La Diócesis de Pamplona en 1734, a través de la visita ad limina del Obispo Melchor Ángel Gutiérrez Vallejo (review)

Since Pope Sixtus V mandated the first ad limina visits in 1585, bishops have regularly traveled to Rome to visit the tombs of Ss. Peter and Paul and to give the pope a report on the state of their dioceses. The documents generated with each ad limina visit are numerous, and the records at the Vatican Archives, spanning more than four centuries, are indispensable to study the evolution of the ad limina visits, church organization, and religious practices within dioceses.

This book provides a detailed description of the ad limina visit of the bishop of Pamplona in 1734 and includes transcriptions of all the ad limina documents from that visit. María Iranzu Rico Arrastia does not analyze the documents here; rather, she provides a primer on how to read and interpret these sources. She posits that understanding how and why the documentation was generated in Rome and Pamplona will help historians move beyond the formalism and the repetitive nature of the documentation and thereby gain fresh insights into early-modern society from these sources.

The book is divided into five chapters and includes lengthy appendices. Chapter 1 defines an ad limina visit and briefly gives the context for the visit of 1734. Chapter 2 identifies repositories in Rome and Pamplona with documentation on ad limina visits. Chapter 3 describes the different types of documentation generated in Rome and Pamplona. Chapter 4 develops more fully the historical context of the visit, examining the career of Bishop Melchor Ángel Gutiérrez Vallejo, his efforts to prepare for the ad limina visit despite illness, and the role of local clergy in preparing the documents as well as in impeding the visitation process by claiming exemption from episcopal oversight. Chapter 5 describes the documents in the appendices. Rico Arrastia’s commentary on the written report and a unique catalog describing the 927 parishes in the diocese is particularly helpful. Here, she hints at different ways the documentation might be used for church history, demographic history, or social history. For example, she notes that the clustering of parishes named San Román in the archpresbyterate of Yerri might shed light on popular devotion in that region. Disappointingly, because it is a primer, the book only alludes to such lines of investigation but never takes them up. Rico Arrastia also points out the documents’ shortcomings, most notably numerical errors in the documents sent to Rome. With this grounding, the reader is ready to undertake his or her own investigation of the sources.

The appendices consist of tables and documents. Rico Arrastia has painstakingly created seventy-two pages of useful tables from the documentation. These tables include names of the parishes within the diocese; identification of parishes dependent on chapters, religious orders, monasteries, or other ecclesiastical bodies; locations of monasteries, convents, and confraternities; plus several tables on the population of the parishes. The seventeen documents of the ad limina visit total 240 pages of text. Most of the documents are in Latin, but a few are in Castilian.

Rico Arrastia must be commended for providing scholars with an easy-to-follow description of the documentation and making available the documents of the most thorough ad limina visit from early-modern Pamplona. This book will be a useful starting place for all historians planning to consult ad limina records for their own research.