Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New

Abstract

Building on his previous research in colonial Mexico, Daniel Reff offers us a lively comparative volume that suggests helpful parallels between the early years of Christianity in that region and the rise of Christianity more than a millennium earlier in the late Roman Empire. Though the focus is on the evangelical encounter and lived human experience, he also pays some attention to sacred narratives and missionary writing. In particular, Reff is able to complement his recent commentary on the classic account of the seventeenth-century Jesuit André Pérez de Ribas.From the beginning, Reff places his perspective within the arc of a pendulum that is familiar to mission scholars: “[W]hat were previously seen as ‘great men’ on a mission of God and progress . . . now are understood as sexually repressive agents of colonialism” (p. 11). In league with other historians of the “new mission history” (see, e.g., the collection of this name edited by Robert Jackson and Erick Langer), missionaries are neither vilified nor romanticized. Instead, the emphasis is on human agency, as “pagans” in imperial Rome and “Indians” in New Spain appropriated Christianity, often on their own terms. Among the interesting parallels is each group’s attraction to the pantheon of Christian saints — not surprising, given the pantheistic belief systems that predated Christianity in both places. This is one of many examples of the Christian “reflexivity to local conditions” (p. 34) that Reff suggests is behind successful evangelization in both places.The book itself is neatly divided into three chapters, plus an introduction and a conclusion. Following 35 thoughtful pages of introductory historiography, the author first narrates the complex process of the rise of Christianity in Europe (150 – 800 C.E.), following with a chapter of the Jesuit missions of New Spain (sixteenth through eighteenth centuries). These two chapters are meant to focus on the role of disease, the subject of Reff’s groundbreaking demographic research, though many more cultural, political, and environmental issues are brought to bear. On the downside, this diversity of subject matter at times causes the chapters to appear a bit haphazard in their organization, as the author synthesizes such an impressive bibliography of varied works on both regions. For the Roman case, Reff understandably depends on secondary sources, yet in the Jesuit chapter there is an overdependence on Pérez de Ribas, despite the availability of numerous other Jesuit writings. All the same, the details and footnotes in these chapters are invaluable.The fourth chapter weighs the importance of early Christian literature for Jesuits in New Spain. Thus, after using the previous two chapters to make comparisons, the author turns to the possibility of connections through written narratives. In this chapter he delves into the politics and practicality of Jesuit reading. While this is not the strongest section, Reff does offer some tenuous interpretations of the role of these narratives in the colonial moment. In truth, the subject could warrant an entire book by a literary critic with the skills of Rolena Adorno. Such a treatment should involve analysis of the temporalidades, lists of written and other artifacts found in the Jesuit missions after their expulsion. These and related primary documents are missing here. In exchange, we are treated to some interesting parallels about the belief systems of each group of religious that explain their part in the conversion encounter. Echoing Sabine MacCormack, Reff discovers that Jesuit missionaries and early European religious held powerful conceptions of the devil. The Jesuits were “as convinced as [their founder] Loyola and early Christian authors that Satan as well as God were actively involved in human affairs” (p. 229). Just how these conceptions might have been changing over time, a subject of interest in MacCormack’s work on Peru, is not as fully developed. To his credit, however, the author does attempt to imagine native interpretations of religious discourse as related to them by the Jesuits, despite the lack of native voice in the historical record.Reff concludes that disease and its interpretation influenced the evangelization process, yet the worldviews of the particular missionaries, as seen in their consumption of religious narratives, played an important role as well. The resulting “hybridity” or “heterogenous mixing of traditions” (p. 244) that Reff suggests is not a new conception for religious historians; in fact, this dynamic process of religious (mis)readings and convers(at)ions is the subject of many mission histories in the past decade. The book is nonetheless highly recommended as a readable and well-researched comparative history of these complicated historical processes in two radically different settings. In the end, therefore, the book is a fine addition not only to ethnohistory but also to world history, as that corner of our discipline takes a much-needed cultural turn. Three cheers for comparative history!