Bishops of the Habit in Castile, 1621-1665: A Prosopographical Approach

The seventeenth-century Spanish Church stood out among other Catholic countries of western Europe on account of the high percentage of members of the religious orders – especially Dominicans – recruited as bishops. While their authority as preachers and theologians, schooled in the post-Tridentine tradition, made them eminently suitable candidates for office, they had none of the secular experience normally required of an episcopate that worked in close alliance with the state. The political and fiscal pressures placed on this alliance under Philip IV prompted an unprecedented crisis of recruitment to the Spanish church hierarchy, of which the religious orders became the direct beneficiaries.