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.

Chapter 1 presents the contexts for the making and circulation of books in late colonial Peru. It analyses three limiting factors related to society, legislation, and materiality, and concludes that circulation was never unfettered owing to various barriers imposed by the colonial administration. Addressing illiteracy, this chapter shows how educational reforms promoted by contemporary theories of Enlightenment pedagogy and alternative ways of acquiring reading skills created potential book customers. Although a double mechanism of control – before as well as after the publication – determined the book market, actual practice differed from legislation. Finally, an analysis of the material constraints reveals how dependence on paper and printing types restricted Peruvian print production. Notwithstanding these confines, an increasing number of people learned how to read, regulations were not always fully enforced, materials were re-used, and tools were invented, allowing printed commodities to enter the colonial market.

This chapter reconstructs Vicente Nogueira’s Inquisitorial trial, recovering the many political and religious motivations which lay behind it. Inquisitorial sources provide an opportunity to reflect on the interplay between Nogueira’s religious and sexual identities. Tried by the Inquisition for sodomy, Nogueira conceived his trial and subsequent exile as opportunities to reflect on his social statuses as someone who belonged to diverse intellectual, ecclesiastical, political and emotional communities. Despite the personal challenges posed by the trial and forced migration, these experiences ultimately provided Nogueira with more resources and greater public exposure as a mercenary of knowledge. Between his cell in Lisbon and the sugar mills of northern Brazil, Nogueira witnessed a set of conflicts that gave him access to the most unexpected spaces of the Republic of Letters.

The breakaway cardinals returned to Avignon, taking much of the administration with them. The Roman papacy adapted by imitating the type of letter called a ‘brief’ used by some secular systems. Briefs were written by a different set of men, and before long distinguished by humanistic script. From this time on a dual system operated: Chancery and Secretariate. Initially the latter was for high-level letters but in the later fifteenth century it took on routine business too. Another post-Schism innovation was the sale of offices. Apparently absurd, this bound the upper classes of Italy to the papacy. After the Council of Trent papal government was drastically reorganised. The book enters scantily researched territory in attempting to map the changes in the functioning of the Penitentiary, the processes behind the production of letters by the Chancery and of briefs by the secretaries, and at the Congregations of the Council and of the Inquisition. The documentation generated by these two-sub-systems on the problem of whether Calvinist baptism was valid (for example) is of a kind that medievalists can only envy.

This concluding chapter turns from inquisitional procedure to the inquisition as an institution. The first part of the chapter examines the tale of the good man and the inquisitor (1.6). The second part argues that when Boccaccio responds to his nameless critics, he puts himself in the role of the good man and treats his critics as inquisitors. In mounting his defense, Boccaccio compares his situation to that of Dante’s; both must contend with the talk of the crowd. Yet instead of transcending common talk, Boccaccio answers it: he parries his critics’ talk, their novelle, with another novella (recounting a tale about a hermit’s son’s sexual awakening). Dante responds to an inquisition against him by ensnaring his judges within a more encompassing inquisitorial trial. Boccaccio turns their monologue into a dialogue, their whispered criticisms into an open rhetorical contest, their secret denunciation into an accusatorial trial.

The introduction makes a case for returning to the topic of Boccaccio’s realism through the lens of law and rhetoric. Boccaccio’s Decameron is not just realistic from a stylistic perspective, a mark of the authors modernity. Rather, the work is itself a critical examination of the uses and abuses of realism. This examination of everyday, social mimesis occurs most trenchantly in the Decameron’s numerous trial scenes. Accordingly, this introduction argues that we should shift focus from Boccaccio the expert canonist to Boccaccio the astute observer of procedural law. It argues, further, that that the difference between Dante’s and Boccaccio’s realism can be seen as a legal-procedural difference. Dante prefers in inquisitorial poetics aimed at uncovering hidden truths while Boccaccio’s realism is dialectical and accusatorial.

This chapter distils a massive reservoir of discourses of heresy against Abu Hanifa to document the capaciousness of the proto-Sunni traditionalist effort to marginalise him and his followers. It identifies the multifarious nature of criticisms against him: proto-Sunni traditionalists assailing him on account of his jurisprudence, expertise in hadith, theology, and piety. This chapter closes with a discussion of the social regulation of heresy and orthodoxy in the eighth to tenth centuries.

Chapter 6 examines the role of mobility in Veracruz’s distinctive social and cultural landscape, focusing on how individuals moving between Veracruz and other ports established intercolonial networks and developed informal religious communities. In a series of case studies based on investigations of the Mexican Inquisition, the chapter considers border-crossing associations of free-black women, using their cases to demonstrate both Veracruz’s remarkable religious diversity and the occasionally surprising mobility of its residents. While heterodoxy was undoubtedly common in the early modern Atlantic, I demonstrate how the Mexican-Caribbean world conditioned particular religious practices in Veracruz. Describing Veracruz as a spiritual borderland, I argue people from a variety of backgrounds understood the city as a place where the ability to come and go with relative ease created overlapping systems of power and, consequently, space to articulate distinctive ideologies.

Seventeenth-century Cartagena de Indias exemplified the multiracial life of imperial Iberian port cities. Few European doctors served the newly cosmopolitan areas of the empire that fostered alarming new experiences of climate, disease, and injury. Surgeons and herbalists of African descent competed for Iberian clients and played significant roles in defining the spaces of a port city vulnerable to all sorts of invasion. Europeans entrusted their ill bodies to casta healers while fearing death at the hands of those healers’ colleagues, who might be motivated to revenge by the slave system or by the internal tensions of European politics or marriages. This essay teases out the gendered competition among casta surgeons and herbalists who told stories with their words and movements through hospitals, jails, city walls, neighborhoods, churches, and homes of the port city. It draws especially on the trials of herbalist Paula de Eguiluz and surgeon Diego Lopez whose stories allay and arouse the fears of the Iberians they lived with and treated.

Chapter 3 examines two features deemed constitutive of ‘national characters’ in the eighteenth century: language and religion. Many naval recruits, both from abroad and from the British Isles and Ireland, were not native English speakers, and sometimes did not understand the language. Yet naval English was a technical argot, blurring language divides, and shipboard structures and workflows, combined with a shared professional background, made linguistic competence a secondary concern. In fact, it was men otherwise known as ‘foreigners’, but speaking perfect English, who were potentially seen as suspect, because of their upturning of expectations. Religious difference, too, was generally unproblematic. Unlike other European fleets, the Navy ranked devotion relatively low among its priorities and routines. Although Catholics were theoretically banned from serving, this law was policed only in the case of officers, and some practical accommodations were even provided for Catholic common seamen. Overall, cultural differences often mattered to individuals. However, the naval service pursued efficiency, and its discipline was very efficacious in flattening or accommodating difference, making any diversity relatively marginal to shipboard rhythms. Royal Navy ships could thus become just another part of a maritime world in which various languages and faiths met and mingled.

This chapter describes the earliest stirrings of religious dissent in the Low Countries during the period 1520–1540. Reformist ideas coming out of the Holy Roman Empire and Swiss cities, especially the protests of Luther and Zwingli, followed continental trade routes to circulate in the Netherlands by 1520. Combined with long-standing humanist criticisms of the church, these reform ideas quickly gained a small but significant audience among the urban, literate populations of the region, first among clergy and intellectuals and then among the broader middling sort. By the mid-1520s a vocal minority was espousing religious ideas the Catholic Church deemed heretical. By the 1530s an even more radical evangelical movement, Melchiorite Anabaptism, found a broad following, especially in the northern provinces. This radicalism climaxed in 1535 with the Anabaptist kingdom of Muenster and Anabaptist attempts to overthrow the government of Amsterdam. By this time Charles V had instituted a new judicial apparatus of laws and courts to suppress heresy. This judicial regime proved at least temporarily successful in staunching the spread of heresy in the region after the Muenster debacle.