Steven Avery
Administrator
Religious Authority in the Spanish Renaissance (2000)
Chapter 2 Erasmus and the New Testament
The Valladolid Conference of 1527
Lu Ann Homza
Valladolid is a little-known yet incredibly important conference that essentially put Erasmus, his books, his NT and beliefs on trial.
Chapter 2 Erasmus and the New Testament
The Valladolid Conference of 1527
Lu Ann Homza
Valladolid is a little-known yet incredibly important conference that essentially put Erasmus, his books, his NT and beliefs on trial.
The same sort of intellectual convolutions emerge from an even larger pool of evidence collected in 1527, in the northern Castilian city of Valladolid. In the summer of that year, the Inquisition called some thirty-three of Iberia’s most prominent theologians to Valladolid, and asked them to assess dubious, potentially heterodox excerpts from Erasmus’s writings. The same clerics met and quarreled for more than two months, but never reached a collective decision on the problematic passages. In fact, they never even pondered all the material under review, for once plague struck the area in early August, Inquisitor General Manrique sent them home, and they never reconvened. Modern scholars have turned the 1527 Valladolid conference into a symbol whose meaning duplicates the scholarship on Vergara’s prosecution: here, too, is a contest between the forces of reaction and progress, with predictable stances and participants; the meeting itself is supposed to signify only a momentary glitch in the swelling Erasmian revolution.1 Yet the Valladolid deliberations are more important than the dominant historiography allows, for the Inquisition not only asked the theologians to debate orally, but to record their opinions as well. Most of the participants did as they were told, and wrote down their views on the excerpts from Erasmus’s books; most of their reflections are extant. These surviving materials by Spain’s clerical elite are priceless sources for questions about religious authority and the Spanish Renaissance.2 p. 49-50
...The Valladolid theologians adduced earlier and later sources, appealed to history as well as Church tradition, and advocated more or less hierarchy and tolerance in their relationships with each other and with the laity. They seldom adhered to a consistent position, and rarely accepted or rejected Erasmus’s ideas in an absolute fashion. Their declarations confirm for Spain what we already know for Italy: Erasmus by way of his own writings, and Erasmus by way of his readers’ responses, could amount to two very different phenomena.3 p. 50
... On April 24, 1527, Juan de Vergara explained the reasons for the conference to Erasmus himself. In a letter, Vergara relayed the tumult that had occurred once Erasmus’s Enchiridion militis christianis had been translated into Spanish and published in Alcala, sometime in 1524: “[The monks] began to shout continuously from the pulpits, the marketplaces, the shrines, the basilicas (for shouters of this sort are distributed everywhere), Erasmus is heretical, blasphemous, impious, sacrilegious. What more? More enemies to you suddenly arose from the vernacular translation of the book than from Cadmus’s sowing of the teeth.”4 p. 50
... the monks stopped their sermonizing, immediately set off to find the errors in Erasmus’s books, and became so involved in their task that they did not even have time to hear confessions during Holy Week. p. 50-51
... The head of the Dominicans, Garcia Loaysa y Mendoza, spurned even the Latin edition of the Enchiridion because it deprecated purgatory and refused (famously) to equate monasticism with piety.5
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