Religious Authority in the Spanish Renaissance (review)

Lu Ann Homza hunts big game in this book, and she bags enough trophies to make her work fundamental reading for all those who deal with the sixteenth-century Hispanic monarchy in both its European and overseas domains. Heavily influenced by Spain's nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over how the country should be constituted, many prominent Spanish and foreign scholars have adopted metanarratives presenting the last half millennium of Spanish history as a grand struggle between those who wished to open their country to currents of broad political participation and toleration and reactionaries defending the old order through authoritarian institutions dedicated to ideological conformity. The religious disputes of Charles V's era produced, by the reign of his son, a victory of "absolutism," inquisitorial repression, general passivity, and a fearful flight from economic, political, and cultural creativity and innovation. These constituted the roots of a Spanish "decline" and "crisis" that shut off the Hispanic domains from "modernization" and left both Spain and Latin America in a condition of "backwardness" and "dependency" from which the population's deeply ingrained, irrational "values" offer little hope of escape.

Although others have punctured this stereotype at various points, Homza is among the first to examine the categorization of Renaissance ecclesiastical disputants on which it is heavily based. She refuses to begin her reading of these sixteenth-century authors of scholarly and pastoral works on the basis of the polarities defined in the historiographic literature and remains open to the ways they treat the authority of religious texts and institutions. She discovers that during the period she examines, roughly to 1570, Spain's cultural environment remained a rich repository of interpretive schemes that ecclesiastics could employ to understand the world around them as they sought to deal with important intellectual and institutional issues. Moreover, no individual writer can be identified with a group of schemes that corresponds to the polarities in which the period's history is often encapsulated. Each applied available categories and hierarchies with a degree of flexibility, sensitivity, and innovation that could not have been predicted from his historical reputation as modern or reactionary.

Homza divides her book into two broad sections, each with three chapters. In the first, she focuses on the clash between the "scholastic" and "humanist" methods of grasping the meaning of classical and Christian texts, enriched for individual readers by the expanding printing industry. The subjects of these chapters are the Inquisition trial in the 1530s of the "humanist" Juan de Vergara, the 1527 Valladolid "Conference" over Erasmus's work on the New Testament, and the studies on the Old Testament by one of the meeting's participants, the converso theologian Pedro Ciruelo.

In the second section, which will perhaps be of greater importance for Latin Americanists, Homza pulls together in an interesting way a series of vernacular publications that were intended and marketed for both clerical and lay readers. The three chapters deal with the responsibilities of the secular clergy, the moral issues treated in the process of confession and absolution within the sacrament of penance, and the understanding of magic and witchcraft, including that of Pedro Ciruelo's much-cited Reprobación de las supersticiones y hechicerías discussed in chapter 3. She shows that ecclesiastical writers did not assume that the laity were passive brutes without the rational capability to take active roles in the Christian community, nor did they follow a narrow, draconian interpretive line about the standards to which community members must adhere. Homza has produced a detailed examination of the Spanish cultural environment that merits the attention of all those interested in the Hispanic monarchy of the first global age.