Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500-1800 / Edition 1

by Allan Greer, Jodi Bilinkoff

Overview

From the cult of Saint Anne to the devotees of the Virgin of Guadalupe, from Saint Anthony who competed with Christ for popularity in Brazil, to Jesuits who mixed freely with shamans that talked with the gods, this exciting new anthology examines the conversion of the colonized. The essays examine how New World spirits transformed into Old World saints - for example, the spirit of love transfigured into the Virgin Mary - as well as the implications of the canonization of the first American saint. Colonial Saints illustrates the complex and intimate connections among confessional life writing, canonization, and the practices of the Inquisition. There was a dynamic exchange involving local agendas, the courts in Spain and France, and, of course, Rome. This bold collection clearly shows the interplay between slavery and spirituality, conversion and control, and the links between the sacred and the political.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415934961
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/20/2002
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	340
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Allan Greer is Professor of History at the University of Toronto. His areas of expertise include Canadian social history, colonization of the Americas, and cultural encounters between Native Americans and Europeans.

Jodi Bilinkoff is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center. She has published widely on the social history of women and religion.

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	vii
	Preface	ix
	Introduction	xiii
Part 1	Cultural Mixing	1
1.	St. Anne Imagery and Maternal Archetypes in Spain and Mexico	3
2.	Querying the Spirit: The Rules of the Haitian Lwa	31
3.	Diego de Ocana's Hagiography of New and Renewed Devotion in Colonial Peru	51
4.	Old Bones and Beautiful Words: The Spiritual Contestation between Shaman and Jesuit in the Guarani Missions	77
5.	St. Anthony in Portuguese America: Saint of the Restoration	99
Part 2	Holy Women, Holy Men	113
6.	Francisco Losa and Gregorio Lopez: Spiritual Friendship and Identity Formation on the New Spain Frontier	115
7.	In the Shadow of the Cloister: Representations of Female Holiness in New France	129
8.	Isaac Jogues: From Martyrdom to Sainthood	153
9.	Martyred by the Saints: Quaker Executions in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts	169
10.	St. Palafox: Metaphorical Images of Disputed Sainthood	193
Part 3	The Uses of the Sacred	209
11.	Writing a Relic: The Uses of Hagiography in New France	211
12.	Iroquois Virgin: The Story of Catherine Tekakwitha in New France and New Spain	235
13.	"Redeemer of America": Rosa de Lima (1586-1617), the Dynamics of Identity, and Canonization	251
14.	Mexico's Virgin of Guadalupe in the Seventeenth Century: Hagiography and Beyond	277
	Select Bibliography	299
	Contributors	305

Editorial Reviews

"This important and fascinating collection ranges from New France through Massachusetts, Mexico, the Caribbean into Peru and beyond. The methodological and topical ranges—voodou, child-bearing, race, art, devotion, to name a few—are truly impressive. The book fulfills its promise of transporting the reader beyond the saints into "the mysteries of colonial culture." — John W. O'Malley, Professor of Church History, Weston Jesuit School of Theology
"These pathbreaking essays move us beyond the metaphor of "spiritual conquest" to a more complex understanding of colonial American religious cultures in the making. Colonial Saints gives close, convincing readings of its agents, gender politics, visual economies, and much more." — Kathryn Burns, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
"Greer and Bilinkoff have organized a project both novel in its goal and ambitious in its scope, providing a tantalizing and kaleidoscopic picture of sanctity and its cult in the colonial Americas. Colonial Saints marks the first steps in what will clearly be a long and important new scholarly journey." — Thomas Head, Hunter College and The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
"This important collection of essays provides a superb account of the emergence of distinctive new forms of hagiography in the Americas... [and] provides an invaluable demonstration of the importance of a comparative approach to the religious history of the Americas.
." — American Historical Review
"It is usefull and informative for any type of researcher." — Alejandra Rengifo, Central Michigan University,Sixteenth Century Journal

From the Publisher