Religion—a central motivator of Spain's imperial project in the early modern period—has long been a source of fascination for scholars of Latin American colonial history. From the sixteenth-century evangelization projects to the flowering of Baroque Catholicism in the seventeenth to the changing role of the church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, numerous scholars have addressed topics such as the institutional church, popular religiosity, and Catholic cosmology in Latin America. This excellent edited volume focuses primarily on the latter theme; specifically, the role of supernatural beings in colonial Spanish American mentalities.

The role of the devil in the New World has been ably explored elsewhere by the editors of this book, Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden, as well as by a number of the contributors. In this project, they build upon and expand upon their earlier studies of Spanish American demonology to include angels, a fitting addition to the scholarship on Spanish Catholicism, with its Manichean, dualistic tradition of the eternal battle between good and evil. They take up the question of the reasons for the persistence of belief of angels and demons in the post-Reformation period. Noting that Europe's Patristic and medieval heritage had produced religious cultures “marked by an immense appetite for contact with the supernatural” (1), they address the ways that demons and angels were conceptualized and represented by theologians and the laity, and explore the “impact and long-term repercussions of the Reformation and the Renaissance” as well as “the relationship, interaction and evolution of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ mentalities” (4).

The book is divided into three sections, “From the Old World to the New,” “Indigenous Responses,” and “The World of the Baroque.” These sections thus trace the evolution of Spanish religious culture from the late fifteenth century to the early eighteenth. The first section's three essays examine the intellectual histories of angelology and demonology in Europe, and the creative ways these theories were advanced and received in their New World settings. Andrew Keitt addresses early modern European discourses on superstition, medical humanism, and preternatural philosophy, concluding that theologians’ interest in educating the laity on the folly of superstition, and the developments of medical humanism, illustrate some of the nuances of early modern Spanish intellectual life and should not be taken as evidence of an incipient scientific rationalism. Kenneth Mills, meanwhile, complicates the histories of the devil in Spain and its colonies by examining the writings of two Hieronymite friars who traveled together to Peru at the turn of the seventeenth century, emphasizing the interactions between Spain and the New World, and rejecting a more teleological model of religious diffusion from Spain. Fernando Cervantes, for his part, also emphasizes the negotiations that took place among different groups, but focuses on the central place of angels in the sixteenth-century evangelization projects, thus highlighting the interactions between European and indigenous ways of perceiving the liturgy.

Cervantes's essay segues nicely into part II, which takes a closer look at the newly emerging indigenous Christian cultures, specifically the roles of angels and demons in them. Louise Burkhart builds on her numerous earlier studies of theater as an effective tool of evangelization in central Mexico, here focusing on the representations of angels and demons in Nahua morality plays, and the ways that these anthropomorphized beings communicated their messages via human interlocutors. Caterina Pizzigoni's essay focuses on the representation of angels in wills, another rich Nahuatl-language source that sheds light on how indigenous communities perceived these holy beings. She concludes that these indigenous testators tended to conflate angels with saints, seeing both as special protectors or guardians, with suggestive implications for the study of popular religion. Andrew Redden, meanwhile, explores a similar conflation, but this one of angels with demons in New Granada, which should be viewed within the context of the campaigns to “extirpate idolatry” in the seventeenth-century Andean region amidst growing concern that the evangelization projects of the sixteenth century had been unsuccessful, or incomplete at best.

The third and final section explores the rich artistic traditions arising out of Spanish American spirituality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the period known as the Baroque. Ramón Mujica Pinilla addresses the question of the Church Militant through the peculiarly Andean tradition of representing angels as conquistadores, with Hebrew names and heraldic clothing and weaponry, with which to vanquish infidels and protect the faithful. Jaime Cuadriello examines the functions of the sacred image and the construction of the image of the Indian as a “new man,” ready to receive instruction and guidance from the Mendicants in charge of saving their souls. Angels were often portrayed as guiding spirits who led pious Indians to sacred sites where the Virgin Mary wished to make her presence known, and in the process, the Indians were metamorphosed into angels themselves. David Brading portrays the spiritual geography of New Spain through the lens of localized religious devotions that eventually spread to vast regions of the Spanish empire. All three draw attention to certain continuities in Spanish American worldviews: Mujica Pinilla links the imagery of military angels to the Conquest (itself deriving from the Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Muslims, completed in 1492), while Cuadriello explores the ways that mid-seventeenth-century apparitions of the Virgin Mary were rooted in the sixteenth-century Mendicant evangelization projects in New Spain. Brading, meanwhile, emphasizes the persistence of the influence of local religious cultures throughout New Spain, tracing the regional impact of devotion to angels to various actors, from clerics like Bishop Palafox of Puebla, to Jesuit propagandists for the devotions to the Virgins of Guadalupe and Loreto, to the mystical visions of a Filipino ex-slave named Caterina de San Juan.