"God guards the prison": the Royal Prison of Seville as a picaresque space

The Royal Prison of Seville is a prototypical space for the coexistence of the monarchy, the civic elites and the criminal world. Its small size provided inhuman living conditions, but at the same time, despite its status as a place of confinement, it was a porous and amalgamated territory. Its very existence and maintenance constituted a paradoxical contradiction between the repression of criminality, the expression of a religiosity as popular as it was heterodox, and the manifestation of the charity of the Sevillian elites. The texts that bear witness to this coexistence from different perspectives have been collated to try to define its spatial paradigm.