"Every True Christian Must Have in his Home a Painted Image of the Cross, on which our Lord Jesus Christ Suffered": The Converso Response to Christian Images

Two art historians, Cynthia Robinson and Felipe Pereda have recently brought to our attention an ordinance put into effect by Pedro Gonzalez de Mendova and Hernando de Talavara in Seville in 1478 which demanded all true Christians to hang on the wall of their homes a Passion painting or an image of Mary. This new ruling created an ubiquity of images in domestic spaces as well as an outpouring of accusations that conversos were desecrating them. Having spent some years tracing the medieval allegation that professing Jews desecrated images of Christ and Mary, my intention in this paper is to question whether the allegations that surfaced in fifteenth and sixteenth century Spain against conversos should be read as a continuation of this medieval narrative and discourse or should be interpreted as something very different.