Apart from references to some notable Spanish exiles who settled in Protestant centres in the rest of Europe, reformation of a Protestant nature in mid sixteenth-century Spain is still largely surrounded by a cloud of unknowing in English-language historiography. This ignorance or indifference has little or no justification since, in addition to the records of trials of Spanish luteranos which survive in Inquisition archives, source material on and by sixteenth-century Spanish Reformers was systematically edited and printed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Luis Usoz y Río, Benjamin Wiffen, Eduard Boehmer and Ernst Schäfer. The meticulously researched study under review here is valuable because it brings to the attention of non-Spanish speaking scholars the life and work of one of the most prominent reformist Catholic figures of the period, who died in an Inquisition gaol in Seville before he could be burned alive as a ‘Lutheran heretic’, though his bones and effigy did indeed go to the fire. This book is clearly structured, and consists of an opening section on Constantino's family background, early upbringing and education, followed by a careful account of his subsequent career as a teacher at the Complutensian University of Alcalá de Henares, a canon and preacher at Seville Cathedral and a chaplain to prince, later king, Philip, on his journeys to Italy, the Netherlands and Germany (1548–51) and England and the Netherlands (1554–5). Luttikhuizen then describes the trial and death of the ‘canon preacher’, and gives a clear account of his known and surviving publications, which include biblical commentaries, catechisms and sermons. The book is meticulously annotated, with a comprehensive bibliography, and also two useful appendices. The first of these lists the remarkably complete library of Protestant works, belonging to Constantino, which was found by Inquisition officers in the house of a friend of his in Seville, while the second consists of an English translation, by Juan Sánchez-Naffziger, of six powerful sermons on Psalm i, Beatus vir, which were apparently preached at Seville Cathedral. The author also offers a discussion of Constantino's theology, which tackles quite effectively the central issue of how to place him on the spectrum of Catholic to Protestant Reform. In the process, existing knowledge of the man, his career and his surroundings is clearly set out and effectively discussed, giving the reader a very good idea of the state of the subject and also, importantly, indicating where further research is needed, particularly concerning the complex exchanges of ideas between ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ reformers which took place in the central decades of sixteenth-Europe. Unfortunately, the publisher has not served the author well in terms of copy-editing and indexing, but this does not detract from the importance of Luttikhuizen's contribution to the study of Spanish sixteenth-century reform in general, and Constantino de la Fuente in particular.
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