This study of early modern Spain uses parish records to examine the content of religious practice and belief at the parish level and the success of the Catholic Church's attempt to alter those beliefs during the Catholic Reformation.
The first three chapters explore the problems encountered by episcopal Visitors to parishes in the diocese of Ourense in northwestern Spain as they attempted to enforce the ideals of the Catholic Reformation program. The last three chapters use both quantitative and qualitative sources to contrast the expectations of the Catholic Church with parishioner...

The early fourteenth century saw the resistance of the Franciscans to the conduct of the ecclesiastical Inquisition in the wake of the Cathar heresy, the crisis and destruction of the Spiritual Franciscan movement and the struggle to maintain the unity of France under Philip the Fair. The movement to suppress the Inquisition - unique in the Middle Ages - was conceived of and directed by Bernard Delicieux, one of the last leaders of the Spiritual Franciscans, whose rise to fame and involvement in these controversies forms the focus of this first monographic treatment in 70 years.

This volume deals with shifts and changes that took place during the Middle Ages when things, or ideas, or writings, were transferred from time to time, place to place, or one ideological realm to another. The same objects, ideas, or texts changed their meaning, impact, or symbolic value according to different contexts. The twelve papers, written by leading experts, investigate the authority attributed to texts and their canonization in different contexts; the shifting uses and meanings of gifts, from honorable instruments in the settlement of disputes to corruption and bribery; and the...

During the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries the Mercedarian Order of friars, founded in the 1220s, underwent a period of reform from which it emerged utterly transformed.
This study sets out to examine not only the context of that reform - the policies of the crown and the papacy, the condition of Catalonia and Spain at large, the circumstances prevailing within the Order and the dialogue with its past - but also to grasp the essence of monastic reform itself against this diverse background.
The imposition of other than purely religious criteria onto the reform agenda alerts us...

Early in the 17th century the Western Pyrenees were riven by one of the greatest witch panics in history. The mountain villages were in uproar when villagers' children reported how they had been abducted during the night and taken to a witches' sabbath. The abducters denounced by the "child-witches" were subjected to violence and illegal torture to wrest confessions from them. A series of eye-witness reports written by a Jesuit, a Bishop, and a Spanish Inquisitor show a surprising lack of interest in the demonological theories of their time, and analyse the phenomenon from its psychological,...