The Spanish church of the Counter-Reformation, with its array of saints, theologians, canonists and missionaries, or the church caught in the bitter political struggles of the twentieth century, has offered more attractive fields of study to the historian than an eighteenth-century church that produced no St Theresa of Avila, no St John of the Cross, no Luis de León, no spectacular missionary achievements in distant and exotic lands. Even the Inquisition went about its work with a desultory spirit that would have shocked the harsh inquisitors of an earlier age. But the church of the eighteenth century, if it lacked the vitality of its predecessors, continued to be an immensely rich and powerful institution in a land where religious practice was deeply rooted and luxuriant in its variety. Moreover, an understanding of the problem of the church in modern Spain requires some knowledge of the long process of disintegration of the Old Regime church that began in the late eighteenth century and continued through the far-reaching liberal reforms carried out between 1835 and 1860. It has been fashionable to consider the history of the Spanish church as a long continuum from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella to the militant and intolerant church of the years prior to and during the civil war of the twentieth century. But the structure, economic base and mentality of the church in modern Spain are very different from those of the church in the Old Regime.

The eighteenth century witnessed the final flowering of the reforming efforts of the Counter-Reformation, but it also saw deep cracks appear in the facade of the traditional alliance of throne, altar and orthodox belief. These rifts have often been explained by the development of an intellectual movement, the Enlightenment, which displayed hostility both to the institutional church and even to the practices of traditional Christianity. The struggle between reforming states and the church over the use of ecclesiastical wealth, the extreme differences between the high and low clergy, the growing tension between the extravagances of baroque popular piety and simpler forms of religious expression, the inequalities of an archaic organization, the uneven distribution of resources between the urban and rural church, all pointed to the beginnings of a crisis within the church and between it and the larger society.

The historiography of the church is, of course, extensive. The shelves of libraries are heavy with studies of bishops, seminaries, religious orders, relations between church and state and the analysis of theological disputes. Members of the church have studied its history with careful detail and much of their work is of considerable merit. In France, A. Schaer's work on the Alsatian clergy, in Spain, Lôpez Ferreiro's well-documented history of the archdiocese of Santiago, are examples of the solidity of clerical scholarship. But many of these works, though valuable for the information they provide on the operation of ecclesiastical institutions, neglect the problem of the relationship of the church to the wider society.

This collection of essays on the Catholic church in eighteenth-century Europe arose from a conference on the topic held at the University of Toronto in November 1974. Although the present volume has been expanded to include countries not covered at that time, we owe a debt to those who participated in the conference and who generously offered suggestions. We are grateful to Harvey Mitchell, Roger Clark, T. J. A. LeGoff, David Smith, William Slottman, Charles Jago, Helen Liebel and Pierre Hurtubise and the other participants for their stimulating contributions to the conference discussions. We express our thanks to Stanley Golowacz for translating chapter 9; the editors are responsible for the English versions of chapters 5, 7 and 10. We also wish to acknowledge the generosity of the Canada Council and Varsity Fund and the History Department of the University of Toronto, which enabled the conference to take place.