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prologue The Formation of a Tridentine Bishop Juan de Ribera lived most of his life in the kingdom of Valencia, but his roots were firmly planted elsewhere. Born in Seville around 1532, Ribera grew up among the well-laid gardens and classical statuary of the Casa de Pilatos, home to the prestigious Enríquez de Ribera lineage. His ancestors on the Enríquez side of the family descended from King Alfonso XI (r. 1312–50), making Ribera a distant cousin of Ferdinand the Catholic and thus of the Habsburg monarchs.1 This house was merged with the Ribera clan in the marriage of Ribera’s great-grandparents, Pedro Enríquez (d. 1492) and Catalina Ribera (d. 1505), consolidating two of the more expansive landowning families in Andalusia. His famous great-uncle, Fadrique Enríquez de Ribera (1476–1539), took the habit of the Order of Santiago at the age of nine and began fighting Muslims at age fourteen. Fadrique also participated in the suppression of an uprising of Granadan Muslims in 1500, and in 1514 Philip I named him 1st Marquis of Tarifa.2 In 1519–20 he undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, accompanied by Juan de Encina, a Spanish classicist who served as master of the chapel for the pope.3 While in Jerusalem, Fadrique followed the path of Christ from the house of Pontius Pilate to Golgotha, recording in his journal a distance of 1,580 paces.4 In the 1530s he decided to recreate the Way of the Cross in Seville, beginning at his newly constructed palace (hence the name Casa de Pilatos) and terminating at a cross in the countryside, on the road to Granada. Juan de Ribera scarcely knew his greatuncle , but he spent his childhood in an environment built by Fadrique, a world of Roman coins, religious artwork, and hundreds of books ranging from Seneca to Boccaccio to Augustine. The boy also lived to see this complicated man’s vision of a Vía Crucis in Seville grow from a rite observed by a few penitents to a popular civic event.5 Fadrique’s brother having died years before, his titles devolved upon his nephew, Per Afán de Ribera III (1509–1571), 2d Marquis of Tarifa, 6th Count of Los Molares, and—subsequently—1st Duke of Alcalá de los Gazules. None of these titles, however , would be passed on to Per Afán’s only son. Juan de Ribera, the illegitimate offspring of Per Afán and a local noblewoman, knew that despite his father’s open recognition of paternity he would never inherit the Casa de Pilatos. Upon the premature death of his mother, his sister Catalina took over the responsibility of caring for him; years later he would reward her for this act of kindness with a regular stipend for the rest of her life.6 Although his father continued the family’s centuries-old tradition of royal service as viceroy of Catalonia (1554–58) and Naples (1558–71), Ribera chose another path at an early age. In 1543 he received the clerical tonsure at the parish church of San Esteban, and in 1544, with his father’s blessing, the twelve-year-old and a retinue of six servants set out for the University of Salamanca.7 At the university Ribera studied canon law and Thomist theology under disciples of the famous neo-scholastic Francisco de Vitoria.8 Despite his noble pedigree and his house filled with servants, Ribera did not follow the example of those young gentlemen who used their time in Salamanca as an opportunity to lead an “easy, pleasurable student life.”9 He did associate with fellow students Fernando de Toledo, brother of the Count of Oropesa, and Antonio de Córdoba, brother of the Duke of Feria, but these men turned down more lucrative offers to become a humble priest and a Jesuit, respectively. The hagiographers of Juan de Ribera have presented testimony to his studiousness and parsimony, claiming that at one point his father had to intervene to compel him to return from a hermitage to his appointed house.10 In 1554 he matriculated as a theologian with a bachelor’s degree in arts, and in May 1557 he earned his master’s degree in theology.11 By this time he had already expressed a desire to take holy orders as a priest, an event that took place shortly thereafter . In 1562 Philip II nominated the young and inexperienced Ribera to the bishopric of...

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