[xi] Seen from a distance, the parish church of Horcajo de Santiago is a large structure built on a low rise in the otherwise featureless expanse of La Mancha. The town itself is invisible, built below the crest of the small elevation. As were so many of Castile's churches, the temple was remodeled in the late sixteenth century according to the bleak, new Tridentine style. It was built large to accommodate the town's rapidly growing population; in 1575 the community boasted 270 households (about 1,200 inhabitants) and had increased by 150 families since 1530.⁽¹⁾

A modern-day historian of religion, impressed by the size of Horcajo's parish church and its commanding location, might find in it a metaphor for the Catholic church's prodigious wealth and power in early modern Spain. So I thought one rainy afternoon in December, 1978, as my companions and I approached the town by car to observe Horcajo's annual celebration of the fiesta of the Immaculate Conception. Now as in the sixteenth century, Horcajo is a farming community. As we walked through the town, my shoes were soon fouled by clumps of mud, straw, and manure. The fiesta, famous in the province, is known as the Vítor. On the eve of the holy day, hundreds of local people crowd into the parish church and cry rapidly, "¡Viva la purísima concepción de la Virgen Santísima, concebida sin mancha de pecado! ¡Vítor! ¡Vítor! ¡Vítor!"⁽²⁾ For three hours, the parish priests attempt to bring a standard of the Immaculate Conception out of the sacristy, but the tightly packed crowd bars their way. The men symbolically reject the cult by beating back the image with their gloves. The women, often in groups, in near hysteria rhythmically repeat the cry at the top of their lungs. ¡Vítor! ¡Vítor! ¡Vítor! Every square inch of the church is filled with excited people and the incredible cacophony of voices. Finally, around eleven o'clock in the evening, the standard is allowed to leave the sacristy and is handed over to three horsemen mounted on richly accoutered steeds. Throughout the night and well into the next day, accompanied by a large crowd, the Virgin visits every street of the town, as well as the local shrine, and then finally, she returns to the parish church, where she is [xii] joyously received, her cult triumphant and her patronage assured. No one, not even the tourists, sleeps during the vigil.

On that rainy night in December, Horcajo's celebration of the Immaculate Conception was a demonstration of deeply felt faith. Oblivious to the presence of curious outsiders and the usual tired country fair, at the center of the observance were the older adults of the community, loudly affirming their devotion to La Inmaculada. For two days, men and women reenacted the arrival of the cult in Horcajo. They took over the parish church, fought with the priests, and finally embraced the devotion.⁽³⁾ As we left the town and I looked again at the large church, it was now impossible to see it as simply dominating the countryside and its inhabitants. Horcajo owned the church as well.

More than four hundred years ago, in 1575, Horcajo de Santiago had not yet taken a vow to the Immaculate Conception. According to the reports that Horcajo and other nearby towns sent to King Philip II, the region's public religious life was as yet untouched by the reforms recently enacted by the Council of Trent.⁽⁴⁾ The purpose of Horcajo's holidays honoring St. Sebastian and St. Ann was to ensure the continued well-being of the town, not to uphold a point of contested religious doctrine. The modern ritual battle between cult-bearing priests and faithless people would have brought down scandal on the community; instead, the town's religious holidays emphasized the unity of believers in a corporate, hierarchical society, in which priests led the way. The pope was a distant, nameless figure, important to horcajeños and other manchegos primarily for the indulgences and relics that were sold with his blessing.

Before the end of the century, however, the religious life of Horcajo de Santiago and countless similar communities all across Spain would be transformed. The themes of the holiday described above -- the town's well-being linked to the defense of doctrine, priests as bearers of true religion -- would become commonplace. This was in part the agenda of the Counter Reformation, which took hold in Spain in the latter half of the sixteenth century. In the pages that follow I will explore the transition in Spain from traditional Christianity to the modern form of Catholicism promoted by the Council of Trent. The region chosen for study is the Castilian diocese of Cuenca, situated one hundred miles to the east of Madrid. The large bishopric might be considered prototypical of most of central Castile: its institutions were of relatively recent medieval origin, the economy was reasonably prosperous, there were few newly converted Christians, and its local elites were well-connected to [xiii] the centers of royal and ecclesiastical power. Without pomp or fanfare, Cuenca was the heartland of the Spanish empire.

To show the full extent of the transition, Chapter I begins by describing traditional Christianity in late medieval Cuenca. Contrary to what is often assumed, the religious policies of the Catholic Monarchs, known as the Pre-Reform, were of scant importance to the bishopric. Instead, the people of Cuenca, like Christians throughout Europe, knew little about the formal tenets of their religion and practiced a faith that was thoroughly mixed with magic. A small minority of converted Jews and Muslims lived in the diocese. Problems common to the secular clergy all over Europe -- concubinage, ignorance, corruption -- characterized the conquense clergy, while the mendicant movement had only just penetrated the region. The formal hierarchy of the church exercised little control over bishopric.

The policies of the Catholic Monarchs primarily affected the upper echelons of the church and religious orders; by contrast, sixteenth-century Spanish reformers ambitiously set out to change the lives of the lower clergy and the people. Chapters 2 and 3 describe how the Tridentine reforms were brought to Cuenca in the mid-sixteenth century and the dramatic changes that took place in the lower clergy's level of education and discipline. Characteristic of the early phase of the Catholic Reformation in Spain was the great emphasis on mass religious education, inspired by St. Juan de Avila and the Jesuits, but carried out primarily by the lower clergy. Chapter 4 examines methods of indoctrination and evaluates the success of the catechism campaign among ordinary conquenses. The remaining two chapters explore the transformation of local religion in Cuenca from the corporate, intercessory faith of the Middle Ages, to one that was complex mixture of old and new modalities of religion. Trent succeeded in breaking through the "social web" of medieval Christianity and imposing a more personal faith, but one that became increasingly mechanical through the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century, while the local, intercessory religion still thrived, the reformed religion had lost its vitality, particularly among elites, who were beginning to feel the influence of Enlightenment.

Paradoxically, while Spain has been identified more than any other country with the Counter Reformation, what reform meant at the local level in Spain itself has never been studied systematically. The most notorious and most powerful institution of the Counter Reformation was the Holy Office. Although Inquisition studies have witnessed an explosion in the [xiv] last ten years, the opportunities the Inquisition's vast records offer for the social history of religion, or "historical anthropology,"⁽⁵⁾ in Spain as yet remain unrealized. With few exceptions,⁽⁶⁾ historians have remained focused on the institutional and social history of the tribunals and their Jewish and Muslim victims. No one has completely integrated the rich materials of the Inquisition into a general study of religious practices in early modern Spain or evaluated the Inquisition as one among many factors in the process of sixteenth-century religious change, two of the goals of the present study.

Following the great interest in social history and mentalités, foreign and Spanish scholars have begun to publish some city-based histories of certain facets of religious life in the early modern period. In The Avila of St. Teresa, Jodi Bilinkoff provides our first view of the religious politics of a Spanish city during the Catholic Reformation. At this point, it is impossible to know if Avila's mystic blooming was a unique circumstance, magnified by the presence of Teresa, or whether it was mirrored on a smaller scale by other Spanish cities during the sixteenth century. We do know, however, that Spaniards were enthusiastic participants in the confraternal system of late medieval Europe, and in Sacred Charity, Maureen Flynn described the fraternities in the northern city of Zamora, and their shift from charitable to penitential activities in the course of the sixteenth century. Several local descriptions of baroque piety based on urban testaments, inspired by Vovelle's seminal work, also have appeared in Spain during the 1980s. Regrettably, however, their Spanish authors have been unwilling to connect the various gestures recorded in wills to more than the simplest religious ideology.⁽⁷⁾

Closest to the subject of this book is the work of William Christian, whose Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain is the one of the few studies of the religious life of early modern Castilian commmunities. Based on the Relaciones topográficas de Felipe II, the royal questionnaire sent out between 1575 and 1580, Christian described the collective faith of New Castile, that is, the history of community-based shrines, holidays, vows, and Christocentric devotions. Christian's rejection of the term "popular religion" in favor of "local religion" has greatly influenced my own thinking about aspects of the religiosity of early modern conquenses. It makes little sense to call "popular" traditions that were embraced by the whole of the Castilian population, from the king down; what becomes important is the relationship between the local faith and the universal religion espoused by the Catholic church. Nonetheless, [xv] Christian's source could not reveal the real variations in feligious practice that did exist between individiuals of different social backgrounds, and I point these out whenever they become apparent.

Although the impact of the Counter Reformation on local religion in Spain is still relatively unexplored, there exists a large corpus of literature on its impact on local religion in France, and this has become one of the points of reference for all studies of the Counter Reformation in the early modern period. It bears emphasizing that the French literature reflects historical issues that are rooted in French problems, and thus is not entirely applicable to Spanish situations. This historiography begins with the collapse of the traditional religious order during the Wars of Religion and ends with the de-Christianization of the Revolution. In between, French monarchs used Tridentine Catholicism in their efforts to create an absolutist state, while the countryside was rocked by massive peasant revolts. Central to virtually all discussions of popular religion in France, regardless of the author's approach, is the perception of a profound split between the interests of the upper-class bourgeois and urban prole, sophisticated city and traditional countryside. The peasant community especially appears as an alien world, in perpetual conflict with the urban one which sought to dominate and exploit it.⁽⁸⁾

Little of the turmoil and polarization that typically informs so much of the French historiography can be found in Castile. While France at times threatened to disintegrate into religious and regional fragments, the most striking aspect of early modern Castilian history is its religious and social stability. Despite all the scholarship devoted to Spanish heterodoxy, the fact remains that the authority of Catholicism for Old Christians was never seriously tested anywhere in the peninsula. Politically, although late-medieval Castile was a chaotic place, after the last revolt in 1521, the monarchy was in firm control of the country until the reign of the incompetent Charles II (1664-1700). Despite the crushing taxes and poverty of the seventeenth century, history records only short-lived riots.⁽⁹⁾ Finally, in Castile, several aspects of the northern European urban-rural dichotomy which were behind the attack on popular religion were lacking. What is most important, by the sixteenth century, the distinction between free city and subject countryside had ceased to exist in most parts of Castile; personal serfdom had disappeared, and much of Castile was a patchwork of self-governing towns, many of which bought their autonomy during the Habsburg era.⁽¹⁰⁾ In New Castile, the center of this study, settlement patterns contributed [xvi] the blurring of urban-rural lines. Most communities, no matter how small, were densely settled and repeated in crude miniature the social hierarchy usually found in cities. On the other hand, very few communities were large enough to have an exclusively industrial and service economy and substantial numbers of elites and industrial workers -- in the diocese of Cuenca, only the city of Cuenca itself.

Owing to this very different historical background, in the early modern period in Castile we do not find the same overt class antagonism, the same friction between urban and rural areas, or the same patterns of control that developed to keep such tensions in check. It has been suggested many times that both the Reformation and the Counter Reformation were attacks of governments and cities on the countryside, where the large majority of the population, only partly Christianized, lived and labored. Three familiar examples of control closely connected with the reformations -- literacy, carnival, and magic -- in their Castilian contexts quickly illustrate that often a more subtle dialogue between rulers and ruled took place.

Literacy means access to elite culture and power, and the possibility of dissent. Although seventeenth-century elites in Spain mistrusted education and censored books, their suspicion should be seen against the backdrop of rising popular literacy rates. In the cities of Madrid, Avila, Toledo and Cuenca, over half of the urban males were literate. There are fewer studies for men in small-town Castile, but because of the varied social composition of Castilian settlements, the ability to read was not unusual, even in villages. Books and pamphlets, most of them religious in nature, circulated freely outside of the large towns.⁽¹¹⁾ As yet, little is known about the creation and consumption of popularly priced religious literature, but the fact remains that it existed and was read by all levels of Castilian society, in the city and the countryside. As in northern Europe, books were seen by readers as an aid to their own religious development, but owing to an effective system of censorship, the connection between literacy and religious dissent was rarely formed. Instead, religious books universally promoted a common belief system.

French historians have focused on carnival as a highly formalized means of expressing and releasing tension between the upper and lower classes as well between the sexes. Early modern Spain knew the licentious and critical side of carnival, but some of the elements characteristic of the social control in the French institutions seem to have been curiously deflected in Castilian versions.⁽¹²⁾ While Carnival in France might feature a reversal of roles in which a peasant became king for [xvii] the day, in Castilian communities, peasants assumed animal identities or, in one favorite carnestolendas activity, the honest poor beat up the village beggar, that is, people vented their hostility on their social inferiors.⁽¹³⁾ In one Mardi Gras celebration in 1567 that ended up spontaneously mocking certain religious institutions and authorities, all of the participants and victims seemed perplexed by what happened. A group of people, including two men and two women, were drinking and dancing at home. Inspired by the moment, one of the women picked up plateful of earth and ashes and began to make the sign of the cross on everyone's forehead, saying "Memento homo." Then one of the men caught up a potful of water and an oxtail and began to sprinkle water on everyone who had been marked.⁽¹⁴⁾ The merrymakers liked the effect so much that they decided turn their clothes inside out, put on masks, and visit the town's familiar of the Inquisition and his employer, the barber-surgeon; they stopped just short of visiting the town priest. Later, the familiar told the inquisitors that he did not understand what the revelers were up to but whatever it was, it seemed bad to him. Other "victims" said exactly the same: they did not understand what was going on; in other words, they could not "read" the revelers' message of drunken mockery. One of the defendants claimed he was so drunk he had no idea what he was doing, and with that, potentially subversive as it seems, and despite the all-pervading fear of infiltration of Protestant ideas, the Inquisitors dropped the case.

Northern Europe during the era of the reformations transformed folk magic into witchcraft, and witchcraft into witch hunts. While interpretations vary widely according to country and historian, common to all of the countries in which the hunts took place was the judges' belief that the witch's power was real and that the witch herself was a threat to society and an attack on God's majesty. The witch usually was a rural woman of low social class, poorly integrated into the dominant religious culture.

Witch hunts depended on magistrates' willingness to prosecute. In Spain, inquisitors rarely transformed folk magic into witchcraft, nor did they view the occasional witch as a serious threat to society.⁽¹⁵⁾ In trials, the distinction between superstition, sorcery and witchcraft (i.e., folk tradition and scholastic demonology) was always observed. On the other side of the bench, the practitioners of magic did not conform to the stereotype, either. In the diocese of Cuenca between 1490 and 1700 just under half of those prosecuted for superstition, sorcery, and witchcraft were men. A sampling of trials shows that the accused were fully, if not [xviii] better, catechized than most other Inquisition defendants, attended mass or confessed more frequently than did other defendants, and finally, in the case of the women, were better educated than most. These people do not fit the profile of a marginated group being persecuted under the guise of religious deviance. Rather, they suggest an incomplete process of religious indoctrination whereby common folk became outwardly Christianized but continued to view spells, potions, and the church's prayers as equally valid, and not conflicting, avenues to supernatural power.⁽¹⁶⁾

From these examples we should not conclude that social relations were idyllic or that social control was unnecessary in Counter Reformation Castile; merely that early modern Castilians found other, as yet not fully understood means of maintaining order that were fairly successful.⁽¹⁷⁾ Religion served to unify Old Christians, whatever their status in life, in a national identity and to exclude the converted Jewish and Muslim minorities. As odious as it seems, the Inquisition was a popular institution among the majority of early modern Castilians, who accepted the tribunals' premise that religious deviance was dangerous, and cooperated with its policies, just as they accepted, with little overt resistance, the Counter Reformation itself. How they came to do so, and the consequences of that embrace for the people of Castile, is the subject of this book.

1. J. López-Salazar Cuevas, "La población manchega en los siglos XVI y XVII," Revista Internacional de Sociología, no. 37 (1981): 12.

2. "Long live the purest conception of the most holy Virgin, conceived without stain of sin! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!"

3. The holiday has also become confused with the mythology of the medieval Reconquest and the traditional battles of cristianos y moros. Thus the horsemen are dressed in an oriental style, but the cult of the Immaculate Conception did not become popular in the diocese until the seventeenth century, long after the Reconquest itself or even the expulsion of the moriscos. The format of many of the diocese's fiestas seems to date back to the eighteenth century.

4. See W.A. Christian, Jr., Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, chap.5.

5. J.-P. Dedieu, "The Archive of the Holy Office of Toledo" in The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe, ed. G. Henningsen and J. Tedeschi, 158-89.

6. G. Henningsen, The Witches' Advocate; J. Edwards, "Religious faith and doubt in late medieval Spain"; and R.L. Kagan, Lucretia's Dreams. Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990).

7. Perhaps the best of several quantitative studies is R. J. López López, Comportamientos religiosos en Asturias durante el Antiguo Régimen.

8. This, at least, is the tact taken by Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief, whose concluding chapter has provided the starting point for this comparison. While agreeing that the rural world was different, Briggs sharply disagrees with the reductionist approaches of J. Delumeau and R. Muchembled. A contrary view is taken by Kathryn Norberg, in Rich and Poor in Grenoble, who comments on this tendency in French history and concludes that with regard to Catholic Reformation religiosity at least, there was no town or country.

9. For a survey and evaluation, see C. Larquié, "Popular uprisings in Spain in the Mid-Seventeenth century." Although there were numerous riots, Larquié concludes that Castilian uprisings do not compare with the contemporary French uprisings (103).

10. See H. Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain.

11. S. Nalle, "Literacy and Culture in Early Modern Castile." On Avila, S. de Tapia, "Nivel de alfabetización en una ciudad castellana del siglo XVI: sectores sociales y grupos étnicos en Avila," Studia Histórica. Historia moderna homenage al profesor dr. d. Manuel Fernández Alvárez, 2 vols. (Salamanca, 1989), 1: 495-516.

12. The best known study of Carnival in early modern Spain is J. Caro Baroja, El Carnaval. Caro Baroja relies on many descriptions of carnival in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Madrid, which as the capital, is hardly typical.

13. Although Caro Baroja emphasizes that carnival was a time for taking liberties and expressing conflict, he dedicates very few pages to that aspect of the holiday. Class antagonism and attacks on the church typical of carnival seem to become common in the large cities during the eighteenth century. In the diocesis of Cuenca, the town of Requena celebrated carnival with a "bird king," a practice observed elsewhere as well according to W. Christian.

14. ADC, Inq., leg. 242, exp. 3217.

15. However, when Spanish secular courts got hold of witches, the result could be disastrous (see W. Monter, Frontiers of Heresy). Secular trials for witchcraft seem to have taken place mainly in the kingdom of Aragon.

16. R. García Carcel argues for a Mediterranean model of witchcraft which would fit the case of Castilian magicians far better than the prevailing "Basque" or northern European model (see his article, "El modelo mediteraneo de brujería" in Annuario storico dell'Instituto Storico Italiano per L'età moderna e contemporanea, 37-38 [1985-86]: 245-57).

17. These pages are written before the appearance of the volume Culture and Control in Counter Reformation Spain, ed. A. Cruz and M.E. Perry. The primary study is J. A. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque.