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Assembling Alumbradismo: the Evolution of a Heretical Construct1 Assembling Alumbradismo 251 Chapter 9 Assembling Alumbradismo: The Evolution of a Heretical Construct1 Jessica J. Fowler The heresy of Alumbradismo is far from an unknown topic of study, but it remains one of the most confusing terms in Spanish historiography.2 It has appeared in general studies of the Spanish Inquisition since the beginning of the twentieth century.3 An increasing interest in this heresy as part of, and contributing to, a broader and more nuanced assessment of the Spanish spiri- tual climate of the sixteenth century produced a number of important articles in the mid-twentieth century.4 Larger studies of these specific heretics and their beliefs would appear beginning in the late 1970s.5 This trend was quickly followed by efforts to make the inquisitorial documents dealing with Alum- 1 The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) ERC Grant Agreement number 323316, project CORPI ‘Conversion, Overlapping Religiosities, Polemics, Interaction. Early Modern Iberia and Beyond’. The author would also like to thank the tutors and participants of the 2015 Summer Academy of Atlantic History for their com- ments and suggestions on this paper. 2 Alison Weber, ‘Demonizing Ecstasy: Alonso de la Fuente and the Alumbrados of Extremadura’, in The Mystical Gesture: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Spiritual Culture in Honor of Mary E. Giles, (ed.) Robert Boenig (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 141. 3 Among others see Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Historia de los Heterodoxos Españoles (Madrid: Librería General de Victoriano Suárez, 1911); Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1907); Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 4 Among these works see Melquíades Andrés Martín, ‘Recogidos y alumbrados. Nueva visión conjunta del alumbradismo español’, Salmanticensis, 21 (1974): pp. 151–63, and Andrés Martín, ‘Los alumbrados de Toledo según el proceso de María de Cazalla (1532–34)’, Cuadernos de Investigación Histórica, 8 (1984): pp. 65–81; José C. Nieto, ‘The Heretical Alumbrados Dexados: Isabel de la Cruz and Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz’, Revue de littérature comparée, 52 (1978): pp. 293– 313; Ángela Selke de Sánchez, ‘Algunos datos nuevos sobre los primeros alumbrados: el edicto de 1525 y su relación con el proceso de Alcaraz’, Bulletin Hispanique, 54 (1952): pp. 125–52. 5 Alvaro Huerga, Historia de los alumbrados, 5 vols. (Madrid: FUE, 1978–94); Alastair Hamilton, Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alumbrados (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); Bernardino Llorca, La Inquisición Española y los Alumbrados (1509–1667) © Jessica J. Fowler, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004324329_011 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND License. Jessica J. Fowler - 9789004324329 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:47:28PM via free access 252 Fowler bradismo accessible to a larger audience, resulting in the publication of source material relating to this heresy, specifically the procesos of at least some of the accused.6 This immense historiography most often focuses on the group iden- tified as Alumbrados in 1520’s Toledo, occasionally mentioning the next appearance of the heresy in Extremadura, but rarely making any effort to understand how and why the heresy continued to appear sporadically in Spain and its colonial holdings during the rest of the sixteenth century and beyond.7 Studying individual manifestations of alumbradismo in a particular time and place has left us with a fractured understanding of what the Spanish Inquisition understood as a coherent and unified sect. The initial group that became known as Alumbrados lacked a formal state- ment of doctrine or clear leader. The understanding that they constituted a distinct heretical sect was the product of the Spanish Inquisition’s efforts to identify, define, and categorize suspicious individuals in and around Toledo in the 1520s. There was no such thing as an Alumbrado heresy, or even an Alumbrado heretic, until the Inquisition elected to identify and persecute them. As R.I. Moore points out in The Formation of a Persecuting Society, ‘her- esy exists only in so far as authority chooses to declare its existence’.8 Thus, from its inception, the heresy of Alumbradismo and the supposed threat it posed was a construct of the Inquisition that would develop and evolve over the course of the sixteenth century: ‘The Inquisition created the vocabulary of (Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1980); Antonio Márquez, Los alumbrados, orígenes y filosofía, 1525–1559 (Madrid: Taurus, 1980). 6 See Milagros Ortega-Costa, Proceso de la Inquisición contra María de Cazalla (Madrid: FUE, 1978); Javier Pérez Escohotado, Antonio de Medrano, alumbrado epicúreo. Proceso inquisitorial (Toledo, 1530) (Madrid: Verbum, 2003); Alastair Hamilton, El proceso de Rodrigo de Bivar (1539) (Madrid: FUE, 1979); Lu Ann Homza (ed. and trans.), The Spanish Inquisition, 1478–1614: An Anthology of Sources (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006) among others. 7 Occasionally some of the historiography has treated the second manifestation of Alumbra- dismo in the Extremadura as a way to close their discussion of the Toledo group. General studies of the Inquisition in the Spanish colonies regularly mention Alumbrado cases that appear within the particular jurisdiction under study. Specific studies about this heresy in Mexico include Adriana Rodríguez Delgado, Santos o embusteros. Los alumbrados novohis- panos del siglo XVII (Mexico: Estado de Veracruz, 2013); and Nora Jaffary, False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). For an effort to start understanding Alumbradismo within a more imperial context see Mercedes García- Arenal and Felipe Pereda, ‘On the Alumbrados: Confessionalism and Religious Dissidence in the Iberian World’, in The Early Modern Hispanic World: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Approaches, (ed.) Kimberly Lynn and Erin Rowe (Cambridge: Cambrige University Press, 2016), pp. 119–50. 8 Robert I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), p. 64. Jessica J. Fowler - 9789004324329 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:47:28PM via free access Assembling Alumbradismo 253 the Alumbrado heresy, taught it to the public, who denounced practitioners in their communities, and catalogued its existence in trial proceedings’.9 This essay unites the manifestations of Alumbradismo in Spain and New Spain during the sixteenth century to demonstrate how the Inquisition’s defi- nition of the heresy could evolve and spread without impairing the fundamental understanding of it as a coherent and unified sect. Grouping together the Alumbrados of the 1520s, a group of Converso beatas and their male followers who practiced an interior spirituality devoid of any form of external expres- sion, with those of the 1590s, a sensual cadre of religious men leading groups of beatas who experienced public raptures and ecstasies, has led many historians to dismiss the charge as a catch-all encompassing such a plethora of deviant behaviors and practices that it became effectively meaningless by the late six- teenth century.10 Such an assessment, however, fails to consider the inquisitorial reasoning that occurred between these dates which would explain the con- glomeration of these seemingly disparate religious trends. A better approach would consider the larger context created by the Inquisition in its efforts to prosecute those it labeled as Alumbrados as well as the inquisitorial logic and processes that contributed to understanding these groups as analogous. Too often historians reproduce the categories used by the Inquisition without examining the development, or even exact meaning, of these classifications, assuming them to be static entities.11 Rather than becoming too vague to be meaningful, the charge of Alumbradismo developed over time, as most under- standings of heterodoxy do, and its evolution is clearly traceable through the sixteenth century. The documentation pertaining to this alleged sect demon- strates a clear progression of inquisitorial thought as individuals and ex- periences contributed to redefining the parameters of what constituted this heresy. However, ideas were not enough to generate heretics. The appearance of Alumbrados throughout the sixteenth century required not only a defini- tion of this heresy, even if it was evolving, but also individuals willing to work 9 Jaffary, False Mystics, p. 16. 10 Hamilton, Heresy and Mysticism, p. 91; Adelina Sarrión Mora, Beatas y endemoniadas. Mujeres heterodoxas ante la Inquisición, siglos XVI a XIX (Madrid: Alianza, 2003), pp. 196, 213; Jacqueline Holler, ‘More Sins than the Queen of England: Marina de San Miguel Before the Mexican Inquisition’, in Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World, (ed.) Mary E. Giles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 220; Helen Rawlings, The Spanish Inquisition (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), p. 92. 11 Mercedes García-Arenal, ‘Creating Conversos: Genealogy and Identity as Historiographi- cal Problems’, Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, 38, no. 1 (2013): pp. 1–19, esp. p. 4. Jessica J. Fowler - 9789004324329 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:47:28PM via
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