Anticlericalism was a decisive trend in Spanish political, social, andcultural life from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the SpanishCivil War. It is true that anticlerical movements also existed in otherEuropean states, but the confrontations were much more intense in Spain.José M. Sánchez recalls this in a concise summary of the violence unleashedby these struggles: from 1822 to 1936, at least 235 members of the clergywere assassinated and around 500 churches and religious centres wereburned. In addition, in the three years of the Civil War, almost 7,000priests, monks and nuns suffered the same fate. Despite this, until a fewyears ago there were frequent complaints about the scant attention paid bySpanish historians to this trend. Julio de la Cueva Merino referred to thislack of research, and even to the ‘historiographic vacuum’, in a summaryof publications on the subject which appeared in 1991. Three years later,Pilar Salomón mentioned the ‘absence of fruitful bibliographic production’, and, as recently as 1997, Rafael Cruz spoke of a ‘shortage of works’,or at least a very scarce production of monographs. Outside the field ofhistory, anthropologists such as David Gilmore and Manuel Delgado havelikewise criticized the lack of interest of their colleagues in the face of whatGilmore defined as ‘as powerful a social and ideological phenomenon asdevotion’, and which should deserve the same intellectual consideration.