Awards

• Winner of Winner, Nineteenth Century Studies Section's Best Book Award, Latin American Studies Association.

Overview

The Age of Revolution has traditionally been understood as an era of secularization, giving the transition from monarchy to independent republics through democratic movements a genealogy that assumes hostility to Catholicism. By centering the story on Spanish and Latin American actors, Pamela Voekel argues that at the heart of this nineteenth-century transformation in Spanish America was a transatlantic Catholic civil war. Voekel demonstrates Reform Catholicism's significance to the thought and action of the rebel literati who led decolonization efforts in Mexico and Central America, showing how each side of this religious divide operated from within a self-conscious intercontinental network of like-minded Catholics. For its central protagonists, the era's crisis of sovereignty provided a political stage for a religious struggle. Drawing on ecclesiastical archives, pamphlets, sermons, and tracts, For God and Liberty reveals how the violent struggles of decolonization and the period before and after Independence are more legible in light of the fault lines within the Church.

Full Product Details

9780197610190

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Reviews

For God and Liberty provides a fascinating read, and is worthy of intense study. * Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, Professor of Latin American history at California State University, Northridge * Pamela Voekel's For God and Liberty is a tour de force. Her research spans religious and secular archives throughout the vast Catholic world of the Age of Revolution and its aftermath. Providing a micro-level analysis of the Catholic intellectuals and social actors within Mexico and Central America, she offers a transatlantic account of a stunning network of revolutionary and conservative lay and religious social actors whose participation in the rapidly changing political and religious life of Latin America and the world was defined by the language, history and intellectual currents of Catholicism...For God and Liberty provides a fascinating read, and is worthy of intense study. * Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, ReVista * Important and original...By asserting that there were committed Catholics on both sides [of the Atlantic], she [Voekel] distinguishes her interpretation from an older tradition of scholarship that had seen secularization as key to understanding political conflict in this period. * Donald F. Stevens, Church History * This is an important book; it deserved better attention in the final stages of production. * Donald F. Stevens, Church History *

For God and Liberty provides a fascinating read, and is worthy of intense study. * Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, Professor of Latin American history at California State University, Northridge *

Pamela Voekel's For God and Liberty is a tour de force. Her research spans religious and secular archives throughout the vast Catholic world of the Age of Revolution and its aftermath. Providing a micro-level analysis of the Catholic intellectuals and social actors within Mexico and Central America, she offers a transatlantic account of a stunning network of revolutionary and conservative lay and religious social actors whose participation in the rapidly changing political and religious life of Latin America and the world was defined by the language, history and intellectual currents of Catholicism...For God and Liberty provides a fascinating read, and is worthy of intense study. * Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, ReVista * This is an important book; it deserved better attention in the final stages of production. * Donald F. Stevens, Church History * In this ambitious book, Pamela Voekel joins a revisionist historiographical trend that emphasizes the centrality of religion in the so-called Age of Revolutions in Spanish America...Voekel's book will offer a helpful guide in answering it. * Pablo Mijangos Y Gonza´ Lez, Hispanic American Historical Review *

Author Information

Pamela Voekel is Associate Professor of History and Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of the prize-winning Alone Before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico and is a co-founder of the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas.

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