Shortly after the birth in 1554 of Sebastian, the last of the dynasty of Avis, a doctor in attendance named Maldonado cast his horoscope. Among other things, the horoscope predicted that Sebastian would be given to "pleasures" with women, and that his wife would give him many noble and handsome children. Since Sebastian never married and had no children in spite of the fact that producing heirs was one of the primary duties of royalty, Sebastian's failure to do so prompted author Harold B. Johnson to examine Sebastian's life more closely in an attempt to understand why. These researches led Johnson to elaborate a radical new picture of the young king's upbringing, a picture that has proved deeply upsetting to conservative Portuguese scholars. Sebastian King of Portugal: Four Essays is a collection of Johnson's contributions to the understanding of King Sebastian. Within its pages he provides evidence of Sebastian's sexual abuse at the age of nine, as well as Sebastian's homosexual behavior later in life. Johnson also addresses the arguments of his critics, providing documentation that further authenticates his interpretations of this unusual king's life.

The author explores the conspiracy of Gabriel de Espinosa who attempted to pass himself off as the deceased King Sebastian of Portugal sixteen years after his death. Through this the author explores how stories - regarding such topics as prophecies of returned leaders, nuns kept against their will, kidnappings by Moors, etc. - are conceived, told, circulated, and believed.

Hercules and the King of Portugal investigates how representations of masculinity figure in the fashioning of Spanish national identity, scrutinizing ways that gender performances of two early modern male icons—Hercules and King Sebastian—are structured to express enduring nationhood. The classical hero Hercules features prominently in Hispanic foundational fictions and became intimately associated with the Hapsburg monarchy in the early sixteenth century. King Sebastian of Portugal (1554–78), both during his lifetime and after his violent death, has been inserted into his own land’s charter myth, even as competing interests have adapted his narratives to promote Spanish power. The hybrid oral and written genre of poetic Spanish theater, as purveyor and shaper of myth, was well situated to stage and resolve dilemmas relating both to lineage determined by birth and performance of masculinity, in ways that would ideally uphold hierarchy. Dian Fox’s ideological analysis exposes how the two icons are subject to political manipulations in seventeenth-century Spanish theater and other media. Fox finds that officially sanctioned and sometimes popularly produced narratives are undercut by dynamic social and gendered processes: “Hercules” and “Sebastian” slip outside normative discourses and spaces to enact nonnormative behaviors and unreproductive masculinities.

Laborie and Hessayon bring rare prophetic and millenarian texts to an international audience by presenting sources from all over Europe (broadly defined), and across the early modern period in English for the first time.