Religion in New Spain is a welcome new offering in the expanding Anglophone scholarship on the religious history of colonial Latin America. Edited by the noted ethnohistorian Susan Schroeder and by one of the field's most accomplished scholars of religion and religious history, Stafford Poole, the collection is both a re-evaluation of several areas of cultural and social history and an indirect paean to Richard Greenleaf, who was honoured at the first France Vinton Scholes Conference on Latin American Colonial History at Tulane University in March 2000. Many of us in the field have eagerly awaited the appearance of this volume, and it does not disappoint. The editing and thematic arrangement of the book have been carefully considered, and the individual essays showcase recent and innovative additions to the field both of colonial history in general and religious history in particular. The collection adds to numerous recent works on the religious history of colonial Spanish America, including several by Stafford Poole, as well as others by Javier Villa-Flores, Susan Schroeder, Asunción Lavrin, Kathleen Myers, Margaret Chowning and David Brading.
As the editors point out, the collection of essays presented here is quite diverse and wide-ranging, ‘representative of the rich mosaic of New Spanish society’ (p. 8). The authors argue that religion was more than just what took place inside churches, but was deeply imbued in social and cultural relations in New Spain. Accordingly, the collection covers both institutional Church apparatuses and popular local religious practices; formal Spanish Catholic thought and informal cultural mentality in New Spain; imperial visions of worldwide Catholicism and local, indigenous responses to those aspirations. The collection as a whole avoids easy dichotomisation of religious values, practices and systems, and the individual essays are nuanced, sophisticated and firmly grounded in deep archival sourcing.
After the fine introduction by Schroeder and Poole, seven thematic subsections (each with two or three essays and short introductions) follow. The first subsection deals with encounters between Indians and Spaniards. Kevin Terraciano offers a suggestive and first-rate reading of Inquisitional trials of indigenous elites of Yanhuitlan and Coatlan in the mid-1540s. While after 1571 the Inquisition was stripped of its jurisdiction over Indians, it had previously engaged in notorious trials against native caciques; the most famous of these was Zumárraga's prosecution of Don Carlos of Texcoco, whom he ordered executed and for which he was stripped of his power as inquisitor. In the case of the Mixtec caciques prosecuted by Tello de Sandoval, Terraciano unpacks the complicated connections of power, spiritual conquest and accommodation and strategy involved in early Oaxaca. He shows how these native elites did not entirely oppose Christianization but struggled to accommodate Christianity into their own cosmology and religious systems. David Tavárez's essay suggests that the resistance to Christianity in Oaxaca may have been deeper than the Inquisitional trials of the 1540s have revealed, as he shows that in Cojonos and Villa Alta, Zapotecs were still actively worshipping prehispanic gods and attending to the prehispanic calendar as late as the early eighteenth century.
Other essays highlight these complex relationships between Iberian and Indian cultural practices. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera compares Nahua and Spanish conceptions of public honour, dress codes and visions of appropriate public behaviour. Likewise, Lisa Sousa shows the approaches taken by Spanish friars to adapt prehispanic Nahua concepts of marriage to Christian ones. John Chuchiak argues that the prehispanic Maya had to confront a dual Iberian system of sexuality that combined formal Catholic propriety with a kind of Renaissance libertinage. They in turn used the Inquisition as a form of resistance to sexually abusive priests by having them accused of solicitation in the confessional. Mónica Díaz examines the case of the first convent for Indian women in Mexico, Corpus Christi, to highlight the debate about the racial nature of religious life and the status of nuns.
Other essays offer excellent social historical analyses using documentation derived from religious sources, especially from the Inquisition's archives. For example, Javier Villa-Flores adds to our understanding of the social implications of blasphemy in a lively discussion of gambling and blasphemous attacks on God. Stanley Hordes argues that frontiers, especially Zacatecas and then New Mexico, were refuges for conversos and Judaizers who used the sparse nature of the Mexican Inquisition to escape prosecution for continuing to observe the Mosaic Law. María Elena Martínez examines the ways in which limpieza de sangre statutes, as enforced by the Inquisition, the Audiencia, religious orders and cabildos, fashioned categories and conceptualisations of castas and mixed-ethnicity peoples in the New World.
Finally, four excellent essays discuss various frontiers. Kristin Dutcher Mann examines the ways in which Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries on the northern frontiers of New Spain employed music as a tool in conversion, but one that in the process also served to construct community religious identity. Maureen Ahern examines the difficulties Jesuits had on those northern frontiers, resulting in numerous cases of martyrdom. In discussing ‘other frontiers’, James Riley and Michael Polushin offer essays on the clergy and their social, political and economic relationships with the secular world in Tlaxcala and Chiapas.
Two essays stand out as more explicitly dealing with religion than with broader social historical topics. Jeanette Favrot Peterson offers an excellent reconsideration of the origins of the Guadalupe cult in New Spain. Analysing contemporaneous discussions of the shrine at Tepeyac and two early seventeenth-century images of the Virgin which predate the 1648 and 1649 publications of the apparition stories, she argues that the cult of Guadalupe and the devotion to the apparition mythology was widespread in Mexico prior to the publications by Miguel Sánchez and Luis Laso de la Vega. This is a provocative discussion of the ways in which devotional cults are disseminated through public, oral culture and imagery beyond the standard written record that non-art historians tend to privilege. Asunción Lavrin adds to her impressive corpus of work with a discussion of female visionaries and mystics in New Spain. She argues that while many of these women left no archival or historical trace, they can be placed in the tradition of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, whose works influenced them. These female mystics viewed themselves as part of a larger tradition of spirituality and spiritual process of knowledge of God.
Overall, this collection will appeal to a wide range of readers. While ostensibly about religion, its breadth is such that readers with interests as varied as ethnohistory, social history, nuns, gender and sexuality, missionary studies, mysticism, borderlands and idolatry will find something of value. Likewise, as the essays are clear, direct and largely free of jargon and tortured peregrinations on method and theory, they will be appreciated by specialists, professional historians, students and non-practitioners alike.
