The experiential trajectories of early missionaries to New Spain have been the subject of debates among scholars of colonial Mexico since Robert Ricard's Conquete Spirituelle de Mexique hit scholars' bookshelves in France in 1933. John Leddy Phelan's The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World (1956; 1970) revised Ricard to a point while taking a closer look at Gerónimo de Mendieta's writings, while more recent studies have pushed the debate on the nature of the Franciscan apostolate in the New Spanish kingdoms even more. What is at stake is whether the missionaries had, firstly, a coordinated, coherent approach to the missionary apostolate and, secondly, how their mettle held within the crucible that was early New Spain's missionary complexes, first the doctrinas (missionary proto-parishes) and then other mission sites of the expanding colonial kingdom. To that enduring line of investigation we may add Steven Turley's new book that adds strong analysis of the expectations and lived experiences of the friars. Turley claims that the reasons for going to New Spain and the reasons for staying caused trauma to the typical Spanish, Observant Franciscan; he also questions the rationale for seeing such a thing as a typical Observant friar. While others have noted the latter in prior work on friars, that the friars were indeed as different and diverse in their backgrounds as snowflakes in the winter sky, Turley puts this thesis to a test with close readings of the Franciscan sources and shows that, indeed, one's orientation to the vocation did matter in the sixteenth century.

At the outset of the book, Turley engages the debate on the origins of the Franciscan doctrineros in New Spain and how those origins influenced missionary vocations. In this first discussion, Turley comes in as a heavyweight. In a deep reading of the friars' words from the period typical of his approach throughout the book, Turley notes that the home friary and region of these friar-missionaries determined the conceptualization of Franciscan life the friars brought to missionary vocations. The Ultramontane Observant perspective turns out to be more nuanced, sometimes violently so, than earlier portrayals of it have led historians to believe. Turley connects the various eremitic strains of Franciscan life in Iberia to the writings of specific friars. The result is a wild variation in views on the proper vocation of the friar in a Franciscan house, though all believed in some degree in the eremitic calling of Francis. Lady Poverty and her relations to the friars loom large in these discussions, but the main focus of Turley's approach is to tease out the ideals which friars brought with them to New Spain.

Those ideals informed the ways in which friars viewed their callings. Those ideals also influenced the attitudes of friars towards extensive missionary labors among Native peoples in New Spain. As Turley provocatively notes, the first Franciscan archbishop of New Spain, Juan de Zumárraga, begged for another to do his work even though Zumárraga had paramount access to influence and power in his position, power enough should he wish to effect a complete overhaul of the missionary project of the sixteenth century. And yet he and others among his fellow friars sought to be released from the project of building a Native church in New Spain. Such friars longing for release from their missionary assignments included some of the early, revered personages of the original contingent of 1524. The lived experience of friars calls out here, in their words, to point to the extreme difference between life in missionary work and the life to which most signed themselves as novices, the eremitic life of a friar that, though perhaps marked by bouts of preaching and missions to faithful flocks in the Spanish kingdoms, was primarily the life of a cloistered religious. In New Spain, various interpretations of Franciscan ideals confronted the friars' lived experience in the doctrinas.

Turley then takes this confrontation and applies more close reading to the primary sources, those letters, memorials, reports, and other documents penned by friars in New Spain. Here he sees their reality expressed in their words and proceeds to examine friars' reactions: flight away from the doctrinas, reactions to the expectations of superiors that they retain their vocation as eremitic friars at the same time they performed as parish priests, and how this all resolved towards the end of the sixteenth century. Personnel conflicts, the varying actions of bad apples and true believers, the descalzo movement, and the other ways in which the eremitic tradition revived both in New Spain and the kingdoms of Iberia receive excellent attention in Turley's book. In the end, this is an important contribution to scholarship on the spiritual conquest first examined by Ricard. Turley takes the next step many have sought in recent years: a careful reading of the extant writings of early missionary friars in New Spain to settle in a satisfying manner the complex issues driving the project and the well-known reactions of the Franciscans to the church councils held in New Spain in the second half of the century. Contrasting the ideals of numerous friars with their real work allows Turley to examine missiology and its implementation in great detail. That examination will breathe new life into studies of later Franciscan movements in New Spain and elsewhere, including studies of the bases on which the apostolic missionary colleges de Propaganda Fide and the Descalced friaries built new mission networks on the frontiers of Spanish America from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. For a scholar of Franciscan life in New Spain, Turley's study is essential reading.