These would seem to be two very different books; a reader might recoil from the difficulty of picking out unifying themes and content. One is a monograph, the other a collection of essays; the collection is largely the work of traditional historians, whilst Reff is an anthropologist and ethnohistorian working in a department of comparative studies. In fact, both works tap into some rising trends in historical study, particularly that which ventures outside the boundaries of European statehood into global, comparative and post-disciplinary territories.

With access to the marvellous Americas resources at the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, James Muldoon set about collecting scholars whose work would reflect the comparative American angles on work which he had already explored in a medieval European context, namely the spread of Christian ideals within Europe and the cultural encounter which this entailed, and the frontier ethnic interaction between Anglo-Saxon and Norman on the one hand and Irish Gael on the other. Therefore, although a preponderance of his contributors have a connection to the Carter Brown Library and are mainly north American scholars, he has assembled a good cross section of subject matter and approach. Some contributors will be better known to British audiences than others: Evan Haefeli's work on New France is starting to become known outside America, and here he provides a fascinating essay on the conversion from Puritan Protestantism to Roman Catholicism of captives, in which he reminds us of the ironies of hidden histories, for ‘[u]nderstanding the religious dimensions of the conversion process is difficult because it was the most personal and least documented aspect of the converts’ experience' (p. 217). Amy Turner Bushnell's work on Florida is well known, and in this collection she writes on the spiritual, conversionary aspects of the process of collecting otherwise mobile, migratory peoples for the purpose of social and political control. This has been the subject of many more studies related to the European and American experiences of northern European peoples (see Fur's comparison between Saami and Lenape) but Turner Bushnell's study explores the traditionalism of the Spanish missionaries and the pragmatism of their potential converts. Reff, in exploring the role of the mission on the European and Spanish American frontier, Barbara De Marco's survey of accounts of conversion, and Jaime Valenzuela Márquez's analysis of the language of guilt, concentrate on the Spanish Americas. Protestant conversion accounts are represented by Eliot's Praying Towns (Parker); Lutheranism in Landis's chapter which challenges the idea that this confession lacked the proselytising zeal of its Christian brethren, though, surprisingly, without reference to New Sweden; and a comparative study of the Dutch in the very different settings of Brazil and New York (Meuwese). Several of the chapters pay explicit service to Muldoon's own mission to explode the chronological divide between medieval and early modern mentalities, and thus demonstrate that the Reformation did not always divide Christendom and that there are continuities which encounters with a new continent of heretics, pagans and infidels brought into sharp relief.

Daniel Reff is the author of the first of the chapters in Muldoon's collection, in which he brings his anthropological training to bear on the comparative study of the spatial and spiritual culture of mission and frontier in early Christianising Europe and colonial Mexico. Reff has already published widely on the Spanish Americas, with a 250-year survey of depopulation and the effects of disease and acculturation in the north-west of New Spain, and has collaborated on a translation of Andreas Perez de Ribas's history of the conquest of ‘the most barbarous and fierce peoples of the new world’. In Plagues, priests, and demons he takes the themes of his article, Muldoon's collection and his own research history, and presents them in a way which is challenging for historians. Reff draws parallels between the history of Christianity in the dangerous first century after Christ and the situation 1,400 years later when the Spanish sailed with a mission to spread Christianity in the New World. The themes which draw the book together are two-fold. First, he focuses on conversion narrative, and second, returns to the theme of disease. Thus, in first-century Europe and sixteenth-century America, the notion of disease, epidemic and its destabilising effect on a population can be explained, and guarded against by the security of Christian belief. Monasticism, therefore, in the hands of an anthropologist becomes a physical space of safety, beyond that offered by the injunction to care for the sick, but as part of a ‘reordering of social life’. The massive depopulation of the Americas as a consequence of the Spanish presence, which can be explored historically as a tragic exercise in military and epidemic suffering, is here also a motive force behind the adoption of Christianity by those who came into contact with its proselytisers in Europe and America.

Both studies are patchy. As is always the way with edited collections, some contributions to Muldoon's volume are overviews of larger research, some experiments with work in progress and some detailed micro-studies of specific areas. In this particular collection, some essays are continuous prose, whilst others come with subheadings, of varying regularity. The reader might have cause to wonder how far the frequency of subheadings reveals material which is overly sketchy or diverse. Reff's work is better on the colonial American aspects than on early Christianity, as one might expect. In this latter respect, his material is determined by the survival of missionary narratives, although the manuscript research is American-based and does not venture into the Archivo General de Indias. The centralisation of their empire leaves much of the material in repositories in Spain, and thus we are confronted with just what a huge task is involved in making studies of the Spanish presence in colonial America, and, once we add comparisons across European nations, religious confessions, disciplinary boundaries and chronological periods, the new fields of acculturation research are daunting, confusing and intimidating, but how exciting, fruitful and illuminating, as these two studies indicate.