LATE one Sunday afternoon in June 1654, four men waited to hear their death sentence pronounced. They stood high on scaffolding constructed next to the cathedral in the plaza mayor of Cuenca. Below them and fifty-three lesser prisoners sat officials representing the Inquisition, the bishop and cathedral, the royal government, and the city of Cuenca. They all faced the crowd that had packed into the narrow plaza to watch the auto de fe. Perhaps the condemned men's gaze drifted from the excited but solemn crowd, made up of the city's parishes, cofradías, familiars, and religious, all carrying their standards, crosses, and candles, to the tall, stone houses that leaned into the plaza. From the open windows, which had been rented out for the occasion, the city's nobility returned the prisoners' gaze. The four condemned men, Portuguese conversos, had ignored previous warnings from the Inquisition and had continued to practice Judaism. The death sentence was obligatory. The city's doctor, who witnessed the auto de fe, wrote of the doomed men,

Lacking in faith, stubborn and obstinate,
(whoever lacks faith lacks all)
blind to the end, and rooted without reason,
since they deny the truth which uplifts them,
or better said, they are without hope-
because hope and faith serve as a ladder
to an action so uplifting as to save oneself-
triumph despairs if one is without the other.⁽¹⁾

[207] Around them, the city and diocese, the empire itself, was in full decline. If the city's doctor, as he described the auto-de-fe, was aware of the contrast between the lavish spectacle before him and the city's abandoned houses, he gave no sign of it in his heroic poem. For the doctor, there was only one reality. Despite the fact that there was little to fear from heresy in Castile, and even less so in Cuenca, the doctor's idiom was the language of militant Catholicism. His turgid verse returned to the point over and over again: without the strong arm of the church, there would be no peace in Cuenca. The bishop of Cuenca, who reported on the state of the diocese a few years later, shared the doctor's uncritical vision. Even though by his own estimation the bishopric was desperately poor, in a report he sent to Rome in 1659, Fernández Pacheco concluded that all of his clergy were virtuous and well educated and the people were free of doctrinal errors and superstition. No synod had been held in over thirty years, but Fernández was confident that given the bishopric's reformed state, none was needed.⁽²⁾

Elsewhere in Catholic Europe, the Counter Reformation was reaching full stride. In Spain, the heroic age of the church had run its course. Foreign visitors in the late seventeenth century described a country in which outward display of ceremony poorly disguised the emptiness of its interior life. By the eighteenth century, it almost seemed as if no reform of the church had ever taken place. Once again, important differences in preparation and vocation existed among the secular clergy. Now, however, reflecting the poverty of agrarian Castile, the rural clergy was the most poorly educated as well as the most poorly paid. The archbishopric of Toledo, where in the past developments had paralleled those in Cuenca, presented a depressing picture of clerical absenteeism, ignorance, and concubinage.⁽³⁾ Jansenists and enlightened intellectuals in the government criticized local religion for its reliance on divine intervention, its processions, ex-votos, and miraculous images. What had once been the shared faith of all was becoming the devalued superstitions of "the people" and with time, increasingly marginal to the learned tradition of elites.⁽⁴⁾ All this, however, lies in the future. If we return to our starting place, the late fifteenth century, we see that the reformation of the sixteenth century wrought profound changes in the religious life of Castile. However briefly drawn the picture of late-medieval Cuenca, it showed that the only part of the Pre-Reform that affected the diocese was the outlawing of Judaism. Otherwise, the diocese reflected many of the traits of traditional Christianity: the confusion of religion and [208] magic, the lack of clerical discipline, even the millenarianism. After the Comunero Revolt, however, the religious life of the diocese began to change rapidly. The push for a better clergy, the concern with religious education, and desire for an interior faith were all well established as the Council of Trent was entering its final session. Judging by conquenses' growing pious bequests and level of indoctrination, there seems to have been no sixteenth-century "slump" in commitment to Catholicism as there was in Lyon, divided between Protestants and Catholics, or in Renaissance Siena, where there was a "cinquecento collapse in piety and charity."⁽⁵⁾

The forces of renewal and change were fourfold. First, between the reigns of the Catholic Monarchs and Philip II there was the sustained pressure of a century of reforms designed to bring local religious life in line with standards set in Toledo and Rome. However, what church authorities wanted should not be the sole criterion of religious life; we must also think in terms of the religious needs of the people who were the target of reform.⁽⁶⁾ One was the age-old demand for supernatural aid and protection, which reformers respected as long as the protection rendered was orthodox in nature. Alongside this traditional function of religion, however, there was a new one abroad in sixteenth-century Spain, the need for a more personal relationship with God. Ironically, this driving force for an interior life was one of the major challenges faced by Spanish religious authorities of the time. Although they wanted to encourage an individual faith, liberated from the compromises imposed by family and community, authorities feared the mystic. The tension between authority and interiority thus represents the second force of change. More peculiar to Spain was the third force of change, national identification with the Holy Mother Catholic Church. This identification took two forms: vindictive repudiation of Spain's religious and ethnic pluralism and the popular conviction, in Castile, at least, that the church's struggles and priorities were the people's own. The final catalyst was not an idea or attitude, but social crisis. The demographic crisis of entire first quarter of the seventeenth century, coupled with economic hard times, reinforced both communitarian and individualistic aspects of sixteenth-century religious expression. For communities, economic and demographic catastrophe meant increased reliance on "survivalist" religious modes of propitiation. On the other hand, the sixteenth century's emphasis on personal spiritual development meant that when death struck, individuals now turned away from the supportive network of kin and community to seek salvation on their own, via the [209] offices of the church. Out of this crisis and the sixteenth-century reforms was born modern Spanish Catholicism: highly personal yet strongly conformist; localized yet nationalist; dogmatic yet proudly independent.

In practice, Catholic reform in Cuenca was an incongruous mixture of official compulsion and popular religious enthusiasm. The use of inquisitorial and episcopal edicts exhorting people to confess their transgressions and denounce those of others, as well as the public humiliations, drew alternately on conquenses' feelings of guilt and personal honor. Such emotional blackmail (to say nothing of trampling on unimagined human rights) effectively promoted compliance - if one's conscience did not suffice to combat sin, then the threat of losing one's honor was a powerful incentive. On the other hand, the insistence on asceticism, the sacramental view of religious practice, and the attack on "superstitions" and loose morals were trends that could be found among both groups of zealous religious and lay people seeking a more spiritual form of religious self-expression.

The religious reformation in Castile may be seen as two movements, spearheaded by different groups who were not always on speaking terms with one another. First, there was the essentially clerical attack on secular culture (sexual mores, public sins, magic) and heterodoxy, which was waged on all social fronts via ecclesiastical discipline. In this reformation of morals and ideas, the gentry was drawn into the Inquisition's net as frequently as were other Christians, and for very similar reasons. Don Alonso Pacheco de Guzmán, son of the Duke of Villena, was penanced in 1562 as a great blasphemer. Doña Juana Pacheco (no direct relation) had to explain to the inquisitors why she said, contrary to the church's teaching, that being married was better than being celibate. The occult sciences, such as astrology, necromancy, and the like, were most popular among the upper classes, including Philip II himself, and it was not unusual for educated persons, even devout ones, to resort to love magic.⁽⁷⁾

The second part of the reformation was the spiritual revival of the sixteenth century. Here, we can see the emergence of groups of self-conscious devout, primarily literate bourgeois, often of converso background, such as the conquense Juan de Céspedes (married to a conversa) and his group of "teatinos." However, it would be a mistake to insist too much on this association of religion with class, particularly in the latter half of the century. The Inquisition found people of all backgrounds making comments reminiscent of Erasmian spirituality; one did not have to be bourgeois to think that devotion to images was [210] superstitious or that funeral pomp was a vanity. Many of the typically Tridentine confraternities were made up of working-class members or were founded in the diocese's small towns. The third estate could not afford as many suffrages as the gentry and clergy but was just as committed to the various forms of baroque funeral piety (friars, habits, special masses and indulgences), and a higher percentage of them gave to the city's charities. To complicate matters, there were clearly female and male forms of religious expression, which may, with further research, turn out to be just as significant as those associated with any particular social class.

By the seventeenth century, a new religiosity was laid over preexisting structures of faith. The catechization campaign had successfully taken root, and most conquenses fulfilled their minimum obligations as Catholics. Tridentine morality seemed to have won out for the time being. In the capital, during Lent conquenses avoided sexual intercourse and illegitimate conceptions declined throughout the seventeenth century.⁽⁸⁾ The emphasis on personal faith can be seen in funeral strategies, which came to focus on the supreme moment of judgment between the individual and God. Local religion lost some of its autonomy, and international Marian and Christocentric devotions were popularized. What did not change in Cuenca in the late seventeenth century, however, was the pace of economic recovery. With recovery could come new social structures, values, and priorities. Instead, the diocese remained tied to a cruel subsistence economy, one that was as vulnerable to crisis in the eighteenth century as it had been in the sixteenth century.⁽⁹⁾ Thus, intertwined with the modern religion that took form through the Catholic Reformation, there endured an earlier, resilient faith, the religion of preindustrial people dependent on the harsh and unpredictable land of Castile.

1. Cristobal de Estrada y Bocanegra, Trivnfo de la fe (1654), fol. 3.. The auto inspired a second description as well, A. de León y Jarava, Triumpho de la Catholica Religion. Auto general de Fe, celebrado por el Tribunal Santo de la Inquisicion de la Ciudad de Cuenca, el dia 29 de junio deste año de 1654 (Cuenca, 1654). For an analysis of the symbolism of the auto de fe, see M. Flynn, "Mimesis of the Last Judgement: The Spanish Auto de fe," Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991): 281-97.

2. ASV, Cong. Conc., Visitationes, scat. 249A, fol. 1v.

3. W. J. Callahan, Iglesia, poder y sociedad en España, 1750-1874 (Madrid, 1989), 27.  In Cadiz, the clergy presented a similar picture of decadence in the first half on the century, but improved with the economy.  Like Toledo, however, the rural areas remained on the fringes of reform  (A. Morgado, El clero gaditano a fines del Antiguo Régimen, 203–05).

4. See A. Mestre Sanchis, "Religión y cultura en el siglo XVIII español," HIE, 4, pt. 2, ch. 7; and C.C. Noël, "Missionary Preachers in Spain, Teaching Social Virtue in the Eighteenth Century," American Historical Review 90 (1985): 866–92.

5. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 24; Cohn, Death and Property in Siena, 127.

6. On Christianization, see of course J. Delumeau, Un chemin d’histoire: chrétienté et christianisation (Paris, 1981).  On the problems of defining "popular culture," including religion, see Bob Scribner, "Is a History of Popular Culture Possible?"

7. ADC, Inq. leg. 226, exp. 2832, and leg. 301, exp. 4337 (1584); D.C. Goodman, Power and Penury: Government, Techonology, and Science in Philip II's Spain (Cambridge, 1988).

8. Reher, Town and Country in Pre-Industrial Spain, 99.

9. See ibid., ch. 5; M. Jiménez Monteserín, "Los motines de subsistencias de la primavera de 1766 y sus repercusiones en la ciudad de Cuenca," Revista Cuenca, nos. 11 and 12 (1977); C. R. Phillips, Ciudad Real, 1500-1750: Growth, Crisis and Readjustment in the Spanish Economy (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); and J. López-Salazar Pérez, Estructura agrarias y sociedad rural.