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For 300 years, Franciscans were at the forefront of the spread of Catholicism in the New World. In the late seventeenth century, Franciscans developed a far-reaching, systematic missionary program in Spain and the Americas. After founding the first college of propaganda fide in the Mexican city of Querétaro, the Franciscan Order established six additional colleges in New Spain, ten in South America, and twelve in Spain. From these colleges Franciscans proselytized Indians in frontier territories as well as Catholics in rural and urban areas in eighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America. To Sin No More is the first book to study these colleges, their missionaries, and their multifaceted, sweeping missionary programs. By focusing on the recruitment of non-Catholics to Catholicism as well as the deepening of religious fervor among Catholics, David Rex Galindo shows how the Franciscan colleges expanded and shaped popular Catholicism in the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world. This book explores the motivations driving Franciscan friars, their lives inside the colleges, their training, and their ministry among Catholics, an often-overlooked duty that paralleled missionary deployments. Rex Galindo argues that Franciscan missionaries aimed to reform or "reawaken" Catholic parishioners just as much as they sought to convert non-Christian Indians.
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2019, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
2019, Colonial Latin American Review
2020, Knowledge of the Pragmatici Legal and Moral Theological Literature and the Formation of Early Modern Ibero-America
Legal and Moral Theological Literature and the Formation of Early Modern Ibero-America Editors: Thomas Duve and Otto Danwerth Knowledge of the pragmatici sheds new light on pragmatic normative literature (mainly from the religious sphere), a genre crucial for the formation of normative orders in early modern Ibero-America. Long underrated by legal historical scholarship, these media-manuals for confessors, catechisms, and moral theological literature-selected and localised normative knowledge for the colonial worlds and thus shaped the language of normativity. The eleven chapters of this book explore the circulation and the uses of pragmatic normative texts in the Iberian peninsula, in New Spain, Peru, New Granada and Brazil. The book reveals the functions and intellectual achievements of pragmatic literature, which condensed normative knowledge, drawing on medieval scholarly practices of 'epitomisation' , and links the genre with early modern legal culture. Readership All interested in the legal history, the history of knowledge and book history in early modern times, especially with regard to colonial Ibero-America.
2018
In the middle of the eighteenth century, Franciscan martyr portraits became popular in monastic spaces of the Spanish viceroyalties of central Mexico. To visually construct the meritorious life of these martyrs, artists drew inspiration from hagiographic chronicles that described various Native rebellions, which featured the graphic depiction of the gruesome deaths of friars. The prospect of martyrdom enticed novices to follow in their footsteps in service to God, but also to the Crown, whose presence in to the northern territories of New Spain intensified during the period of the Bourbon reforms. In this essay, I explore this propagandistic approach to martyr images by analyzing examples anchored to the Franciscan missionary history of New Mexico.
2018, Catholic Historical Review
2007, History Compass
Recent scholarship makes a case for examining the Atlantic world as a Catholic space throughout the Early Modern period. The Catholic Church was the most expansive and broadly flung of the different religious institutions in the West throughout the Early Modern period. For better or worse, the Catholic spiritual tradition was also a critical force in shaping cultures on both sides of the ocean, and it was also itself informed by the many cultures it encountered. While historians on both sides of the Atlantic remain region-centric in their focus, this article will suggest that a comparative examination of the Catholic tradition in a broader cultural context will best shed light on the resiliency of this tradition in an age of spiritual upheaval.
SMT
F or more than 70 years, The Americas, a publication of the Academy of American Franciscan History, has been a leading forum for scholars studying the history of Spanish America's colonial missions. As the articles collected from the journal for this special issue show, the general trend has been to move beyond the hagiographic treatment of missionaries and towards a more complex understanding of the historical roles played by the colonial missions in rural life. While scholars such as Robert Ricard in the 1930s once posited a one-way " spiritual conquest " that cast native peoples as passive receptacles for Catholicism and European culture, such a view is no longer tenable, for several reasons. 1 First, since then scholars have demonstrated how the durability of indigenous cultural systems influenced the acceptance, rejection, or modification of Catholic teachings to form new kinds of syncretic and hybrid belief structures. Second, scholars have come to recognize the ways in which the " local " and idiosyncratic flavor of Spanish Catholicism also contributed to this hybridity, as did the missionaries' adaptation of their teachings through the use of indigenous languages and local forms of ritual expression. 2 Finally, recent scholarship has also begun to explore the contested nature of power within the missions and the larger spiritual economy that connected the missions, the missionaries, and native societies to the broader political and cultural terrain.
1991, Ucla Historical Journal
2010
2017, California History
In 1833 a group of Mexican-born Franciscans from the College of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Zacatecas was sent to Alta California to replace their Spanish confreres in several of the northern missions. The Franciscan priests were not prepared, however, for the situation they would encounter as a result of mission secularization. With missions in decay and stripped of both their resources and their native inhabitants, these priests eventually found themselves marginalized in a society in which their Spanish predecessors had been protagonists. The political changes of the 1840s, from local insurrections against Mexican authorities and inter-Californio rivalries to the difficulties of U.S. military occupation, forced a shift in identity among some of these friars. No longer missionaries, they had to adapt to a hand-to-mouth existence and the lifestyle of an itinerant pastor, while seeking wherever possible to advocate for Native rights. Beginning with H. H. Bancroft, California historians often portrayed the priests' unorthodox lifestyles as the result of corruption and ignorance. A closer look at the life of one of these friars, José María Suárez del Real, helps contextualize their choices within the trying circumstances of years of upheaval and uncertainty.
This is the first chapter of my dissertation, "Imperial Education: Colonial Colleges, Indigenous Elites, and Cultural Syncretism in New Spain (1521-1605) and the British Raj (1817-1855)." It lays out the case for comparison between the two colonial milieus and for setting up a framework of comparative cultural analysis for projects of colonial acculturation and syncretism.
Examines the role of black saints in the new global era of Catholicism and the clergy's attempt to bring non-European peoples within the fold the Church. Hagiographers consequently developed an archetype of the black saint, leading to new ways of talking about spirituality and color difference that circulated widely throughout the Catholic world; such rhetoric was ground in metaphors of light, exemplified by their use of the "candidez" to describe the black saints' souls.
The first in-depth analysis of the advocation of the Virgin of the Macana--a devotion promoted by the Franciscans of Mexico in the eighteenth century connected to the Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico. The essay illustrates a range of previously unpublished images, and provides fresh observations on the construction of devotional images in a colonial context.
This article examines the language policies of sixteenth-century Mexico, aiming more generally to illuminate efforts by Mexican bishops to foster conversions to Christianity. At various points throughout the colonial era, the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church propagated the use of Castilian among Amerindians; leaders of these institutions, however, also encouraged priests to study indigenous languages. That Spanish authorities appear to have never settled on a firm language policy has puzzled modern scholars, who have viewed the Crown and its churchmen as vacillating between " pro-indigenous " and " pro-Castilian " sentiments. This article suggests, however, that Mexico's bishops intentionally extended simultaneous support to both indigenous languages and Castilian. Church and Crown officials tended to avoid firm ideological commitments to one language; instead they made practical decisions, concluding that different contexts called for distinct languages. An examination of the decisions made by leading churchmen offers insight into how they helped to create a Spanish-American religious landscape in which both indigenous and Spanish elements co-existed.
1998, Journal for the scientific study of religion
2015, Latin American Research Review
2005, History of political economy
2007, Cambridge History of Christianity
A synthesis of the historical context and examination of the distinctive elements of the theology and liturgy of Reformed Christianity in a broad European context in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
2018, Bartolomé de Las Casas, O.P.: History, Philosophy, and Theology in the Age of European Expansion. Eds. Rady Roldán-Figueroa and David Orique, O.P., Brill
In 1555, Franciscan missionary Toribio de Motolinia wrote a letter to the King of Spain criticizing his contemporary, Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas. Motolinia’s coarse letter accentuated tensions between the reformed Franciscan millennialism of Motolinia and the Dominican intellectualist missiology of Las Casas, such as with disputes over the proper administration of baptism and disparate indigenous language-learning policies for the friars. Yet, Motolinia’s letter not only highlights differences, but also reveals many similarities between Motolinia and Las Casas. The moral faults for which Las Casas criticized the Spanish in his prolific works were also Motolinia’s frustrations with Las Casas. After discussing differences, this chapter matches arguments of Las Casas and Motolinia to show when and how they both condemned incorrect facts, unnecessary insults, an abandonment of their common cause, a failure to forgive, and the character flaws of hypocrisy, dishonesty, zeal, and pride.
Volume One of the history of Catholicism in North America
Early modern Christian missionaries often learnt about other cultures in remarkable depth, and made an extremely important contribution to the writing of ethnog-raphy and to the global circulation of knowledge. While their cultural insight was usually built upon linguistic expertise, missionary writings were of a complex nature , often combining scientific observations and historical speculations with wider rhetorical aims. In fact, issues such as accommodation to local customs became complex ideological battlegrounds. Whilst an earlier historiography may have been tempted to emphasize either the pioneering character of the Christian missionaries as proto-anthropologists, or – in a more critical fashion – their Eurocentric ideological agendas, there is growing awareness of the crucial importance of the native mediators who acted as knowledge brokers, and who also had their own personal agendas and cultural biases. However, the cultural interactions did not end here: in parallel to these complex acts of local translation, missionaries also 'translated' cultural diversity in another direction, to the European Republic of Letters, where they increasingly had to defend religious orthodoxy in the context of a rapidly changing intellectual landscape.
2011, Architecture of Thought
chapter 2 in Architecture of Thought
2015
This book is about religious women’s contributions to others’ salvation in seventeenth and eighteenth century Spanish America and the Philippines, a subject that has been little studied in previous research. In this investigation, special emphasis is put on aspects of the colonial gender relations that have bearing on the intricate relationships between the apostolic and contemplative forms of religious life as presented in colonial texts by and about these women. The majority of them were nuns, who lived a life in enclosure, a fact that in a most concrete way constrained the physical mobility normally seen as a presupposition for apostolic endeavours. Despite the constrictions of space and agency that were related to their female gender, many women in the Spanish colonial empire, whether nuns or other contemplatives, were said to have functions in the missionary enterprise. As a consequence of their love of God and neighbour, they felt a vocation for missionary work, they prayed and suffered for the salvation of others, they taught and counselled people who came to them with their religious and moral queries, and some claimed that they were transported in spirit to the mission frontiers where they carried out similar work as the male missionaries, albeit in a supernatural way.
In this article, I explore the parallel responses of two groups of colonial subjects who were confronted with the institutional changes that occurred in the context of Enlightenment ideas in eighteenth-century Mexico: Creole clerics headed by the Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero; and native religious men who petitioned to colonial authorities and the crown for additional spaces for the education of indigenous men.
2016, Holy See’s Archives as Sources for American history ed. by Kathleen Cummings and Matteo Sanfilippo
This essay analyzes papal governance of sacramental matters from the pontificates of Paul III to Benedict XIV, providing an overview of positions adopted over the long term pertaining to sacraments for the faithful in the New World. It also examines the manner and timing of the construction of the magisterial and judicial function of the papacy regarding the governance of the sacraments for new converts in the New World. Over 220 years, papal authority granted special abilities and adjudicated in specific situations with ever-increasing attention. Benedict XIV confirmed the legislation of the Roman Congregations, incorporating it into his own measures.
2005, Archivium historicum societatis iesu
In the colonial theater of New Spain, multiple actors utilized the rhetoric of disease to discuss and describe the ongoing discoveries of indigenous traditional religion, which they termed idolatry. Focusing primarily on Yucatán, this article closely analyzes these usages, arguing that the two primary modes of understanding the spread of illness in the early modern world, that of miasmic factors and that of contagion, provided rationalizations for the perseverance of idolatrous practices, informed the institutionalized prevention of these heretical acts, and ultimately provided models for their possible cure. As the definition of idolatry was expanded to include all religious crimes committed by New Spain's indigenous population, it was severed from the material aspect (idol worship) that had originally defined it. The result was the conceptual conflation of two of the defining characteristics of early colonial experience: epidemic disease and ongoing idolatries.
2018, The Art Bulletin
Art history has approached female monastic culture in New Spain through the lens of crowned-nun portraiture, a late colonial genre that reaffirmed a nun’s position as Bride of Christ. This has led to scholarly neglect of the image of a crucified abbess. Rather than a mystical bride, the crucified abbess was presented as an alter Christus. The exploration of an eighteenth-century Mexican portrait illuminates the history of the design and its significance during periods of monastic reform, the relation between pictorial mimesis and religious imitatio, and the anxiety produced by the visual demand for sensorial mortification.
2017, Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures Antje Flüchter and Rouven Wirbser
2018, International Journal of English and Cultural Studies
This article aims at revealing the connections between the ideals of renewal contained in the European devotions of the Late Middle Ages and those of the missionaries during the first wave of the Evangelization of Mexico. Inspired by a variety of spiritual movements aimed at building an indigenous church and centred on upholding the Law of Christ, these missionaries concur with both the reformers of the Brethren of the Common Life and Luther's political philosophy of attaining a perfect communitas. This research focuses on demonstrating how the ideals of spiritual renewal articulated by Franciscan mystics and missionaries in the Americas embraced the same theological sources as those used by Groote, Eckhart and à Kempis in the Late Middle Ages.
2017, Words & Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America, David Tavárez , ed.
The Hispanic Society of America holds a manuscript that contains two Nahuatl religious dramas that up until recently were unknown to scholars. Both are highly creative adaptations of the medieval legend of Antichrist, a subject that is something of a rarity in the corpus of colonial Nahuatl religious literature. This chapter will begin by arguing that the Nahua who composed these texts did so independent of the oversight of European friars. This circumstance resulted in a uniquely Nahua performance of Christianity, one in which the doctrinal discourses of the author’s religious education were allowed to unfold in a relatively unrestricted way. This paper will argue that the language of the canonical doctrinas was manipulated and adapted in ways that made sense to Nahua Christians. The resulting texts constitute what Mary Louise Pratt refers to as “autoethnography.” By appropriating the colonizer’s discourses, the author of these plays offers a subtle but unmistakable counter-narrative that challenge the colonizer’s negative characterizations of native Christians.
2014, History Compass
Holy women and hagiography (autobiographies and biographies of saints and holy persons) were defining features of the "spiritual renaissance" that flourished in Spanish American cities during the 17th and 18th centuries. Recently, scholars have expanded their traditional focus upon nuns and convent literature to consider hagiographical texts about pious laywomen, or beatas, among them non-elite, native, African, and mixed-race holy women. This article considers recent approaches to holy women and hagiography, which rethink the "marginal" or "subversive" position of beatas and non-Europeans within colonial Spanish Catholicism. These studies also challenge historiographical narratives about the uniformly repressive nature of Counter Reformation Catholicism and illustrate how priests diversely responded to the intersection of Universal Catholicism and local religion in colonial Spanish America. The scholarship under review suggests that the evangelizing spirit of the Counter Reformation and enthusiastic lay female religiosity, which crossed racial and class lines, fostered more flexible ideals of feminine and non-European piety than previously imagined. More broadly, these studies rethink approaches to religion that emphasize paradigms of domination versus resistance, dichotomize official and popular Catholicism, and isolate religious experience and practice from broader and more complex colonial contexts.
2018, Rome and Irish Catholicism in the Atlantic World, 1622-1908
2017, Boletín: Journal of the California Missions Foundation
In this article I reconstruct the life of María Sylveria Pacheco, a frontier woman whose life spanned the decades of Spanish, Mexican and U.S. rule in the San Francisco Bay Area. A daughter of Anza party member and San Francisco Presidio soldier, Miguel Antonio Pacheco y del Valle, Sylveria was born and raised at Mission Santa Clara during the tenure of Fathers Magín Catalá and José Viader. In the 1830s she married German aristocrat Karl von Gerolt, only to be widowed a month after her wedding. Following secularization, she ran a boarding house for Anglo-American immigrants in what was the women’s neophyte dormitory at the mission during the tumultuous years of the U.S.-Mexico War and the annexation of Alta California. She later moved to the East Bay and married an American immigrant. She was also heiress to Rancho Arroyo de las Nueces y Bolbones, which later became the city of Walnut Creek. Her life was profiled in a 1916 issue of Bret Harte’s Overland Monthly. As a woman, a single mother and a Californio, Sylveria Pacheco lived on the margins of the Spanish, Mexican and Anglo-American societies she inhabited. Yet she also persevered in adapting to the enormous changes she witnessed during her lifetime. A fuller investigation of her life can help provide a more granular view of life in northern Alta California.