By everyone interested in the late medieval Church the arrival of the ninth volume of Synodicon Hispanum deserves to be acknowledged as epochal. Less than thirty years after its institution, more than five thousand pages into its publication, and with further volumes already in preparation, the Synodicon continues to afford social historians of the late Middle Ages in general materials for research and students of the Spanish Church in particular post-IV Lateran evidences of exceptional richness. For this remarkable achievement the director of the series, Professor Antonio García, is chiefly, and warmly, to be congratulated. The present volume deals in extenso with the synods of Alcalá la Real (1542), Guadix (1554) and Jaén (1478 and 1511), reprinted from otherwise inaccessible incunables and early printings and concerning dioceses at the heart of the peninsula's only recently reconquered south. If one theme predominates all others, therefore, it is that of the New Christians: the baptism of their children, the prohibition of circumcision, the need for Christian midwives to keep an eye on things, and the maintenance of baptismal registers. In 1554 the need for exposition of the consecrated host was paramount, ‘which is almost universally not the case in our diocese where almost all places are peopled by New Christians with consequent danger and irreverence to the sacrament’. Marrying couples were instructed to celebrate with uncovered, unhennaed faces, eyes open ‘at least during the mass’ and no ‘forbidden and heretical’ songs. The prohibition by the Guadix Catechism of 1554 of other ‘superstitions and rites’, especially the celebration of Ramadan, necessitated the leaving of house doors open in order to check what was happening behind them. In circumstances as nervous as these, small wonder that it was thought necessary to forbid the clergy to fortify or castellate their churches. Parallel with this (or complementary to it) was a sprucing up of Christian discipline: confession at the age of seven or eight and communion at twelve for boys, fourteen for girls. The clergy were warned to steer well clear of nunneries, especially at night, and of dancing at weddings. Sobriety of dress (no long hair) was prescribed, likewise of behaviour (no cakes and ale or concubines). Even so it remained necessary to forbid clerical sons to succeed to the benefices of their clerical father. Priests were required to celebrate four, even five, times a year (pp. 516, 633: Jaén, 1478, 1511). Sacristans (who are also God's ministers ‘en su manera’ (p. 343, Guadix 1554: a grudging concession powerfully reminiscent of the member of Trinity's description of those of other Cambridge colleges) had to be prohibited from commemorating the deceased by placing their bedding and tablecloths on the altar. But the major theme was monetary, which vastly exceeded its coverage in earlier synodal collections (was this a consequence of the availability of printing?). Minutely detailed instructions on the nice question of the tithing of male and female piglets when the litter was indivisible by ten provided precious instruction for a rural audience. Details of payments due at episcopal visitations, of episcopal procurations, and for sealing episcopal documents; as well as charges for every other conceivable deed enacted in a minutely policed society, accumulated in dizzying profusion. Tithes have hundreds of pages to themselves as well as three full columns in the (excellent) index, with the lack of scriptural apparatus for these sections plainly due to a failure of episcopal ingenuity rather than to editorial sluggardliness. Here is rich loam and, beneath it, the impenetrable foundations of Counter-Reformation Spain.