This English translation of a work first published in Spanish in 2008 will be a welcome resource for historians and art historians seeking to understand how Spanish artistic and devotional practices fit into the larger story of Christian art, devotion, and culture in early modern Europe. A leading art historian well versed in religious history and theology, Felipe Pereda explores how religious polemic shaped art and devotion in Andalusia, which he calls “the place where the most exuberant culture of religious imagery in all of Europe took root” (74). He finds a major source of this exuberance in the intense religious strife that accompanied the large-scale conversion of Jews and Muslims starting in the late fifteenth century. Three case studies, two from Seville and one from Granada, structure the book. Each focuses on a particular body of Andalusian devotional art and explores the practices and theological disputes surrounding their production, use, and, in some cases, destruction. The first two parts of the book are set in Seville after 1478, the year the Spanish Inquisition was created to enforce Catholic orthodoxy on Jewish converts to Christianity (conversos). Part 1 deals with images of Christ used in daily worship, in both church and domestic settings. Part 2 examines a Marian painting tradition that sprang up after Seville's reconquest in 1248 and which expanded into the seventeenth century. In part 3, the scene shifts to Granada, where in 1492 the church embarked on a multipronged conversion campaign for newly conquered Muslims. All three parts show how religious controversy served as a catalyst for the development of a robust Catholic theology of images, decades before the Reformation played a similar role in other parts of Europe.

Pereda approaches each case study through a learned theological and historical lens. Part 1 opens with the controversy sparked by a 1478 edict requiring all the city's conversos to possess and venerate crucifixes and images of the Virgin. This prompted a burst of painting activity, as well as protests from learned conversos who invoked the Mosaic injunction against idolatry to resist the edict. In the ensuing controversy, Catholic polemicists revived and intensified anti-iconoclastic arguments from Gregory the Great, John of Damascus, and Thomas Aquinas, resulting in the articulation of a more robust defense of the veneration of images (both dulia and latria) than any before. In this anti-Judaic context, Spanish Catholics not only defended images as representations of holiness worthy of “reverence” or “veneration,” but as embodiments of holiness that, like the consecrated host, deserved the same kind of worship or “adoration” as God himself. Pereda's analysis of these intricate theological debates is even more nuanced than the pictorial analysis of the paintings themselves, and it sets the stage for the continuing theological discussions in subsequent chapters. The seven translated texts in the book's appendices, all excerpts from Spanish contributions to the theological debate, are also of great interest.

In part 2, Pereda turns to a second manifestation of a renewed Byzantine figurative tradition in Andalusia: the Marian cult of “The Ancient Virgin” (La Antigua) in Seville's cathedral. He traces the specific iconography of a golden Virgin on a marble pillar from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to Reconquest-era Seville, by way of the thirteenth-century Cantigas de Santa María (a possible model for Seville's painting). The Virgin Mary painted on the wall of Seville's cathedral sometime after the city's reconquest in 1248 became both an all-purpose protector of the Christian faithful and “an image against the Moors” (86). In the sixteenth century, her cult not only survived converso protests that it was idolatrous, but became truly global in scope, as nobles, kings, and overseas explorers paid her homage and enriched her shrine on a grand scale. As the Virgin's cult expanded, her supposed antiquity also increased; by the time of the Catholic Monarchs, legend had it that she had been painted in Visigothic times and had survived the five centuries of Muslim domination by miraculously resisting the efforts of Muslim architects to tear down her supporting wall.

After showing how La Antigua was widely copied for other Seville churches in the sixteenth century, Pereda returns to the theological problem of image worship and the arguments between the neo-Thomist defenders of images and their critics. His central figures are the Cordoban painter Alejo Fernández Rodrigo and the converso college founder Fernández de Santaella who commissioned from him an elaborate altar incorporating a faithful copy of La Antigua. The patron Santaella defended his Thomist position in an unpublished treatise which is excerpted in Pereda's appendices. Pereda argues that the painter expressed his patron's view by creating a “new form of pictorial representation” that fused “two pictorial languages—one for sacred images and another for narrative ones—[into] a modern third way” (101), drawing heavily on Byzantine iconographic tradition. Although Santaella's text and Pereda's exegesis are both challenging, Pereda makes a compelling argument for the “Greek taste” (106) of both the painter and the patron, as well as for Queen Isabel's own interest in Byzantine art, as evidenced by her possession of no fewer than sixteen Greek icons.

Part 3, which centers on the efforts to use printed and carved religious images to evangelize the moriscos of post-reconquest Granada, may be of greatest interest to many readers for its masterful interweaving of theology, popular history, and artistic production. The central figure is Hernando de Talavera, Granada's first archbishop, whose measured defense of images also figured in the book's two earlier sections (although, unfortunately, his key 1479 treatise, Católica Impugnación, is not represented in the appendices). Here the cleric appears as the architect of a multifaceted and pacific approach to converting Granada's moriscos. Talavera's embrace of vernacular preaching (in both Castilian and Arabic) is well-known, as is the fact that his voluntary-conversion policy was overturned by the more vigorous policy of Cardinal Cisneros after 1499. But Pereda's account may be the best treatment available in English (thanks to López-Morillas's translation) of the Talavera-Cisneros conversion campaign and its violent sixteenth-century aftermath. Talavera made possession of Christian texts and images obligatory for Granada's moriscos. To this end, he brought the first printers to Granada from Germany. Under Cisneros's harsher policy, carved Christian images were also introduced into the former mosques that were all consecrated as churches. This generated a sacred-image industry that Pereda chronicles in detail. While Talavera lost the battle over voluntary conversion, his influence was still felt in the decision to privilege figures of the Virgin Mary, whom he knew Muslims venerated and would accept more readily. Both kinds of images, however, provoked a fierce backlash, and iconoclasm became a central feature of subsequent morisco rebellions—a manifestation of Pereda's larger argument that the controversies over religious images, although often conducted in esoteric theological terms, were deeply embedded in popular beliefs.