Kevin Ingram's tour de force, this book is original, persuasive and controversial; demonstrating the determining influence of converso nonconformity on the culture and society of early modern Spain with an argument that moves far beyond the sterile shadow of the debate between Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, still influential through a conservative Catholic cultural attachment to a form of casticismo. Spain's foremost humanist intellectuals, spiritual reform movements and cultural icons from Alonso de Cartagena and Fernando de Pulgar to Diego Velázquez all shared converso roots. Amongst the book's strengths are the way it teases a buried, coded lexis around limpieza (cleanliness) that responded to the positing of an exclusionary Old Christian order out of a huge array of documents from poetry to theological treatises and painting, and the extraordinary prosopographical and archival research, allowing Ingram to reconstruct networks around key figures from Juan de Avila, Benito Arias Montano, Luis de Léon to Bartolomé Carranza and the way their biographies intersected with infamous episodes of persecution and retrenchment. There are revelations aplenty and while the evidence always strains against the strong incentives individuals had for dissimulation of their true views, as much as their genealogical antecedents, there can be no doubt that the material uncovered in this book has profound implications for our understanding of the Counter-Reformation in Spain, as well as the religious history of Europe in the age of confessionalisation.