Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
In the summer of 1527, the Spanish Inquisition summoned some thirty-three of Iberia's most prominent theologians to the Castilian city of Valladolid in order to judge a variety of suspicious passages culled from Erasmus's works. The theologians met, argued, and disbanded without ever reaching a decision on the orthodoxy of the excerpts or even debating the whole inventory under review, for when plague struck the area in early August, Inquisitor General Alonso Manrique sent them home and never reconvened them. The place of the Valladolid assembly in the scholarly record is nearly minimal, for if a few academics have detailed Erasmus's response to it, no one has sufficiently explored its implications for Spanish history. The reason for such neglect lies not only in the conference's failure to pronounce, but in the modern argument that diagrams it in terms of Erasmus's impact on sixteenth-century Spanish culture.
Earlier versions of this material were presented at the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference in 1990, the Central Renaissance Conference in 1991, and the Mid-Atlantic Renaissance and Reformation Seminar in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1993. I would like to thank the College of William and Mary for financial support in the form of a 1993 Summer Research Grant; and Charles Nauert, Thomas Mayer, Jerry Bentley, and MARRS's participants for their criticism and encouragement.