You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
During the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries the Mercedarian Order of friars, founded in the 1220s, underwent a period of reform from which it emerged utterly transformed. This study sets out to examine not only the context of that reform - the policies of the crown and the papacy, the condition of Catalonia and Spain at large, the circumstances prevailing within the Order and the dialogue with its past - but also to grasp the essence of monastic reform itself against this diverse background. The imposition of other than purely religious criteria onto the reform agenda alerts us to the deeper implications of monastic change in Early Modern Europe. For the Mercedarians the result by 1650 was a wholly new Order; the evolution of this process, by turns calculated and unexpected, is here explored.
How does society deal with a serial killer in its midst? What if the murderer is a Catholic priest living among native villagers in colonial Peru? In The Chankas and the Priest, Sabine Hyland chronicles the horrifying story of Father Juan Bautista de Albadán, a Spanish priest to the Chanka people of Pampachiri in Peru from 1601 to 1611. During his reign of terror over his Andean parish, Albadán was guilty of murder, sexual abuse, sadistic torture, and theft from his parishioners, amassing a personal fortune at their expense. For ten years, he escaped punishment for these crimes by deceiving and outwitting his superiors in the colonial government and church administration. Drawing on a rema...
The Frontier Mission and Social Transformation in Western Honduras deals with the interaction between Mercedarian missionaries and the indigenous Lenca Indian population of western Honduras during the early sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries. Using an anthropological perspective, it relies heavily on previously neglected ecclesiastical archival material in conjunction with preliminary archaeological evidence as an integral source of data. A fine-grained description of the local processes of missionization in a frontier region examines the organization, operation and goals of the Mercedarian mission province located in the colonial Audiencia of Guatemala. Summary data concerning aspects of Lenca society and physical environment relevant to investigation of mission activities are provided. The importance of this study lies in its ability to explain mission development in frontier settings as well as to trace transformations within a mission order over almost a 250-year period.
Santiago de Guatemala was the colonial capital and most important urban center of Spanish Central America from its establishment in 1541 until the earthquakes of 1773. Christopher H. Lutz traces the demographic and social history of the city during this period, focusing on the rise of groups of mixed descent. During these two centuries the city evolved from a segmented society of Indians, Spaniards, and African slaves to an increasingly mixed population as the formerly all-Indian barrios became home to a large intermediate group of ladinos. The history of the evolution of a multiethnic society in Santiago also sheds light on the present-day struggle of Guatemalan ladinos and Indians and the problems that continue to divide the country today.
On the night of March 18, 1655, two Spanish friars broke into a church to steal the bones of the founder of their religious institution, the Order of the Most Holy Trinity. This book investigates this little-known incident of relic theft and the lengthy legal case that followed, together with the larger questions that surround the remains of saints in seventeenth-century Catholic Europe. Drawing on a wealth of manuscript and print sources from the era, A. Katie Harris uses the case of St. John of Matha’s stolen remains to explore the roles played by saints’ relics, the anxieties invested in them, their cultural meanings, and the changing modes of thought with which early modern Catholics...
This collection takes a new approach to understanding religious plurality in the Iberian Peninsula and its Mediterranean and northern European contexts. Focusing on polemics—works that attack or refute the beliefs of religious Others—this volume aims to challenge the problematic characterization of Iberian Jews, Muslims, and Christians as homogeneous groups. From the high Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century, Christian efforts to convert groups of Jews and Muslims, Muslim efforts to convert Christians and Jews, and the defensive efforts of these communities to keep their members within the faiths led to the production of numerous polemics. This volume brings together a wide ...
Challenges conventional views of medieval piety by demonstrating how the ideology of charity and its vision of the active life provided an important alternative to the ascetical, contemplative tradition emphasized by most historians
This series of essays, dedicated to the work and career of Father Robert I. Burns, S.J., treats the complex relationship of Spain to the Western Mediterranean and Atlantic on the eve of Spain's ascent as a world power.
On June 25, 1767, royal officials in all Spanish territories, including the Americas, began the process of expelling the members of the Society of Jesus. At the time there were some 2,200-2,400 Jesuits in Spanish America, and they staffed urban colegios and frontier missions. This book provides an overview of Jesuit institutions at the time of the expulsion order, their urban role, and the status of frontier missions focusing on the case study of several issues related to the Missions among the Guaraní in South America. This volume contains a visual catalog of historic maps, and historic and contemporary images of selected Jesuit colegios and other urban institutions.
"The book also features cross-references throughout, a bibliography accompanying each entry, an elaborate appendix listing biographies according to particular categories of interest, and a comprehensive index."--BOOK JACKET.