The latest addition to Synodicon Hispanum maintains the high standards of its predecessors (rev. this Journal lxii [2011], 820-1; lxiii [2012], 599–600). The survival of material post-1215 is extremely patchy with not a shred of evidence prior to 1323 and in the case of the diocese of Almería with not a single synodal trace prior to Trent. We have the few corrections to the constitutions of his first synod provided by the bishop of Cádiz in 1435, but not those of the synod itself. Moreover, the constitutions of northerly Palencia, Córdoba, Osma and Badajoz adopted by Seville, Palencia, the Canaries and Córdoba respectively between 1490 and 1520, are too closely modelled on their sources to be relied upon as evidence for the adopting dioceses. Neither Hernando de Talavera's (it is claimed) ‘mould-breaking’ legislation for Granada (1502×1507) nor Málaga's (?1515) was indisputably synodal, and similar uncertainty surrounds the Seville legislation of ?1490 (if it be so, the first such legislation since Seville's reconquest in 1248). If Spain's late medieval bishops appeared to have little new to complain about, therefore, it is necessary to stress that in many cases we are indeed dealing with appearances only. From the case of Cartagena we know that synods could be of quite regular occurrence, with thirty-one assemblies between 1323 and 1561 whose legislation has either survived or can be inferred, and occupying 240 pages of the present volume (with Córdoba accounting for another 190). But when in the first decade of the sixteenth century a Granada synod referred to a constitution of the cardinal of Sabina (p. 565) the legate of 1229 rather than his successor in 1322 must have been meant. Within these bounds we are in territory with themes familiar from the preceding ten volumes of this notable collection ever recurrent, with the cleric with a falcon on his fist (Cádiz 1435: p. 10) an old acquaintance; and above all clerical concubinage. At Córdoba and Málaga the episcopal front-line retreated to a prohibition on clerical offspring serving at the altar (pp. 412, 612); at Cartagena on the bequest to them of church goods (p. 240). In 1388 prohibition had already been limited at Cartagena to relationships with nuns, married women or relations (by contrast with ‘suspect women’), and in 1475 to forbidding confessors to hold hands with female penitents (pp. 190, 311). All-night parties in churches, with dice and dancing in borrowed vestments could lead to bloodshed or worse (pp. 176, 427), and assemblies ‘por devocion’ at vigils provide cover for ‘muchos maleficios, especialmente fornicaciones y adulterios’ (p. 643). Anxiety on the matter occasioned a pruning of the ‘multitude’ of feast days per annum, to thirty-seven at Cartagena and forty-eight at Córdoba (in addition to Sundays of course), with in the one case the list being reduced out of consideration for the labouring poor and in the other episcopal restraint on their feast-breaking being invoked to provide the spur (pp. 238, 392–3, 461–8). But, as the lengthy entry in the editors’ excellent thematic index shows, above all there was the matter of tithe, with nice definitional questions such as the case of transhumant ewes lambing beyond diocesan boundaries looming large and regularly. Indeed, even in the constitutions of recently reconquered Granada the space allotted to tithes exceeded that devoted to theological arguments designed to secure the religious allegiance of the diocese's ‘new Christians’ and its measures to obliterate the region's Moslem past (‘Que olviden toda cosa morisca’, p. 589). With their instruction in the matter of genuflexion and the nature of transubstantiation, their insistence that Muslims treated Jesus as holier than Mohammed, and their argument that by becoming man Christ had not ceased to be God any more than by becoming Christian a convert ceased to be man, the Granada constitutions are of exceptional interest, and the porous frontier that they describe will be readily recognisable to readers of Brenan and Pitt-Rivers and students of the anthropology of the area. Thus also the pages on the Canaries, as in the case of the colour-coded candles in the superstitious masses of ‘St Amator’ (p. 27), one of many prohibitions imported from the mainland,Footnote ¹ or of the theatrical guying of the Passion, and the superimposition of a Christian system on the ‘indio’ population, so called (pp. 108, 83). Particularly prominent was the attempt at diocesan bureaucratisation, by means of copies of synodal legislation to be kept by all diocesan clergy (Cartagena 1377, p. 158), and the maintenance of lists of excommunicates, of baptisms, confirmations and godparents (especially in Granada, p. 588) and of those fulfilling their Easter duties. Whether such regulation was effective, however, is another matter. For, as the 1563 Cartagena synod acknowledged, the penalty of excommunication ‘albeit perilous to the conscience [was] little feared’. Cancellation of the sanction for non-compliance with synodal measures, especially in the case of trifling offences (‘sobre cosas livianas e de poca quantidad’ (Cartagena 1380; Córdoba 1520; pp. 172, 475), as well as wholesale dispensation from synodal legislation itself, ‘as may seem fit’ (by the otherwise energetic Lope de Rivas of Cartagena in 1475; p. 309), and the surrender of peccant clerics to the secular arm for punishment ‘porque nuestro alguazil puede ser en esto negligente’ (Málaga 1515; p. 614), all indicate not only that the spiritual sword was now blunted but also that its handle was working loose. On the evidence presented here, the late medieval Spanish Church was in the grip of a fatal combination of extreme regimentation and torpid inertia. While braziers and fly-traps were requisitioned to render the lives of Granada's church-goers tolerable in both winter and summer (p. 571), and (‘si buenamente se pudiere escusar’) those Christians’ duty to avoid sexual congress after communion was recorded (p. 594), provincial life continued to be lived along rather modern lines of its own, complete with partnerships instead of marriage, clerical squirreling away of church property, and the transfer of tithable assets to the late medieval equivalent of off-shore tax havens (pp. 533, 254, 210). With the combination it presents of material both sociological and theological this latest testament to the late Antonio García's splendid initiative provides an ample feast of food for thought.