On 19 March 1588 labourers working on the demolition of a tower in the city of Granada uncovered a parchment and collection of saintly remains which testified to the antiquity of the town's Christian origins. Seven years later, treasure-hunters digging on a hillside known as the Sacromonte, just outside the city, unearthed lead books (plomos) written in Arabic and other relics which confirmed and amplified the city's importance in Apostolic times. Although Granada's archbishop authenticated these relics in 1600, their status as genuine products of the earliest Christian past was contested right from the beginning even by local clerics as well as by scholars elsewhere in Spain. However, it was not until 1642 that the plomos were dispatched to Rome for examination and a further forty years before Pope Innocent xi condemned them as fakes which aimed to mislead the faithful. Taking as her starting point the fact that the problem of the plomos ‘is not their falseness but their success’ (p. 152), Harris has undertaken a careful and nuanced investigation of how the plomos and related findings ‘created historical links to a mythical Christian past for a city that had been for centuries a stronghold of Islam and played a key role in its transformation into a model of continuous, steadfast Christianity’ (p. xiii). She concludes that

As such, Harris's work constitutes a valuable, early modern addition to what is an already flourishing historical literature on the politics and processes of memory and memorialisation, influenced by the work of scholars such as Pierre Nora and his notion of the lieux de memoire. Her book also builds upon the appreciation of the creative role of forgery in early modern culture as discussed recently by, among others, Anthony Grafton and Ingrid Rowland. Finally, Harris's work shows a sophisticated awareness of the importance of the re-presentation of the past to local churches the length and breadth of the Roman Catholic world as they sought to defend their particular devotions in the face of Rome's attempts to regularise liturgy after the Council of Trent. Accordingly, Harris grounds her analysis firmly in the context of Granada's troubled, distinctive immediate past in order to show how the timing of the discoveries has to be understood in relation to the ethnic tension and economic depression consequent on the Morisco Alpujarras revolt which began in December 1568. The plomos offered a redefinition of Christianity along Muslim lines by combining the account of the life of Jesus in the synoptic Gospels with a Quranic Christology in which Christ, although born of the Virgin Mary, was viewed ultimately as not divine. On the occasion of his baptism in the River Jordan the voice of God does not claim him as His son but is heard to say: ‘You are my beloved spirit and my repose.’ Moreover, the ritual prescriptions contained in the plomos blended Christian and Muslim practices: before saying mass, the priest should complete thorough ablutions: washing not only his hands but also his face and mouth. The eucharist itself was to be celebrated with water rather than wine. This careful exposition of the contents of the plomos is matched by a thorough analysis of the ways in which the Granadinos used civic ritual and commemorative processions to instruct themselves and others in their collective past. Here the plomos and related relics shared the limelight with St Cecilio, the city's patron saint and with the Virgin Mary (a phrase about whom in one of the plomos supplied evidence for the antiquity of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception). Harris includes at this point welcome consideration of contemporary printed images. A subsequent chapter is given over to the ways in which the discoveries in the hillside of Sacromonte reconfigured the sacred geography of the town. In a thoughtful epilogue, in which the authorship of the plomos is considered as well as an account of the Sacromonte in contemporary Spanish and Granadino culture, Harris perceptively concludes that ‘the close relationship between the plomos and their local context is, I think, at the heart of both their successes and their failure’ (p. 156), since outside the local context the plomos's role as a clearly anachronistic expression of Morisco identity became all too evident.