This is a valuable new offering from one of the field's most prominent practitioners of religious-political and Catholic Church history. Following up on his previous study of the origins of the cult of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Stafford Poole's new book traces the various controversies over the origin stories of the Virgin and the apparition stories relating to Juan Diego. Meticulously researched, the study traces the debates over the truth of the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe to Juan Diego which, according to the legend, occurred in 1531. This book then is less a history of the cult of the Virgin or a history of the sources surrounding the apparition stories and more a study of the political and social controversies generated by this debate between pro- and anti-apparitionist groups—a debate that would have an uneasy denouement in the canonization of Juan Diego in 2002. As an active opponent of the canonization of Juan Diego, Poole argues that there is no evidence for contemporaneous discussion of the apparition to Juan Diego. The book's conclusions are to be expected from this interpretive position. Poole sees the canonization process as one that brought more shame than honor to the Catholic Church, calling it a “sad and tawdry spectacle that did little service to the church's mission and credibility” (204). Overall, Poole's approach is to examine the controversies from the perspective of a kind of positivist theology. The relationship between Poole the historian and Poole the ordained priest thus manifests itself in a fusion of exacting historical analysis and an (implicit) call for theologians to heed the evidence of historical research and for historians to investigate theology on its own terms.

The study begins with the 1648 publication of Miguel Sánchez's Imagen de la Virgen María, the first known account of the apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Shortly thereafter in 1649 the vicar of Guadalupe published in Nahuatl a different account of the same story, Huei tlamahuiçoltica (By a Great Miracle). Thus the controversy of whether the Virgin of Guadalupe actually appeared to Juan Diego was begun. The Guadalupan Controversies details these debates, glossing the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and then following with densely considered analyses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The result is a largely political history of the Church and intellectual battles about the relative truth and historical evidence marshaled over the question of the apparition. The book frames the debates around the conflagration of the debate in the late nineteenth century surrounding the work of noted historian Joaquín García Icazbalceta—who concluded that there was no historical evidence for the apparitions or contemporaneous discussion of them—to a movement to have a special coronation of the Virgin, through twentieth-century academic and linguistic debates about the origins of the apparition mythology. The book concludes with a discussion of the politics and intrigues surrounding the (successful) movement, which the author actively opposed, of Juan Diego in which historical realities were largely overlooked (for example, some of the documents used in promoting the canonization were shown to be forgeries) in an effort to promote Juan Diego as an example of Indian piety.

This is an important book that tackles the politics of canonization and of religious historical memory. It will appeal to historians of Mexico, colonialists, Church historians, theologians, and linguists. Some strange editorial decisions lend a kind of off key to the book. It is written in the third person, which is a bit jarring since the author has been an active participant in the debates. In many sections of the book Poole relates his own activities, scholarship, and even personal correspondence as if speaking of a neutral party. In any case, these auto-assessments are, by any measure, quite fair and level. In the end, Poole makes a strong case that historians cannot simply ignore the questions of theology and that simultaneously theologians should, in his view, be required to seek not just spirituality but historical accuracy. Thus The Guadalupan Controversies is both a political history of the Mexican Church and a polemic in favor of a kind of theology verified by objective measures of evidence. Poole argues that confronting the relative truth of the apparition stories is a duty of the historian as well as of the theologian. But even if there were evidence for continuous discussion of apparition stories, which does not exist, historians can never know whether the Virgin really did appear to Juan Diego. Let us pretend for a moment that there had been a contemporaneous written tradition of the supposed apparitions. We would, in many ways, be in the same place we are now, since we would never be able to know if those stories were real or fabricated, since such apparitions cannot be confirmed by any objective measure. This book thus tends to bypass questions of the cultural significance of the invention of apparition stories and focuses on the relative merits based on objective definitions of their claims to truth. Overall, this is a book that is sure to contribute to those controversies over the Guadalupan tradition and to that end succeeds with a high level of scrutiny, lending it considerable weight as a theological polemic as well as a work of historical investigation.