12

Spain

Allyson Poska

William Maltby ended his review essay on Spain in Catholicism in Early Modern History: A Guide to Research on a depressing note. The study of Iberian history was in decline; few new scholars were being trained, and the impetus to new and exciting scholarship had been lost.¹ Yet although the state of Iberian scholarship may have looked dismal at the time, since the mid-1980s early modern Spanish history has flourished, driven by a wide array of academic and social factors, among them the opening of new Spanish archives and the professionalization of many others in the years since Franco’s death.² With easier access to a wider range of materials, the field has expanded beyond the economic and demographic history that dominated earlier scholarship to address a wide range of historiographic issues. As a result, historians have moved away from the isolating notion of Spanish exceptionalism, better integrating Spain into the early modern European context and calling into question some long-held notions about the Spanish past.

Over the past two decades, interest in Spanish history has boomed, particularly in the United States. While some of this interest may be attributed to the growth of the Spanish-speaking population in the United States, Spain has also proven to be a useful historical touchstone for a wide range of scholars. Both the peninsula and the Spanish empire offer important historical precedents for understanding the dynamics of power, the creation of empire, the tensions of multicultural societies, and the complications of cross-cultural interaction. In the process, the new scholarship has dramatically transformed our understanding of early modern Spanish politics, economics, and society.

To begin with political history, scholars have significantly reevaluated many aspects of Spain’s ascent to political prominence. Historians have finally begun to analyze Isabel I (1451–1504) not only as a ruler who marked a critical transition from medieval to early modern notions of monarchy, but also as a woman whose reign was constrained by contemporary notions of gender and power.³ Moreover, for all the rhetoric about the unification of Spain under the Catholic kings, scholars now understand much more clearly how separate Isabel’s Castilian realms remained from Ferdinand’s Aragonese kingdoms. While the couple shared many common goals, their distinctive policies are a reminder that these were very different monarchs ruling under different social and political constraints.⁴ Indeed, the complications of their reigns climaxed in a series of dynastic machinations that led to the succession of their grandson Charles rather than their daughter Juana.⁵

During the late 1980s and 1990s, interest in Charles I (Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 1500–58) seemed to wane.⁶ However, the five hundredth anniversary of his birth in 2000 reinvigorated the scholarship and prompted a number of conferences and collections of essays on the emperor. While most of the scholarship focused on Charles’s imperial activities, a few scholars used the opportunity to compose modern biographies, some of which highlight Charles’s time in Spain.⁷

Traditionally, Philip II (1527–98) epitomized absolute monarchy, single-handedly and obsessively ruling his worldwide empire. However, recent research reveals a much more complicated relationship between the sovereign and his subjects. Helen Nader’s work has refuted the supposed centralization of power under both Charles and Philip. Through the sale of towns and town charters, the Habsburg monarchs attempted to both garner necessary funds for their international campaigns and maintain good relationships with their subjects. Thus, monarchical power remained the product of ongoing negotiation between the crown and local authorities.⁸ Philip’s power was also affected by the Castilian aristocracy, whose individual ambitions and collective power served as important checks on royal authority.⁹ In terms of Philip’s personality, although a number of new biographies appeared around the four hundredth anniversary of his death in 1998, he remains an enigma. Among the varied perspectives, Henry Kamen offers a sympathetic portrayal of the king, while Geoffrey Parker takes a harsher view of the relationship between Philip’s management style and his foreign and domestic policy failures.¹⁰

Some of the most dramatic scholarly reassessments have focused on Philip III (1578–1621), whom historians had described as a lazy, incompetent, or—at best—uninterested monarch who delegated most of the governance of the kingdom to his favorite or valido. Expanding on John Elliott’s studies of the Count-Duke of Olivares and the court of Philip IV, Antonio Feros has argued that rather than a break with the practice of government under Philip II, Philip III’s reliance on the Duke of Lerma had much in common with his father’s reign. Indeed, Philip III’s use of a valido was a pragmatic response to the enormous pressures brought to bear on the king by both the size of the Spanish Empire and the weight of the Spanish bureaucracy. Moreover, Philip was actively involved in foreign policy decisions, working closely with his councils and advisors to formulate a coherent response to Spain’s complicated international entanglements.¹¹ Lerma’s power was further constrained by Philip’s powerful female relatives. Although they were ensconced in the convent of the Discalced Carmelites, they pursued political agendas on behalf of their Austrian relatives that frequently clashed with those of the king’s favorite.¹² Without a doubt, Philip III and his court have been rehabilitated.

The work of J. H. Elliott continues to dominate the scholarship on Philip IV, although in recent years scholars have begun to move beyond the study of the Count-Duke of Olivares. Historians have taken a particular interest in the years after Olivares, examining Philip as a ruler in his own right.¹³ Charles II (1661–1700), the last of the Habsburg kings, has not fared as well. Although segments of his monarchy have begun to attract the attention of scholars, he and his reign still await extensive historical study.¹⁴

One result of this reassessment of the seventeenth-century Habsburg kings has been a reconsideration of the economic “decline” of Spain. Based on the furor created by arbitristas, seventeenth-century men who enthusiastically offered myriad solutions to Spain’s economic ills, earlier generations of historians focused on the extent and causes of widespread depression, or at least recession. Like their seventeenth-century sources, they attributed Spain’s decline to a variety of factors, including climatic and demographic events, religious dogmatism, weak monarchy, and poor fiscal policy. Certainly, the first half of the seventeenth century was marked by severe economic problems; however, based on a series of local and regional studies, economic historians now paint a much more complicated picture of the economic health of the peninsula over the century. Most importantly, these scholars have demonstrated that Castile was not Spain and that its problems were not replicated across the peninsula. Different areas experienced economic problems at different times and some regions recovered faster than others.¹⁵ In this new context, scholars have shifted their investigations to the study of specific sectors of the Spanish economy and the economic structures of the broader Spanish empire.¹⁶

Long neglected, eighteenth-century Spain has become an area of interest to scholars. In particular, historians marked the three hundredth anniversary of the succession of Philip V (1683–1746) with a spate of biographies and works on the reign of the first Bourbon monarch.¹⁷ However, in terms of broader social and economic issues, although Latin American historians have explored the impact of the Bourbon reforms extensively, few scholars have examined the reforms on the peninsula.¹⁸

Without a doubt, scholars produced some of the most important work in Spanish history leading up to and in the wake of the Columbian quincentenary. Snatched from the morass of myth and error, Christopher Columbus has finally become the subject of serious scholarly study. Rather than a hero or a conqueror, he was clearly a man, merchant, and mariner of his time.¹⁹ Once he established contact between the two worlds, sixteenth-century thinkers quickly formulated intellectual rationales for Spanish conquest and settlement, creating new, and refashioning older, notions of empire and subjugation.²⁰

Quincentenary celebrations led to the publication of a series of regionally specific quantitative studies of Spanish emigration to the Americas, but surprisingly few scholars have examined the qualitative impact of overseas migration on those who remained on the peninsula.²¹ Ida Altman’s works on Extremadura and Brihuega stand out as the most detailed discussions of the effects of early migration to the Americas, while Juan Javier Pescador demonstrated the impact of transoceanic ties on families and family strategies in a Basque village.²² These studies are important because historians have largely taken for granted the connections between peoples and ideas in Spain and the development of social, political, and economic life in Spanish America. Only recently have scholars begun to focus on the ongoing intellectual and cultural dynamic.²³

Certainly, the traditional conceptualization of Spanish “discovery” of the Americas has been consigned to the dustbin, replaced by the much more precise notion of cultural encounter.²⁴ From the initial contacts in the Caribbean to the last decades of the colonial period, most scholars now understand Spanish involvement in the Americas as a constant negotiation between Spaniards and indigenous, mixed-race, and African peoples. Non-Spaniards constantly challenged Spanish political, religious, and cultural dominance, and Spaniards provided no uniform response to those challenges as conflicts between secular and regular clergy, colonists and their governments, creoles and peninsulares left authority in the Indies weak and decentralized. While space does not allow a full discussion of this enormous and transformative literature, it is important to recognize the degree to which it has forced historians to reconceptualize both the Spanish and Portuguese colonial enterprises.²⁵

Scholars have subjected the Spanish Catholic Church to the same rigorous inquiry as they have Spanish politics, economics, and the creation of empire; as a result, it no longer appears to have been the epitome of religious, cultural, and social power that historians once believed it to be. Much of the early historiography was mired in the propaganda of the Catholic Church that asserted both its unity and its ultimate success. However, scholars have found little evidence to support the idea of a dominant, monolithic Catholic Church. Instead, the Catholic Reformation Church in Spain was a multifaceted, often disorganized institution with varying and often conflicting priorities. Rather than a unified force in Spanish society, the church was an institution made up of individuals who continually interacted with and responded to the Spanish populace: rich and poor, literate and illiterate, pious and not so pious. In this rich drama, the prejudices, power schemes, and religious cosmologies of all those involved were central to the formation of church priorities and the progress of religious reform.

Without a doubt, the Spanish Catholic Church was not a moribund institution, paralyzed by dogmatism. The supposed dichotomy between progressive Erasmianism and regressive Scholasticism described by an earlier generation of scholars was overly simplistic. Indeed, the intellectual atmosphere of sixteenth-century Spain was diverse and highly contested.²⁶ Moreover, although Spanish Catholicism may have seemed homogenous, each of Spain’s regional cultures experienced the Catholic Church through the lens of its local religious culture and priorities. During the late 1980s, the work of anthropologist William A. Christian Jr., the quantitative diocesan studies undertaken by historians of religion in France, and the burgeoning history of mentalities influenced a number of scholars to examine the mechanisms employed by the Catholic Reformation Church to exert control over its parishioners. Sara Nalle’s groundbreaking study of the diocese of Cuenca used both qualitative and quantitative measures to demonstrate the impressive strides that the Catholic Church made in alleviating ignorance and religious laxity among both the clergy and the laity.²⁷ The influence of French scholarship was also evident in a series of studies that examined religious mentalities and the pervasiveness of Catholic Reformation attitudes through the quantification of the rituals surrounding death.²⁸ However, as both Henry Kamen’s study of Catalonia and my own study of the diocese of Ourense in Galicia reveal, the successful reform of the diocese of Cuenca was not replicated across the kingdoms. On the periphery of the peninsula, where ecclesiastical institutions were weaker, local religious beliefs and practices and illiterate clergy continued to be pervasive influences well into the seventeenth century.²⁹ Moreover, ecclesiastical reform did not occur outside of the context of civic life. Only by understanding the cultural milieu of Spain’s urban elites can scholars fully comprehend the scope of Teresa’s Carmelite reform in Avila.³⁰

The research on women in early modern Spain has also contributed to the reassessment of the Catholic Reformation. Mary Elizabeth Perry’s 1990 study of Seville demonstrated how the desire for religious and political order translated into a struggle for gender order.³¹ Yet, women of all social strata challenged attempts by both the church and state to restrict their activity. Prostitutes continued to solicit on street corners and peasant women had sex outside of marriage. Even reformers like Teresa of Avila and members of Spain’s female religious communities resisted attempts to control their religious fervor and separate them from society.³²

Certainly the Spanish Inquisition bears little resemblance to the institution vilified for so many centuries.³³ Over the past two decades, scholars have come to a better understanding of the theological basis of the institution, its functioning, and its interactions with the Spanish populace. Much of the recent research on the Inquisition has been fueled by the initial results of Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen’s database of 44,000 Inquisition trials. The possibilities were exciting. Using statistical analysis, scholars could see the Inquisition in action at both the macro and the micro levels, and compare the activities of the various tribunals. From this perspective, the Inquisition was seen to be as diverse as the personalities of its officials, and was deeply influenced by those it sought to protect from the spread of heresy.

Some of the earliest quantitative analyses classified Inquisitional activity into a number of phases over the course of the early modern period.³⁴ Initially, Isabel sought the establishment of an Inquisition in her kingdoms to deal with the growing population of converted Jews (conversos). The old Christian population distrusted and feared conversos, suspecting that they secretly maintained Jewish beliefs while taking advantage of the benefits of their conversion to Christianity. The collaboration between the old Christian population and the Inquisition led to a bloody campaign to stamp out judaizing, during which more heretics were executed than faced the stake during the rest of the institution’s history.³⁵

During the middle of the sixteenth century, denunciations focused on other types of heresies, particularly Lutherans, moriscos, converted Muslims, and alumbrados (members of a sect who believed that by surrendering to the love of God, they could be illuminated by the Holy Spirit).³⁶ Then, from approximately 1560 to 1700, more Inquisition trials inquired into the beliefs of old Christians accused of minor heresies, such as blasphemy, fornication, and bigamy—a phase punctuated by a spate of anti-converso activity at midcentury. During the eighteenth century, the Inquisition went into decline and little is known about its last century of existence.

Within that framework, the research on individual tribunals has demonstrated the differing priorities of each tribunal, as well as their successes and failures.³⁷ For instance, the Aragonese and Valencian tribunals were far more interested in the religious activities of outsiders (Frenchmen, conversos, and morsicos), than the heresies of old Christians, while the Murcian Inquisition became the tool of factions competing for authority within the city.³⁸

In addition to reevaluating the institution itself, scholars have found that Inquisition trials provide a rare window into the lives of individuals. In one of the most interesting cases, the dialogue between the inquisitor, Pedro Cortes, and the accused, Bartolomé Sánchez, reveals the priorities of one inquisitor, the crazy ideas of a peasant, and evolving notions of madness.³⁹ The trials also show new converts and their families struggling to maintain connections to their religious heritages. Moriscos challenged Christian law by continuing to circumcise their boys well into the sixteenth century and conversos transmitted Jewish knowledge from one generation to the next.⁴⁰ Women’s role in clandestinely preserving traditional beliefs, practices, and language has been a particularly important theme in many of these studies.⁴¹

The trials also provide some important evidence about sexuality and gender expectations. Clerical solicitation remained a serious problem throughout the period.⁴² Contreras and Henningsen’s statistical information did not include gender as a category—thus we have no comprehensive data on the numbers of women who came before the Inquisition. However, it is clear that while men made up an overwhelming majority of the accused, some heresies were clearly associated with women. Pious women, including mystics and beatas, who stepped out of their prescribed feminine roles, attracting crowds and even hinting at political discourse, often faced the condemnation of inquisitors.⁴³ More typically, women were denounced for less serious heretical infractions, such as having participated in love magic.⁴⁴ However, the Inquisition ultimately failed to end women’s activity in these spheres.⁴⁵

Indeed, scholars now understand that despite the reputation of the Inquisition, most Spaniards never had any interaction with its tribunals and most of those who did generally received light punishments aimed at reconciling the heretics with the Catholic Church rather than leading them towards the stake. Certainly in the context of other early modern judicial systems, it is clear that the Inquisition’s ultimate goal of stopping heresy and saving souls created a complex dynamic of social discipline, religious education, and popular/elite interaction, and not a reign of religious absolutism and terror.

Because of the weaknesses of the Inquisition and Spain’s other ecclesiastical institutions, the kingdoms were never as culturally homogenous as many scholars had assumed. Indeed, new understandings of the ways to access the history of subaltern peoples and their interactions with dominant political, social, and religious cultures have revealed the complex identities of Spain’s minority communities. Moriscos were not simply rebellious subjects or opportunistic collaborators. Instead, the relationship between moriscos and the Christian community and its power structures was intricately connected to an ever-changing array of personal aspirations and community expectations.⁴⁶

The study of Spain’s converso population has generally been the realm of Jewish historians, rather than scholars of Spanish religion and society—a scholarly divide based on different understandings of religious and cultural identity. Jewish scholars have tended to see conversos first and foremost as former Jews who happened to be living in Spain, while historians of Spanish society generally understand them as Spaniards marginalized to different degrees by their religious heritage. However, both groups of scholars have produced a number of more nuanced explorations of Sephardic identity, connecting conversos to both Jewish and converso communities abroad as well as to the Christian communities in which they lived, thus emphasizing the fluidity of both religious belief and cultural identification.⁴⁷

Although flawed, Inquisition trials give us remarkable insight into the history of sexualities. Historians have explored both the varieties of homosexual relationships and the sites of homosexual liaisons. They have also begun to tease out how class, race, and nationality influenced both popular expectations and Inquisitorial outcomes in sodomy cases.⁴⁸ The cases of transvestism and hermaphroditism that came before the Inquisition reveal much about early modern Spanish society’s understanding of sex and gender as well as reactions to those who transgressed gender norms.⁴⁹ Heterosexual sex has proven no less intriguing. Scholars have deftly employed both Inquisition records as well as the documentation from Spain’s multiple judicial systems to explore the most intimate moments of people’s lives. Despite religious injunctions to the contrary and expectations of female chastity articulated by the prescriptive literature, Spaniards regularly engaged in extramarital sex, sometimes as a guarantor of a marriage promise, but also for reasons of love and lust.⁵⁰

The history of the family in Spain remains largely the territory of historical demographers. Their careful reconstructions of marriage, residence, and inheritance patterns, household types, and family networks over the life course have demonstrated the multiple meanings of family and the adaptability of family structures to changing social and economic circumstances. Here, as noted for other areas of Spanish history, regional differences in family structures have become a prominent feature of the scholarship.⁵¹

Finally, the Spanish city has become a vibrant subject of intellectual inquiry. Using both traditional social history and interdisciplinary approaches, scholars have produced a remarkable array of studies of urban life.⁵² Established as the capital during the sixteenth century, Madrid is an excellent example of early modern urbanization in action. Scholars have explored both the creation of the city itself and the formulation of its civic identity.⁵³ The images of cities in both Spain and Spanish America depicted more than just a place; they were vivid descriptions of the inhabitants’ sense of who they were and how they fit into the cosmos.⁵⁴

Spain’s cities were home to dynamic cross-sections of humanity, from aristocrats and bureaucrats to porters, laundresses, tradesmen, and merchants. James Amelang has described the emergence of Barcelona’s elites from a combination of the city’s ruling oligarchy and the traditional aristocracy. This new, relatively open ruling class then created its own distinctive culture through language, education, and control of civic festivities.⁵⁵ Barcelona’s artisans were savvy political actors, who had clear ideas about their place in Spain’s political hierarchy and pursued their political interests through both coalition building and violence.⁵⁶ Spanish cities were also centers of economic life that drew a steady stream of migrants from the hinterland.⁵⁷ As for the rest of urban society, scholars are only beginning to understand the lives of the poor and the institutions that served them.⁵⁸

In the past two decades, the study of early modern Spain has come into its own. A review of the literature reveals that the peninsula was a much more complex political, economic, and social entity than most scholars realized. Spain’s absolutism no longer seems as absolute; its decline seems less precipitous. The Spanish church was more vulnerable, and the Spanish people were more diverse. Yet, as exciting as the past twenty years have been, the future of the field is even brighter. From an historical perspective, early modern Spain is edging towards another new world.

Bibliography

ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

Biblioteca Virtual de Andalucía:

http://www.catalogo.bne.es/uhtbin/webcat.

Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes:

http://www.cervantesvirtual.com.

Catálogo Colectivo del Patrimonio Bibliográfico Español:

http://www.mcu.es/bibliotecas/MC/CCPB/index.html.

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Altman, Ida. Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

——. Transatlantic Ties in the Spanish Empire: Brihuega, Spain and Puebla, Mexico, 1560–1620. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

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