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The literary texts Lee examines in “Chapter Two” involve scenarios in which hidalgos are threatened by lowborn passers determined to do them harm, and ultimately arrive to the felicitous conclusion that the established nobility prevails. These fictional narratives and dramas of lowborn passers allow the target reader or audience member to peek into the otherwise mysterious lives of these imagined impostors and proffer the false sense that s/he has an insight on the well-shielded secrets of their deceptive performances. Lee focuses on authors Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo’s El caballero puntual, Diego de Hermosilla’s Diálogo de la vida de los pajes de palacio, Lope de Vega’s El caballero de milagro, Quevedo’s Historia de la vida del buscón llamado don Pablos, Alonso de Castillo Solórzano’s Teresa de Manzanares, and Vicente Espinel’s Relaciones de la vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón. She ends her discussion of social anxiety with an interpretation of the hidalgo hero in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quijote as a figure who initially incarnates the anxiety of sameness and eventually conquers it.

In “Chapter Four,” Lee analyzes popular songs, anecdotes, aphorisms, and jokes that were invested in perpetuating the image of Conversos as essentially greedy, non-pork-eating Jews. She examines the construction of the Converso body as a grotesque, sub-human entity in the anonymous Diálogo entre Laín Calvo y Nuño Rasura and in Quevedo’s satirical poetry. She discusses Lope de Vega’s little known play, El galán escarmentado, which specifically addresses the Old Christian anxiety of being unknowingly stained by the passing Conversos through marriage. She concludes her discussion of the fear of passing Conversos with an analysis of Cervantes’ El retablo de las maravillas, a play representing the madness and disorder that ensues when limpieza-obsessed Old Christians find themselves incapable of tagging the impure subjects who, they believe, live amongst them.

“Interventions” reflects on the impact of the spyglass and the telescope in two political satires. The section “The political intervention I: The transatlantic prism” deals with the sophisticated view of the spyglass in the vignette “Los holandeses en Chile (The Dutchmen in Chile),” included in the satire La hora de todos (The hour of all, 1650) by Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645)—a writer who may have met Galileo in Rome in 1616, and who portrays himself as a lynx in his treatise to Philip IV El lince de Italia u zahorí español (The lynx of Italy or the Spanish diviner, 1628). The second section, “The political intervention II: The transalpine prism,” studies an emblem, empresa 7 from Diego de Saavedra Fajardo’s Empresas políticas (Political advice, 1640). With the motto auget et minuit (waxes and wanes) and a telescope as the pictura, or image, the Spanish moralist offers a fascinating meditation on the limits and abuses of absolutist power.

Despite Bellarmine’s authoritative template for royal confessors, the practical experience raised deeper anxieties over how to survive as voices of conscience in the adverse environment of contemporary court society. These are explored in a trilogy of chapters. The first topos explored here is that of the prophet as role model for royal confessors. It emerged in both Spain and France to contrast the confessors’ good counsel with the flattery of courtiers. This chapter focuses on Caussin’s interpretation of prophecy as exposed in the re-edition in 1646–7 of his Cour Sainte following his fall and exile at the hands of Cardinal Richelieu. In an original and apologetic adaptation of Biblical prophecy Caussin proposed both an understanding of his own experience as well as edifying exempla to prepare future confessors for suffering and exile. The prophetical model insisted on the confessors’ duty to Divine truth, downgrading the importance of scholastic expertise.