Most English-speakers know very little about the dramatic events surrounding the Spanish reformation of the 16th century due to the Inquisition's incredible success of suppressing Protestantism, especially in Spain. Now, for the first time, English-speakers can read the only confession of faith that was written by Spaniards during the 16th century based on the original Spanish and Latin texts. Casiodoro de Reina (of the Spanish Reina-Valera Bible translation) was the principal author of the confession. He was influenced by all of the major strands of Reformation thought (Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, and Anabaptist), and this shows up in this work. Reina appears to have been more of a pacifist in his theological outlook, attempting to be truly "catholic" in outlook.

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

From Word to Book addresses questions that the author’s students frequently raised about how the Bible was inspired, written, and passed down through the millennia. From the first storytellers to contemporary researchers working with digital technologies, the Bible’s story reveals fascinating interactions between the divine and the human. The book’s chapters offer insights both for those who find the Bible central in their life of faith, and for those who are skeptical about its claims or even wonder why the Bible matters. Brief illustrative texts from readers and scholars ranging across generations and geography enhance understandings about how the Bible as we know it was shaped.

In The Complexity of Hispanic Religious Life in the 16th–18th Centuries, Doris Moreno has assembled a team of leading scholars to discuss and analyze the diversity of Hispanic religious and cultural life in the Early Modern Age. Using primary sources to look beyond the Spanish Black Legend and present new perspectives, this book explores the realities of a changing and plural Catholicism through the lens of crucial topics such as the Society of Jesus, the Inquisition, the Martyrdom, the feminine visions and conversion medicine. This volume will be an essential resource to all those with an interest in the knowledge of multiple expressions of tolerance and cultural dialectic between Spain and the Americas.

This book examines the effects of Jewish conversions to Christianity in late medieval Spanish society. Ingram focuses on these converts and their descendants (known as conversos) not as Judaizers, but as Christian humanists, mystics and evangelists, who attempt to create a new society based on quietist religious practice, merit, and toleration. His narrative takes the reader on a journey from the late fourteenth-century conversions and the first blood purity laws (designed to marginalize conversos), through the early sixteenth-century Erasmian and radical mystical movements, to a Counter-Reformation environment in which conversos become the advocates for pacifism and concordance. His account ends at the court of Philip IV, where growing intolerance towards Madrid’s converso courtiers is subtly attacked by Spain’s greatest painter, Diego Velázquez, in his work, Los Borrachos. Finally, Ingram examines the historiography of early modern Spain, in which he argues the converso reform phenomenon continues to be underexplored.

The Inquisitionis Hispanicae Artes (Heidelberg, 1567), written by exiled Spanish Protestants, is the first systematic denunciation of the Spanish Inquisition. Its first part is a description of the Inquisition’s methods, making use of the Inquisition’s own instruction manual, which was not publicly known. Its second section presents a gallery of individuals who suffered persecution in Seville during the anti-Protestant repression (1557-1565). The book had a great impact, being almost immediately translated into English, French, Dutch, German, and Hungarian. The portraits very soon passed into Protestant martyrologies, and the most shocking descriptions (torture, auto de fe) became ammunition for anti-Spanish literature. This critical edition presents a new text as well as, for the first time, extensive notes.

A Cuban/Spanish journalist and author examines the historical and cultural influences that shaped Latin America and suggests how they have made it into the most impoverished, unstable and backward region in the Western world.