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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Underground Protestantism in Sixteenth Century Spain: A Much Ignored Side of Spanish History by Frances Luttikhuizen Andrew Wilson Underground Protestantism in Sixteenth Century Spain: A Much Ignored Side of Spanish History. By Frances Luttikhuizen. Refo500 Academic Studies 30. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017. 448 pp. When nineteenth-century nationalist Melendez y Pelayo quipped that “The Spanish tongue is not formed to utter heresy” he summed up several centuries of proactive purity on the part of an emboldened Catholic hierarchy. Filled with providential fervor following the expulsion of the Moors and Jews, fueled by cargoes of American gold and silver, Iberian Spain was sheltered from the disruptions of Protestantism—mostly. This book sums up the small but significant exception to this rule. What is particularly shocking, given how successfully it was extinguished, is just how primed Spain’s intelligentsia were for the same Reformation that swept across the Holy Roman Empire. Fervent preaching was desired; monks and beatas, ladies and gentlemen alike all flocked to the inward, mystical piety of silent prayer and study; horror at mass ignorance spawned a flood of catechisms and educational endeavors; humanism and its cry, ad fontes, were heard loud and clear in courts and universities. The study of the Bible in its original languages reached an apex in 1516 with the Complutensian Polyglot, a Hebrew-Greek-Aramaic-Latin (and later Syriac) monument to the Muslim and Jewish philological traditions absorbed into the Iberian church. High-minded devotees of Erasmus’s simplified piety abounded; external works were on the rocks. That Franciscan Cardinal and sometime regent, Cisneros, was a reviver of the Inquisition did not prevent his patronage of these and other ecclesiastical innovations. Of particular importance was his founding of a humanist university in Alcalá, where languages—Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic—were central, and Biel was favored over Ockham and Aquinas. The parallels to Wittenberg are uncanny. From this institution flowed a steady stream of pastors, confessors, theologians, translators, and pamphleteers, whose competence and erudition gave them entrance to the courts of dukes, princesses, kings, and even emperors. That is, before they were all fastidiously pursued, tortured, exiled, and burned at the stake for heresy. This much is boilerplate Black Legend, and has long been flogged by Protestants, anti-clerical [End Page 104] revolutionaries, and general whiggish partisans. Though this book is dedicated to Spain’s minority report, nearly everything we know about their underground lives flowed from the scrupulously comprehensive pens of the Inquisition’s notaries. A major lacuna of this tome is its failure to treat this infamous institution with more subtlety and insight—even the notes are devoid of reference to the many studies which shed light on it. One is left with no idea as to why—other than sheer diabolical fervor—the Protestants were pursued. Luttikhuizen’s narrative is careful not to interpolate too much detail into the Inquisition’s files. It offers chapters on the major episodes and figures of the Spanish Reform: the Alumbrados dejados, Juan de Valdés, the Evangelical circles of Valladolid and Seville, the exiles (Francisco de Enzinas, Juan Perez de Pineda, and others). A very illuminating chapter is dedicated to pseudonymous Reginaldo Gonzales de Montes, a mysterious notary who wrote the insider’s exposé of the Inquisition—which found a happy home for centuries in Protestant lands oppressed by various Hapsburgs, and beyond. Concluding chapters trace interest in and publication of the “Spanish Protestants” through the twentieth century. The bibliography is nearly complete on the subject. Two long chapters on female voices—first in Guadalajara and Valladolid, then Seville—are a welcome addition to the usual tale of published males and their ideas, and are the main new contribution of the book. Luttikhuizen portrays the familiar anxiety of powerful men faced with independent, literate women—whose halls and coffers were the main life and support for Spain’s “Protestants.” Fully half of the persons sentenced at the main auto-da-fe in 1559 were women—beatas, aristocrats, and nuns. Through evangelical preachers and clandestine books, they had read and sympathized with many Reformation ideas. A similar story can be told for Seville, where heady, educated women were informing themselves about religious subjects...