Staging autos-de-fe

Sense and Sacramentality during the Spanish Reformation

Bibliographic Data

ID16345534
AuthorsKathryn Phipps (corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume48
Issue1-2
Pages51-86
Publication date2025-07-09
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueRenaissance and Reformation (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0034-429X • E-ISSN: 2293-7374
PublisherUniversity of Toronto Libraries - UOTL (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.33137/rr.v48i1-2.45692
OpenAlexW4412122454
LanguageEN
References cited22

The Spanish Inquisition’s notorious public executions, celebrated in tandem with elaborate spectacles called autos-de-fe, foreground the contested theological weight of death and the senses at the apogee of the Spanish Reformation. Joining efforts to re-evaluate the sensory in early modernity, this article argues that contemporaneous accounts of autos-de-fe simultaneously perpetuate and challenge the notion that the Reformation constituted a fundamental change to theological interpretations of the senses. Published evangelical treatises by Reinaldo González de Montes and Juan Pérez de Pineda, alongside official manuscripts stored in the Inquisition’s archives, collectively elucidate the transformations of the senses in the aftermath of the Reformation in Spain. Moreover, Pérez’s corpus exemplifies Protestantism’s paradoxical interpretations of the deadly autos, viewing their sensorial abundance at once as profoundly significant and utterly meaningless

Art · Early Modern Women Writers · Latin American history and culture · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

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