In Política y religión en la independencia de la América hispana, Josep-Ignasi Saranyana and Juan Bosco Amores Carredano have gathered together a series of studies presented at a colloquium, held at the University of Navarre in 2010 within the context of the bicentenary celebrations, in the form of 11 chapters devoted to exploring the importance of religion at a decisive political moment in Hispano-American history. Conceived from an interdisciplinary perspective, with the collaboration of historians, jurists, canonists, theologians and philosophers from an array of institutions, the appearance of this work can be seen as being part of the historiographical renewal within independence studies that arose, as is suggested in the opening pages, in the 1990s under the indisputable aegis of a Franco-Spanish historian, François-Xavier Guerra. Although not all the studies in the book establish a direct dialogue with this new generation of Americanists, the approach to rediscovering themes associated with religion, Catholic culture and the religious political culture of the period connects us to recent discussions regarding this world of profound convictions, of religious belief and discourse. Hence, the overview of the new historiographical tendencies offered by Amores Carredano in the opening chapter is not merely routine; it enables us to identify the premise of this collective undertaking.

From the northern borders of the empire down to Chile, this collection explores the history of the struggles for independence and their consequences in Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Nueva Granada, Uruguay, Chile and Río de la Plata, seen through the prism of religion. These were highly diverse processes in which the levels of participation, the motives and the discourses of the clergy and their congregations reveal a wide range of situations, with the inevitable consequence that efforts at comparative analysis have been redoubled. Roberto Di Stefano does this explicitly in his chapter. Who can fail to note the evident contrast between the solidity of ecclesiastical institutions in New Spain, with nine bishoprics, two universities, an extensive network of educational establishments and a well-established parochial structure even in peripheral regions, coexisting with the weakness of ecclesiastical structures in the River Plate? This author indicates that a similar awareness is called for when dealing with the historiography. For example, the extensive Mexicanist literature has emphasised the idea of a church under siege in Bourbon Mexico, yet for Di Stefano there is room for greater ambiguity than this might suggest; after all, the role that the Bourbon monarchy assigned to priests in the modernising process is worth noting, as is the establishment of a new ‘civilising’ pastoral model that is highly visible in such far-flung places as the River Plate or the peripheral regions of the Kingdom of New Granada.

In the context of the diversity of circumstances in which the American churches found themselves, and the particular forms to which the extraordinary shift brought about by revolution and war gave rise, the problems which the ecclesiastical institutions and the Catholic population were obliged to confront were, however, broadly similar. First, confrontation within the Church was inevitable. Did this, as Saranyana asks, amount to a civil war between Catholics? Clearly, in New Spain, the clash between Church hierarchy and rebel priests reached dramatic extremes, and isolated those insurgents who, even while insisting that they were faithful Catholics, were expelled from the community via excommunication. Elsewhere there was greater scope for conciliation, as can be seen in the chapter devoted to Venezuelan independence. Here, José Rodríguez Iturbe sets out the difficulties in carrying out pastoral duties in the midst of constant change, taking a revisionist approach to the figure of Archbishop Narciso Coll y Prat. In other places still, such as Buenos Aires, the clergy was in such thrall to political power that it is difficult to make out the extent to which its revolutionary sympathies may have been sincerely held.

Secondly, there is the question of royal patronage, and in whose hands its exercise lay in the absence of the monarch. The period also witnessed the questioning of the fuero eclesiástico (the privilege of clerical immunity from civil courts), religious intolerance and the relationship with Rome. In this context, the chapter by Mariano Delgado is particularly interesting, as it looks at the Restoration in Europe and the establishment of the Holy Alliance, providing an excellent framework within which to explain the difficulties of the new governments in establishing contact with the papacy. In each case, the individual chapters deal with the specific efforts each made to solve this crucial issue for the American churches.

This book allows the reader both to trace the importance of the religious dimension in the years of struggle, and also to understand the force of Catholic dogma as the root of the religious moral discourse that held such sway at the time. This was, in fact, the basis for a high proportion of the arguments employed in the period. So, if on first reading some seem contradictory, this may, as Robert H. Holden states, be due to the fact that there was no single ecclesiastical voice. As the distinctive voices of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Florencio del Castillo, Juan Germán Roscio, Gregorio Funes, José Ignacio Cienfuegos and so many others gathered together in these pages show, woven into the backdrop of independence there was ‘a rich doctrinal tapestry of soaring speculative flights; an intellectual construct that was born and developed principally within a genuinely Hispanic tradition’, as Saranyana sets out clearly in his conclusion. As he himself explains, late Jansenism, the arguments in favour of civil disobedience, the ideas of the Synod of Pistoia, the Visigothic conciliar traditions and the four Gallican articles were pervasive, offering a ‘rich doctrinal foundation’ that served to legitimise the rising. The political uses to which the different actors put these arguments in their differing circumstances did vary and, taken as a whole, offer magnificent examples, from this reviewer's point of view, of a sensibility and a pragmatism, the virtues of which have not always been given their due.