It is imperative that the various ways that body was central to the spiritual landscape of early modern Castile be accounted for in any history of Spanish Christian thought. This chapter will reassess Renaissance Castilian spirituality, offering a corrective to the traditional view relayed by historians of Spanish mysticism that the era hierarchized soul over body, incorporeal spirituality over lay ritual and embodied meditation. It will become evident that the bodies of Christ and the believer were key concerns in the early decades following the religious unification of Castile, that is, the age of Cisneros’s reform of the Spanish church...

While Inquisition trial transcripts have provided modern historians with an unparalleled record of daily religious life in sixteenth-century Spain,¹ the lives of those who did not run afoul of the inquisitors remain obscure. The archives of many convents were lost during the nineteenth-century ‘exclaustration,’ or closure of the monasteries, making it particularly challenging to find data concerning those housed in religious orders.² As a result, it is not possible to provide a traditional biography of Bernardino de Laredo, despite his dual fame as author of the first Castilian pharmaceutical treatises and as one of the primary mystical authors to influence...

Of late, scholars have produced any number of excellent studies on the role of ‘body’ in late medieval religion, bringing to light aspects of ritual, popular religion, and cult about which we were previously unaware.¹ Yet historians of Christian mysticism, although attentive to the role of body in relation to such matters as visionary experience and to the role of gender in mysticism, have rarely taken into consideration the medieval or Renaissance body as a scientific reality according to the physiological models prevalent in those eras.² Whether the body was denied or exalted en route to mystical union, mystics, as...

Research in medieval epistemology has shown that Aquinas, followed by other scholastic theologians, ‘insisted more completely than the Arabic commentators on the “embodiment” of all kinds of human knowledge,’¹ and reflected a familiarity with the scientific theory that mapped the five inner senses to brain ventricles. The intersection of the history of science with the study of medieval religion that produced the cognitive turn in medieval studies, however, has yet to yield any full-length treatments of mystical treatises² and has had no impact on studies of Spanish mysticism or devotional experience.³ This absolute disciplinary divide must be rectified in order...

The most effective memory devices are those that depend on shock value or clever ornamentation. Many of the graphically violent or sexual images found in medieval literature and religious meditation were not formulated in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator; they were intended to be forceful enough to imprint on the memory like incisions on a wax tablet.³ Authors of mnemotechnical treatises insisted that sequences of violence, whether in a historical chronicle or in depictions of the Passion, not only stayed vividly in the mind’s eye but also drew the reader into visualizing the depicted scene, a necessary...