Priests, Mountains, and "Sacred Space" in Early Modern Europe

Mountains and Priests

Serge Brunet's monumental Les Prêtres des montagnes is a study of customary religious practice and institutions in the Val d'Aran in the Pyrenees and of diocesan attempts to bring this high, isolated valley to heel. Formed by the river Bavarthès, the Val d'Aran rises from an altitude of 600m at the frontier with France to peaks as high as 2500m; in a space of 633 km² there are thirty villages or hamlets with a total population in the early modern period of about 6000 persons. For centuries part of Spain but in a French diocese, the valley was able to garner considerable ecclesiastical independence by playing off the two jurisdictions. The book is a fascinating case study of an unusual prolongation of custom in the face of the uniformizing forces of modern nation states and the Council of Trent.

Following Marc Bloch, Brunet practices a "regressive history" which shows "how much religion has left its clues which, consciously or not, the historian follows up, going back to the source" (p. 59). He does so, in the words of the historian Bartolomé Bennassar, in an exercise of "total history," starting from architecture, art, kinship, patterns of inheritance, family names, place names and travelers' reports, as well as a wide range of ecclesiastical, civil, military and administrative documents at the local, regional, and national level both in France and Spain.

For virtually every topic Brunet compares his findings (on vocations, reform, education, migration of priests, etc.) with other valleys in the diocese of Comminges, valleys in neighboring dioceses, and those of other studies of the Catalan valleys of Àneu and Boí, Andorra, Brittany, Savoy, cities of Languedoc, and Paris. The comparisons reveal great variation, and sometimes it is hard to discern the landscape in the thicket of detail.

The result is a book that, well, sprawls. The pilgrim reader has to keep an eye on the compass as the author goes on major, if rewarding, detours. Topics are scattered through the 863-page work (itself only part of his unpublished four-volume thesis). There are statistics on everything countable (those who choose to wade through them should bring hip boots) and a profusion of photographs, maps, and charts. All in all, this reader felt quite at home.

From the fourteenth until the eighteenth century, the valley pretty much had its way. Each new bishop had to come and confirm the valley's privileges "on knees, with head bowed, before representatives of valley clergy and laity, his right hand on the holy scriptures" (p. 89), then add his signature to that of his predecessors on the original 1372 parchment. These privileges, incremented by customary accretion, included valley retention of all tithes (half for the priests, half for the parish expenses), parish council presentation of curates, the figure of a local archdeacon with bishop-like judicial authority who could be appealed only to the archdiocese or the pope, and the limitation of episcopal visits (with no retinue) to once every seven...