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Spain  Prophecy  Felipe Pereda Ramón Mujica Pinilla is certainly right to argue that the apocalyptic or prophetic discourse could appeal both to religious authorities and to marginal figures: if in the first instance prophecy was an instrument of legitimization, in the second it often opened prospects to the reform of the Church or the foundation of a new messianic kingdom. As a way to understand history, prophecy could not but reflect the tensions embedded in a society that, at the very moment of encounter with the New World, was taking decisive steps to erase the memory of its multiconfessional past. Let us take the case of the visionary Francisco de la Cruz, the Dominican friar and prophet of the Viceroyalty of Peru to whom Mujica refers. De la Cruz’s extraordinary trial in Lima came to a dramatic close in 1578 with his public burning at the stake for alumbradismo (as inquisitors called various forms of deviated spirituality). This singular biography brings together key themes that cut across many of the prophetic discourses that had grown in Spain since at least the fourteenth century. According to his inquisitorial process and his own testimony (1570–1578), de la Cruz had been told by Archangel Gabriel to defend the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. The Dominican was not deemed suspicious for holding this belief, but for refusing to confess other revelations from the archangel that supported the miraculous conception. In order to understand Francisco de la Cruz’s heterodox spirituality and how it related to a devotion soon to become a symbol of Spanish Catholic monarchy, we do well to explore the development of prophetism in the Iberian peninsula since around 1500. As we will immediately see, this key dogma in the foundations of the Catholic monarchy fed on the various forms of prophetism that had grown in Spain since the Late Middle Ages, oftentimes interlaced with its multicultural past. By the close of the Reconquista prophetism had become ubiquitous in the Iberian peninsula: 1492 revitalized long-­ cherished expectations of a spiritually unified territory , nurturing the renewal of early Mozarabic prophecies that likened the Arabic invasion to divine punishment (that of San Isidoro, the only known early medieval vernacular prophecy). The year 1492 signaled the fulfillment of a Christian Golden Age while creating expectations immediately projected into the future. In interior policy, for example, King Ferdinand was identified with the Encubierto or “Hidden King” destined to expel the morisco minority during the Germanías revolt in Valencia. Similar expectations accompanied Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros’s conquest of Oran in 1509, the reinvention of the powerful mythical prediction of the reconquest of Jerusalem, and the reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple. Christopher Columbus stated in his Bookof Prophecies that even Abbot Joachim “[had] said that from Spain should come [he] who had to rebuild the House of Sion.”1 The new political agenda channeled prophetism as propaganda, creating a sort of “official messianism” for a monarchy invested with a glorious destiny. Spanish prophetism, however, did not only feed an “ideology of exclusion” crucial to the traumatic transition from the multireligious Iberia to a Crown under one faith and law. For the trauma experienced by religious minorities fostered the creation of their own closely related myths of identity. María de Santo Domingo, for example—the beata who prophesied to Cardinal Cisneros his victory in the African Crusade and to King Ferdinand that he would not die before he had reached Jerusalem—was speaking a language very similar to that of the Jewish prophetesses of Córdoba who, around 1500, expected Elijah and the Messiah to “[come] take them out from the captivity in which they find themselves and bring them to the promised Land.”2 Paradoxical as it seems, in the first half of the sixteenth century, translatio ecclesiae, church reform, and the conquest of Jerusalem often coalesced and flourished in what Stefania Pastore has called a vernacular “converso declension” of political prophetism.3 The claim that one Fray Melchor—a converso from Burgos—made in Castile around 1512 about the urgency of a “translatio [of the Church] de Europa in Syriam atque Iudaeam” is a very good example of this phenomenon. But Christopher Columbus’s blend of Joachimite and Jewish prophetic messianism can also be considered in the same light.Therefore, when Francisco de la Cruz claimed during his trial in Lima more than half a century later that he was “Jewish, through and through,” his claim was less...

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