This illuminating collection features transnational and interdisciplinary work in early modern Hispanic studies, focusing on four core areas: “City and Society,” “Religion, Race, and Community,” “Law and Letters,” and “Performance and Place.” The editors have brought together some of the most interesting scholars working on early modern Spain in a collection that usefully knits together various disciplinary and geographic spaces. Essays range from the late fifteenth to the eighteenth century.

Lynn and Rowe’s introduction, “Mapping the Early Modern Hispanic World,” situates the essays in the context of the field’s new commitment to transnational histories and to examining the fluctuations of the Spanish monarchy. A new generation of scholarship, they argue, is systematically dismantling the Prescottian exceptionalism that long isolated Spain, whether by examining the varied spaces of the Hispanic world, integrating Spain more fully into its contexts (as with the growing interest in Ibero-Italian relations, represented here by A. Katie Harris’s fine essay on Sardinia), or exploring comparative histories. At its most capacious, the collection makes a powerful case for interdisciplinarity: no account of the early modern Hispanic world can be complete without taking into account the various dimensions of culture—law, politics, religion, art, literature—examined here. Literary scholars are only marginally represented, however—an unfortunate sidelining, given how vigorously the literary field has participated in the larger changes addressed in the introduction and in the essays themselves.

Essays by distinguished senior scholars offer astute surveys of their respective fields or subfields, while also advancing the discussion. The collaboration between Mercedes García-Arenal and Felipe Pereda on alumbrados and religious dissidence goes well beyond tracing the historiography on these figures to raise important questions about how historians might transcend the Inquisition’s own characterization of heterodoxy through a more sensitive reading of sources—a “linguistic turn” (131) for the history of belief. They also sensitively challenge the association of religious heterodoxy with converso genealogies, showing how much more widespread was the propensity to question religious authority and external ceremony, among Old Christians as among converts. María Portuondo surveys recent advances in the history of science, explaining how a change from focusing on Spain’s supposed lack vis-à-vis other European nations to assessing Spanish science in its own right has transformed the field. Portuondo charts the “contextual turn” that analyzes the role of empire in Spanish science, and notes the field’s salutary expansion beyond elites focused on natural philosophy to a broader range of objects and practitioners. Refuting teleological approaches to the New Science, Portuondo explores Spanish responses to the perceived crisis of knowledge in the sixteenth century. She demonstrates both the widespread emphasis on pragmatic empiricism and the importance of philosophical systems of knowledge, despite how uneasily the various systems coexisted.

Other essays in the collection are more narrowly focused but equally fascinating. Rowe’s own contribution, “The King, the City, and the Saints,” examines the 1622 celebration in Madrid of the canonization of four Spanish saints, as well as the 1627 proclamation of Teresa of Ávila as co-patron saint of Spain. Rowe intriguingly argues that religious festivals in the period helped disseminate a sacred vision of both king and nation: as monarchs became increasingly private, she notes, religious events became their primary public appearances, thus providing a crucial opportunity to disseminate their authority, in “a transposition that both secularized the sacred and sacralized the civic” (66). As their national identity became more important than their universality, Rowe argues, “the saints could be subject to the king” (87). Benjamin Ehlers traces the life of Don Pedro Luis Galcerán de Borja—Valencian nobleman, governor of Oran, and disgraced sodomite—to show how much more complex was “The Spanish Encounter with Islam,” on both sides of the Mediterranean, than might at first appear. Ehlers demonstrates that by the late sixteenth century the crusading rhetoric voiced so loudly in relation to presidios in North Africa, or indeed to the repression of the Moriscos, bore little relation to a reality of unpredictable violence, opportunistic negotiation, and pragmatic exchanges. Lynn’s essay on censorship and publication explores the contingency and contestation of the Inquisition’s actions, productively complicating our understanding of the politics of communication as it operated even among the officials regulating publication across the empire.

With its lucid introduction and strong range of scholarship, Lynn and Rowe’s collection makes a wonderful contribution to early modern Hispanism, advancing the new paradigms that it so richly describes. To judge from this volume, transnational and interdisciplinary approaches have indeed proved transformative for the field.