Reviewed by: The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas by Jennifer Scheper Hughes Erik R. Seeman 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) Jennifer Scheper Hughes breathes new life into an important topic: the relationship between the devastating toll of disease on Indigenous communities in sixteenth-century Mexico and the Christian affiliation of many Native Mexicans in that same time span. Readers of this journal will be most impressed by Hughes's theological readings of her primary sources. Though she does not sustain some of her claims, Hughes succeeds in categorizing colonial Catholicism as a church of the dead. Hughes focuses on an epidemic that began in 1576 and lasted roughly five years. The epidemic is not well-known outside specialist circles, perhaps because the disease itself remains unidentified. Marked by grim symptoms, including hemorrhages from the nose, the disease may have been caused by the bacterium Salmonella enterica, Hughes speculates (13). Instead of getting bogged down in medical guesswork, Hughes wisely refers to the illness by its Nahuatl name: cocoliztli. The 1576 epidemic caused such widespread death that Spanish observers defined the period as one marked by mortandad, which can be translated as "mortality," but which also connotes "carnage" and "slaughter" (16). Faced with this mortandad and the demise of so many Indigenous Christians, some missionaries despaired for the future of the Mexican Church. Hughes analyzes this [End Page 116] moment of despair with great sensitivity, focusing on (but not limiting herself to) 135 unpublished missionary letters written from 1576 to 1581. Relying on these sources, Hughes argues that Mexican Catholicism became a church of the dead, meaning that "every aspect of [it] was in some way defined by or responsive to the fact of cataclysmic death" (99). When describing the church of the dead, Hughes uses language that sometimes seems hyperbolic, as when she states that this "spectral church" was an "ecclesial body absent of living persons" (95). In other places, her poetic writing suggests that such characterizations are not meant to be taken literally but are rather attempts to describe the essence or spirit of colonial Mexican Catholicism: the church "breathed in death; it exhaled death; it dwelled in death" (99). Hughes supports these claims in four vigorously analytical chapters. The first focuses on the intimate bodily and spiritual care missionaries offered sick Natives. Serving as healers, priests infused their ministrations with theological significance. Healing was "a religious rite"; indeed, it was "a kind of sacrament" that helped "transform Indigenous bodies into Christian flesh" (37–38). Unlike in English North America, where (following Joyce Chaplin's interpretation) Native susceptibility to illness led colonists to believe in their own racial superiority, missionary encounters with Native illness in Mexico led to "the mystical incorporation of Indigenous persons into a larger, encompassing Christian body" (39). Chapter two continues the analysis of Indigenous bodies, emphasizing their relation to the corpus mysticum, a medieval phrase that conjures both the mystical body of the church and the literal flesh of Christ. Even as missionaries incorporated Indigenous bodies into the colonial corpus mysticum, the mortandad threatened that project: the mystical body was "injured and at risk" (66). To remedy this, priests turned to the healing power of blood. They urged Indigenous Catholics to shed their own blood in scourging penitential processions, and they performed bloodletting on their dying Native parishioners. The result was not racial othering but mystical union: Mexico's sanguinary theology "was often more about assimilating and erasing difference than about drawing ever sharper lines of division and distinction" (84). The next two chapters take spatial relations as their organizing principle: the third from the perspective of the missionaries, and the fourth based on Indigenous sources. Whereas the mortandad led some priests to fear that the Mexican church was failing, others took up the challenge of ministering to a dying population. To do so, Archbishop Pedro Moya de Contreras walked 800 leagues (perhaps some 2,000 miles). According to Hughes, Moya and other missionaries "resanctified the landscape by walking" (106), expanding the...
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Oct 30, 2024
Krystyna Krawiec-Złotkowska 
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