This volume consists of eight chapters that are grouped together for the first time, each having originally appeared in academic journals and edited volumes in Spanish, between 2011 and 2018. Seven of the eight authors are affiliated with universities and research institutes in Barcelona. The introduction, written by Doris Moreno and Ricardo García Cárcel, notes that the contributions take as a starting point the religious plurality of the early modern Hispanic world, rather than a homogeneous national Catholicism. The aim of the collection is to “improve our understanding of the various expressions hidden in the complexity of religious life, both in the areas of doctrine and theory and in collective social practice” (5).

To that end, Moreno examines the tensions experienced by the Society of Jesus when Protestant cells were discovered in Seville and Valladolid in the late 1550s, and the Jesuit leadership in Spain had to decide whether and how to cooperate with the Spanish Inquisition. José Luis Betrán highlights the centrality of martyrdom for the religious mentality of the Spanish Empire. Rosa María Alabrús Iglesias surveys the mixed messages from clerical authors on the phenomenon of female visionaries and the exemplarity, or not, of Teresa de Jesús. Ricardo García Cárcel explores “channels of alternative tolerance,” which provided some scope for religious flexibility even if they lacked “a truly active principle of accepting difference” (87). Manuel Peña Díaz posits that the Inquisition effectively used its penitential garments, called sambenitos, as part of its symbolic construction of power, given that such apparel hung in local churches and thereby affected the honor of persons beyond the individual convicted heretic. José Pardo-Tomás evaluates three Mexican convents—one each from the Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian religious orders—as sites of conversion via medical care. Pedro Rueda Ramírez reviews the diversity of writing and reading situations that could occur in the Atlantic world. Finally, Bernat Hernández engages in a close reading of texts by exiled Jesuit Ramón Diosdado Caballero (1740–1829) in order to illuminate arguments for colonial domination.

Some of the essays are quite successful. Pardo-Tomás cites telling evidence for a dual mission of spiritual and physical healing pursued by the religious orders, while also recognizing the Mexica's efforts to preserve Indigenous medical knowledge. Rueda Ramírez correctly warns us not to treat private correspondence flowing across the Atlantic as ego documents, given that letters were deployed in both the private and public domains. He argues that the history of the book must be transnational, because books have no limits. Meanwhile, Hernández's point that Diosdado Caballero “denied the Mesoamerican world a history of its own” (209) is highly provocative vis-à-vis the question of whether Jews in Spain and Europe were allowed to have a history and holy scripture of their own in Christian thought—via the Torah—or whether Jewish sacred texts would be interpreted relentlessly through a Christian filter.

By and large, however, this is a puzzling collection to review. Despite the editor's desire to subvert the binary of orthodoxy vs. heterodoxy for religious history in the early modern Spanish world, certain authors here are still arguing that the middle of the sixteenth century saw a pivotal and fixed shift in religious values, that the Spanish Inquisition functioned like a machine, and that Spanish ecclesiastics had to choose between internal and external modes of religiosity. The translation often is not helpful in terms of clarity, either. For example, rule 4 of Ignatius of Loyola's Rules for Thinking with the Church is rendered as “Commend many religions” when the text actually says “Commend much religious orders” (15); the term penitenciado is rendered as “penitented” (32). Perhaps more importantly, one might wish for more sustained engagement from the contributors with arguments made by Mercedes García-Arenal, Stefania Pastore, Simon Ditchfield, John Martin, Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Alison Weber, Stuart Schwartz, Kimberly Lynn, Bianca Premo, and Camilla Townsend, among others.