Adolfo Carrasco Martínez teaches Modern History at the University of Valladolid and is a researcher at the Instituto de Historia Simancas. His research has been focused on studying the Spanish and European nobility of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, as well as the political culture of the Golden Age. This work has led, among other studies, to Control y responsabilidad en la administración señorial (1991) and Sangre, honor y privilegio. La nobleza española bajo los Austrias (2000). He is a corresponding member of the Real Academia de la Historia.