Paradoxically, because of its secrecy, few documents describe how Catholics en masse experienced confession. To write a social history of the sacrament, one must turn to Church and government policies, prescriptive literature, the occasional account from a holy biography, and in the case of Spain, the records of the Inquisition. Patrick J. O’Banion has resorted to all of these strategies to research his first book. In the heyday of Michel Foucault’s influence, the sacrament of penance would have been characterized as another tool in the state’s arsenal to be used for social control. While noting the potential for social discipline that the Tridentine reforms held, O’Banion concludes that Spaniards were too wily to allow the sacrament to have too much power over them; rather, the ambiguities surrounding the enforcement of annual confession allowed Spaniards to negotiate the terms for the surrender of their conscience.

The book is comprised of six chapters, an introduction, and conclusion. Throughout, O’Banion’s goal is to place confession, particularly the annual obligation at Eastertide, within its social context. He is not so much interested in the spiritual or psychological transformations that might take place via regular confession, and has nothing to say at all about what sorts of penances Spaniards accepted in order to expiate their sins. The chapters are of uneven quality. More successful are chapter 1, “How to be a Counter-Reformation Confessor”; chapter 2, “How to Behave in Confession”; and chapter 4, “Confession on Crusade.” In chapter 1, O’Banion relies on Church law, confessor’s manuals, and the secondary literature to describe how confessors were trained. He concludes that the parish clergy was generally well prepared to hear confessions, but for several reasons parishioners could avoid compliance. In the following chapter, O’Banion describes the experience of confession — the occasions when a confession was required, what the confessional space was like, the motions and words employed by the penitent, and the differences in types of confessions, jurisdictions, and exemptions. A centerpiece of O’Banion’s argument appears in chapter 4, which deals with the indulgence known as the Bula de la Crusada. Purchasers gained the right to confess at Easter with any confessor of their choosing, thereby allowing those who wished to avoid their parish priests the ability to do so.

Other chapters are not so successful. In chapter 3, “Regulating the Easter Duty,” O’Banion ventures into a muddled quantitative study of confessional practice as reported to the Inquisition of Toledo. O’Banion supplies no demographic or geographical details about his 500 or so cases, which makes interpreting his results quite difficult. Space constraints do not allow for a complete explanation of the various methodological problems presented in this chapter and the missteps in reporting data from my book, God in La Mancha (195n50).

The final chapter of the book, “Confession and the Newly Converted” is written mostly from secondary sources with the occasional primary source used as an accent. O’Banion’s sample of 500 cases does not come into play here (did he not track ethnic self-identification of his subjects?), but he might have resorted to information I provided in God in La Mancha, which does report ethnicity. Much of the discussion of the Judeoconversos focuses on alumbradismo, a particularly converso form of heterodoxy that eschewed confession, but O’Banion fails to cite Stefania Pastore’s important 2004 book, Un’eresia spagnola: spiritualità conversa, alumbradismo e Inquisizione (1449–1559) (Spanish edition, 2010). O’Banion concludes that the gypsies’ “success [at eluding confession] brings into sharp relief the church’s failure to realize local religious changes by using confession as a reforming mechanism” (153). So little direct documentary evidence exists about the gypsies’ religious practices, and they were in addition such an infinitesimal minority that the conclusion seems misplaced; rather, it is the Moriscos’ steadfast resistance to Christianization that underscores the limits of the Church’s confessionalization efforts.

O’Banion concludes that by the mid-seventeenth century the majority of Spaniards were complying with the annual precept, but on their own terms. Regular confession became more frequent, but the wider significance of such practice O’Banion sees in rather different terms. Normally historians focus on the intimate nature of confession and its potential to lead individuals to a modern self-awareness. Instead O’Banion concludes that “penitents could lay claim to a degree of anonymity and freedom that smacks of modernity” (178). This, if anything, leads one to thoughts of alienation, the malaise of the twentieth century. Overall The Sacrament of Penance is a modest contribution to the history of religious life in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.