When George Borrow travelled through Spain in the 1830s, attempting with mixed fortune to distribute vernacular Bibles, he obtained an interview with the Primate of Spain, the Archbishop of Toledo. ‘Does your Lordship think’, Borrow asked the great man, ‘that a knowledge of the Scripture would work inestimable benefit in these realms?’ ‘I don't know’, replied the Archbishop.

Spain is not a country we associate with a culture based on a great vernacular Bible, nor is Spanish a language influenced by one. Borrow's journeyings reveal how firmly the prohibition against the Bible in Spanish had been enforced through the centuries. For many people, sixteenth-century Spain brings to mind the intolerance and fanaticism symbolized by the Inquisition, the cruelty and greed of the conquistadores and the imperial designs of the Armada. But it is important to remember that there was another side to the story.

It is not just that there was a flowering of all the arts which makes it so appropriate to speak of the Golden Age of Spain. Alongside the Inquisition went a vitality of religious life and controversy within Roman Catholicism and sometimes outside it which was not stifled by the threat of imposed silence or persecution, and which certainly did not lead to a dull uniformity or an unquestioning orthodoxy. Alongside conquest went exploration, and with the discovery of new lands and peoples came new ideas and challenges to received opinions.