Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic

Abstract

At first glance this volume might seem to have limited interest and utility for historians of Latin America since only 2 of its 12 chapters deal directly with Spanish America and none with Brazil, but that would be a misleading conclusion for a number of reasons. The editors have brought together 12 scholars (5 historians and 7 literary specialists) to address the essential paradox of early modern empires that based their creation and expansion on supposed divine mandates, but that simultaneously provoked moral and ethical questioning of the violence and exploitation inherent in their creations. To varying degrees this was true of all the early modern Atlantic empires, Protestant and Catholic alike, and so their commonality and the variations between them provide numerous opportunities for comparison and contrast. Although a number of the articles included here do not actually attempt that task and are mostly limited to one imperial area, others specifically examine the contacts, interrelationships, and parallels between the English and Spanish empires.Two essays deal directly with the Spanish Empire. The content and argument of Rolena Adorno’s essay, which leads off the collection, are already well known to many HAHR readers, since this material was included in two chapters of her book Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative (Yale University Press, 2007). Here, Adorno reviews the theological and juridical questions provoked by the papal bulls of 1493 and the well-known arguments of Francisco de Vitoria and the Salamanca Dominicans in defense of indigenous rights. She then provides a commentary on the debate between Sepúlveda and Las Casas on the questions of “just war,” the encomienda, and Castile’s rights to the Indies that emphasizes the mixture of philosophy, theology, and law mustered by both sides. Her point that these debates set the parameters of subsequent discussions of religion and empire is thus a useful starting point for this volume’s contributors. The imperial dimension of religion is the subject of Cornelius Conover’s study, “Catholic Saints in Spain’s Atlantic Empire.” Conover challenges William Christian’s argument about particular devotions as expressions of localism as well as Antonio Rubial’s emphasis on a growing criollismo in the choice of saints to honor. He argues instead that the crown’s control of the liturgical calendar reinforced the authority of the empire despite local pride in creole saints, and thus tied religion ever more closely to rule.A number of essays devoted to anglophone or francophone regions emphasize Spanish precedents and parallels and Spain’s continuing presence as a competing model of empire. These themes figure prominently, for example, in Carla Gardina Pestana’s demonstration of how Spanish cruelty and Catholicism were used to justify English opposition and rivalry, but she also demonstrates that these tropes could be manipulated to justify English opposition to the Protestant Dutch as well. Similarly, Barbara Fuchs examines sixteenth-century texts to show how the English used the opposition between their own perceived Protestant “temperance” and Spanish Catholic cupidity and greed as a way of creating a sense of difference that Elizabethans believed was fundamental to their imperial project. Katherine Ibbett shows how reading the Vida of Teresa of Ávila influenced the French Ursuline Marie Guyart, who sought martyrdom in the forests of New France and whose own biography published in the 1670s showed the popularity of a reinvigorated French frontier martyrology. Susan Juster presents a penetrating analysis of Protestant iconoclasm at its height in British North America in the late seventeenth century, at a time when on the northern and southern frontiers political realities facilitated Indian savagery to become linked to French and Spanish Catholic idolatry. The English responded to the threat with what Juster believes was an iconoclasm on churches and violence on Indian bodies.A number of chapters dealing with the missionary efforts in New France and British North America evoke natural comparisons with Latin America: Allan Greer studies the Jesuit Chaumonot in New France, whose command of Huron and Iroquois made him a particularly effective missionary and proto-ethnographer. Dominique Deslandres discusses the French missionaries’ attempt to control Native American dreams and the importance of a struggle over the subconscious as a locus of cultural shock. Kristina Bross examines the “praying Indians” of New England in the context of a number of English missionary texts, some of which saw the conversion of the heathen as an essential step in millenarian expectations, similar to the contemporaneous preaching of Antonio Vieira.As a whole, this well-organized volume challenges Latin Americanists to remember that not only Spanish and Portuguese monarchs and their subjects believed that God was on their side, nor were they alone in their efforts to catechize and integrate indigenous or colonial peoples into these Atlantic empires. Moreover, in all of them, Christian morality sometimes exercised a brake on the political, religious, and material designs of empire.