Overview

Religion in New Spain presents an overview of the history of colonial religious culture and encompasses aspects of religion in the many regions of New Spain. In reading these essays, it is clear the Spanish conquest was not the end-all of indigenous culture, that the Virgin of Guadalupe was a myth-in-the-making by locals as well as foreigners, that nuns and priests had real lives, and that the institutional colonial church, even post-Trent, was seldom if ever above or beyond political or economic influence. Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole have divided the presentations into seven parts that represent general categories spanning the colonial era: Encounters, Accommodation, and Outright Idolatry ; Native Sexuality and Christian Morality ; Believing in Miracles: Taking the Veil and New Realities ; Guardian of the Christian Society: The Holy Office of the Inquisition - Racism, Judaizing, and Gambling ; Music and Martyrdom on the Northern Frontier ; and Tangential Christianity on Other Frontiers: Business and Politics as Usual. Sacred space can be anywhere and might not be bound by walls and ceilings. As the authors of these essays show, religion is often an attempt to reconcile the mysterious and unmanageable forces of nature, such as storms, droughts, floods, infestations of pests, epidemic diseases, and sicknesses; it is an attempt to control the uncontrollable.

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9780826339782

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Religion in New Spain succeeds brilliantly in...highlight[ing] the rich diversity of religious experience in colonial Mexico.

Author Information

Susan Schroeder is France Vinton Scholes Professor of Colonial Latin American History at Tulane University and the author of numerous works relating to Colonial Mesoamerican society and politics, religion, resistance, and women. Stafford Poole, C.M., is a Roman Catholic Priest of the Congregation of the Mission of Saint Vincent de Paul, Los Angeles, and is a full-time research historian.

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