Eighteenth-century Mexico City Research Articles

Race and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City: Architecture and Urbanism at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe

This article analyzes the urban and architectural transformations in the Villa de Guadalupe, the site where the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe originated, in present-day Mexico City, on behalf of Creole architects, urban planners, and clerics. The article argues that members of Mexico City’s Creole elite played a critical role in fabricating a fervent cult of a dark-skinned Madonna while orchestrating dramatic changes to the site of the apparitions, which transformed it from a humble Indigenous village into the religious and spiritual heart of New Spain. The essay focuses its attention on the town’s urban and architectural changes during the eighteenth century, which is when the village of Guadalupe was transformed into a veritable “villa”, a special designation for an urban establishment in the early modern Hispanic world, which vested it with certain legal autonomy. The story of the urban and architectural transformations and innovations at this site is fascinating, given the ambition on behalf of Mexico City’s Creoles to appropriate it and its success in promoting it as the source of Mexico City’s and New Spain’s claims to exceptionality by divine designation. The Virgin Mary’s appearances to a humble young Indigenous man in an impoverished Native village near Mexico City, which became the spiritual center of New Spain, became a potent narrative wielded by the Creole elite, as they sought to assert their political claims in the face of staunch opposition from Spanish-born administrators and clergy. At the Villa de Guadalupe, as this essay reveals, Creole elites tested their political, urban planning, and architectural skills, asserting their cultural and political relevance in 18th-century Mexico City.

Compound Remedies: Galenic Pharmacy from the Ancient Mediterranean to New Spain

Compound Remedies invites readers into the pharmacy of Jacinto de Herrera y Campos in late eighteenth-century Mexico City. The apothecary's medicines, equipment, and records provide a glimpse into early modern medical practice. Paula De Vos asks how Galenic medicine transformed and changed before arriving in New Spain, and how it evolved in the Americas with exposure to new environments and materia medica. In answering these questions, she challenges long-held assumptions that Latin American apothecaries tell us more about colonial than European medicine. In doing so, she embraces the global turn in the history of science. De Vos contends that the history of colonial Mexican pharmacies must include key learning centers in the Mediterranean world and beyond like Córdoba, Santander, Alexandria, Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Montpellier, Florence, Paris, and London (p. 15).This rich history traverses centuries of knowledge through the libraries and writings of several Mediterranean intellectuals, including Galen, Dioscorides, Paul of Aegina, Ibn Sīnā, and John Mesue. The text operates on two levels: pragmatic and intellectual. The former takes Mexico's early modern pharmacies and analyzes their inventories and technologies. De Vos contextualizes how these materials were used, understood, and applied in Western medicine. The latter level reminds readers that this art was never static—it was steeped in centuries of theoretical discourse, reflection, and revision. Nevertheless, De Vos highlights that a very small percentage of American materia medica, despite its evolving nature, was adopted and used by Iberian physicians in New Spain.One tremendous strength of the book is its geographical framing. De Vos recenters this history on the Mediterranean region and in particular Arabic scholars. This allows researchers and students to reconsider the Eurocentric roots of Western medicine and even the scientific revolution. For example, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a series of Arabic medical works were translated into Latin and disseminated in European learning centers like Salerno and Toledo. This corpus became “the basis for the medical curricula in newly established universities of Bologna, Paris, Montpellier, Padua, and, later, Salamanca” (p. 108).Another important intervention made by the book is its defiance of traditional chronological boundaries. Mexico's colonial medical practices simultaneously drew on ancient, medieval, and early modern medical theories. De Vos adeptly guides readers through these layers, bringing to the forefront actors like Mesue. Of note, Mesue's thirteenth-century Grabadin touted several key ideas that later shaped traditional Galenic practices. This included systematically organizing recipes by remedy type and determining how compound ingredients (several ingredients in one mixture) reacted when mixed.De Vos synthesizes the key concepts, texts, authors, materials, and practices of the Galenic pharmaceutical tradition. She addresses additional gaps in the literature by problematizing the concept of medical virtue, examining the influence of material culture and artisanal work on the science of Galenic medicine, and exploring how chemical medicines were formulated and tied to medieval alchemy.The book benefits graduate students and researchers studying medicine in Latin America and the Mediterranean. The chapters progress naturally and balance both the theory behind pharmaceutical practices and their application in the lived world. Chapter 1 examines simples (raw natural materials) and their medical uses. Chapter 2 describes how pharmacists corrected and processed simples. It highlights how Arabic scholars attempted to explain inconsistencies in Galen's work. Moreover, in the chapter De Vos traces the search for the virtue of a total substance and the subsequent “astrologization” of natural philosophy (p. 75). Chapter 3 addresses an often-overlooked area: compounding. Compounding, key to Galenic pharmacy, involved optimizing the combination and mixture of simples. Chapter 4 focuses on Nahua materia medica from the Nahua, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Maya peoples (p. 149). The chapter demonstrates that approximately 110 Indigenous substances formed the core of Nahua pharmacopoeia (p. 153). Finally, chapter 5 discusses alchemical pharmacy, which diverged from traditional Galenic medicine but nevertheless retained deep roots in the Mediterranean world and medieval medicine. Compound Remedies is an indispensable contribution to the history of medicine in Latin America. It is a text that readers will prefer to have at hand because it provides a wealth of reference information and much inspiration within its pages.

R. Douglas Cope (1955–2019)

R. Douglas Cope, associate professor of history, passed away at Rhode Island Hospital on October 6, 2019, with his sisters at his side. He was 64 years old.Doug, as all knew him, was born on August 24, 1955, in Michigan. He received his BA in history from Oakland University (in Michigan) and his MA (in 1981) and PhD (in 1987) in Latin American history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he worked under the supervision of Steve Stern, Florencia Mallon, and Thomas Skidmore. Doug's graduate mentors and colleagues recall his brilliance and his almost impossible humility, a rare combination in the ego-driven world of academia. These qualities led Doug to guard his work zealously; his graduate mentors recall having to strategize as to how to get him to relinquish his chapter drafts in order that they might be read and evaluated.Ultimately, that writing took impressive form in Doug's book, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), which received an honorable mention for the 1995 Herbert E. Bolton Prize for the best book in Latin American history. The Limits of Racial Domination represents a pioneering contribution to scholarship on race and class relations in colonial Latin America. In contrast to previous work, which had stressed the hegemony of Spanish racial systems privileging whiteness, Doug captured, through painstaking archival research, the strategic and often-counterhegemonic negotiation of such categories by subaltern colonial subjects. This interest in the political, social, and cultural lives of nonelite actors carried over to Doug's new book project on the informal economy of eighteenth-century Mexico City, which was, at the time of his death, nearly complete. His research on this topic also produced several publications on petty commerce and notions of the public good in late colonial Mexico.After graduating from Wisconsin, Doug held teaching positions at the University of Oregon and the University of Miami before arriving to Brown University in 1988, where he joined his graduate mentor, Thomas Skidmore, on the History Department's faculty. At Brown, Doug oversaw the building of a Latin American studies program, both within and beyond the History Department, to which he dedicated significant energy over the course of his career. He served a five-year term as book review editor for the Hispanic American Historical Review from 1997 to 2002. He was also known as a beloved undergraduate teacher, whose courses on colonial Latin America, Mexico, the Mexican Revolution, the Atlantic world, Central America, indigenous history, ethnic and racial formations, and, most recently, pirates inspired a devoted—indeed, we might say zealous—following. Doug was an effortless storyteller who peppered lectures with unforgettable details that his former students can still conjure up at over a decade's remove. For this record of dedicated service to undergraduate teaching, Doug received the William G. McLoughlin Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Social Sciences in 1994. Doug also played a key role in the life of the History Department's graduate program and trained several generations of PhD students in colonial Latin American history.Doug was a thoughtful listener with a gentle but playful sense of humor. He loved baseball and often surprised with his au courant references to popular culture. He was also a devoted uncle to his nieces and nephews and a generous colleague to many at Brown and beyond. Doug is survived by his three loving sisters—Melissa Zantello, Marge Fagan, and Marikay Cope—along with his brothers-in-law and many nieces and nephews.Donations may be made to the R. Douglas Cope Memorial Undergraduate Fund, established by the Brown History Department in honor of Doug's commitment to addressing past and present class inequities. The award will recognize outstanding low-income and first-generation history concentrators. Checks should be made payable to the Brown University History Department (memo line: Cope Prize) and may be sent to Brown University, Department of History, c/o Cherrie Guerzon, Box N, 79 Brown Street, Providence, RI 02912.

Notes and Comments

Notes and Comments Paul Kollman C.S.C. Nelson H. Minnich Prize The Nelson H. Minnich Prize for Best Article in the Catholic Historical Review in 2018 is awarded to Brian R. Larkin, professor of history, College of St. Benedict/St. John's University, Minnesota. His article "Beyond Guadalupe: The Eucharist, the Cult of Saints and Local Religion in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City" appeared in the Spring issue (Volume 104, No. 2). In this groundbreaking article, Professor Larkin demonstrates that the Virgin of Guadalupe was not the preeminent Marian devotion of colonial Mexico. The Guadalupan devotion was rising, but always second in preference to Our Lady of Sorrows. He also proposes that Mexican devotion to local virgins, saints, and Christ images never exceeded devotion to such universal Catholic devotions as the Eucharist. He proposes that otherworldly concerns such as eternal salvation and release from purgatory be considered important motivations for religious gifts and bequests. Professor Larkin's contribution lies in his argument for greater balance in examining colonial Mexican piety. He finds a presentism in considering the colonial past, first by imposing on that era the Guadalupan domination that later generations produced, and second by focusing on the local/exotic/particular over the universal in developing an understanding of colonial Mexican piety. While Robert Morgan's Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Identity, 1600–1810 emphasizes American discontinuities, this author balances that attention to the unique with equal attention to the more commonplace or universally recognized. Thoroughly grounded in primary sources, the author uses tables to demonstrate the range of devotions present in the minds of devotees as they wrote their last wills and testaments. In acknowledging evidence that does not support his arguments; he admits that further study is needed on the widespread popularity of Our Lady of Sorrows or St. Anthony of Padua. He places the Mexican experience in wider contexts: Tridentine reforms of Catholicism, papal declarations, Spanish piety, official sponsorship of particular devotions, and others. This strengthens the emphasis on the importance of universal devotions in relationship to local Mexican novelties. On account of its outstanding research and original contributions, "Beyond Guadalupe: The Eucharist, the Cult of Saints and Local Religion in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City" deserves recognition of the Nelson H. Minnich Prize for 2018. [End Page 401] Newberry Library The Newberry Library's Center for Renaissance Studies proudly launches a new digital resource devoted to Italian paleography, sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Paleography, the study of the history of handwriting and scripts in books, manuscripts, and other documents, is essential for scholarly research in the humanities for the premodern period. Created and edited by Isabella Magni (Newberry Library), Lia Markey (Newberry Library), and Maddalena Signorini (Università di Roma-Tor Vergata) in collaboration with the University of Toronto Libraries Information Technology Services and the Walter J. Ong S.J. Center for Digital Humanities at St. Louis University, this new website provides pedagogical tools for the study of Italian vernacular handwriting from 1100 to 1700 using manuscripts in the Newberry collections as well as other US institutions. The new paleography site complements a resource devoted to French paleography launched in 2016, also funded by the Mellon Foundation and designed in partnership between the Newberry, Toronto, and St. Louis. Like the French site, the intended audience of the Italian site is varied: scholars preparing to conduct research in Italian archives; students studying Italian language, history and culture; curators, librarians, and archivists who work with manuscripts; calligraphers and graphic designers interested in historical scripts; and anyone who would like to experiment with transcribing early Italian documents. The site features 102 digitized manuscripts representing 7 different types of scripts and 3 difficulty levels. Each manuscript is paired with a transcription and a scholarly entry written by a specialist in the field. These background essays provide the historical, cultural, and at times codicological context for the manuscripts. Using the Ong Center's transcription tool, T-PEN, users of the site can transcribe the documents and save their transcriptions online. The site includes a handbook describing the various types of scripts and providing the history of the vernacular in medieval and Renaissance Italy. The...

Beyond Guadalupe: The Eucharist, the Cult of Saints, and Local Religion in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City

This article charts new ground within the historiography on colonial Mexican piety by arguing that the Virgin of Guadalupe did not dominate devotions in Mexico City even in the late colonial period. Rather, the single most important focus for pious attention was the Eucharist. Even in terms of Marian devotions, Our Lady of Sorrows figured as importantly as Guadalupe. Universal devotions like the Eucharist and Our Lady of Sorrows have received scant attention in scholarly literature on colonial Mexican piety, which has been guided by the concept of local religion, an analytical lens that largely overlooks the universal Church and its liturgy. This article calls upon scholars to attend more closely to the Mass and liturgy.

The art of being a colonial letrado: Late humanism, learned sociability and urban life in eighteenth-century Mexico City

This study treats the social and specifically urban context of late humanism in eighteenth-century Mexico City and New Spain. Through the careful reconstruction of the lives of particular scholars, it argues that the specific configuration of urban space (including colleges, libraries, print shops and personal dwellings) should be taken into account when understanding important monuments in the cultural history of Mexico, like the Bibliotheca Mexicana of Juan José de Eguiara y Eguren. This distinct urban culture, in turn, was influenced by larger patterns of circulation in books, ideas and people that gave the late humanist culture of Mexico City both an internal coherence and made it an integral part of a larger cultural sphere.

Amores perritos: Puppies, Laughter and Popular Catholicism in Bourbon Mexico City

AbstractIn late eighteenth-century Mexico City, Spanish colonials, particularly members of the urban middle and popular classes, performed a number of weddings and baptisms on puppies (which were wearing clothes or bejewelled collars) in the context offandangosor dance parties. These ceremonies were not radical challenges to orthodoxy or conservative reactions in the face of significant economic, political, religious and cultural Bourbon reforms emanating from Spain. Employing Inquisitorial investigations of these ceremonies, this article explores the rise of pet keeping, the meanings of early modern laughter and the implications of the cultural and religious components of the Enlightenment-inspired Bourbon reforms in late colonial Mexico.

The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City

The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City

Liturgy, Devotion, and Religious Reform in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City

On February 16, 1696, Doña Inés Velarde, the widow of Capitán Don Miguel de Vera, a former notary of the Mexico City Cabildo, redacted her will before Juan de Condarco y Caceres, a notary public in New Spain’s capital. Despite the typhus (matlazáhuatl) epidemic that ravaged the city in that year, Doña Inés was in good health. She had carefully prepared for the pious act of will writing, issuing over thirty meticulously designed religious directives in her last will and testament. Two directives in particular reveal much about colonial Mexican religious sensibilities. In the thirty-seventh clause of her twenty-page will, she founded a perpetual act of charity with the capital of 3,000 pesos.

Liturgy, Devotion, and Religious Reform in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City

On February 16, 1696, Doña Inés Velarde, the widow of Capitán Don Miguel de Vera, a former notary of the Mexico City Cabildo, redacted her will before Juan de Condarco y Caceres, a notary public in New Spain’s capital. Despite the typhus (matlazáhuatl) epidemic that ravaged the city in that year, Doña Inés was in good health. She had carefully prepared for the pious act of will writing, issuing over thirty meticulously designed religious directives in her last will and testament. Two directives in particular reveal much about colonial Mexican religious sensibilities. In the thirty-seventh clause of her twenty-page will, she founded a perpetual act of charity with the capital of 3,000 pesos.

Jesuits, Nahuas, and the Good Death Society in Mexico City, 1710-1767

Jesuits, Nahuas, and the Good Death Society in Mexico City, 1710-1767

Locating Race in Late Colonial Mexico

It is a warm summer morning in late eighteenth-century Mexico City. An evening rain has left a soft haze hanging over the cobblestone streets; the sweet smell of wood fires fills the nostrils as street vendors prepare fresh tortillas; the swishing sound of brooms is heard as merchants sweep the walkways in front of their shops. The bells of the cathedral drone the beginning of another busy day in the capital city of New Spain.