Description
Book SynopsisChristianity took root in the Americas during the early modern period when a historically unprecedented migration brought European clergy, religious seekers, and explorers to the New World. Protestant and Catholic settlers undertook the arduous journey for a variety of motivations. Some fled corrupt theocracies and sought to reclaim ancient principles and Christian ideals in a remote unsettled territory. Others intended to glorify their home nations and churches by bringing new lands and subjects under the rule of their kings. Many imagined the indigenous peoples they encountered as savages awaiting the salvific force of Christ. Whether by overtly challenging European religious authority and traditions or by adapting to unforeseen hardship and resistance, these envoys reshaped faith, liturgy, and ecclesiology and fundamentally transformed the practice and theology of Christianity.
Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas explores the impact of colonial enco
Trade Review
"This nuanced and compelling volume charts religion's invention, reinvention, and interventions across the geographies of the Americas in early modernity. Editors Kirk and Rivett are to be highly commended for their clear voice, light touch, and firm hand in this perfect assembly of essays representing interdisciplinary expertise, spatial reach, and thoughtful, carefully moderated comparative analysis. A model set of important studies: fascinating, articulate, smart, and, I dare say, transformative of the ways we think about early modern American histories, religions, populations, and practices." * Sally M. Promey, Yale University *
"How was Christianity not only transformed in the New World but transformed by it? This superb collection of essays shows that the answers to this question for Iberian Catholicism and English Protestantism are neither identical, nor as opposed, as traditionally conceived. Stephanie Kirk's and Sarah Rivett’s Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas is particularly commendable for giving equal weight to both of these religious traditions, setting a new standard for edited collections that seek to represent the hemispheric Americas. As readers accompany an outstanding interdisciplinary group of scholars through the main sites of religious transformation in the American colonies-from demonology and martyrdom to piety and missionization-they will be challenged to think anew about North-South comparisons and the relationship between religion and modernity in the early Americas." * Lisa Voigt, Ohio State University *
Table of Contents
Introduction
—Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett
PART I. COMPARISONS
Chapter 1. Religions on the Move
—J. H. Elliott
Chapter 2. Baroque New Worlds: Ethnography and Demonology in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation
—Ralph Bauer
Chapter 3. Martín de Murúa, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, and the Contested Uses of Saintly Models in Writing Colonial American History
—David A. Boruchoff
PART II. CROSSINGS
Chapter 4. Transatlantic Passages: The Reformed Tradition and the Politics of Writing
—David D. Hall
Chapter 5. Dying for Christ: Martyrdom in New Spain
—Asunción Lavrin
PART III. MISSIONS
Chapter 6. Believing in Piety: Spiritual Transformation Across Cultures in Early New England
—Matt Cohen
Chapter 7. Return as a Religious Mission: The Voyage to Dahomey Made by the Brazilian Mulatto Catholic Priests Cipriano Pires Sardinha and Vicente Ferreira Pires (1796-98)
—Júnia Ferreira Furtado
Chapter 8. Jesuit Missionary Work in the Imperial Frontier: Mapping the Amazon in Seventeenth-Century Quito
—Carmen Fernández-Salvador
PART IV. LEGACIES
Chapter 9. "Reader . . . Behold One Raised by God": Religious Transformations in Cotton Mather's Pietas in Patriam: The Life of His Excellency Sir William Phips, Knt.
—Teresa A. Toulouse
Chapter 10. Between Cicero and Augustine: Religion and Republicanism in the Americas and Beyond
—Sandra M. Gustafson
Notes
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
