Juan de Valdés has long posed interpretive challenges for scholars of the early modern period. Contemporaries praised him as a ‘rare man of Europe’ (p. 13), yet Theodore de Beza denounced him as comparable to Servetus or Loyola. Was Valdés an Alumbrado mystic, a crypto-Lutheran, a Spanish Erasmian or something else entirely? Manuel Martínez-Ortega’s substantial study, which originated as a doctoral dissertation, offers a compelling answer. Valdés was none of these exclusively, and they all fail to do justice to the fact that he exhibited a genuine and intentional eclecticism shaped by his particular circumstances as a converso layman navigating pre-Tridentine religious turmoil.

The book divides into three parts following a biographical sketch and literature review. Part i examines national religious influences in Valdés’s background, devoting attention to his converso lineage and his relationship with the Alumbrados of Toledo, especially the spiritual teacher Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz. Part ii turns to the Dialogue on Christian doctrine (1529), the only work Valdés published during his lifetime, and analyses it against the backdrop of Spanish Erasmianism and the penetration of Lutheran ideas into the Iberian peninsula. Part iii considers Valdés’s Neapolitan writings (the Christian alphabet, One hundred and ten considerations, and his biblical commentaries), demonstrating continuity with his earlier thought while acknowledging greater freedom of expression in the Italian context.

Martínez-Ortega’s methodological commitment is to treat Valdés’s writings themselves as the primary evidence for his thought, rather than relying on historical associations or inquisitorial indictments. This approach proves fruitful. As the author rightly notes, historical coincidences do not indicate theological affinities. Valdés’s participation in Erasmian circles at Alcalá, for instance, did not make him an Erasmian theologian, just as his contact with Alumbrado networks did not make him simply a follower of Alcaraz. By attending carefully to themes, emphases and terms across Valdés’s corpus, this study reveals both the stability of his thought over time and the distinctive voice that emerges from his selective appropriation of diverse sources.

The book’s treatment of Valdés’s converso identity represents one of its more valuable contributions. Building on work by María Laura Giordano and Stefania Pastore, Martínez-Ortega deepens our understanding of how the experience of religious marginalisation shaped Valdés’s religious disposition. The external pressures of limpieza de sangre statutes and the internal tensions of incomplete assimilation both played their part. The author identifies several traits potentially linked to this heritage. These include a certain independence from institutional Christianity combined with outward compliance, religious restlessness, a stance toward diverse sources that was both critical and appropriative and an emphasis on interior spirituality over external ceremony. The analysis of fifteenth-century converso writers such as Alonso de Cartagena (1384–1456), Alonso de Oropesa (d. 1468) and Hernando de Talavera (1430–1507) provides useful comparative context, though the connections to Valdés occasionally remain suggestive rather than demonstrable.

The analysis of Valdés’s relationship to Alcaraz and the Alumbrado movement is careful and nuanced. Martínez-Ortega distinguishes between different strands of what has been indiscriminately labelled ‘Alumbradism’. One strand involved the prophetic-visionary disorders condemned in the 1525 Edict; another involved the more contemplative teachings associated with Alcaraz and Isabel de la Cruz (d. 1540). The study persuasively argues that while Valdés absorbed Alcaraz’s emphasis on grace, abandonment to God and interior religion, he was never simply a disciple. He developed beyond his teacher, incorporating elements from Erasmus and Luther that served his own pastoral and theological purposes.

The treatment of Valdés’s use of Erasmus’ Inquisitio de fide and Luther’s catechetical writings in the Dialogue on Christian doctrine is detailed and illuminating. Martínez-Ortega demonstrates that these textual dependences, while real, do not indicate exclusive theological allegiance to either figure. Valdés employed these sources (amounting to roughly a quarter of the Dialogue) selectively. He incorporated what aligned with his own emerging thought while departing from both authors on key points. The author’s rejection of earlier scholarly claims that Valdés used Erasmus as a ‘mask’ for covert Lutheranism is well argued.

Less persuasive is the book’s handling of Valdés’s soteriological scheme, which Martínez-Ortega presents as the unifying principle of his thought. The author argues that Valdés’s teachings revolve around an ‘entrance’ into God’s kingdom (preceded by preparation and followed by transformation) as outlined in the short tract De penitentia. While this framework has merit, its application sometimes feels forced, particularly when accommodating the diversity of Valdés’s occasional writings. The claim that this scheme ‘essentially appears to emerge out of his own experience’ (p. 520) raises questions about the relationship between theological structure and personal biography that remain underexplored.

The book’s self-imposed limitations deserve mention. Martínez-Ortega explicitly excludes consideration of Valdés’s relationship with the Italian spirituali and the development of his teaching through his followers. He argues that these are ‘complementary elements and not essential for the assessment of Valdés’s thought’ (p. 38). This decision is defensible given the study’s focus on formative influences, but it does mean that the Neapolitan writings are analysed largely in relation to Spanish antecedents rather than Italian contexts. Scholars interested in Valdés’s actual influence on figures like Pietro Carnesecchi (1508–67), Marcantonio Flaminio (d. 1550) or the Viterbo circle will need to look elsewhere, perhaps to the historical work of Massimo Firpo, which the author acknowledges but distinguishes from his own theological approach.

A further limitation concerns the handling of primary sources. While the study draws extensively on inquisitorial records and Valdés’s own writings, readers may wish for more sustained engagement with the textual complexities of manuscripts that circulated in multiple versions and were edited posthumously by followers with their own agendas. The lack of critical editions for several of Valdés’s commentaries (a gap the author himself laments) complicates efforts to trace the precise development of his thought.

These reservations notwithstanding, this is a learned and carefully argued study that advances our understanding of a figure who resists easy classification. Martínez-Ortega’s insistence on reading Valdés on his own terms, attending to the particular religious currents of pre-Tridentine Castile without imposing later confessional categories, represents sound method. The book will be of interest to scholars of Spanish religious history, the early Reformation and the negotiations between orthodoxy and dissent in sixteenth-century Christianity.