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NAMED A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 BY THE SUNDAY TIMES, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, THE TABLET AND THE LADY 'This book is a terrific read ... I could not put it down' Matthew Restall, Literary Review The 'conquistadores', the early explorers and settlers of Spanish America, have become the stuff of legends and nightmares. In their own time, they were glorified as heroic adventurers, spreading Christian culture and helping to build an empire unlike any the world had ever seen. Today, they stand condemned for their cruelty and exploitation, as men who decimated the ancient civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas, and carried out horrific atrocities in their pursuit of gold and glory. In Conquistad...
"The 'conquistadores', the early explorers and settlers of Spanish America, have become the stuff of legends and nightmares. In their own time, they were glorified as heroic adventurers, spreading Christian culture and helping to build an empire unlike any the world had ever seen. Today, they stand condemned for their cruelty and exploitation, as men who decimated the ancient civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas, and carried out horrific atrocities in their pursuit of gold and glory. In Conquistadores, Mexican historian Fernando Cervantes cuts through the layers of myth and fiction to immerse the reader in the world of the late-medieval imperialist. It is a world as unfamiliar to us as ...
Until the end of the eighteenth century, missionaries to the New World agreed that diabolism lay at the heart of the Native American belief system and at the root of their own failure to establish a church purged of Satan and pagan superstition. The Devil mattered, and he occupied a central place in discussions of all non-Christian religious systems and in the bitter disputes over how to combat them. In this elegant and sensitive analysis, Fernando Cervantes gives the Devil his due, illuminating a neglected aspect of the European encounter with America and setting the full history of the "spiritual conquest" in a rich and original context. He reveals how Native Americans reinterpreted the vi...
The Inquisition has become a byword for persecution and intolerance, and is often given as a reason for distrusting the Catholic Church. This booklet looks at what led up to this most controversial chapter in the Church's history, what really happened during it, and what changes of perspective led to Pope John Paul's famous 'apology' in 1997.
The Mexican aristocracy today is simultaneously an anachronism and a testimony to the persistence of social institutions. Shut out from political power by the democratization movements of the twentieth century, stripped of the basis of its great wealth by land reforms in the 1930s, the aristocracy nonetheless maintains a strong sense of group identity through the deeply held belief that their ancestors were the architects and rulers of Mexico for nearly four hundred years. This expressive ethnography describes the transformation of the Mexican aristocracy from the onset of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when the aristocracy was unquestionably Mexico's highest-ranking social class, until the...
Robert Walpole foiled the Atterbury Plot by preventive arrests and holding those he suspected illegally without bail or trial. When Parliament met and the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, he used show trials, decided by votes along party lines and depending on forged evidence, to curb the Tory party, to reuinted the Whig party and to consolidate his hold on power. Rich in new material, this book unravels for the first time the scale and international dimension of a plot which posed the most serious challenge to the Hanoverian regime before the '45 rebellion.
Spiritual Encounters is a comparative and theoretically informed look at the religious interactions between Native and colonial European cultures throughout the Americas. Religion was one of the most contentious, dramatic, and complex arenas of confrontation between Natives and Europeans during the colonial era. This volume fully explores the significance of colonial religious encounters. Case studies, organized by theme, showcase previously unexamined sources and offer interpretations that shed new light on Native-European religious encounters in the New World. One group of studies examines the extent to which Native peoples internalized Christianity and the cultural mechanisms that enabled them to do so. Other chapters assess in detail the often uneasy relationship between Christianity and coexisting indigenous religious practices involving sorcery and healing. A third set of essays looks at the broader political and economic forces underlying Native-colonial religious encounters. An introduction and epilogue by the editors provide valuable summaries of the broad patterns characterizing the religious interactions between the West and the Other in the colonial Americas.
The invasions of Guatemala -- Pedro de Alvarado's letters to Hernando Cortes, 1524 -- Other Spanish accounts -- Nahua accounts -- Maya accounts
An innovative textbook for use in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses; accessible to students in financial mathematics, financial engineering and economics. Introduction to the Economics and Mathematics of Financial Markets fills the longstanding need for an accessible yet serious textbook treatment of financial economics. The book provides a rigorous overview of the subject, while its flexible presentation makes it suitable for use with different levels of undergraduate and graduate students. Each chapter presents mathematical models of financial problems at three different degrees of sophistication: single-period, multi-period, and continuous-time. The single-period and multi-perio...
The notion of an infernal place of punishment for 'undesired' elements in human culture and human nature has a long history both as religious idea and as cultural metaphor. This book brings together a wide array of scholars who examine hell as an idea within the Christian tradition and its 'afterlife' in historical and contemporary imagination. Leading scholars grapple with the construction and meaning of hell in the past and investigate its modern utility as a means to describe what is perceived as horrific or undesirable in modern culture. While the idea of an infernal region of punishment was largely developed in the context of early Jewish and Christian religious culture, it remains a ce...