Les Instructions, e ordinacions perals nouvament convertits del regne de Valencia… (Instructions and ordinances for the newly converted Christians in the kingdom of Valencia…), by Jorge de Austria and Antonio Ramírez de Haro. Valencia: Joan (Juan) Mey, 1566. Spanish. First edition.

First Christian catechism written specifically for the Muslim converts to Christianity in Spain – the Moriscos (a word related to "Moors", the Muslims of North Africa and Spain). The catechism was written ca. 1538 by the bishops of Valencia, Jorge de Austria (1504?-1557), and of Segovia, Ramírez de Haro (d. 1549), but was first printed only about thirty years later, a few years after the deaths of the authors. The small volume contains illustrated initial letters (woodcuts).

Some half a million Muslims lived throughout Spain in the 16th century. As a result of the Revolt of the Brotherhoods (Rebelión de las Germanías) in Valencia, the kingdom's numerous Muslims were forcibly converted to Christianity, in like manner to the Jewish Marranos. Like the Marranos, the new Christians among the Muslims, known as Moriscos, were also not quick to abandon their faith and customs; the present catechism was written as part of efforts on the part of the Church and Inquisition to extirpate the old customs of the Moriscos, and more importantly, from the point of view of the Christian establishment, their previous faith.

The catechism defines rules of acceptable behavior for Moriscos, clarifies the differences between Christian and Muslim rules of fasting and slaughtering, forbids giving children Muslim names, states that it is better for parents to speak with their children in the Valencian dialect rather than Arabic, and details the religious customs encouraged by the Church. Violations of the instructions and laws appearing in the work were to be penalized by high monetary fines. The work concludes with a call to the church authorities to cease from imposing high taxes on the Moriscos, which, the authors claimed, could inculcate an incorrect impression of the Church.

For more information on the Instructions e Ordinacions, see: Daniel I. Wasserman-Soler, Truth in Many Tongues: Religious Conversion and the Languages of the Early Spanish Empire, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020, pp. 73-77.

For further reading on the work and its time period, see: Benjamin Ehlers, Between Christians and Moriscos: Juan de Ribera and Religious Reform in Valencia, 1568-1614, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006, pp. 19, 117.