The Visión deleitable under the scrutiny of the Spanish inquisition : new insights on converso literature

The Visión deleitable y sumario de todas las ciencias by Alfonso de la Torre is a didactical work on philosophy and religion that had enormous success in fifteenth century Christian Spain, in spite of its large debt to the Guide of the Perplexed by the Jewish sage Maimonides. Reprinted many times in Catholic Spain, this work was also published in Italy and the Dutch Low Countries, in the communities of those Iberian Conversos who returned to Judaism. There has been huge speculation as to how the Visión deleitable was interpreted by both Christian and Jewish readers. Through a hitherto unstudied report by the Spanish Inquisition and an examination of the editions printed in the Western Sephardi diaspora (Ferrara and Amsterdam) I will offer some fresh reflections on the fascinating reception of this text in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.