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Forging Spirituality in Renaissance Europe

Forging Spirituality in Renaissance Europe

Last updated on: August 1, 2026 at 9:13 am by Philip Jenkins

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Forging Spirituality in Renaissance Europe 2026-08-01T09:13:16-04:00 Philip Jenkins

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We have all heard of the modern rediscovery of ancient scriptures, and we all know the standard stereotypes of how they are found – think of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or the Nag Hammadi library. Although such spectacular finds are not common, rediscoveries on a smaller scale are in fact quite a regular fact of scholarship, and of religious life. Moreover, that has been true for several centuries, certainly dating back to the Renaissance.

In my next several posts, I will be looking at some sensational discoveries that all belonged to a particular historical period, namely the first quarter or so of the seventeenth century, roughly between 1600 and 1625. Think of it as the time of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, or the era that sent the Mayflower to North America, or the start of the Thirty Years’ War: it is the Late Renaissance age of Cervantes, Rubens, and Monteverdi. I like to call it the Age of Prospero.

Within that narrow spell, we will see how various individuals and groups deployed the standard tropes – the secrets hidden in a cave, or in a tomb, or in the Secret Archives of the Vatican, or transmitted by an angel – to build whole new spiritualities. Many of those ideas are still very much alive today, albeit in mutant forms. I will be touching not just on “lost gospels,” real or imagined, but also on Rosicrucian and Hermetic ideas, on Druidism and Enochian magic, and on the earliest inventions of what, in modern times, we call the New Age. Today, I will sketch the intellectual setting for such explosive finds. Throughout the story, we constantly trace bewildering themes of forgery, deception, and masquerade.

All images are in the public domain.

One general comment: the scholarly literature on these matters is sizable, and I have compiled quite a substantial bibliography that you can find here. Ignore the “Enlightenment” part of the title!

Rediscovery and Resurrection

In writing about the recovery of religious texts, it is hard to avoid deploying the language of mythology, or even of folk-tales, and the words we choose are intrinsically dramatic. The finding of the Gospel of Thomas in 1945, for example, becomes a narrative of secrecy and persecution, of buried treasure, even of burial and resurrection. The fact that such writings were hidden in the first place forces us to ask why they were concealed, and that in turn raises the suspicion that they must contain secrets that were not just unpopular, but also vital. Their very lost-ness becomes a crucial part of the narrative. Again, to borrow religious language, such acts of discovery appear as “revelation” or resurrection rather than mere excavation.

According to this vision, God conveys sacred truths in the holy writings that make up canonized scripture, but there are also other texts that have long been concealed, and when they are found, in God’s own time, they provide necessary illumination and correction to a stumbling world.

At the end of the Middle Ages, humanists such as Petrarch made amazing discoveries of ancient manuscripts, which laid the foundation for a new era in European scholarship and culture. Some of the great discoveries were highly consequential for the Christian tradition. The French Orientalist Guillaume Postel discovered a Greek copy of the Infancy Gospel of James, a (totally genuine) text that was a primary source of much Marian lore, and as such it had a massive influence on Christian sacred art. “Infancy James” was probably written before 150 AD, well before many of the well-known Gnostic writings that have attracted such attention in modern times. Believing this work to be a prologue or prequel to the canonical gospels, Postel gave it the auspicious title of the First Gospel, the Protevangelium, and that was the name under which he translated and published it (in Latin) in Basel, in 1552. Could there be a greater find than a First Gospel? We still use Postel’s title for that work.

The Golden Age of Forgery

Anyone reading about such seemingly miraculous finds recognized that The Truth Was Out There, and that began a fevered search for other secret scriptures. Most of the seekers were honest scholars, but the story also opened the door to a great many individuals who borrowed that narrative for their own ends, boasting how they had discovered astonishing texts that very often made sweeping spiritual claims. A golden age for forgers, pranksters, and outright cranks ensued, with a number of scandals through the seventeenth century. If you were a literate or scholarly person around in that era, you assuredly knew a great many claims about incredible “new” manuscript finds, and you did your best to sort the wheat from the vast amount of chaff. And oh my, there was a lot of chaff.

People created such things for multiple reasons. Often, they sought to ground their ideas in a supposedly ancient text that would confer cultural authority, perhaps glorifying a particular place or person. Also, in a time of ferocious censorship, a “newly found” document could bring heterodox religious ideas into general discourse at minimal risk: don’t blame me, I am just reporting what I found!

As early as the 1490s, the Italian friar Annius of Viterbo built upon the prestige of such genuine scholars as Petrarch to create a whole industry of fabrication, which included bogus ancient statuary as well as numerous documents allegedly originating from Egypt, Babylon and Greece. Some of these (he claimed) he alone could read, including texts in Etruscan. He used his supposed finds as the basis for extensive writings in multiple genres, including prophecy and apocalyptic, which retained their influence until the middle of the following century.

Annius found a spiritual descendant in the 1630s when another Italian forger produced pseudo-Etruscan prophecies of Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection, in an affair that likewise transfixed the learned world for decades. Ingrid D. Rowland has a wonderful study of this case in her 2004 book The Scarith Of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery.

The Lead Plates in the Cave

Forgers often sought to score ideological points, and commonly, such deceptions aimed to subvert the teachings of the mainstream hierarchical Church. Spain was incredibly productive of such deceptions. On the orthodox side, a Jesuit priest claimed to have made amazing discoveries of ancient texts concerning Christian origins in Spain, and those documents were not fully discredited for two centuries.

Other finds were actively seditious. I tell this next story less for its intrinsic interest – although it is mind-boggling – than for what it says about the whole atmosphere of literary deception that was so fundamental a component of the culture at this time. At the end of the sixteenth century, a large collection of texts was reportedly found in the Spanish caves of Sacromonte, near Granada. Written on lead plates, the texts featured a bizarre mixture of Latin and early forms of Arabic, which were translated by local scholars who were Morisco – that is, former Muslims who had accepted Christianity, but who remained under deep suspicion by Catholic authorities. In their day, the Plates had an impact reminiscent of that of the Dead Sea Scrolls in modern times.

According to the Morisco readings, the Lead Plates recorded the extensive teachings of the Virgin Mary, as she dispatched early apostles to evangelize Spain. Mary had declared her special love for the Arabic peoples and their culture, and also praised religious practices favored by present and former Muslims. However blatant the forgeries might appear, learned debates over the Plates continued through much of the seventeenth century, and only in 1682 did Papal authorities finally discredit them as having been produced, mainly between 1588 and 1606. In retrospect, it is easy to understand the forgers’ agendas, as the Plates were the work of Moriscos who wished to validate their culture in the face of ever more severe challenges from the mainstream church and the Inquisition. In fact, the Spanish state expelled all Moriscos from the country only a couple of years after the supposed retrieval of the final Plates.

A chief author of the Lead Books appears to have been one Miguel De Luna, who was no stranger to forgery. In 1592, he also wrote a “True History” of Don Rodrigo, a revisionist history of Spain based on wholly imaginary Arabic chronicles. We will return to him next time.

One of the fine modern scholars on these matters was the late and much lamented Katie Harris. I summarize an account of her research, and the light it casts on the very active culture of forgery and historical invention in this era:

In From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing a City’s Past in Early Modern Spain (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), she explored how, in the wake of the Reconquista, the people of early modern Granada built a Catholic civic identity on the basis of forged Arabic documents and bogus relics. Unearthed in the 1590s, the Plomos or Lead Books of Granada told the previously unknown story of Granada’s supposed first bishop, St. Cecilio, an Arab Christian martyr from the time of the apostles. Unlike previous studies, which had focused on the Plomos’ fabrication by Moriscos (Arab converts to Catholicism and their descendants), Katie instead examined their reception among Granada’s non-Morisco population. For the culturally precarious Moriscos, the pseudo-history told in the Plomos was an attempt—ultimately unsuccessful—to establish an identity that was simultaneously Christian, Spanish, and Arabic. For Granada’s “old Christians,” it offered a solution to a different problem: the lack of an ancient Christian pedigree for a city that had been ruled by Muslims for seven centuries prior to 1492. … Drawing on a wide array of sources, Katie demonstrated the spectacular success (despite doubts about the Plomos’ authenticity, which led to their confiscation and eventual condemnation by the Vatican) of Granadinos’ project “to locate their city upon a new historical terrain, refiguring their civic identity and imagining themselves as the legitimate heirs of an ancient Christian heritage.”

That Morisco resistance left another critical legacy. I recently described the astonishing find claimed in 1718 by the Deist John Toland, who published what he claimed (sincerely) to be the ancient Gospel of Barnabas, which made nonsense of orthodox Christian doctrines about the Resurrection and the Trinity. I have written quite a bit on Barnabas and still have much to say on it, but for present purposes, I will just stress that the Gospel as we have it almost certainly derives from that hyperactive age of forgery in southern Spain at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Much more on that next time.

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