Erasmus as Hero, or Heretic? Spanish Humanism and the Valladolid Assembly of 1527*

Abstract

In the summer of 1527, the Spanish Inquisition summoned some thirty-three of Iberia's most prominent theologians to the Castilian city of Valladolid in order to judge a variety of suspicious passages culled from Erasmus's works. The theologians met, argued, and disbanded without ever reaching a decision on the orthodoxy of the excerpts or even debating the whole inventory under review, for when plague struck the area in early August, Inquisitor General Alonso Manrique sent them home and never reconvened them. The place of the Valladolid assembly in the scholarly record is nearly minimal, for if a few academics have detailed Erasmus's response to it, no one has sufficiently explored its implications for Spanish history. The reason for such neglect lies not only in the conference's failure to pronounce, but in the modern argument that diagrams it in terms of Erasmus's impact on sixteenth-century Spanish culture.