The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas by Jennifer Hughes

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas by Jennifer Hughes Julia G. Young, Lidia Ernestina Gómez García, Ramón A. Gutiérrez, J. Michelle Molina, Paul Ramírez, and Jennifer Scheper Hughes Jennifer Scheper Hughes, The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas. (New York: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. xviii, 245. $35.00. ISBN 10987654321) Introduction Julia G. Young (The Catholic University of America) In April 1576, a deadly plague of hemorrhagic fever began sweeping through colonial Mexico, claiming almost two million victims—most of them Indigenous—until it subsided in 1581. It was not the first such pandemic, nor was it the most deadly: Indigenous communities had already seen multiple waves of epidemic sickness and death since the arrival of the Spanish in 1519, most famously the 1520 smallpox epidemic. Yet the mortandad, as it was called by the Spanish at the time, brought the population of New Spain to its lowest point yet, and seemed to many to herald a watershed event. The resonance of the 1576 plague, and its impact on the Catholic Church in the Americas, is the subject of Jennifer Scheper Hughes’s The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas. After a brief preface (Mortandad: Requiem) in which Scheper Hughes discusses the ways that the demographic collapse of indigenous populations in the Americas has profoundly marked the geological record, the book’s Introduction (Eccelsia ex mortuis: Mexican Elegy and the Church of the Dead) describes the key questions under study. It asks how American Christianity was shaped by the “epidemic cataclysm” and argues that the epidemic was a formative event for the Church in the Americas. The aim of the book, according to Scheper Hughes, is to explore the “religious ideas, practices, emotions, and structures that emerged in response to the mortandad” for both Spanish and Indigenous people (p. 2). While the Spanish felt “apocalyptic despair” at the collapse of the Indigenous population (p. 5), Scheper Hughes argues that Indigenous people responded with “survivance” (a term that combines the concepts of ‘survival’ and ‘resistance’). Indeed, she asserts, “. . . the Mexican church endured the mortandad because communities of Indigenous Christians asserted a rival theological and institutional scaffolding that carried into the [End Page 151] future” (p. 7). By centering the Indigenous role in this history, Scheper Hughes challenges the myth that Europeans were the sole drivers of Christianization of the Americas. Rather, Indigenous people played an active role in shaping Christianity from the Colonial period onward. To substantiate her arguments, Scheper Hughes draws on a wealth of primary sources in Spanish and Nahuatl; these include 135 unpublished letters written by church officials in New Spain between 1576 and 1581, as well as Indigenous Mexican texts, especially indigenous-authored maps. In her analysis, Scheper Hughes takes a theological approach that includes a “search for densely layered meaning in reference to the long Christian tradition” (pp. 26–27). The rest of the book is structured in two parts. The first part, Ave Verum Corpus: Abject Matter and Holy Flesh contains two chapters. Chapter 1, Theologica Medicinalis: Medicine as Sacrament of the Mortandad, analyzes missionary writing in order to describe how religious orders came to see themselves as medical practitioners responsible for saving the bodies—and therefore the souls—of Indigenous people. The processes of conversion (religious conversion) and conservación (preservation) became inextricably linked in the minds of Spanish priests, friars, and bishops in Mexico. Chapter 2, Corpus Coloniae Mysticum: Indigenous Bodies and the Body of Christ describes how the Spanish in Mexico “reimagined and remade” the preexisting theology of the mystical body of Christ “in response to the spiritual and political demands of the emerging global imperial church” (p. 64). In particular, they developed specific interpretations of blood, autopsies, and a concept of indigenous people as the feet of the body of Christ, all of which incorporated the dramatic reality of the mortandad. The second part of the book, Roads to Redemption and Recovery: Cartographies of the Christian Imaginary also contains two chapters...