Underground Protestantism in Sixteenth Century Spain: A Much Ignored Side of Spanish History by Frances Luttihuizen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Underground Protestantism in Sixteenth Century Spain: A Much Ignored Side of Spanish History by Frances Luttihuizen Lu Ann Homza Underground Protestantism in Sixteenth Century Spain: A Much Ignored Side of Spanish History. By Frances Luttihuizen. [Refo500 Academic Studies, volume 30.] (Göttingen and Bristol, CT: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 2017. Pp. 434. $113.00. ISBN 978-3-525-55110-3.) Underground Protestantism in Sixteenth Century Spain is a puzzling book. The author seems to have put a lifetime of work into it, for it teems with facts about the genealogies, marriages, careers, travels, and publications of sixteenth-century Spaniards who found evangelical doctrines attractive and pursued them at great personal risk. The volume also takes up the nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars who rediscovered and collected the treatises of these Spanish Protestants, and in some cases, put them into print. Its three appendices contain, in order: 1) a list of prohibited books confiscated by the Spanish Inquisition in Seville, which the author dates to 1563; 2) a list of editions and translations of the works of the most famous Spanish philo-Protestants; and 3) a list of the contents of the twenty-two-volume [End Page 146] series, Reformistas Antiguos Españoles (1847–65), which were printed by Luis de Usoz y Rio (1805–65), with two volumes added later by Eduard Boehmer (1827–1906). The strength of Underground Protestantism in Sixteenth Century Spain lies precisely in these appendices, which could open up a world of research for interested scholars. The author has done an especially impressive job of identifying the more than 200 works that appeared on the Inquisition's confiscation list. The collations could help to reinvigorate the English-language study of religious ideas of Spanish evangelicals, which has been relatively rare since the studies of A. Gordon Kinder and Jose Nieto, though of course Stefania Pastore and Massimo Firpo have conducted excellent recent work on the topic in Italian. This study also comes with weaknesses. The book does not have an argument; rather, it can be viewed as a polemic, akin to the works of Jean Crespin or John Knox. The author writes that her "main aim … [is] to vindicate the memory of those men and women who died for their 'Lutheran' convictions, of those who were fortunate enough to escape, and of those who rediscovered their stories and their works" [p. 350]. In the process of that vindication, the author indulges in Black Legend stereotypes about early modern Spain. At one point, she notes, "as a result of the Inquisition, the Bible became an unknown book in Spain" (p. 296), which must have been a shock to the Hebrew scholars in Salamanca in the 1570s, not to mention Juan de Avila or Luis de Granada. It is not true that "all prisoners" were obliged to wear sanbenitos (p. 137). To say that the "spirit of the [Spanish Inquisition] continues" (p. 328), is to perpetuate a myth about national character. Another difficulty is that Professor Luttikhuizen apparently is not trained in historical research. She has never encountered a text that was not telling the straightforward truth, nor does she appreciate possible differences between earlier and later, historical investigations. These are the only reasons I can think of as to why she thinks it is appropriate to cite, as still-authoritative sources, Reginaldo Gonzalez de Montes' Sanctae inquisitionis hispanicae artes aliquot detectae (1567), Juan Antonio Llorente's Historia crítica de la Inquisición de España (1822), and works by Thomas M'Crie (1828–32). Lack of familiarity with recent research is also obvious. One of her sources for the Council of Trent is a 1908 article from the Catholic Encyclopedia (p. 131). There is no modern scholarship on Geneva (which was not a welcoming pot of refugees) (p. 299). The Protestant Reformation's effects on women were not uniformly benign (p. 298). She does not appear to know that French printers and female literacy in Spain have been studied in depth. Finally, the book features odd practices of citation, which also call her methods into question. Luttikhuizen has placed the references to her points both in the body of the text and in the footnotes, though...