An Invisible Thread is actually the third incarnation of a work originally published in Italian in 2004: Un’eresia spagnola: spiritualità conversa, alumbradismo e inquisizione (1449-1559). The second version, Una herejía española: Conversos, alumbrados e inquisición (1449-1559), was an updated and expanded Spanish translation of this original, published in 2010 and well known to historians of late medieval and early modern Spain. This third edition, a translation of the Spanish version, brings an important work to an even wider audience. And, as its conspicuously different title in English suggests, Pastore does more than simply bring the book’s bibliography and references up to date (though she does this, too). She has also added a prologue and introduction, as well as a new concluding chapter (chapter 7) in which the author situates her “research in relation to the historiographical debates of the last hundred years but devotes particular attention to those that have developed after the appearance of the Italian and Spanish editions of [her] monograph” (x).
Pastore’s approach is people-focused, and her many protagonists are a mixture of well-known and more unfamiliar figures. In the former camp would go Granada’s first archbishop, Hernando de Talavera (chapter 1); the reformer Juan de Valdés (chapter 5); the “Apostle of Andalusia” Juan de Ávila, as well as preachers Juan Gil (“el doctor Egidio”) and Constantino Ponce de la Fuente (chapter 6). The lesser-known individuals, meanwhile, include humanist and courtier Juan de Lucena (chapter 2); Toledan priest and alleged prophet Pero López de Soria (chapter 3); and accused alumbrados Juan del Castillo, Petronila de Lucena, and Juan López de Celaín (chapter 4). Pastore ultimately shows that, whether familiar or obscure, these figures had much in common, as I will describe in more detail below. In broad strokes, however, most were of converso origin, and all became targets of the Spanish Inquisition.
Chapter 1 begins in Toledo in 1449. It was in that fateful year that Pero Sarmiento—leader of a city then in open rebellion against the Castilian Crown—issued the first purity of blood statute, which barred conversos from holding public office. That statute set an ominous legal precedent, but also set off a flurry of debate between pro-conversos—who were, Pastore is quick to note, almost always anti-Jewish—and anti-conversos. The converso bishop of Burgos, Alonso de Cartagena, and the Franciscan Alonso de Espina, author of the rabidly anti-converso and anti-Jewish Fortalitium fidei, were each faction’s earliest representative. But it was Talavera, Queen Isabella’s confessor from 1474 and the future archbishop of Granada, who would become the best-remembered advocate of converts and their descendants. Talavera was himself a converso, as well as a Hieronymite, “the converso order par excellence” (29); and he wrote his Católica impugnación in 1480-81, just as the newly founded Spanish Inquisition was setting up shop in Seville.In this pro-converso, but also deeply anti-Jewish text, not published until 1487, Talavera argued against forced conversions and defended genuine converts to the faith, grounding his views in the Pauline Epistles in particular (a thread to which Pastore will return). As is well known, Talavera’s approach did not win the day. Jews who remained in Spain were forced to convert in 1492; Granada’s Muslims were forcibly baptized by 1502; and by 1506, the Inquisition had charged members of Talavera’s own family, and even Talavera himself, with judaizing. Talavera would be exonerated by the Pope (Julius II), but he died in 1507, a few days before news of his acquittal could reach him.
Pastore turns to a likeminded contemporary of Talavera in chapter 2: the humanist and converso Juan de Lucena (not to be confused with the converso printer of the same name). Lucena spent many years in Italy, first at the court of Alfonso V the Magnanimous in Naples and then working for the Pope himself (Pius II), from whom he received the title of apostolic protonotary. Upon his return to Castile in 1463, he finished his De vita beata, an adaptation of a dialogue written by an Italian humanist. The interlocuters of Lucena’s dialogue, however, were prominent Castilians, all recently deceased: the poet Juan de Mena; the Marquis of Santillana, Íñigo López de Mendoza; and the aforementioned Alonso de Cartagena. Together, they lament the corruption of the contemporary clergy, with Cartagena offering up Paul’s portrait of an ideal bishop in his letter to Titus (Ti 1:7-9) as a corrective. And when the trio’s “conversation” eventually turns to that peculiarly Castilian issue of the day, the converso question—that is, the question of whether Jews or their descendants could ever be genuine Christians—the bishop gives an impassioned defense of his Jewish ancestors. After all, he reminded his companions, Old Christians descend from “idolatrous Gentiles” and are not despised on that account (52). Later, probably in 1481, Lucena would compose a letter or treatise, now lost, in which he criticized the Inquisition in his own voice. That work was subsequently condemned, and Lucena was reconciled by the Inquisition. But his problems with the Holy Office didn’t end there. In 1503, he and other members of his family were investigated for judaizing. Lucena still had friends in high places and claimed to enjoy papal immunity from such charges, but we do not know the outcome of his appeals. Like Talavera, he died in 1507.
Chapter 3 introduces an even less familiar figure, the converso Pero López de Soria, “an obscure priest from Toledo” (92). López de Soria was one of many “prophets” who emerged in both Castile and Aragon in the opening decades of the sixteenth century, a phenomenon referred to as “prophetism” throughout the chapter (though spelled “profetism” in the chapter’s title). After experiencing a vision, he predicted that the Pope would come to Toledo, which would then serve as the Church’s new capital. Preceding this establishment of a new Rome, moreover, would be a “profound reform of the corrupt Church” (97). And for López de Soria, a leading symptom of this corruption was the Inquisition, which he allegedly accused of sending people to the stake in order to steal their property. According to this view, the Inquisition’s victims were actually martyrs, while “those who ordered them burned were more deserving of being burned” (98). After the deaths of King Ferdinand in 1516 and Cardinal—and Inquisitor General—Ximénez de Cisneros in 1517, López de Soria was also reported to have had visions of both men being tormented in Hell. He denied most of the charges against him (save the one about his prophecy), but was ultimately condemned.
In chapter 4, Pastore next considers accused alumbrados and wades into debates about alumbradismo itself. She focuses on two “extraordinary figures”in particular: Juan del Castillo, who was also the nephew of the Juan de Lucena discussed in chapter 2; and Juan López de Celaín (125). Celaín was a Basque preacher and, unlike most of the protagonists of Pastore’s book, an Old Christian. He led an ill-fated mission of twelve “apostles” on lands (Medina de Rioseco, near Valladolid) belonging to the Admiral of Castile, Fadrique Enríquez (who had, in fact, invited and subsidized this missionary effort). Celaín was ultimately arrested in 1528 and executed in 1530. Castillo, on the other hand, was not only a priest, but also a doctor of theology and professor of Greek. He was one of Celaín’s supporters and even accompanied him on one of his missions. Fortunately, we know a great deal about his beliefs because of sources preserved from the trial of his sister, Petronila (also accused of alumbradismo), which include letters in his own hand. From these sources, we learn that Castillo rejected the ceremonies of the Church, including the sacraments, denied the efficacy of indulgences, and despised vocal prayer. He even admitted, under torture, to reading and lending out a work by Luther (his De servo arbitrio of 1525). But, as Pastore emphasizes, his views “combined different stimuli and influences,” and many of these were distinctively Castilian (154). For a time, Castillo evaded punishment by going abroad, but he was ultimately arrested in Italy and brought back to Spain in 1534, where he was executed two years later. Pastore’s verdict on alumbradismo is at once critical of the views of Antonio Márquez, whose definition she considers too narrow, rigid, and abstract, and Marcel Bataillon, who defined the term too broadly in her judgment. She’s wary, too, of attempts to universalize what inquisitors themselves believed alumbradismo to be. (126) Instead, Pastore’s approach is what one might call “thick contextualization,” in which the influence of specifically local factors in the development of so-called alumbrado belief is prioritized, e.g., the inspiration of the Franciscan mission to the New World (which served as a model for Celaín); the status of and controversy over conversos, from whose ranks nearly all alleged alumbrados came; and the related attraction to and embrace of a theology that elevated spiritual concerns over material ones.
Pastore returns to a more well-known figure in chapter 5, the Castilian reformer and humanist Juan de Valdés (d.1541). Born into a wealthy and prominent family of conversos in Cuenca, Valdés would study at the Complutense University in Alcalá, correspond with Erasmus, and spend the last years of his life in Italy. His Diálogo de doctrina cristiana (1529) is a catechism in the form of a dialogue between three people, two fictional and one historical, the latter being Pedro de Alba, the recently deceased Hieronymite Archbishop of Granada who was Talavera’s heir both literally and figuratively. Just as in Lucena’s dialogue, it is from the bishop’s mouth that the work’s most important lessons are imparted. And those lessons ring familiar bells: an insistence on clerical reform; anti-ceremonialism and an accompanying call for a more “internalized Christianity” (199); and an emphasis on particular passages of the New Testament (e.g., Paul’s description of love or charity as the “greatest” virtue in 1 Cor 13:13). Valdés’s catechism was initially approved by a theological panelput together by the Archbishop of Seville, and Inquisitor General, Alonso de Manrique; but it was ultimately censored by the Inquisition beginning in 1531—tellingly, the same year Valdés abandoned Spain for Italy—and would appear on the first Indices of Prohibited Books. The Diálogo has been viewed by scholars as inspired principally by Erasmian (Bataillon), alumbrado (Nieto), or Protestant ideas (Gilly), and also as purposefully concealing its alumbrado or Protestant sympathies (Nieto and Gilly, respectively). [1] Pastore eschews both approaches, however, preferring instead to view the Diálogo as evidence of a “willed eclecticism” (191), influenced by Erasmus and Luther, among others, but better understood as a product of the specific Castilian context in which it was composed.
Chapter 6 takes us to the final destination of Pastore’s itinerary: Seville. For a time, that city would become a hub of reform-minded luminaries. Among them were three renowned converso preachers, all educated at the Complutense: Juan Gil (better known as Egidio), Constantino Ponce de la Fuente, and Juan de Ávila. What we know of Egidio’s views comes largely from his abjuration of various propositions, the fruit of a years-long trial that concluded in 1552. Egidio abjured, for example, that faith “may be lost through any mortal sin,” a proposition that had recently been anathematized by the Council of Trent (217-18). He also criticized ceremony-obsessed Christians (whom he called “cerimoniáticos”) and questioned the necessity of learned intermediaries between ordinary people and God. Ponce de la Fuente, meanwhile, published a series of works between 1543 and 1546, from which we can glean some of his beliefs. Borrowing heavily from Valdés’s catechism, he emphasized the connection between faith and charity and depreciated external works. His reputation was such that, when he was finally arrested and imprisoned in 1556, Charles V is said to have exclaimed: “If Constantino is a heretic, he must be a great one” (225). He would die in 1560 while still in prison; but his remains were soon disinterred and burned. And though Egidio had died years earlier, his remains were disposed of in similar fashion at the same auto-da-fé celebrated in 1560. The third and final preacher dealt with in this chapter is Juan de Ávila. The future saint, who was canonized only in 1970, was tried for alumbradismo in 1532-33. After his acquittal, he wrote his most famous work, Audi filia, first published in 1556 (and initially placed on the Index in 1559). Ávila preached and taught a similar doctrine, one that emphasized inner experience over external signs; that criticized the Inquisition; and that defended those, like himself, who were of the “wrong” lineage.
Pastore concludes this welcome third edition of her work with a new appraisal of a “centuries-long debate on Spanish identity” (265). In particular, she identifies two twentieth-century scholars who “remain a silent presence even when they are no longer explicitly invoked” (279). The first is Bataillon who, in his classic Erasme et l’Espagne (1937)—which only began to make its mark in the Hispanophone world after its translation into Spanish in Mexico in 1950—adopted a “horizontal approach,” seeking to connect what was happening in the Spain of this era to concurrent events in the rest of Europe, especially the Reformation. Américo Castro, meanwhile, in his España en su historia (1948) took a “vertical approach” that stressed the uniqueness of Spain and, more specifically, its medieval legacy of convivencia (266). Both have had their prominent heirs, Bataillon’s more in Europe (e.g., Massimo Firpo), Castro’s more among North American hispanists, the first of whom were his former students. While Bataillon’s focus on “Erasmianism” has now faded, Pastore wants to revive what she regards as one of his most valuable contributions: building bridges between the historiographies of Spain and other parts of Europe. She wants to preserve Castro’s influence as well, although with important amendments. In Pastore’s view, what made these years of Spanish history unique wasn’t simply the result of the individual experiences of conversos; rather, it was the period’s “broader ecology—the legal changes, theological debates, and social conflicts engendered by forced conversions over more than two centuries” (281). In other words, this was a historical circumstance that profoundly affected the Old Christian majority, too, whose identity was inextricably linked to that of the conversos—and moriscos—in their midst. Pastore leaves historians with this salutary warning: be wary of the “straitjacket of inquisitorial categories,” of making individuals fit into boxes first created by inquisitors, and which historians sometimes perpetuate unawares. (281) The alternative is less tidy, but ultimately yields more reliable answers: immersing ourselves in the complicated, messy contexts into which our subjects were born, in which they lived, and which they helped to shape.
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Note:
1. Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España, estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI, 2 vols. (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1950); José C. Nieto, Juan de Valdés y los orígenes de la reforma en España e Italia (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1979); Carlos Gilly, “Juan de Valdés, traductor de los escritos de Lutero en el Diálogo de Doctrina Cristiana,” in Los Valdés, pensamiento y literatura (Cuenca: Instituto Juan de Valdés, 1997).