Donald Fithian Stevens's book opens with a murder and a plague. The murder was of Seth Hayden, a Protestant shoemaker from Connecticut stabbed by a religious fanatic during a Catholic procession in Mexico City in 1824. The plague was cholera, which struck nine years later and killed thousands of Mexicans in ways no less painful. Stevens explores the broad themes that connect these two stories: religion and propriety, love and marriage, birth and burial. The lives of a few individuals are presented in rich detail, such as Concepción Lombardo, Francisco Estrada, and Guillermo Prieto, each demonstrating “how men and women made their choices about when and who to marry” (204). Stevens draws mainly on Catholic baptism and marriage records of four cities in central Mexico (Mexico City, Puebla, San Luis Potosí, and Oaxaca) and autobiographies. He also relies on Catholic canons, decrees, and pastoral letters; descriptions from foreign travelers; and Mexican periodicals. The book should be of interest to an audience beyond researchers and specialists, especially the three middle chapters (4, 5, and 6) that detail love, betrayal, and commitment of (mostly elite) men and women at a point when Mexico was establishing its republic.

What makes a Yankee shoemaker's murder relevant “in the time of cholera” is not straightforward, and there is no single question or argument that unites this book. Stevens does not provide a typical introductory chapter to explain motivation and how the book's structure achieves a purpose. The book moves among the public spaces in which cholera traveled, conservatives and liberals volleyed for power, and church officials announced or reaffirmed Catholic decree. He also moves among private spaces in which men and women made capricious and calculated decisions out of lust and love. The narrative veers well away from cholera to courtship and marriage and then back again to plague, death, and burial. These hairpin curves may reflect changing interests and new approaches after Stevens returned to a partial draft of the book after a six-year hiatus. Nevertheless, what historians discover in the archive over a decade or two of work, the ways research questions evolve, and their subjects’ personalities cannot always be wrangled into a simple structure or easily summarized as the answer to one guiding question. The book that emerges is sinuous and raveled, but so are love and death.

Catholic dogma and ritual guided most Mexicans in matters of the heart and soul. Still, it was a transitory moment for the Mexican Church in the 1830s as it resisted or sought new opportunities in disestablishmentarianism. As Stevens pointed out in his first book, Origins of Instability in Early Republican Mexico (Duke University Press, 1991), the church was weakened after the wars of independence. Its hierarchy and administration had withered, its wealth drained, and it confronted both radicals who wished to destroy the church's power and moderates who supported gradual limitations. Conservatives sought to protect the church's moral monopoly but could not forge lasting alliances among monarchists and the army. Mexico in the Time of Cholera demonstrates the church continued to have enormous sway when we view it less in institutional terms and more as the arbiter of tradition and the lasting but “commonsensical” decisions ordinary people made at moments of childbirth, marriage, and death. Steven's book gives credence to Lucas Alemán, a statesman, historian, and leader of Mexican conservatives, who wrote that the church was “the only common link which binds all Mexicans when all the rest have been broken” (36). The parish records reveal this “common link” in the names given to babies, the age that men and women courted, reasons for marriage, sex during pandemics, and the sacraments received before death. Even the famous Mexican novelist and liberal politician Guillermo Prieto described falling hard in love in Catholic terms. Stevens does better than most historians in explaining how the clergy understood the cholera pandemic. He also does remarkable work in deciphering and explaining the parish records from the church's perspective. Therefore, it is surprising that a book framed by the cholera pandemic focuses mainly on the baptism and marriage records but spends little time with the death records (defunciones).

There are a few other shortcomings. Most problematic is the book's moralistic stance on cemetery burials while eschewing judgment on gender norms. Readers should be troubled to read that a quarter of marriages involved girls under the age of 18. Some girls married as young as 12. There is no good answer to why the average age of females marrying dropped to its lowest point during the period this book discusses. Girls received the blessing of the Catholic Church to marry men fifty years their senior. Since the necessary “unequivocal sign of tacit consent” may have been provided only by the brides’ parents, these unions inevitably involved violence and rape (212). At the very least, Stevens may have reviewed the work of historians like Sonya Lipsett-Rivera. The scholarship of Donna Guy and Steve Stern should not have gone unmentioned. Such neutrality toward gender contrasts with the church's progress to create modern cemeteries. Suppose we abandon the nineteenth-century theories of filth, miasma, and changing morality. In that case, there is no good reason that burying bodies under a church floor is more dangerous or less progressive than in a distant yard.

These issues aside, Stevens's book shows the trajectory of a historian making sense of early interests with a growing experience that enables creative possibility. Too few historians are willing to embrace literary analysis as much as statistics or to link the quotidian with the religious in ways not belittling.