Anyone who has worked on the Order of Preachers or Dominican Order is familiar with a long-established narrative: growth, decline and reform. The worst problems in the period of decline, placed in the fourteenth century, are blamed mostly on external events like the Black Death. Michael Vargas uses his detailed study of the Dominican province of Aragon to challenge this tidy pattern, returning the untidy experience of reality to the order's historiography. This study is based on the author's database and reading of works of social science, as well as a thorough knowledge of the primary and secondary sources. To help readers find the convents discussed in the text, Vargas has provided two maps, one outlining the borders of the province and the other indicating the locations of the Dominican convents in Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia and the island of Majorca. Vargas rejects the idea that the Black Death caused the province to lack senior friars able to discipline young recruits. His research shows major losses of friars to disease but not as hard an impact on mature friars as once thought. His thesis is that the order already had the seeds of problems within itself, and that there was no period of perfection. Even St Dominic himself had troubles with his early recruits like John of Navarre, who insisted on being paid travel expenses. Differences between friars and conversi long existed, older and younger friars differed, so did privileged friars like preachers general and other members of a convent. Dispensations from regulations were given, especially to preachers general, inquisitors and lectors, because they might excel in study, teaching, preaching and defence of the faith. The problems were not limited to ‘bad boys’. Nor were all the problems focused on sexual or financial offences. Meat was eaten without permission, even stolen; and benefactors provided rich feasts that undermined austerity. Factions squabbled, and some friars came to blows. Friars made efforts to rig conventual elections. Families became involved in their sons' lives, and internal information was leaked to outsiders. A weak sense of obedience made all these problems worse. So did the undermining of conventual priors' authority by custom, in-house roles of senior brothers and efforts of provincial priors to impose stricter rules. These higher authorities were concerned not just with discipline but with the difference between ideas and realities as they affected the order's reputation. Anyone who has studied a religious order knows that a gap always exists between ideas and practice, even among cloistered monks and nuns. The internal problems of the Franciscans, for example, are well documented. Writings about the later observant movement among the Dominicans show that there were problems long rooted in the lives of the friars. Reform was resisted at the local level, and reform often was imposed from above. Vargas's contribution makes it clear that idealisation of the oldest generations of Friars Preachers is overblown. Human problems always afflicted the order. These problems came not so much from outside as from inside. The work of the friars conflicted with monastic ideals of austerity and withdrawal from the world. Occasionally one misses a balancing factor, a look at the following of routine in study, teaching and preaching when no failures of conduct are involved. None the less, Michael Vargas has given us a study whose like can be done for other Dominican provinces where the necessary records survive.