Spain in the sixteenth century was not exempt from the movements of reform sweeping over Europe. Its enthusiastic but short-lived reception of Erasmian humanism in the 1520s is well-documented. So is its even more enthusiastic suppression of native ‘Lutheran’ conventicles in the 1550s and the extinction of hope for a Protestant Church in the kingdom of the Spanish Habsburgs. These events have relegated Hispanic Protestantism to little more than a footnote in most histories.

The story, though, is not limited to the Iberian peninsula. A dedicated cadre of Spaniards did battle in the realm of ideas from places of exile in Naples, France, England, Geneva and Germany. In so doing, they contributed significantly to a core literature of evangelical humanism in Spanish. This corpus consists, in part, of translations of Reformers' works, such as Melanchthon's Antithesis and Luther's treatise on Christian liberty, by Francisco de Enzinas (1540); Calvin's catechism, by Juan Pérez (Geneva 1556); and Calvin's Institutes, by Cipriano de Valera (London 1597). Translations of classics also figure prominently in the work of Francisco de Enzinas, for example Plutarch's Lives and the Decades of Livy.