JUAN DE VALDES AND THE ALUMBRADOS

ALASTAIR HAMILTON Amsterdam

Despite his influence and the intellectual and social distinction of his circle astonishingly little is known about the life of Juan de Valdes. His father, a nobleman, was an alderman, regidor, of Cuenca. His mother was descended from conversos or New Christians, Jews con- verted to Christianity, and a brother of hers was burnt at the stake as a relapsed Judaizer. Himself one of six sons, ,Juan de Valdes was born in about 1509. Nothing certain can be said about his early education, but both he and his elder brother Alfonso, may have had as their tutor the Italian humanist Pietro Martire d'Anghiera. The first clear glimpse we catch of Juan de Valdes is in 1523 and 1524 when he was serving as a page in the household of Don Diego Lopez Pacheco, Marquess of Villena. He was staying at the marquess's castle of Escalona, north- west of Toledo, at the same time as the accountant Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz, who was arrested for heresy in 1524 as one of the main proselytisers of the alumbrado movement. By the second half of November 1526 Valdes was studying at the university of Alcala. There he was soon a respected member of a group of scholars who, like his brother Alfonso, were friends of Erasmus, and Juan too sus- tained a brief correspondence with the Dutch humanist for whose works he had such esteem. At Alcala he established his reputation as a writer with his first publication, the Didlogo de doctrina christiana, dedicated to the Marquess of Villena and printed by Miguel de Eguia who had produced most of the Castilian translations of Erasmus. The Diálogo de doctrina christiana was examined unfavourably by the . By August 1531 Juan de Valdes had left for . In Italy, more tolerant than his homeland, he first worked at the papal court as an imperial agent. In 1535, after obtaining an ecclesiastical benefice in Spain from the pope, Clement VII, he left Rome for , where he received a further benefice from Paul III and worked for the Spanish secretary of state Francisco de los Cobos. Valdes's Neapolitan period lasted until his death in 1541. It was a time of extraordinary success, in which he was the centre of a circle of 104 aristocrats and churchmen who assisted in spreading his spiritual message throughout Italy and later over Europe. These few facts say little about Valdes's upbringing and the in- fluences to which he was exposed in his formative years. In view of his intellectual achievements it seems safer to err on the side of abundance than to restrict ourselves to texts and ideas known to have been in circulation in Spain in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Juan de Valdes had access to a world that spread far beyond the Spanish borders, and owed still more to his cosmopolitan brother Alfonso than to Pietro Martire d'Anghiera who might have been his tutor.11 Attached to the imperial court from an early age, Alfonso de Valdes attended Charles V's coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in Aix-la Chapelle in October 1520. In May of the following year he was at the Diet of Worms. A keen observer of the first stages of the Reformation, Alfonso, like many other courtiers, would have read Luther's early works with approval and may well have had them with him when he returned to Spain in 1522. Owing to his high reputation as a Latinist he was appointed imperial secretary for Latin correspondence early in 1526. By the end of October of the same year he was made secretary to the chancellor Mercurino Gattinara. At about the same time he began to correspond with Erasmus, and he soon turned into the Dutchman's most enthusiastic supporter at the imperial court and his most precious link with Spain. Until his death of the plague in Vienna in October 1532 Alfonso de Vald6s was a tireless propagator of Erasmus's ideas and an energetic advocate of reconciliation between Catholics and Pro- testants, taking an active part in the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 and atten- ding, but not participating in, the Diet of Regensburg two years later. While Alfonso would have told _Juan de Valdes about the religious movements of the time, at the university of Alcala the works of the northern European Reformers were being read, albeit with discretion, and the academy could pride itself on the tradition of theological and Biblical studies promoted by its founder Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros. The only Spanish university to have a chair of nomina-

1 Cf. José C. Nieto's biographical surveys of the two Valdés brothers in Contempo- raries of Erasmus. A BiographicalRegister of the Renaissanceand Reformation,ed. Peter G. Bietenholz & Thomas B. Deutscher, 3 vols., Toronto 1985-7, vol. 3, pp. 366-70. A sober account of Juan de Valdés and his influence is provided by Domingo de Sta Teresa, O.C.D., Juan de Valdés1498(?)-1541. Su pensamientoreligioso y las corrientes espiritualesde su tiempo,Roma 1957.