Following several years of feminist mobilisation in Spain and only days before President Pedro Sánchez's announcement of a state of emergency in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, on 1 March 2020 there was a demonstration by women outside the Almudena Cathedral in Madrid. This was in response to a call from a collective calling themselves Revuelta de Mujeres en la Iglesia (Stirring Up Women in the Church). The group's manifesto demanded that equality between men and women be put into general practice inside the Catholic Church.11 http://www.redescristianas.net/la-revuelta-de-mujeres-en-la-iglesia-hasta-que-la-igualdad-se-haga-costumbre-manifiesto/ (accessed 21 August 2021). Although only few women — about 600, according to the organisers22 https://www.vidanuevadigital.com/2020/03/01/la-revuelta-de-mujeres-en-la-iglesia-exige-el-acceso-al-diaconado-y-al-presbiterado-femenino/ (accessed 21 August 2021). — were involved in the demonstration, the news had some impact, especially in media outlets sympathetic to the left, such as the digital newspapers Eldiario.es and Público.33 https://www.publico.es/entrevistas/mujeres-igualdad-iglesia-catolica-mujeres-luchan-igualdad-iglesia-llama-arreglar-flores-no-decisiones-importantes.html and https://www.eldiario.es/sociedad/cientos-mujeres-concentran-madrid-igualdad-iglesia_1_1157385.html (accessed 21 August 2021). Even the television programme El Intermedio, a show that is normally quite critical of the church hierarchy, included the feminist theologian Isabel Gómez-Acebo as part of its series of interviews with women with clear feminist views.44 https://www.lasexta.com/programas/el-intermedio/mujer-tenia-que-ser-sandra-sabates/la-entrevista-de-sandra-sabates-a-isabel-gomez-acebo-una-iglesia-con-mujeres-en-el-poder-seria-mucho-mas-cercana-video_201812055c08477a0cf2d96fe2f9d998.html (accessed 21 August 2021). These events indicate the general change that Spanish society has gone through in its perception of the relationship between women and religion. This change has also been reflected in historiography. In one way or another, the double blindness denounced by Ursula King some years ago in relation to the study of religion and gender has begun to disappear.55 U. King, “Introduction: gender critical turns in the study of religion,” in Gender, Religion and Diversity: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. U. King and T. Beattie (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), 1–10. In the case of Spanish historiography, this double blindness had been particularly persistent for two reasons. On one hand, the history of religion had been excessively focused on political and institutional elements, namely the relationship between the church and the state, an area in which women had been largely absent. Nor did the division between a hagiographic and militant religious history that supported the church itself, and an academic religious history unable to dispose of certain anticlerical prejudices, contribute to the advancement of knowledge in this field. On the other hand, following forty years of National Catholic dictatorship led by General Franco, the history of women tended to have a biased view of religion, typically conceiving it as an oppressive force against women's emancipation. As such, any form of women's activism within the church was explained as being the result of the clergy's manipulation of women. Fortunately, the new millennium has brought about an important change to this negative trend. The progressive internationalisation of Spanish historiography has meant not only the introduction and application of the category of gender as a lens for interpreting the past; it has also aided the development of a more pluralised and multifaceted understanding of religion. International debates such as those around the feminisation and re-masculinisation of religion, the gender dimension of the secularisation process, or religious men and women's capacity for agency have been broadly discussed by Spanish historians in conferences, monographs and edited volumes.66 Two good overviews on the issue that demonstrate the progress in studies of religion and gender in Spanish historiography are M. P. Salomón, “Laicismo, género y religión. Perspectivas historiográficas,” Ayer 61 (2006): 291–308 and I. Blasco, “Religión, género y mujeres en la historia contemporánea de España: un balance historiográfico,” in La historia religiosa de la España contemporánea: Balance y perspectivas, ed. F. Montero, J. de la Cueva, and J. Louzao (Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá, 2017), 257–77. The main objective of this special issue is to introduce to an international audience the most recent and innovative research around the pairing of gender and religion in Spanish historiography as it relates to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Journal of Religious History, with its lengthy trajectory – more than sixty years – of specialism in religious history, constitutes an excellent platform for this task. The majority of the authors in this special issue participated in the workshop on Religion and Gender in Contemporary History, organised by Inmaculada Blasco and Raúl Mínguez as part of the XV Conference of the Spanish Association of Contemporary History, held in Cordoba in September 2021. The list of authors includes established scholars of international repute as well as emerging researchers with promising careers who specialise in the study of religion from a gender perspective. In recent decades, the topic that has unquestionably given rise to the most debate among specialists in the study of gender and religion has been the issue of the feminisation of religion. What began as a questioning of the theory of secularisation, which was dominant in the 1960s and 1970s, eventually become a thesis of its own, one that, in recent years, has also generated numerous critiques. As is well known, the thesis of the feminisation of religion has been applied in particular to different versions of Christianity (Catholic and Protestant/Evangelical) in the West during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Its origin lay in feminist historiography in the United States in the 1970s, and it later expanded to Europe, especially France. In the 1980s and 1990s this expansion was driven by the sociology and anthropology of religion, and by the turn of the millennium it was influenced by the discursive turn and the category of gender. The rise of religious practice among women (or its decrease among men), the appearance of a more sentimental and emotional form of piety, the noticeable increase in active women's congregations, and the discursive link between women and religion are the main characteristics of this theory.77 Some of the most recent reflections on the feminisation thesis can be found in B. Schneider, “Feminisierung der Religion im 19. Jahrhundert. Perspektiven einer These im Kontext des deutschen Katholizismus,” Trierer Theologische Zeitschrift 111 (2002): 123–47; T. Van Osselaer and T. Buerman, “Feminization Thesis: A Survey of International Historiography and a Probing of Belgian Grounds,” Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique 103 (2008): 497–544 and R. Mínguez, “¿Dios cambió de sexo? El debate internacional sobre la feminización de la religión y algunas reflexiones para la España decimonónica,” Historia Contemporánea 51 (2015): 397–426. The work of David Martínez Vilches is situated within this theoretical framework and constitutes a clear example of the value of introducing the categories of religion and gender into political history. “Mothers and Queens” focuses on the reign of Isabel II (1833–1868) in order to analyse the way in which the figure of the Virgin Mary was used propagandistically as a likeness of Queen Isabel in her symbolic role as mother of the Spanish nation. This work demonstrates that religion and modernity are not incompatible. In fact, anticlerical sectors knew how to exploit the contradiction between the representation of a model Catholic femininity and the chaotic private life of the queen in order to delegitimise both her and the monarchy. One of the most serious criticisms of the thesis of the feminisation of religion is related to the assumption that, from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, women were more religious than men. Indicators of religious practice, such as attendance at Sunday mass or the taking of the communion at Easter, where women always outnumbered men, appear to confirm this. However, since the 1990s a number of works have challenged the idea that this was something new to the nineteenth century, arguing that it had been the case for several centuries, and that for this reason one could not speak of the feminisation of religion.88 J. Dalarun, “Dieu changea de sexe, pour ainsi dire”. La religion faite femme XIe-XVe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2008) and A. Braude, “Women's History is American Religious History,” in Retelling US Religious History, ed. T. A. Tweed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 87–107. This brings us to reflect on the question of men's religiosity. In spite of the fact that, as noted above, religious history has dedicated thousands of pages to analysing the figures of popes, bishops, monks, and priests, these men have barely been studied as gendered subjects. International research teams, such as those directed by Yvonne Maria Werner, have taken on the task of shedding light on the process of the construction of Christian masculinities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.99 Y. M. Werner, ed., Christian Masculinity: Men and Religion in Northern Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2011). For a critique of the possible excesses in studies on religious masculinities, see M. L. Keinänen, “Feminist reflections on the study of the feminization and masculinization of religion,” in Contemporary Encounters in Gender and Religion, ed. L. Gemzöe, M. L. Keinänen, and A. Maddrell (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 55–75. Along these lines, three of the works in this special issue are dedicated to the study of the evolution of Catholic masculinity in different historical contexts. María Cruz Romeo, like David Martínez Vilches, concentrates on the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a period in which the Catholic Church was trying to recuperate its social influence following the triumph of the liberal revolution of 1820–1823. “A New Priest for a New Society?” emphasises the importance acquired by priests in this project of social Re-Christianisation. Drawing principally on an analysis of manuals of clerical behaviour, María Cruz Romeo studies the training for a model of priestly masculinity. However, she goes further; through personal sources belonging to a priest from that time, she attempts to approach the difficult problem of the negotiation of normative masculine identity on an individual level. For her part, Natalia Núñez situates her study in the first years of the twentieth century in order to analyse the process of the reconfiguration of masculine piety in the historical context framed by the Catholic Church's attempt to gain ground in public and urban space. “Performing Catholic Masculinity” brilliantly examines this phenomenon at a global level and then concentrates on the International Eucharistic Congress of Madrid (1911), where the role played by lay Catholic men in processions and other devotional activities carried out in the public sphere was of fundamental importance. Finally, the article by Mónica Moreno centres on the figure of the priest and its evolution during the final decades of the Franco dictatorship. “A Man Just Like Other Men?” examines how clerical masculinity in the period after the Civil War, which centred on the combative character of the expression of piety or obedience, entered into crisis at the beginning of the 1960s. At this time there emerged alternative models of being a priest, based on responsibility, maturity, and dialogue with lay people. The tensions and controversies generated by these different archetypes of masculinity are at the base of the crisis in the priesthood and the fall in the number of men following the vocation of priest, a trend that now seems irreversible. The final two articles are also situated chronologically during the Franco dictatorship, but approach the relationship between Catholicism and femininity in different ways. Uxía Otero addresses normative discourses of religion, gender, and the body through the evolution of clothing. “Catholic Dressing in the Spanish Franco Dictatorship” emphasises the performative character of dressing and analyses how during the first stage of the dictatorship the church hierarchy, in close collaboration with the civil authorities, attempted to regulate women's dress very strictly. This control was partly successful until the 1950s, after which it was surpassed by the arrival of foreign fashion and by the very development of Spanish society. In contrast, Eider de Dios y Raúl Mínguez use oral history to focus on how the subjects of discourses on religion and gender received such discourses. “Catholic Housewives in Transition” analyses the work carried out by the Centres for the Promotion of Women – linked to Catholic Action Women – from their foundation in 1959. These centres were decisive in helping many poor women expand their life horizons and begin seriously to question the limits imposed on the construction of their religious and gender identities by the education they received during the first part of Franco regime. This special issue thus brings together a diverse sample of works that demonstrate, on one hand, the maturity that Spanish historiography has achieved in recent years and, on the other, the need to continue applying the categories of religion and gender to historical analysis. It is our hope that this collection of articles published in the Journal of Religious History will contribute to generating historiographical debate and opening up new areas of research. Data sharing not applicable.