Spain, attack a straw figure of Machiavelli that they have invented for their own rhetorical and ideological purposes, while they simultaneously incorporate key Machiavellian concepts into their own advice. Keith David Howard is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Florida State University.