Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic. By Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster (eds.).

Abstract

As the title of the book, edited by Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster, Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic, suggests, its contributions highlight the interconnection of religious and political factors which influenced and shaped the colonisation of the eastern North American continent, in New England and New France (as well as one case of Mexico), around 1550–1760. Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster have put together a meticulously edited book, well documented by the authors and with a number of cross-references among the articles. (Unfortunately, there is no general bibliography at the end of the book or of each article, which makes it necessary to work one's way through each apparatus of endnotes.) According to the editors' introduction (pp. 1–15) the explorers of the early modern world were well equipped with the Bible (whereas those of the Spanish world would have had access to the book itself only infrequently and if so, in Latin) and other identity-strengthening reading. Through this and their experiences, eventually all of them would be faced with the link between religion and empire, which, as Gregerson and Juster write, can be seen as a causal, oppositional, dialectical, or affiliative relationship. Ideology and commerce also went together, and religion served as an important structuring factor in establishing the colonies and building the imperial nations.