The essays collected in Empires of God offer readers a searching and interdisciplinary journey through the intertwining strains of faith, the human propensity for rationalization and self-justification, and the power of religious identity to both unite and divide in the early modern world. As a whole, the collection “explores the power of religious narratives as templates for empire” (4), through a series of diverse investigations showing how narratives, broadly defined, intersected with the process of empire. The book avoids attempting to oversimplify the relationship between religion and empire; instead, the editors provide a useful theoretical introduction to the subject that asks the reader to multiply the ways one can understand religion, empire, or the interaction between the two. “Whichever term comes first,” they argue, “and in whichever direction one draws the causal and affiliative links, religion and empire were the constitutive forces of nation building, economic expansion, and identity formation in the early modern era”(3).
Several of the book's rich essays revolve around the reciprocal narratives of the “black legend” of Spanish colonization and the concern, in both Spain and in England, to justify colonial efforts through the principles of just war and, therefore, remove the stain of the black legend. Rolena Adorno interrogates the sixteenth-century works of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Francisco de Vitoria, and Bartolomé de las Casas, showing how those thinkers grappled over an extended period with the religious and legal justifications for Spanish actions against Native Americans. Carla Gardina Pestana uses the lens of cruelty to examine English justifications for conquest, uniting the specter of the black legend and just war theory in a very different context to show how “the English construed their own rule as benign in contrast to the ‘Proud, Deceitful, Cruel and Treacherous’ Spanish” (45). Surprisingly, this trope was also applied to the Protestant Dutch, demonstrating both the portability and effectiveness of justifications for conquest.
The role of religion in generating and justifying the dynamics of European-Indian interactions is also explored. Linda Gregerson investigates seventeenth-century English conceptions of their diverse and growing empire, and the role of missionary work within it, suggesting that the English search for a unified community required missionary efforts, no matter how futile. Susan Juster argues that anti-Indian violence drew, at least in part, on a European heritage of religious iconoclasm and violence. In keeping with the book's project of complicating rather than reducing the role of religion, however, two later essays in the collection neatly complicate the idea that religion served primarily as a justification for conquest. Bethany Wiggin and Patrick Erben each examine German-American pacifist communities, seeking to reassert the significance of a “shared ‘wish for peace’” (171) in Wiggin's case, and the way in which the Ephrata Cloister edition of the Martyr's Mirror in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania “created a textual body that translated martyrdom and pacifism into the New World” (215).
The richness of New France's documentary record is brought to light nicely in a series of articles that highlight the strong connections, personal and cultural, between France and her colonies. Allan Greer traces the biography of a single Jesuit, Pierre Chaumonot, “from his childhood in France to his death at an advanced age in Canada” (107), painting a portrait of a life spent in search of family and connection. Dominique Deslandres argues that both France and New France were in the midst of a “simultaneous campaign of evangelization” and posits that the interpretation of dreams and visions “can be called an essential war of the seventeenth century (144).” Katherine Ibbett follows the biography and writings of Marie de l'Incarnation, an Ursuline nun who spent decades in New France, arguing that these works, as edited and published by Marie's son, intervened in the traditional martyr language of French hagiography. “Marie's rewriting of martyrdom and her son's positioning of her sacrifice,” argues Ibbett, “show how even the most extreme situation could be cast in terms suitable for a bourgeois domestic idea.” (189). Cornelius Conover and Kristina Bross provide similarly transatlantic treatments of texts, broadly construed, from colonial Mexico and New England, respectively.
Essays by Barbara Fuchs and Paul Stevens go beyond specific cases to challenge the broad paradigms of early modern religion and empire. Fuchs argues for the essential similarity between English and Spanish colonial endeavors, and she highlights “the tremendous energy required to forge Protestant difference out of England's very similar motivations and experiences” (68). Religious difference, here, is a created rather than a “real” distinction between empires. In the collection's conclusion, Stevens presents the case for ideological (and religious) considerations in explaining empire, tracing the construction of English empire as a longing for permanence, as seen through the works of John Spencer.
In its effort to unearth complexity as well as its intellectual and methodological diversity, Empires of God offers a sometimes bewildering, but frequently rewarding, entry into the interplay between its two central characters: “empire” and “religion.” It provides scholars of Atlantic world religious history with a strong and theoretically driven survey of the field, particularly issues related to conquest, violence, evangelization, and the influence of the colonial world on discourses of religion in Europe.
