Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Angels, Demons and the New World . Edited by Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden . New York : Cambridge University Press , 2013. xii + 318 pp.
Book Reviews and Notes
Religion--a central motivator of Spain's imperial project in the early modern period--has long been a source of fascination for scholars of Latin American colonial history. From the sixteenth-century evangelization projects to the flowering of Baroque Catholicism in the seventeenth to the changing role of the church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, numerous scholars have addressed topics such as the institutional church, popular religiosity, and Catholic cosmology in Latin America. This excellent edited volume focuses primarily on the latter theme; specifically, the role of supernatural beings in colonial Spanish American mentalities.
The role of the devil in the New World has been ably explored elsewhere by the editors of this book, Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden, as well as by a number of the contributors. In this project, they build upon and expand upon their earlier studies of Spanish American demonology to include angels, a fitting addition to the scholarship on Spanish Catholicism, with its Manichean, dualistic tradition of the eternal battle between good and evil. They take up the question of the reasons for the persistence of belief of angels and demons in the post-Reformation period. Noting that Europe's Patristic and medieval heritage had produced religious cultures "marked by an immense appetite for contact with the supernatural"...