Gamblers, cheats, womanizers and thieves, and cranky reformers who wanted their old Order back, flesh-and-blood men with complicated desires and knotty dispositions. Opening a rich trove of sources - the annual chapter acts of the Dominican Order's Province of Aragon - Michael Vargas uncovers the costly successes and institutional weaknesses that contributed to the distressing realities of Dominican conventual life in the troubled fourteenth century. Taming a Brood of Vipers finds Dominican friars engaged in activities very much at odds with our sense of the way it should have been, but...