Convinced he was the Elijah Messiah, the Spanish peasant Bartolome Sanchez believed that God had sent him in divine retribution for the crimes committed by the Inquisition and the Church. Sanchez's vocal and intolerable religious deviance quickly landed him in the very court he believed he was sent to destroy. Fortunately for him, the first inquisitor assigned to his case came to believe that Sanchez was not guilty by virtue of insanity, and tried to collect the proof that would save his life.

For seven years, Sanchez shuttled between jails, hospitals, and his home village while his...

"Until the middle of the seventeenth century, when complacency got the better of the good intentions of the 1560s, the Counter-Reformation triumphed in Spain. In this process, Nalle shows in her thorough study, persuasion was more effective than coercion. The Inquisition served as a means of spreading the Tridentine doctrine, and of registering the good results, rather than as an instrument of terror."-- "Times Literary Supplement"

"Nalle succeeds in truly writing a solid cultural history. She is devoted to an understanding of the material base without being a reductionist, and is able...