Kathleen Deagan’s edited volume honors and seeks to extend the work of Michael Gannon (1927–2017), a prolific historian of Catholicism in La Florida. The nine assembled essays bring together new historical and archeological findings, highlighting the colonial Spanish presence (1565–1763) in present-day Florida and Georgia. The authors recognize that much has been written on this topic; therefore, this is not a survey of missionary endeavors and their reception. Instead, each essay is a microhistory, focusing on specific localities and new findings and interpretative lenses by which to view this history.

Among the excellent essays, David Hurst Thomas, writing about Georgia’s missions, compares the relative success of Jesuit and Franciscan missions, citing differences in their “theo-visions” and approaches to inculturation. He argues that the Franciscans’ values of “flexibility, adaptability, and heterogeneity” (85) proved more successful than the approach of the Jesuits – all of whom were martyred. In another chapter, George Aaron Broadwell and Timothy J. Johnson continue the discussion by exploring the Franciscans’ literary adaptation. The authors show that the Franciscans not only sought to learn native tongues but also relied on Native persons for writing catechetical texts (as demonstrated by internal textual evidence such as spelling and word choice). A final essay by José Antonio Crespo-Francés offers an important conclusion (and corrective): the religious motivations of colonizers and missionaries were not secondary. The Spanish presence in La Florida was “inevitably linked to evangelization” (217). While it is common to emphasize the secular motivations for the missions, the historian should not, as the essay argues, rush to judge the past by contemporary values.

This volume reinforces the usefulness of revisiting the history of the La Florida missions, especially utilizing archeological discoveries and new approaches to archival evidence. While many questions remain unanswered, and these focused studies are not the final word on the early history of the Catholic Church in what became the U.S. Southeast, they offer a helpful addition to the field of Indigenous and colonial Catholic studies.