Two Kingdoms in a Multi-Tiered Empire: New Spain and New Galicia in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Rosenmüller
Author(s):  
David Rex Galindo

For 300 years, Franciscans were at the forefront of the spread of Catholicism in the New World. In the late seventeenth century, Franciscans developed a far-reaching, systematic missionary program in Spain and the Americas. After founding the first college of propaganda fide in the Mexican city of Querétaro, the Franciscan Order established six additional colleges in New Spain, ten in South America, and twelve in Spain. From these colleges Franciscans proselytized Native Americans in frontier territories as well as Catholics in rural and urban areas in eighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America. This is the first book to study these colleges, their missionaries, and their multifaceted, sweeping missionary programs. By focusing on the recruitment of non-Catholics to Catholicism as well as the deepening of religious fervor among Catholics, the book shows how the Franciscan colleges expanded and shaped popular Catholicism in the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world. This book explores the motivations driving Franciscan friars, their lives inside the colleges, their training, and their ministry among Catholics, an often-overlooked duty that paralleled missionary deployments. It argues that Franciscan missionaries aimed to reform or “reawaken” Catholic parishioners just as much as they sought to convert non-Christian Native Americans.


Author(s):  
Matthew D. O'Hara

This chapter studies the logic of traditional innovation by investigating a form of sanctioned Catholic practice. In the eighteenth century, a new movement flourished in many of the most important cities and towns of New Spain. Calling themselves Holy Schools of Christ, these groups combined collective piety sometimes associated with baroque Catholicism, such as the lashing of flesh, with an intense demand for self-regulation of an individual's thoughts and actions. The participants in the Holy Schools might appear as surprisingly modern in their attitude toward controlling the future and their attempts to achieve individual or collective improvement. Yet to characterize this movement as a moment of hybrid modernity in which elements of the past persisted despite a turn toward the modern would be deeply misleading. For the members and supporters of the Holy Schools, innovation required tradition. Individuals of this period, in other words, were often future-oriented without being modern.


1978 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alicia V. Tjarks

Since early times civil and religious authorities of New Spain showed considerable interest in population statistics of New Mexico. Such an interest was directly related to the peculiarities of settlement in the province since the Reconquest, fourteen years after the bloody Indian uprising of 1680. From then on, control over New Mexico could only be sustained with great difficulty—final pacification could not be achieved until the late eighteenth century—for a purely geopolitical reason: keeping New Mexico for the Crown as a defensive bulwark in the northern approaches of New Spain against the penetration of hostile Indians and foreigners. In that sense, the Franciscan missions performed a decisive role in affirming the Spanish occupation of the territory.


1999 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asunción Lavrin

Este artículo analiza la interrelación de los factores de clase, género y raza en la definición de una política de admisión de mujeres indígenas a las órdenes religiosas de la Nueva España. El argumento teológico que permitiría ubicarlas dentro de los parámetros de espiritualidad de la época maduró en el siglo dieciocho. Clase y raza, usadas previamente para excluirlas, fueron utilizadas por sus promotores para su reivindicación y aceptación, a pesar de residuos de prejuicio racial entre algunos miembros de la iglesia y la burocracia. This article discusses the interplay of class, gender, and race in the definition of a policy of admission of indigenous women to full membership in the regular orders in New Spain. A theological argument to accommodate them within the parameters of established spirituality reached its maturity in the eighteenth century. Class and race--previously used to exclude Indian women--were skillfully used to buttress the acceptance of Indian nuns by their supporters, despite residues of racial prejudice among members of the Church and the bureaucracy.


1971 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asuncion Lavrin

At the end of the eighteenth century, the economic position of the church in New Spain appeared to be secure and prosperous. Although the crown had restricted many of the financial and legal prerogatives of the church in the second half of this century, it had not restricted the basic right of the church to hold property or invest its money in mortgages or loans to lay citizens or to the government. On the contrary, in order to solve its own financial problems, the crown had increasingly relied upon loans from corporations such as the Tribunales de Minería, Consulado, and the church itself. The Minería and Consulado had provided the bulk of such loans after 1780, but these corporations had, in turn, sought loans from ecclesiastical institutions in order to fulfill their promises to the crown. Nunneries in New Spain had made considerable contributions to these loans which appeared as safe investments for these communities. Otherwise, the increasing political and financial entanglements of the mother country in Europe at the end of the century did not mean much for the nunneries. Professions continued to take place, a few new convents were founded prior to 1810, and up to 1805 loans and pious funds continued to be raised and invested in the traditional manner.


1993 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 785-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Smyth

ABSTRACTIreland in the 1690s was a protestant state with a majority catholic population. These protestants sometimes described themselves as ‘the king's Irish subjects’ or ‘the people of Ireland’, but rarely as ‘the Irish’, a label which they usually reserved for the catholics. In constitutional and political terms their still evolving sense of identity expressed itself in the assertion of Irish parliamentary sovereignty, most notably in William Molyneux's 1698 pamphlet, The case of Ireland's being bound by acts of parliament in England, stated. In practice, however, the Irish parliament did not enjoy legislative independence, and the political elite was powerless in the face of laws promulgated at Westminster, such as the i6gg woollen act, which were detrimental to its interests. One possible solution to the problem of inferior status lay in legislative union with England or Great Britain. Increasingly in the years before 1707 certain Irish protestant politicians elaborated the economic, constitutional and practical advantages to be gained from a union, but they also based their case upon an appeal to the shared religion and ethnicity of the sovereign's loyal subjects in the two kingdoms. In short the protestants insisted that they were English. This unionist episode thus illustrates the profoundly ambivalent character of protestant identity in late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century Ireland.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-36
Author(s):  
John Tutino

Abstract The Jesuits arrived in New Spain in the 1570s and soon became participants in a dynamic world of silver capitalism at the center of the early modern global economy. They launched money-making enterprises to sustain their missions, churches, and schools (colegios) that relied upon enslaved African producers alongside indigenous workers in complex labor arrangements. The diversity of labor at the Jesuit-run Santa Lucía and Xochimancas estates contrast with the heavier reliance on enslaved African labor at Jesuit sugar plantations in Brazil. The article analyzes a key eighteenth-century Jesuit text, the Instrucciones a los hermanos jesuitas administradores de haciendas, to show how the Jesuits in New Spain conceived of their management of enslaved people and negotiated the contradictions between the spiritual and secular challenges of the boom era of silver capitalism.


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