Structures of Reform: The Mercedarian Order in the Spanish Golden Age

by Bruce Taylor

During the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries the Mercedarian Order of friars, founded in the 1220s, underwent a period of reform from which it emerged utterly transformed. This study sets out to examine not only the context of that reform - the policies of the crown and the papacy, the condition of Catalonia and Spain at large, the circumstances prevailing within the Order and the dialogue with its past - but also to grasp the essence of monastic reform itself against this diverse background. The imposition of other than purely religious criteria onto the reform agenda alerts us to the deeper implications of monastic change in Early Modern Europe. For the Mercedarians the result by 1650 was a wholly new Order; the evolution of this process, by turns calculated and unexpected, is here explored.

Leather Bound

First published June 20, 2000

About the author

Bruce Taylor was born in Chile in 1967 and educated at the University of Manchester and at Oxford where he received a doctorate in Modern History in 1996. He is author of The Battlecruiser HMS Hood: An Illustrated Biography, 1916–1941 (2005), co-author with Daniel Morgan of U-Boat Attack Logs: A Complete Record of Warship Sinkings from Original Sources, 1939–1945 (2011), and author of The End of Glory: War and Peace in HMS Hood (2012). He has lived in California since 1997 and makes his living as a freelance translator.