This book examines the effects of Jewish conversions to Christianity in late medieval Spanish
society. Ingram focuses on these converts and their descendants (known as conversos) not as
Judaizers but as Christian humanists mystics and evangelists who attempt to create a new
society based on quietist religious practice merit and toleration. His narrative takes the
reader on a journey from the late fourteenth-century conversions and the first blood purity
laws (designed to marginalize conversos) through the early sixteenth-century Erasmian and
radical mystical movements to a Counter-Reformation environment in which conversos become the
advocates for pacifism and concordance. His account ends at the court of Philip IV where
growing intolerance towards Madrid's converso courtiers is subtly attacked by Spain's greatest
painter Diego Velázquez in his work Los Borrachos . Finally Ingram examines the
historiography of early modern Spain in which he argues the converso reform phenomenon
continues to be underexplored.
