| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Bruno Léal. La crosse et le bâton: Visites pastorales et recherche des pécheurs publics dans le diocése d'Algarve, 1630–1750. (Publications du Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian.) Lisbon and Paris: FundaçÎo Calouste Gulbenkian. 2004. Pp. 595.
A traditional French doctoral thesis from its obligatory geographical introduction to its seven appendixes, Bruno Leal's monograph illustrates the most common flaw of the genre: a stultifying overload of detail from a remote region, presented within conventional interpretive parameters, completely submerges a small amount of useful information.	1
At Portugal's southern tip—no fim de Europa, in an apt eighteenth-century description—the Algarve, now bustling with new and inexpensive beachfront resorts, was small, remote, and isolated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The region formed a single, smallish diocese containing sixty-eight parishes, with no significant port cities along its lengthy coastline to balance its largely subsistence rural economy. By tirelessly mining its unindexed episcopal records and exploring documents from its most remote parishes, Léal has uncovered vast amounts of information concerning its numerous episcopal visitations, in an era when Portugal expected its bishops not only to inspect their turf frequently and carefully but also to discover and punish those who transgressed essential Tridentine norms. Ultimately, Léal found interrogations from almost five thousand witnesses who made accusations against about six thousand "notorious" public sinners between 1630 and 1750; in all, he has located evidence from 1,422 parish inspections among probably 1,800–2,000 conducted during this period.	. . .

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