ABSTRACT
There is perhaps no more confusing term in Spanish historiography than alumbradismo. It has been used to designate evangelicals with vaguely protestant leanings, eucharistic enthusiasts, contemplatives, orgiasts, religious hypocrites, and deluded visionaries and stigmatics.2 Although in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Inquisition made several attempts to find a common thread that might link divergent manifestations of heterodox behavior into an over-arching heresy, alumbradismo remained a widely used but inconsistently defined appellation for a variety of suspect religious practices and beliefs.3Nonetheless, it is generally accepted that the earliest manifestation of alumbradismo in the sixteenth century differed fundamentally from the "outbreaks” later in the century. The first group designated alumbrados was active in the region around Toledo in the 1520s. The Inquisition's 1525 edict of 1 Marcelino Menindez Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos espaftoles, vol. 4, Sectas mtsticas. Alumbrados. Quietistas. Miguel de Molinos. Embustes y milagrerias (1880-1882; rpt. Mexico City: Porria, 1982), p. 322. All translations from the Spanish are my own.2 Spain's most famous sixteenth-century saints-Ignacio de Loyola, Teresa of Avila, and Juan de la Cruz-were at various times accused of alumbradismo because of their
condemnation focused largely on such "protestant" errors as disdain for ceremonies and sacraments and the belief in divine inspiration from reading the Scriptures. By 1579, however, a list of alumbrado errors drawn up for an auto de fe celebrated in Extremadura emphasized primarily irregularities in eucharistic or confessional practices, and sexual activity between priests and penitents.4 Although the early Toledo alumbrados have been the subject of revisionist studies, scholars have assumed that the later group, the alumbrados of Llerena, Extremadura, were indeed an orgiastic sect of licentious priests and their female devotees. In other words, we are still reading the story of the Llerena alumbrados in the terms defined by the nineteenth-century historian Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo in his influential Historia de los heterodoxos-as a particularly embarrassing chapter in Spanish religious history, of prurient interest at best.5This essay will explore how Alonso de la Fuente, the Dominican friar who claimed he had discovered the Llerena alumbrados, came to define,
propagandize, and adapt his own version of the alumbrado heresy. As we shall see, his conception was a dynamic one. Furthermore, the list of heresies and errors he originally communicated to the Inquisition does not in the end coincide with the one the Inquisition applied in the auto de fe of 1579. Eventually, his persecutory zeal and over-reaching definition of heresy would bring about his downfall. The story of the rise and fall of this inquisitorial preacher not only allows us to follow the process by which the Inquisition fashioned its notions of heresy, it also illustrates the ambivalence of the sixteenth-century Spanish church toward religious ecstasy. This area of inquiry has been been charted, more than any other scholar, by Mary E. Giles, who has eloquently argued for a more sympathetic and nuanced reading of the embodied "texts" of women’s religious experience.6In the 1560s, Extremadura and western Andalucia had proven to be fertile ground for various movements of lay piety. The teachings of the reformer Juan de Avila had attracted a school of followers at the University of Baeza. Luis de Granada, the author of the extraordinarily popular guidebook to contemplative prayer, Libro de la oracion, and many Jesuits had been actively preaching in the region. Two successive bishops of Badajoz were supporters of beatas, lay women who dedicated their lives to prayer and pious works. But by 1570, Juan de Avila was dead, Luis de Granada had moved to Portugal, and the yxo-beata bishops of Badajoz had been replaced.7 It was at this time that Fray Alonso de la Fuente discovered what he believed to be a secret, deceptively pious, demonic sect.His own account of the history of his discovery is preserved in a report he submitted to King Philip II on December 17, 1575. Fray Alonso recounts that at the end of 1570, he had been assigned to preach in his home town of La Fuente el Maestre. Here he found that a Theatine priest, Gaspar Sanchez, had gathered around him a group of pious female disciples. The devotees, whom Alonso called alternately teatinas and beatas, included married and unmarried
women, and widows, some of them slaves.8 Fray Alonso's initial impression of Sanchez's coterie was favorable, but gradually the women began to confide in him that they practiced "contemplation" or mental prayer, and that during prayer they had experienced raptures. As he informed the king:
patience, because her master told her that all that was a sign of perfection and the sure path to improvement" (Extremadura, 333). The Dominican concludes, "I did not need more information to convince me that there was the devil and a pact with Satan in that doctrine" {Extremadura, 333).In Talaveruela, three leagues from Badajoz, he discovered another "flock" and "new rites" associated with the doctrine, in particular "great idleness": "Many of them had completely given up bodily work and passed the entire day in contemplation and at night asked God to sustain their bodies" {Extremadura, 334). Alonso was also disturbed by the eucharistic enthusiasm of the teatinas. One Mari Sanchez took communion every day, "for she had such hunger for the Host that on the days she did not take communion she took to bed ill and moaned and suffered cruel torments and acted like a woman afflicted with rabies, so much so that she amazed not only the simple people, but confused wise religious men" {Extremadura, 335). One day, just after Fray Alonso was finishing a sermon on the errors of the beatas, she rushed toward the stairs leading to the pulpit and "instantly" climbed it. Such dexterity, Fray Alonso deduced, "obviously was a work of Satan, since the stairs to the pulpit were very steep and one of the steps was broken, but she climbed with as much speed and agility as a cat" {Extremadura,336). From the pulpit, the enraged beata brandished a cross, broken in the rush up the stairs, and shouted to Fray Alonso, "Come back, you silly pedant."10 "The justices of the peace," the friar relates, "tried to drag her down from the pulpit, but she offered such strong and powerful resistance that it was necessary for them to grab her shameful parts to make her come down, and in this way she gave up and they carried her down in a very unchaste way, upside down, with her legs in the air and her bare skin exposed" {Extremadura, 336). The town, however, did not unanimously share Alonso’s interpretation of the events. In fact, a priest defended Mari Sanchez and argued that her remarkable agility and strength in pulpit were signs not of demonic but of divine assistance.11Alonso continued to visit the towns of the region of Badajoz, preaching and collecting information on the beatas. He encountered a woman who had corporeal visions of Christ in the manger: one day she went into ecstasy in his presence and reported, upon regaining normal consciousness, that she had seen the riches of heaven and heard celestial music. One of the friars of his order remarked that the phenomenon he described was very similar to that of the
alumbrados of Toledo. At this point, fourteen months after his initial discovery, Alonso decided it was time to send a report to the Inquisition denouncing a new outbreak of alumbradismo.12Much to Alonso's disappointment, the first report made little impression on the provincial inquisitors of Llerena "because in truth it contained things that were very new, obscure and never before seen by the Inquisition, and there was nothing clear that could be seized upon" (Extremadura, 341). The reaction to his subsequent reports was even more discouraging: "I was shocked to see what little effect my reports caused, since in them I had depicted the heresy, to my mind, as plain and clear as day, and this is why I made so much noise and was so importunate in this matter. I really saw the heresy clearly and openly, and I could not show it to the Holy Office nor could I make anyone see it, so much so that many times, I had doubts and feared that the evil spirit had deceived me" (Extremadura, 341).Worse still, Alonso found himself the target of mockery: "One of the means the alumbrados had to discredit what I preached was to see the little effect I had on the Inquisition. They mocked me, seeing me coming and going from the Holy Office, and said that the inquisitors laughed at my reports and charges. And they were right. . . for when I presented a new report, which was very well written and stated very clearly the evil of this heresy, a secretary [of the Holy Office] laughed and mocked me saying that was of no importance" (Extremadura, 341). Rumors spread in the region that Alonso was "raving mad."13 Sometime after Ascension Sunday of 1572, Alonso and another Dominican were reprimanded by the Holy Office and prohibited from making specific charges of heresy against specific persons. Alonso's per diem allowance for expenses was cut; the prior of his monastery turned against him and forbade him to preach in Fuente de Cantos, an order which nevertheless was overturned by the Inquisition (.Extremadura, 346).Meanwhile, Alonso expanded his list of the sect's social ills, errors and heresies: married women were lured away from their husbands, and daughters from their parents' homes; vocal prayer and the recitation of the rosary were rejected; priests attracted adherents through sorcery; mental prayer was a form of witchcraft invoking Satan; the ecstasies it produced were operations of the Antichrist (348).
