Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas

by Stephanie Kirk (Editor), Sarah Rivett (Editor)

Overview

Christianity 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 encounters in the Atlantic world on the history of Christianity. Essays from across disciplines examine religious history from a spatial perspective, tracing geographical movements and population dispersals as they were shaped by the millennial designs and evangelizing impulses of European empires. At the same time, religion provides a provocative lens through which to view patterns of social restriction, exclusion, and tension, as well as those of acculturation, accommodation, and resistance in a comparative colonial context. Through nuanced attention to the particularities of faith, especially Anglo-Protestant settlements in North America and the Ibero-Catholic missions in Latin America, Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas illuminates the complexity and variety of the colonial world as it transformed a range of Christian beliefs.

Contributors: Ralph Bauer, David A. Boruchoff, Matt Cohen, Sir John Elliot, Carmen Fernández-Salvador, Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Sandra M. Gustafson, David D. Hall, Stephanie Kirk, Asunción Lavrin, Sarah Rivett, Teresa Toulouse.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812290288
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press
Publication date:	10/01/2014
Series:	The Early Modern Americas
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	360
File size:	12 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Stephanie Kirk is Associate Professor of Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis and author of Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities. Sarah Rivett is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University and is author of The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England.

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

Editorial Reviews

"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."

Yale University Sally M. Promey

"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."

Ohio State University Lisa Voigt

"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

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