From Alcala to Seville and Beyond

Abstract

Ingram examines the reform movement in Andalusia in the first half of the sixteenth century, where conversos still find themselves in socio-religious limbo, accepted neither as bona fide Spaniards nor as Christians. The chapter charts the religious campaigns of Juan de Ávila (later Saint Juan de Ávila), who takes his reform message to the converso communities in a bid to create a new evangelical Christianity with New Christians at its vanguard. At the same time, a group of converso prelates in the Seville Cathedral promote Erasmian reform from the pulpit while creating secret conventicles in which proscribed Protestant literature is studied. In the late 1550s this clandestine reform movement is prosecuted by the Inquisition as Philip II becomes aware of these secret Protestant cells and their converso character.