Providencialismo y sacralidad real. Francisco de Blasco Lanuza y la construcción del monarca exorcista

Abstract

The intellectual and religious crisis of Early Modern Europe, fostered among other causes by the systematic reflection that the Renaissance and the expansion of institutionalized heresy produced over the religious and political phenomena, helped undermine monarchies’ pretensions to royal sacrality. In response, the demonological discourse of some catholic intellectuals of the 17th century aimed to endow Spanish kings with an evident bond with God through militant providentialism and confessional zealotry. Particularly, and in a strategy that could be termed as routinization of charisma, the rural priest Francisco de Blasco Lanuza sought to build this bond through the power of exorcism. This hiper-spiritualization of the Spanish monarchy was, also, a symbolic reaction to the material and military decay of the Peninsula