The discovery of a consignment of books of Protestant propaganda in Seville in the autumn of 1557 convinced the Spanish inquisitors of the existence of clandestine circles that promoted doctrines that contradicted Catholic orthodoxy as redefined between 1547 and 1552 during the first sessions of the Council of Trent. The discovery of a second community of religious dissidents in Valladolid a few weeks later, followed by the arrest on suspicion of Lutheranism of Bartolomé de Carranza y Miranda, archbishop of Toledo, on 22 August 1559 created the impression in the royal court of Philip II that Spain had escaped an odious heretical conspiracy hatched by foreigners and supported by members of its own nobility and senior clergy. Some of the outstanding figures among the Seville and Valladolid dissidents cannot, contrary to what historiography has long maintained, be characterised simply as Erasmists; many of them subscribed to the doctrinal core of Protestantism. There were several networks of Lutherans in Spain, as well as among the communities of exiled Spaniards throughout Europe. The Reformation made a greater impression in Iberia than has long been assumed.

This chapter tracks the discourse around race, slavery, and racial Blackness in the Americas from the sixteenth century to the present day, with attention to the way the essay form has responded and contributed to the rise of new multiracial societies and struggles for emancipation and abolition. The author discusses how the work of abolitionist writers such as Lemuel Haynes, Ottabah Cugoano, David Walker, and Anna Julia Cooper has informed the subsequent tradition of Black essay writing in the United States and elsewhere.

Matthew Goldmark examines the role of compassion in the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas’s famous condemnation of sixteenth-century Spanish conquest, the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552), which describes Spaniards’ violent attacks on defenceless indigenous populations across the so-called New World. Goldmark argue that in the Brevísima relación, affect justifies action; it is the sight of indigenous suffering that obliges the text’s royal recipient Phillip II to stop the violent destruction perpetrated by his unmanaged vassals in the New World. While scholars have mined the juridical, classical and religious source base that Las Casas employs in the Brevísima relación, few have placed emotion at the centre of this intellectual inquiry. In this chapter, Goldmark argues that emotion – specifically pity – is essential to the Brevísima relación’s defence of indigenous peoples and, as important, to its creation of a transatlantic imperial relationship between 'Indians' and the Crown. In the Brevísima relación, pity identifies a hierarchical relation that obliges intervention from a powerful imperial witness-authority. Thus, the affective imperative created by pity is not one of contemplation of an equal, but rather a call to action for an Other whose relation to empire remains undetermined.