Turn to Appendix Five of this book and you will find the names of more than five hundred medieval Catalan Carmelites, together with the date of each individual's attestation and the name of the Carmelite house in which he lived. The list bears witness to Jill R. Webster's deep immersion in her topic, just as her notes, which cite documents scattered throughout various Catalonian archives, reflect her extensive research. Carmel in Medieval Catalonia is not without flaws, but it illuminates a chapter in the religious history of medieval Catalonia, and Webster's ideas will intrigue historians of the Carmelite Order.
Readers yearning for brevity will welcome Carmel in Medieval Catalonia, whose text ends on page 132 (there are an additional 68 pages of end matter). The opening two chapters are largely preliminary; the first surveys the medieval history of the Carmelite Order, while the second focuses on the initial migration of Carmelites to Europe. Chapters three, four, and five deal specifically with the Catalan Carmelites. Chapter three examines their history before the outbreak of plague in 1348, while chapters four and five, called "The Attainment of Intellectual Distinction" and "The Two-sided Coin of Secular Involvement" respectively, take the history of Carmel in Catalonia to approximately 1450.
For those unfamiliar with Carmelite history, the first two chapters provide an invaluable introduction to the subject. The Carmelites emerged on Mount Carmel in Palestine circa 1200; the circumstances of their emergence are wholly mysterious, but it is clear that the Carmelites began as an eremitic religious community reminiscent of the Carthusians. By the 1240s, some Carmelites had migrated to Europe, and once in Europe, some Carmelites began to adopt the lifestyle and ideals of the mendicant religious orders. (Even though the papacy did not grant official mendicant status to the Carmelites until 1326, already during the 1240s and the 1250s, popes and the Carmelites themselves modified the Carmelite Rule so that brothers could lead a life of urban mendicancy.) The Carmelites never attained the numerical, financial, or intellectual clout enjoyed by the preeminent mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, and Webster explains why. Some Carmelite brothers were unenthusiastic about the change in the order's direction. The Franciscans and the Dominicans benefited immensely from the fame and qualities of their founders, Francis of Assisi and Dominic Guzman, while the Carmelite Order's lack of an identifiable founder limited its popularity and expansion. By claiming the prophet Elijah as their inspiration and by cultivating a strong devotion to the Virgin Mary (the official name of the Carmelites was Fratres beatae Mariae de Carmelo), the Carmelites attempted to compensate. However, Elijah did not resonate powerfully with the laity, and Marian devotion was too widespread in the thirteenth century for it to garner very much attention for the Carmelites. The Carmelites' timing also hampered the growth of the order, which made its first inroads into European towns decades after the Franciscans and Dominicans had established themselves there, attracting donations, acquiring desirable sites, and thus leaving fewer resources into which the Carmelites could tap. The Franciscans and the Dominicans had also earned the enmity of parish clergy; they saw mendicants who preached, heard confessions, and performed burial rites as usurpers of priestly duties. When the Carmelites arrived in a town, especially a town where other mendicant houses already existed, parish clergy tended to resist the establishment of a Carmelite house, lest the religious pie be sliced even smaller.
Despite these obstacles, the order expanded into Catalonia, a story that Webster takes up in chapter three. The Carmelites established their first Catalonian house (at Perpignan) in the late 1260s; by 1326, the number of Carmelite houses in Catalonia had reached eight, and by 1413, fourteen. As disadvantaged latecomers, Carmelites sometimes wound up in undesirable locations. At Girona, the Carmelites settled in a low-lying area that flooded continually, while the stench of rotting garbage was strong near the Carmelite church at Lleida. Prostitutes congregated and worked near the Carmelite house at Majorca, and the house at Barcelona had to deal not just with the proximity of prostitutes, but also with the disturbing sounds of Jews and Muslims working on Christian holy days.
In chapters four and five, Webster argues that the period after the Black Death was hard on the Carmelites and on mendicant orders generally. Although the number of bequests rose, income from rents dropped and towns cut back on their financial contributions to religious houses. Such hardship led to what Webster calls "moral decline" (xv), "decline in moral standards" (118), "decadence" (131), and "spiritual malaise" (132). Carmelites increasingly pursued relatively secular positions (as, for example, royal chaplains) in order to escape from their straitened houses. Once in the world, brothers sought personal privileges permitting them to evade the rigors of Carmelite discipline. The outbreak of the Great Schism in 1378 facilitated decline as well; competing popes in search of supporters willingly granted concessions to Carmelites and relaxed the observance of their Rule. Webster dates Carmelite 'decadence' to the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century, but also argues that decadence afflicted the Carmelites later and less severely than it afflicted other religious orders. The Carmelites' relative obscurity, rooted in the order's "size and later arrival in Catalonia" (88), partially immunized the order against decline; secular rulers were slower to grant positions and favors to Carmelites than to Franciscans and Dominicans. Furthermore, the intellectual attainments of Catalan Carmelites helped to offset decline - at least for a while. Webster argues that "the end of the fourteenth century was in fact the moment of greatest intellectual splendour in Catalonia; the Carmelite Studium [in Barcelona] reached unprecedented levels of scholarship and produced a number of very distinguished theologians." (88) Nonetheless, the existence of some learned scholars could not make up for the deviations from the Carmelite ideal; "the increase in abuses...in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries initiated a period of unprecedented decline in religious life." (117)
Carmel in Medieval Catalonia advances two new arguments with the potential to change historians' understanding of the Carmelite Order's development. Firstly, Webster makes a case for the arrival of the Carmelites in Europe by 1206, a date approximately thirty years earlier than the usual dates (1238, sometimes 1235) given for the Carmelites' European debut. Secondly, she argues for the existence of an early-fifteenth- century Catalonian reform movement that paralleled similar reform movements elsewhere in Europe and prefigured better- known Spanish reform movements of the late fifteenth century and sixteenth century. The argument in favor of a fledgling reform movement during the early fifteenth century, although not airtight, seems sound enough. Webster demonstrates that some early-fifteenth-century Carmelites criticized their order's current worldliness, and that these critics were often associated with the house at Peralada, which had always been relatively contemplative in orientation. Webster also shows that there were simultaneous (but not always successful) attempts at Salgar and Terrassa to establish houses similar to the house at Peralada. The evidence is circumstantial, but the foundation of the houses at Salgar and Terrassa can be interpreted plausibly as an attempt "to return to the purity of Carmel". (5)
The argument that Carmelites arrived in Europe as early as 1206, however, is problematic. The only direct evidence for their presence in Europe in 1206 is a document that purports to be the foundation charter for a Carmelite house established at Peralada in that year. The date of 1206 invites suspicion; if it were true, then the house at Peralada would predate the next Carmelite foundation in Catalonia by more than sixty years, indeed, the house at Peralada would be the oldest mendicant house in Catalonia. The oldest surviving versions of the foundation charter come from the works of two Carmelite chroniclers, Francesc Font and Juan Bautista Lezana (the latter simply copied the document from the former). Webster characterizes Juan Bautista Lezana's work as an "early chronicle of the Order" (36), but the footnotes and bibliography reveal that the word 'early' has been used rather generously here: Juan Bautista Lezana and Francesc Font were both seventeenth-century authors. Webster also uses very weak circumstantial evidence to make the case for an early Carmelite presence at Peralada. The Order of the Holy Sepulchre had possessed a house there since the middle of the twelfth century. The hermits on Mount Carmel must surely have had encounters with members of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre; after all it was the latter who elected Albert of Vercelli [author of the first Carmelite Rule] as Patriarch of Jerusalem. It would not be surprising therefore, if, on their return to Catalonia, some of the hermits decided to settle in an area where the Order of the Holy Sepulchre had already established a community. Projecting the scenario further, it is probable that the pilgrims, lacking the economic base to establish their own communities, and the authority to found houses under the auspices of the new Carmelite Order, decided to seek hospitality from the Holy Sepulchre canons. (35) The Carmelite-Order of the Holy Sepulchre-Peralada connection is tenuous, and Webster concedes that the 'foundation charter' of 1206 is most likely a forgery. She calls the document "spurious" and states that "certainly, the foundation of a Carmelite house, in the accepted meaning of the term, could not have taken place at that time". (10-11) Nevertheless, Webster insistently speaks of the likelihood that Carmelites had reached Peralada by 1206; as the book's Conclusion puts it, "The theory has been advanced that this probably did happen". (129) Webster even tries to "take this argument further" and suggests that ...other nuclei of hermits from Mount Carmel could also have formed small communities in different parts of Europe, such as Las Aigalades or Hulne, both areas known for early Carmelite foundations. These small groups might have done the spadework which enabled their confreres in the Holy Land to make the important, and irrevocable, decision to migrate to the West sometime during the second quarter of the thirteenth century. (129)Without any trustworthy documents - in the case of houses other than Peralada, without any documents at all - to support the argument in favor of the Carmelites' early arrival, the weight of so many 'could haves', 'might haves', 'must surely haves', and other various qualifiers brings the argument tumbling down.
Carmel in Medieval Catalonia contains some minor factual slips. The statement that "with the exception of Peralada, all the foundations in Catalonia up to 1300 were in episcopal towns" (10) is not right. Perpignan was not an episcopal town in the thirteenth century; it was part of the diocese of Elne. The statement that "Alfons I had taken it [Perpignan] without difficulty in 1197 and his successor, Pere, developed the first Catalan elected city government there" (45) is mistaken on two points. In part, Webster has been misled by the Histoire de Perpignan, edited by Philippe Wolff, which she cites. It does claim that Perpignan's consulate was the first in Catalonia. However, a broader reading in Catalonian urban history, especially in the work of Jose Maria Font Rius, Andre Gouron, Paul Freedman, and Stephen Bensch, would have revealed that other Catalonian consulates predated Perpignan's. The statement that Alfons I had taken Perpignan in 1197 is also incorrect, and the source of this error is hard to identify; Alfons I inherited Perpignan in 1172, and indeed he died in 1196.
These criticisms should not eclipse my admiration for the book's strengths. Webster has an eye for humanizing details, such as the ones found in her discussion of the Carmelite mantle; after fellow students at the University of Paris had taunted Carmelites for the black-and-white striped mantles that they wore, the Carmelite Order adopted an all-white mantle in 1287. She also tells a story that deserves to be told. Through their transition from an eremitic to a mendicant religious order, the Carmelites reflect broader social and religious changes. Carmel in Medieval Catalonia provides a revealing investigation into the tensions that those changes produced.