If you think there’s a lot of religion in The Eye of Leviathan, you’re not wrong . . . but also, there’s probably not nearly as much of it as there should be, historically speaking.

It’s difficult for me and Alyc to accurately represent just how pervasive religion was back then. And not just in Spain, or in Catholic countries more generally; this was true of Protestant ones too! Religion used to saturate everything in a way that’s tough for the two of us to truly imagine, because our own lives are very different. Alyc was raised a very half-hearted Catholic; I was raised a very half-hearted Methodist. Even if both of us had more active faith, though, we don’t live in the kind of society where Christianity influences everything from the calendar to the books we read. We do our best to note festivals and holidays where they ought to be occurring, but we have to remind ourselves to do that. Estevan thinks a few times about specific Bible verses, in places where we happened to know of something relevant, but it’s hard for us to summon those on demand; we simply don’t have the bone-deep familiarity that would let us make those references without putting in an extra layer of effort.

This topic gets especially thorny when we reach the points where modern mentalities and the historical incarnation of Catholicism tend to part ways. Without going into spoilery detail, there’s one character appearing in a few scenes whose attitude and rhetoric are straight-up inspired by St. Teresa of Ávila . . . and, as I said to Alyc at the time, “I’m probably getting this about twenty percent of the way to where it should be, and for some of our readers, that will still be too much.” The embrace — the valorization — of suffering as a holy act exists just a quarter-step to the side from some really thorny issues of mental health and even abuse. How do you represent that honestly, in a way that communicates what it meant to the people of that era instead of what we read out of it now?

At the same time . . . for all that Spain circa 1600 was rampantly religious, that doesn’t mean it was perfectly so. In fact, devout and pervasive faith existed right alongside people who rarely went to Mass, who couldn’t recite their prayers correctly, who were prone to saying things like “fornication isn’t a sin, right?” and “the Virgin Mary was a true pope, the equal of St. Peter.” Half the purpose of the the Council of Trent was to fix the absolutely dire state of orthodoxy among the common people. Just as we’d be misrepresenting the Inquisition if we depicted it as all-powerful, we’d be misrepresenting early modern Spaniards if we wrote them as being flawless Catholics.

When it comes to questions of representation, often the answer is to give more than one answer. A single depiction looks authoritative; once you have several, they can differ from each other, and that difference opens up space for interpretation. Obviously the conflict between the Church and the fae casts the former in a bad light — but we’re not out to say anything half so simple as “Catholicism bad.” So right there in the prologue (this is not a spoiler), you get Teresa praying to the Virgin and then making a deal with a faerie to protect her child. She can be a faithful Catholic without necessarily being an orthodox one; she can do things the Inquisition would punish her for without it meaning she isn’t sincere in her belief. Religion is a comfort to Teresa, even when she knows it’s a terror to her immortal friend.

People are messy like that. And sometimes, so is religion.