This last volume of the latest Spanish work to deal with the Church in Spanish life exhibits many of the characteristics of the previous three volumes in the series: a moderate Catholic outlook befitting the late twentieth century, a more careful use of archives and secular historical sources, and a good eye toward the social setting of ecclesiastical life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The period is one not usually very well known except through the writings of Menéndez Pelayo, whom the main collaborators in this work—Vicente Cárcel Ortí, Javier Fernández Conde, José Luis González Novalín, and Antonio Mestre Sanchis— seem determined to destroy.
What emerges, however, is a much less concentrated treatise without the overall interpretation of Menéndez Pelayo or the original interpreter of this era, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo. Instead, in the manner of the Oxford and Cambridge historical series, new details are added through topical chapters that range from regalism and Church-state relations to religion and culture in the eighteenth century, ending with the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain. Perhaps the most interesting aspects of this large work concern the episode of Sor María de Agreda and Philip IV, Molinos’s Guía espiritual and Spanish quietism, and the rise of Spanish Jansenism. Little new material appears on the expulsion of the Moriscos or, at the end of the period, of the Jesuits. There are some good, though hardly exhaustive, details on the Enlightenment, but very little attention is paid to overseas colonial missionary efforts. As always, this parochial viewpoint of Spanish historiography mars the book, especially since the format encourages completeness.
