This book sets out to critically assess the strengths and weaknesses of Spain's Catholic identity in the early modern period. Traditionally the Spanish Church has been seen as a major bastion of orthodoxy and intolerance. Modern historians now see the Church as a much more complex and diverse institution in which tolerance and conservatism coexisted. The text provides evidence of the survival of multi-culturalism in Spanish society, the extent of innovative trends in religious scholarship, the partial nature of ecclesiastical reform, the vitality of popular religious culture and the...