Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth-Century Spain

Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alumbrados is the first comprehensive historical survey in English of alumbradismo, a heresy which flourished in Spain during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries.Alastair Hamilton traces the develop- ment of alumbradismo, irom its initial clash with the Inquisition of Toledo in the 1520s, to the trials of the alumbrados in Llerena in the 1580s and those of Seville in the 1620s.He bases his study on the writings of various religious figures of the period, and in the case of the earliest alumbrados, who left behind no formal compilation of their beliefs, on letters written in their defense and statements made by witnesses at their trials.Hamilton locates the origins of alumbradismo in heterodox movements of the Christian Middle Ages as well as in the late fifteenth-century Franciscan practice of recogimiento, the gathering up of the soul to God.In certain segments of the clergy and laity, and significantly among a high proportion of women, recogimiento led to a more radical form of prayer known as dejamiento, the abandoning of the soul to God.Though the distinction between recogimiento and dejamiento was never definitively established, the dejados claimed to be filled with a divine light (hence the designation alumbrado) and to achieve a passive union with God.Its practitioners not only

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