Overview

This book uses a gender perspective to examine sermons and other officially endorsed discourses of the Catholic Church in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico City. Analyzing the different ways that, over time, gendered images, metaphors, and hagiographical examples were used in sermons and other documents, the book examines how the church negotiated challenges to its cultural and ideological hegemony. Beginning with sermons from the early eighteenth century, the author follows the evolution of church discourses as preachers reveled in Baroque analogies, embraced ideals of the Enlightenment, targeted women's alleged moral vices at times of political crisis, and ultimately turned to notions of women as ""the devout sex"" in order to combat incipient liberalism. Put another way, liberals after independence were not the only ones to assert a kind of ""republican motherhood"" preachers countered with a vision of ""Catholic motherhood"" that had great resonance in Mexico even into the twentieth century.

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9781498265959

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Reviews

Charles Witschorik brings great skill, sensitivity, and a historian's keen sense of change over time to the issue of how preachers communicated their ideas about women and gender to their listeners. Working at the intersection of gender studies, religious studies, and colonial and 19th century Mexican history, Witschorik has produced an original, deeply researched, and compelling analysis of changing ecclesiastical discourse in a period of tremendous challenges. --Margaret Chowning, University of California, Berkeley This book elegantly places the words of preachers at the heart of Mexico's social evolution from colony to nation state. . . . The mobilizing power of the sacred is brought home by dramatic references to female and male stereotypes that interacted and shifted adaptively over time, producing ultimately a feminized view of piety and the church itself. . . . He has thus simultaneously achieved a longue duree analysis of preaching in Mexico, and a richly informed explanation of some of its powerful tools to reach and transform the population under challenging circumstances. --Brian Connaughton, Professor of History, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico City Charles Witschorik's analysis of the multifaceted forms in which gender was deployed in sermons in New Spain, from the Baroque period to the consolidation of independence, offers an incisive history of the Catholic Church struggle for political space in peoples' imaginaries. This is one of the very few studies of sermons, the vehicle used by priests on an everyday basis, to create a religious public sphere. --Ivonne del Valle, Assistant Professor of Spanish, University of California, Berkeley

Author Information

Charles A. Witschorik is an Instructor of History at San Francisco University High School. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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