Historia de las Diocesis Espanolas. Volume 14: Iglesias de Santiago de Compostela y Tuy-Vigo, and: Volume 15: Iglesias de Lugo, Mondonedo-Ferrol y Orense (review)

José García Oro has brought together some of the best regional scholars for his histories of the five dioceses of Galicia in northwestern Spain. These two volumes are part of a massive project to write modern histories of all the Spanish dioceses known as Flórez 2000. The editors at the Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos conceived of the twenty-five volume collection as a modern complement to Enrique Flórez's monumental compendium España Sagrada, compiled in the eighteenth century.

Volume 14 deals with the coastal dioceses of Galicia, Tuy-Vigo, and Santiago de Compostela, and Volume 15 is dedicated to the interior dioceses. Certainly, Santiago de Compostela, the site of the tomb of Saint James, one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in Christendom, is familiar to scholars, but few outside of Spain know much about the densely populated, but very rural dioceses that surround it. These two volumes will certainly help remedy that lacuna.

García Oro clearly attempted to provide continuity both within volumes and between volumes. Specialists explore one segment of Galician church history, usually early medieval, late medieval/early modern, and modern, and each essay is subdivided into numerous sections. Most include separate discussions of regular clergy, episcopal administration, individual bishops, and the laity.

The quality of the essays varies considerably, and some sections of the essays are more substantial than others. Some sections are merely encyclopedic discussions of bishops and councils, while others provide more historical context and analysis. These texts are not for beginners. The reader must have some background in Galician history to make sense of the information provided in most of the essays. The authors rarely place the Galician Church into the broader context of either Spanish or church history.

The strongest sections are on the medieval period, revealing the sophistication of the scholarship on that period. In addition, in Volume 14, Baudilio Barreiro Mallón provides an excellent examination of the diocese of Santiago from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, and volume 15 includes an interesting overview of religious art in the interior dioceses by María Dolores Fraga Sampedro. Fraga Sampedro reaches back to the fourth century to highlight interior Galicia's most important examples of Christian art and architecture. Probably the most useful information in both volumes comes from the statistical data compiled and/or reprinted in many of the essays and the bibliographic essays that accompany each section. Without a doubt, the weakest essays, or parts of essays, are on the Church in the twentieth century. Those sections tend to be the most encyclopedic—full of data, but lacking in context and analysis.

In many ways, these two volumes are truly the successors to Flórez's España Sagrada. Flórez too had an overwhelming amount of information at hand and his tomes also vary considerably in both content and quality. Nevertheless, España Sagrada remains an essential reference for scholars. Overall, these volumes will be good references for scholars of the region and for scholars who wish to have some basic information about the Church in northwestern Spain within arm's reach.