sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 7/8

Stefania Pastore: An Invisible Thread

This is a welcome translation of the author's 2010 Una herejía española: conversos, alumbrados, e Inquisición (itself an expanded version of her 2004 Italian monograph). The passage of two decades has not diminished the value of her earlier contribution. Indeed, in its updated form, this book not only promises to convey Pastore's core findings to a wider English-reading audience; the addition of a new historiographical essay (chapter 7) situates her arguments within more than a century of research that has all too often suffered from linguistic siloing. Open access publication further expands the potential for this book to serve as a new standard introduction to the field of late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spanish heterodoxy studies.

The book's subject matter is notoriously hard to define, and this is one of Pastore's challenges. She resists the tendency to simplify or force complex historical phenomena into essentialized categories; as a result her analysis weaves together a rich tapestry of historical ideas, personal connections, influences, and events that were sometimes - but not always - targeted by Spanish Inquisitors as a certain type of Christian theological heresy. But what type(s), precisely? As the Spanish subtitle previously suggested, Pastore is interested in the often heterodox spiritual lives of Christianized Spanish Jews, as well as mystically-minded nonconformists who became known as "alumbrados" - two targets of inquisitorial persecution which sometimes, but not always, overlapped. Alumbrados have also often been considered very close to either Erasmians or Lutheran Protestants. But heterodoxy, almost by definition, is rarely a respecter of theological systematization.

Using a series of interrelated case studies, Pastore's goal is thus to carefully trace what she sees as a real spiritual eclecticism that drank from - but was never necessarily defined by - some or all of these currents. In her telling, what developed in late medieval and early modern Spain was a matrix of religious challenges to the rigid, ritual-focused, and exclusionary Church of the Inquisitors. These took different forms in the preaching and writings of many different men and women, but the result was generally characterized by a more or less radical insistence on the equality of all truly "faithful" Christians, no matter how recent or problematic their conversion; on an embrace of "Pauline" mysticism, seeking to achieve a perfect, sinless, and liberated direct connection with God; and by a focus on personal, internal, charity-driven religiosity. At their extremes, which also departed from mainstream Protestantism, such challenges could involve more or less complete rejection of such traditional Christian tenets as sin and damnation, communal worship and physical sacraments (eucharist, baptism), and even the need for exclusive faith in a Trinitarian deity. This appealed to increasingly marginalized Iberian conversos who faced persecution and discrimination. It also intersected with reform ideas simultaneously emerging from the mouths and pens of non-conversos, and non-Spaniards across Europe.

Six chapters knit these spiritual threads of heterodoxy across numerous family, regional, and affinitive networks, in roughly chronological order. From the traumatic introduction of Blood Purity laws at Toledo in 1449, which were vehemently opposed by well-connected converso elites such as bishops Alonso de Cartagena and Hernando de Talavera, developed a deep theological critique of Old Christian religious traditions that were deemed excessively "carnal". Turning the polemical tables, some conversos now argued that a Church which prioritized external and material criteria such as ritual behavior and genealogical descent (rather than true interior spirituality) was in fact guilty of a "Judaizing" heresy.

Condemnations of worldly Church habits and institutions, and pious calls for reform, were of course nothing new, and neither particularly Spanish nor exclusively the prerogative of disaffected conversos. But fighting for personal, family, and community status in the face of an increasingly persecutory Inquisition does seem to have given the protagonists of Pastore's study an extraordinary collective motivation and urgency. At the same time, it so happened that newly vigorous and impactful calls for reform were also being circulated by German and Flemish spiritual writers whose works became more than usually available to conversos as a result of the merging of Spanish and Habsburg courts (not to mention the new power of print) in the early decades of the sixteenth century.

It is not possible here to list all, or even a significant portion, of the converso (and non-converso) spiritual activists that Pastore follows across these eventful decades. For non-specialists, the proliferation of names can also be quite confusing. But a careful read of Pastore's narrative is rewarding. It demonstrates the gradual development of an arsenal of themes and discursive resources that could be accessed with varying degrees of sophistication over time. It is also fascinating to trace each of Pastore's case studies on its own terms, since individuals' avenues for spiritual experimentation were largely dictated by their contextual circumstances.

Pastore in fact makes a conscious effort to present her research in these two ways, which she refers to as "vertical" (following legacies of ideas and texts as they are passed down over time within a given spiritual community, in this case that of the Spanish conversos) and "horizontal" (focusing on contextual details of how spiritual ideas manifest in a specific time and place; not only in a given family or town but more widely in a particular period of continental or even global spiritual conversations such as the Reformation).

Only by taking both approaches into consideration can we fully appreciate how a generalized "converso" concern with interiority resulted in so many different outcomes. Yes, opposition to inquisitorial oppression was a common factor. But inquisitorial oppression ebbed and flowed. And even at its height in some regions, persecution could be mitigated by the protection of powerful patrons. Secular lords such as the Marquis of Villena, the Mendoza family, or queen Isabella herself, protected favored converso spiritual enthusiasts for both religious and political reasons. Ecclesiastical elites too, even those closely associated with the Inquisition and its tribunals (such as Inquisitor-general Alonso Manrique or the Dominican consultant Domingo de Soto), exhibited surprising degrees of sympathy for certain aspects of certain conversos' piety, their reform agendas, and even their (moderated) expressions of mysticism. Surprises, and seeming contradictions, abound as a result.

This is a well-executed book. The translation is almost perfect. Minor typographical errors do not cause any serious confusion. It is easy to see where Pastore prefers the analysis of the frequently-cited Marcel Bataillon, as opposed to the legacies of Américo Castro, Antonio Márquez, and José Nieto (among others), but she is still careful to present earlier historiography in an informative and comprehensive fashion. With regard to more recent scholarship, there is occasional mention of studies that have appeared since the Spanish edition of 2010, although no serious revisions seem to have resulted from these.

The biggest lacuna, in this otherwise very thorough book on "converso" spirituality, is a lack of attention to the parallel phenomenon of spiritual currents within "morisco" populations of converted Spanish Muslims. Pastore mentions a certain "philo-Islamic radicalism" among conversos such as Juan del Castillo, as well as Miguel Servetus' interest in the Quran, but she herself shows little interest in the subject. None of the extremely rich recent scholarship on morisco cultural survival in sixteenth-century Spain is cited at all.

Stefania Pastore has done a great favor to her field by making this book freely available to the widest possible audience. It is thought-provoking, insightful, and well-researched. It is also generous, ensuring that readers become aware even of relatively obscure and out-dated historiographical contributions that she clearly opposes. She marks out a number of areas where further research is needed, and leaves many possibilities open for ongoing discussion - as befits this necessarily complex and often poorly-documented field, where books were often eliminated and voices silenced. The challenge of even partially reconstructing such a tortured and censored past is well worth the effort.