This volume takes a cross-disciplinary approach to analyse links between the religious and political experiences between European settlers and Indigenous peoples in the New World while grasping the “the complexity and variety of the colonial world as it is augmented, transformed, and challenged” throughout a range of Christian beliefs (20). The collections of essays are meant to demonstrate the “trans-hemispheric continuities and inter-American points of contact” that concerned the formation of settler communities, growing tensions between liturgical practices and popular religious manifestations, and the control of resistant and marginalized groups of neophyte Christians (22). Covering both the Iberian and Anglo religious experiences in the New World, this collection of essays is a multi-faceted volume with a wide-range of experts that provide a nuanced and diverse analysis of the religious New World.

This collection of essays offers a new approach to the study of religion in the early modern Americas by reimagining previous arguments and providing new case studies to consider. Religion in the Americas is an important and often-studied subject and these new considerations and historiographies provide new questions for academics and students. The overall strength of this book is the wide-ranging subject matter: Cotton Mather in New England, Brazilian Jesuits in African Kingdoms, mapping and scientific exchange in the Amazon, and new perceptions of Satanism and their relationships to perceptions of Native Americans. The book focuses on the Americas, but it places the Americas in the wider world by positioning these Euro-centric views in the wider world. To bring the collection together, this book is arranged in four parts: “Comparisons”, “Crossings”, “Missions”, and “Legacies”.

The essays in the first part of the book, “Comparisons”, introduce the volume through analyses of how the Europeans initially encountered and perceived native religions in the New World. J.H. Elliott starts off with general questions about how one should approach religious history while dealing with cross-cultural encounters, which is then followed up by two case studies. Ralph Bauer then expands on the question of how Western perceptions of the devil transformed and offers a new examination of European perceptions by arguing that Protestants (particularly the English) did not initially find Native American traditions to be Satanic. David A. Boruchoff finishes Part I with a chapter about how the spread of Catholicism in New Spain was meant to shape the future. The theme of the second part of the book, “Crossings”, looks at religious exchanges between the Old World and the New. It begins with an essay by David D. Hall to answer the question posed by a doctoral student, “What must I know about seventeenth-century New England” (109)? This chapter uses the sacrament of baptism as a social practice as a way to examine the historiography of the period and the Atlantic exchanges that occurred. The chapter is followed up by Asunción Lavrin’s comparative examination of the concept of martyrdom in the Spanish New World and the Orient. Part III, “Missions”, examines new approaches to the religious exchange between colonists and the colonized. Matt Cohen offers a philological approach to examine religious change and exchange between Native Americans and Puritans with a focus on “reciprocity” and “piety” amongst the Native American community, which has had little study. This chapter is followed up by Júnia Ferreira Furtado’s case study about the mission to the African kingdom, Dahomey, undertaken by Brazilian Catholic priests, Cipriano Pieres Sardinha and Vincente Ferreira Pires between 1796 and 1798. The section then concludes with Carmen Fernández-Salvador’s examination of how maps and early modern scientific practices helped shape Jesuit missionary work in the Amazon basin. The final part of the book, “Legacies”, contemplates new interpretations of previously examined subjects, such as Teresa A. Toulouse essay about Cotton Mather’s work, Pietas in Patriam, in which she suggests that the text offers an alternative shaping of the secularization process in New England. The final chapter of the book by Sandra M. Gustafson offers a comparative study of “republican rhetoric, imagery, and beliefs” to explore the relationship between religion and the modern republic using classical writers, Cicero and Augustine, as case studies (253).

Although this collection of essays is diverse in its overall subject matter, the scope is rather narrow as the authors were limited to a Christian lens. The roles and transformations of dissenting and marginalized religious groups (Calvinists, Baptists, and Jews, for example) are quite neglected in the analysis, with the exception of some discussion in Boruchoff’s chapter, despite the fact that they played no less of a role in the social and political developments of the New World. However, religion in the Americas is a vast subject with much to consider, so those roles may be best placed in a new volume.