The Spanish Inquisition began its public activities with the first auto-da-fé in Seville in 1481, directed initially against conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity) suspected of secretly continuing Jewish practice. The Inquisition, authorised by Pope Sixtus IV in 1478 at the request of Ferdinand and Isabella, would operate for over three centuries and become one of the most powerful instruments of ideological control in European history. The burning of books and people alike cast a long shadow over literary and intellectual culture in the Iberian world.

The Spanish Inquisition created an atmosphere of surveillance and self-censorship that pervaded literary culture across the Iberian Peninsula, producing the distinctive phenomenon of writing intended to be decipherable on different levels — orthodox on the surface, more complex beneath. Converso writers and poets, including many of the most intellectually vital figures in early modern Spanish literature, navigated these pressures by developing oblique, allegorical, and ironic modes of expression. The shadow of the Inquisition falls across the work of Fernando de Rojas (La Celestina), Fray Luis de León (imprisoned by the Inquisition), and arguably informs the ironic detachment of Cervantes.