Description
Book SynopsisPosits an underlying religious impetus for modernity in Mexico, claiming that the Catholic Church nursed a reform movement that ultimately affected many of the same changes as the Protestant Reformation.
Trade Review“This arresting study couples substance and style to transform what could have been a dry treatise on internecine clerical debates about dogma and inner spirituality into an intriguing and lively examination of the character of Mexican modernity sure to complicate our understandings of nineteenth-century liberal thought.”—Allen Wells, Bowdoin College
“Voekel's engaging history of the debates surrounding burials and cemetaries in late colonial Mexico provides a fresh perspective on the origins of nationalist sentiments in Latin America. Her creative reading of wills and other archival materals will inspire historians and anthropologists to think in new ways about the role of religion in early liberal thought.”—Deborah Poole, New School University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Baroque Backdrop
2. The Reformation in Mexico City
3. Freeing the Virtuous Individual
4. The Battle for Church Burials
5. Piety, Power, and Politics
6. The Ideology Articulated
7. The Rise of Medical Empiricism
8. The Heir Apparent
Conclusion
Postscript
Appendix
Archives
Notes
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
