The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Counter Reformation

by Henry Kamen

It is commonly assumed that the Counter-Reformation touched Spain only lightly, affecting the religious institutions but not the ordinary Spaniards. Henry Kamen now challenges this view by providing an intimate look at what life was like in one small but distinctive rural Spanish community from the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. By examining the Catalan village of Mediona as a microcosm of Spanish society, Kamen shows that in fact the Counter Reformation led to powerful changes in the daily lives, beliefs, and customs of the common people of Catalonia and Spain.

Kamen portrays the popular culture of Mediona, studying the shifting habits revealed by its administrative reforms during the Counter Reformation; the place of religious belief within the community; the attempts to change popular festivities and celebrations; the far-reaching innovations in marriage and sexuality; the role of the Inquisition and of the Jesuits; the problem of witchcraft, and the impact of books from the expanding presses of France, Italy, and the Netherlands on local language and ideas. Kamen concludes that the Counter Reformation was in some instances liberating rather than repressive in Mediona and the broader Mediterranean society of which it was part. By contemplating popular religion and culture as it was practiced by ordinary citizens, he offers new insights into an epoch normally studied only in the light of great political events, and he presents a wholly original vision of culture and society in Spain's Golden Age.

Genres: History

528 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1993

About the author

Henry Kamen is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in London and an emeritus professor of the Higher Council for Scientific Research in Barcelona.

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting take on Counter-Reformation Catalonia that reminded me a bit of Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. Both take a close look at day-to-day religious life in small villages, and both aim to reorient current scholarship. Kamen argues against the apparently prevailing idea that the Counter-Reformation did not really do much to change religious life in Spain: it had already undergone a serious of pre-Reformation reforms, particularly under Cardinal Cisneros in the 15th century, and the Counter Reformation did not do much reorientation of values or practice. Instead, Kamen claims that while organizational reforms were not terribly successful (particularly within the religious orders), the values of lay people changed slowly but steadily between 1560 and 1650.

The third chapter in here is the best, covering the tangible effects of reform on regular people. Before 1560s Kamen argues that there was tendency to view sex as healthy and non-shameful, there was doubt of the afterlife (particularly hell and purgatory) and there was the idea that non-Christians could be saved if they followed their own religions well. Masses were loud and chaotic, festivals were occasionally wild, and marriage was frequently a loosely-defined institution. People confessed, but rarely took the Eucharist and even more rarely confirmed. But the slow arrival of reform brought new liturgies, new festivals, new calendars of saints, silence at masses, heavier emphases on purgatory and the sacraments, and a general effort to bring each parish under uniformity and tighter central control. It's a great chapter, full of color and detail.

I think the evidence will occasionally be stretched or remain largely anecdotal, and the scale is sort of strange - the first and last chapters read like microhistories, the second chapter reads like an institutional history, and all the rest fall somewhere in between. Still, an interesting study of Counter-Reformation cultural life.