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While the modern world has largely dismissed the figure of the saint as a throwback, we remain fascinated by excess, marginality, transgression, and porous subjectivity—categories that define the saint. In this collection, Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner bring together top scholars from across the humanities to reconsider our denial of saintliness and examine how modernity returns to the lure of saintly grace, energy, and charisma. Addressing such problems as how saints are made, the use of saints by political and secular orders, and how holiness is personified, Saints takes us on a photo tour of Graceland and the cult of Elvis and explores the changing political takes on Joan of Arc in France. It shows us the self-fashioning of culture through the reevaluation of saints in late-antique Judaism and Counter-Reformation Rome, and it questions the political intent of underlying claims to spiritual attainment of a Muslim sheikh in Morocco and of Sephardism in Israel. Populated with the likes of Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, and Padre Pio, this book is a fascinating inquiry into the status of saints in the modern world.
When European notions about angels and demons were exported to the New World, they underwent remarkable adaptations. Angels and demons came to form an integral part of the Spanish American cosmology, leading to the emergence of colonial urban and rural landscapes set within a strikingly theological framework. Belief in celestial and demonic spirits soon regulated and affected the daily lives of Spanish, Indigenous and Mestizo peoples, while missionary networks circulated these practices to create a widespread and generally accepted system of belief that flourished in seventeenth-century Baroque culture and spirituality. This study of angels and demons opens a particularly illuminating window onto intellectual and cultural developments in the centuries that followed the European encounter with America. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of religious studies, anthropology of religion, history of ideas, Latin American colonial history and church history.
The Spaniards typically portrayed the conquest and fall of Mexico Tenochtitlan as Armageddon, while native people in colonial Mesoamerica continued to write and paint their histories and lives often without any mention of the foreigners in their midst. This title addresses key aspects of indigenous perspectives of the conquest.
The ten essays in Local Religion in Colonial Mexico provide information about the religious culture in colonial Mexico.
This is the first scholarly study of the life of the black Peruvian saint, Martín de Porres (1579-1639).
To Overcome Oneself offers a novel retelling of the emergence of the Western concept of "modern self," demonstrating how the struggle to forge a self was enmeshed in early modern Catholic missionary expansion. Examining the practices of Catholics in Europe and New Spain from the 1520s through the 1760s, the book treats Jesuit techniques of self-formation, namely spiritual exercises and confessional practices, and the relationships between spiritual directors and their subjects. Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic were folded into a dynamic that shaped new concepts of self and, in the process, fueled the global Catholic missionary movement. Molina historicizes Jesuit meditation and narrat...
The full text of The History of Mexico: From Pre-Conquest to Present traces the last 500 years of Mexican history, from the indigenous empires devastated by the Spanish conquest through the 21st-century, including the election of 2012. Written in a clear and accessible manner, the book offers a straightforward chronological survey of Mexican history from pre-colonial times to the present, and includes a glossary as well as numerous images and tables for comprehensive study. This version, The Essential History of Mexico, streamlines and updates the text of the full first edition to make it easier for classroom use. Helpful pedagogy has been added for contextualization and support, including: ...
This book focuses on the techniques and materials of polychromy used in early modern Europe and the Americas from 1200 to 1800. Taking a trans-cultural approach, the book studies the production of polychrome sculptures, panels, and altarpieces, as well as colored terracotta. The book includes chapters on treatises and contracts that reveal specific use of pigments, distribution of workshops, collaborations between specialized artists, and artistic programs centered on the use of color as an agent. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, art conservation, early modern history, sculpture, colonialism, material culture, and European studies.
This book analyzes Spanish rule and Catholic practice from the consolidation of Spanish control in the Americas in the sixteenth century to the loss of these colonies in the nineteenth century by following the life and afterlife of an accidental martyr, San Felipe de Jésus. Using Mexico City–native San Felipe as the central figure, Conover tracks the global aspirations of imperial Spain in places such as Japan and Rome without losing sight of the local forces affecting Catholicism. He demonstrates the ways Spanish religious attitudes motivated territorial expansion and transformed Catholic worship. Using Mexico City as an example, Conover also shows that the cult of saints continually refreshed the spiritual authority of the Spanish monarch and the message of loyalty of colonial peoples to a devout king. Such a political message in worship, Conover concludes, proved contentious in independent Mexico, thus setting the stage for the momentous conflicts of the nineteenth century in Latin American religious history.
The term cacica was a Spanish linguistic invention, the female counterpart to caciques, the Arawak word for male indigenous leaders in Spanish America. But the term’s meaning was adapted and manipulated by natives, creating a new social stratum where it previously may not have existed. This book explores that transformation, a conscious construction and reshaping of identity from within. Cacicas feature far and wide in the history of Spanish America, as female governors and tribute collectors and as relatives of ruling caciques—or their destitute widows. They played a crucial role in the establishment and success of Spanish rule, but were also instrumental in colonial natives’ resistan...