The Sabbatean Prophets

From Mystical Vision to Prophetic Eruption 115
they had been (or perhaps cured of an illness). Nevertheless, the witnesses
do state that they were heard to be “declaiming and prophesying” in their
trances.
A final case for comparison with the Sabbatean prophetesses is that of
Spanish spiritual women, both nuns and lay beatas, who prophesied in large
numbers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (Similar phenomena
occurred in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere, yet the records for
Spain are particularly rich.) This is especially important because so many of
the Sabbateans were of Spanish and Portuguese background. The late medieval
and early modern periods were rife with apparition sightings and miraculous
spiritual phenomena in Spain in general. 76 The prophetic movement
of conversas around 1500 was part of this trend, and in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries numerous conversos continued to be found in the
ranks of Iberian seers. 77 Early modern visionaries were actually carrying on
a legacy from medieval Christendom, 78 but the shifting tides of ideas and authority
left deep marks on them as well. The Iberian Peninsula was affected
particularly deeply by these changes, and it went from being a land almost
free of visionary excitement in the Middle Ages to becoming a center of such
activity. 79
The possessing spirit was usually purported to be the Holy Spirit of God
Himself. Mother Juana de la Cruz, an early sixteenth-century Franciscan abbess,
whose patrons included Emperor Charles V, explains that
He [the Holy Spirit] asked the heavenly Father’s permission to come to
speak in this voice. In which voice He did not come so concealed that they
would not clearly recognize that it was He, the true God, inasmuch as He
spoke in an audible voice, as when the musician plays, it is not his own
voice that sounds, but the voice of the flute or trumpet by means of the
breath that he blows through it. Thus, with Him supplying the breath of His
mouth, she spoke through His grace and power. 80
By such explanations the visions of women were legitimated, and the suspicion
of their artifice was allayed. Women like Mother Juana almost always
aligned themselves with powerful male clerics, often their confessors, so
as to maintain a profile of subservience while preserving agency. It was always
touch and go, even with the greatest of Spanish women visionaries,
whether the male protector would prove powerful enough to send his
protégée into the dizzy heights of sainthood, or whether she would fall into