ABSTRACT
The portrait of child abuse in early modern Spain has a dark background: obscure, but with swatches of red. It is only illuminated by the faint light of innocence whose source is hidden and the hope of love and peace in flight. Children born into seventeenth-century Catholic society did not simply enter any other violent society. They entered a Baroque culture that worshiped blood (the blood of Christ), celebrated suffering, and praised justice meted out through corporal punishment, punctuated by grisly executions. There was always hope that love and peace might prevail over the violence of everyday life, but such hope was fleeting.
