Between Christians and Moriscos: Juan de Ribera and Religious Reform in Valencia, 1568–1614 (review)

This is a welcome but a slightly puzzling book. To renew attention, in an English-language work, to the post-Tridentine archbishop of Valencia and his consciously Borromean program of Catholic reform in Spain is helpful. The concise treatment of Ribera’s career and work interestingly confirms the findings of the 1960 Spanish biography by Robres Lluch, but does so independently, without that volume’s association with the process for the archbishop’s canonization. From Ehlers’s archival research comes some useful quantification, for example, of archiepiscopal financing of parochial outreach to the morisco population of Valencia. The author does not overlook the difficulties encountered by the archbishop, particularly at the start of his Valencian episcopate, when he found himself caught up unfruitfully in a triangular contest among the university, the Jesuits, and some of the cathedral canons. That Ribera managed in the end to make his own seminary foundation, known as the Patriarca, an integrated part of the city’s devotional life is acknowledged, with a potentially valuable suggestion that his select promotion of local saints’ cults helped in this, although a crucial point relating to Catalina Muñoz is strangely undeveloped. The author is well aware that after Ribera’s death, another archbishop could still find himself in difficulties with local sentiment over popular veneration of unauthorized figures, but perhaps overestimates the degree to which Ribera modified his own religious priorities. An attempt to strengthen the case by passages of imaginatively colorful description does not convince, especially as Ehlers could well have sought expert advice so as to avoid liturgical imprecision (as on p.24) as well as incautious historical generalization (p. 3). The claim to novelty of the present book must therefore turn on its second, entirely natural theme: the evolution of the archbishop’s attitude to the morisco population of the kingdom of Valencia, where the chief comparisons otherwise used by Ehlers, those of Cuenca and Ourense, can only be of limited value. The development of historical scholarship, since 1960, on the morisco population of early-modern Spain provides a foundation of which good use is made here. From that and from the author’s archival research a careful and balanced survey of the range of Valencian morisco belief and practice is presented, and neither the fixed problems of local noble interest in protecting the morisco workforce from enforced religious change and the local inquisition’s predominantly financial interests nor the changing phases of national policy toward the moriscos in Spain at the central royal court are overlooked. The at best syncretist religious life of the majority of the Valencian moriscos is fully demonstrated here, so it is hardly surprising that the analysis of Ribera’s abandonment of real hope and effort for the true conversion of the moriscos and adoption instead of personal advocacy of the need for expulsion of all the moriscos from Spain does not essentially differ from previous historical analysis of that change. What is not convincing is the author’s contradictory assertion that Ribera was distorting the evidence on the Valencian moriscos’ religious practice to advance his new line of argument for expulsion, while still attempting parochial mission among the moriscos in obedience to as yet unchanged royal policy. Ultimately, the judgment of Ribera attempted in this book appears to turn on an historical anachronism: the supposition that a demonstrably post-Tridentine episcopal reformer should somehow have accepted permanent religious syncretism.