Fray Luis de Leon was both a scholar and an artist, a man who came to represent the most learned elements of his time as well as encapsulating in his personal history some of the darkest elements of Spanish history in the Renaissance. This paper examines his life as well as his work.
Born in 1527 and dying 64 years later, De Leon was educated primarily at Salamanca. Despite the fact that he had taken holy orders and become a monk, his loyalty to the Catholic Church was questioned when he became embroiled in one of the ongoing liturgical feuds between the Dominican and Augustinian orders - the later of which he had entered when he was only 14. This led to his being denounced to the Inquisition and to being imprisoned for almost five years.
It is difficult for us to understand from our vantage point in the 21st century the virulence of what seem to be minor doctrinal differences. But as Spain struggled to regain its waning political power and to control its empire in the New World, the Inquisition became an increasingly powerful tool to quell both political and religious dissent of even the most minor kind. The fact that one of De Leon's great-grandmothers had been Jewish - and had been forced to convert to Catholicism in the 15th century as a part of an entire generation of Jews who faced conversion, deportation, or death - made his loyalty even more suspect, although he escaped charges of heresy for his teachings at the University of Salamanca, a charge that was laid against some of his fellow faculty members:
Some of them, Grajal, Martinez, de Le=n, and others continued to use in their courses or in their exegetical writings the Hebraic texts, the Septuagint, and even the version of Vatable. Some, like Medina and Le=n de Castro, saw in this a defiance of the council's decree, and effectively denounced their adversaries, whom they called rabbinists. Early in 1572 Grajal and Martinez were arrested at Salamanca and accused of he...