Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico before the Reform , and: Marvels & Miracles in Late Colonial Mexico: Three Texts in Context (review)

Abstract

Latin American Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico before the Reform. By William B. Taylor. [Religions of the Americas Series.] (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2010. Pp. xvi, 288. $37.95. ISBN 978-0-82634853-1.) Marvels & Miracles in Late Colonial Mexico: Three Texts in Context. By William B. Taylor. [Religions of the Americas Series.] (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2011. Pp. x, 149. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-82634975-0.) The two volumes under review here are companion volumes. The first is an historical study; the second is a case study of three devotions that illustrate the first. Shrines and Miraculous Images is divided into three sections. The first deals with images and shrines in colonial Mexico, and their meaning and importance. It gives samples of two shrines to Cristo Renovado. Part II deals with Our Lady of Guadalupe, and part HI goes beyond the colonial period to the national period. Part 1 , chapter 1, deals with images and immanence in colonial Mexico. He points out how vital religious images have been for individual and collective well-being in Mexico. "Clearly, the images . . .were more than objects or representations'" (p. 18). They invited the kind of devout response that could lead to direct apprehension of the divine (p. 19). The power of images passed to reproductions. "A copy could still be an 'original' in the religious sensean image exercising power over believers by its actual presence" (p. 46). Under the Bourbons there was a tendency toward greater regulation, although not suppression, of the former baroque practices. Part 1 , chapter 2, illustrates this with the devotion to the shrines of Cristo Renovado. It is a complex story that involves native politics and the fact that there were two shrines to the devotion, at Mapethe and Ixmiquilpan. It was also closely related to Otomi self-definition and identity, as the author notes: On the Otomi side, devotees of the Cristo renovado understood themselves in various terms- as members or allies of competing extended families, as men and women with gendered duties and loyalties, as residents of a dispersed settlement within a township, as fellow devotees, and as Catholics and subjects of the Spanish king under the sign of the cross. (p. 93) In part 2, chapter 3, he begins a close study of the supremely popular devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe. The author follows the convoluted story of the origins of the shrine and devotion, noting the many historical difficulties involved. He narrates the story of the "four evangelists," the clerics who first formulated the Guadalupe tradition. Did they make memory, or mostly capture and codify it? One of the author's most important contributions is a detailed study of the financial records of the shrine at Tepeyac. He shows how the devotion waxed and waned in the late-seventeenth century before coming to fruition in the eighteenth. He does not accept, at least without qualification, the theory that Guadalupe was a sign of creole protonationalism. He also sees the devotion as antecedent to, or at least growing, before the publication of Miguel Sanchez's Imagen de la Virgen (1648), the first account of the apparition tradition. However, he does not mention the surprise caused by that book among the clergy and laity of Mexico City. Neither does he mention that the date of December 12 as a feast day first appeared in Mateo de la Cruz's abridgement of Sanchez's book, although he does refer to the fact that for a long period Spaniards and Indians celebrated the feast on different dates. …