‘What men call gallantry and gods adultery,|Is much more common where the climate's sultry.’ And insofar as it applied to the Spanish peninsula, not only adultery, as later in Byron's century H. C. Lea's Sacerdotal celibacy in the Christian Church briskly confirmed, reporting the seventy concubines of the abbot of S. Pelayo at Santiago and observing that ‘the pontiffs who so energetically enforced the rule of celibacy throughout the rest of Europe were content to offer little opposition to the obstinacy of the Celtiberian priesthood’. Now Michelle Armstrong-Partida arrives to hammer home the same truth, focusing upon Catalan practices in the early fourteenth century as revealed by the insight into parish life provided by the bishops of the dioceses of Girona, Barcelona, Vic, Urgell and Tortosa.

Based upon a tally of episcopal visitation records unparalleled elsewhere in contemporary Europe, Defiant priests enormously extends the work initiated by scholars on the spot to provide an instructive and continuously illuminating account of the domestic bliss enjoyed (or suffered) by the local clergy. Sight of the items on their washing lines left no doubt. Catalonia's parish priests were married men whose wives were known to assist them inter alia in preparing the dough from which to bake the hosts for mass or the oil for their other sacramental work. The role and function of their consorts were widely known. When the rector Jaume Ferrer baptised one of his five sons, the occasion was not a secret one. Every Sunday the parish might see his children and grandchildren filling the church. And though he required papal dispensations for defectus natalium the signs are that Jaume preferred to avoid the expenditure that that involved by securing their tonsure instead per fraudem, and so it might continue down the generations. ‘Clerical couples acted and behaved like other couples … The lack of discretion among clerical families also implies a sense of normalcy’ in ‘advertising their couplehood and family to the parish’ (p. 101). With a wealth of colourful detail, summarised in an appendix of some forty pages, the author has artfully succeeded in shining a powerful light into the un-Gregorian haunts inhabited by clergymen (as the author calls them) who by her own account appear more insouciant than defiant. Thus, the less provident of the brethren might find themselves reduced to using their churches as taverns or canteens – surreptitiously of course, though not sufficiently so as to escape Armstrong-Partida's notice. Indeed it may be that she knows more about the in many cases inevitably endogamous relationships of Ferrer and his like than their bishops either did or even wanted to. Together with this went the consequences of their pent-up masculinity, invigorated doubtless by the vicinity of Europe's bracing Christian frontier. The illustration on her cover shows them not fornicating but fighting.

It may however be that there is a distinction to be drawn between those little visited retreats well off the beaten track whose church might double as a pub run by the rector's son and the cathedral cities of the dioceses under review, none of which the author believes to have been a ‘vibrant intellectual center’ (p. 86). Evidence of access to the sources of canon law provides no guarantee of living by its rules of course, yet to ignore the cultural vitality of Urgell, for example, as indicated by the resources of that chapter's library, may be thought to beg a number of questions. Likewise, the extent of these abuses deserves comparison with the estimate of J. M. Martí Bonet, one of the pioneers of such investigations, who found that in the diocese of Barcelona at the beginning of this period only a quarter of the ‘estamento sacerdotal’, a mere fraction of the author's tally, was tarred with concubinage (pp. 37–8, whence the need, which she well understands, not to include the lesser orders in her calculations of ‘couplehood’). By analogy (or on the other hand), to this day the authorities of formerly men-only colleges may for one reason or another not be the most reliable informants concerning illicit co-residence avant la lettre in their institutions.

Even so, in comparison with reports from elsewhere in Europe it is clear that the case of the Catalan Church was exceptional – though not in the context of other departments of the peninsular Church, since on account of their concubinary clergy Pope John xxii was moved in these very years to denounce both Castilian and Portuguese prelates. The evidence of the Archpriest of Hita and of Portuguese lineage books testifies to the extent of practices which occasioned the remark of a German visitor to the latter kingdom in 1460 that it was the custom, amongst that country's ‘many strange customs’, for ‘the priests there in some places to have lawful wives’. Here we have the origins of the preference evident down to recent times amongst some parishioners of remote areas of the Peninsula to have the care of their souls in the hands of one with a woman of his own to keep him at a distance from theirs. Though the last of them betrays occasional signs of weariness, the author's richly informative six chapters have given these customs a local habitation and a name. ‘Lea, thou shouldst be living at this hour.’