Indian Brides of Christ: Creating New Spaces for Indigenous Women in New Spain

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.



1981 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Temperley

The fuging psalm or hymn tune is a form whose existence one would hardly suspect from any history of English music. Yet is was a product of the Church of England, and there are more than six hundred and fifty specimens in English eighteenth-century printed sources alone. Its neglect is readily explained by the fact that it lies on the borderline of art music: the musicians who developed it were obscure country singers without professional training; but at the same time it does not fall within the definition of ‘folk music’ that we have inherited from the Cecil Sharp era, for it is written music designed for rehearsed performance. We may or may not wish to hear or sing these tunes today. But our understanding of eighteenth-century English musical life must be incomplete if it does not take into account a form that was so distinctive and so widely appreciated at the time.



Author(s):  
Volker Scheid

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a definition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the most obvious starting point for such an inquiry. At the same time, they do offer one advantage over neighbouring disciplines like medical history, anthropology or science and technology studies for someone like myself, a clinician as well as a historian and anthropologist: their strong commitment to the objective of facilitating better medical practice. This promise furthermore links to the wider project of critique, which, in Max Horkheimer’s definition of the term, aims at change and emancipation in order ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. If we take the critical medical humanities as explicitly affirming this shared objective and responsibility, extending the discipline’s traditional gaze is not a burden but becomes, in fact, an obligation.



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):  
Jay T. Collier

Chapter 5 continues to investigate the Montagu affair by surveying adjacent doctrines related to the perseverance debate. For instance, Dort’s more narrow definition of perseverance caused difficulties for those holding a more traditionalist view of baptism and regeneration. After looking at Montagu’s baptismal argument against perseverance of the saints, the chapter evaluates published responses to Montagu’s advocacy of baptismal regeneration as well as more private debates where John Davenant and Samuel Ward tried to reconcile a form of baptismal regeneration with Dort’s determination on perseverance. This survey shows division on the efficacy of baptism even within the pro-Dortian party, with readings and receptions of Augustine factoring in. It also reveals further evidence of how a broad-church approach to being Reformed set the Church of England at odds with the international trends of the Reformed churches.



Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

This chapter investigates changes in mentalities after the Black Death, comparing practices never before analysed in this context—funerary and labour laws and processions to calm God’s anger. While processions were rare or conflictual as in Catania and Messina in 1348, these rituals during later plagues bound communities together in the face of disaster. The chapter then turns to another trend yet to be noticed by historians. Among the multitude of saints and blessed ones canonized from 1348 to the eighteenth century, the Church was deeply reluctant to honour, even name, any of the thousands who sacrificed their lives to succour plague victims, physically or spiritually, especially in 1348: the Church recognized no Black Death martyrs. By the sixteenth century, however, city-wide processions and other communal rituals bound communities together with charity for the poor, works of art, and charitable displays of thanksgiving to long-dead holy men and women.



Author(s):  
B. W. Young

The dismissive characterization of Anglican divinity between 1688 and 1800 as defensive and rationalistic, made by Mark Pattison and Leslie Stephen, has proved more enduring than most other aspects of a Victorian critique of the eighteenth-century Church of England. By directly addressing the analytical narratives offered by Pattison and Stephen, this chapter offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of this neglected period in the history of English theology. The chapter explores the many contributions to patristic study, ecclesiastical history, and doctrinal controversy made by theologians with a once deservedly international reputation: William Cave, Richard Bentley, William Law, William Warburton, Joseph Butler, George Berkeley, and William Paley were vitalizing influences on Anglican theology, all of whom were systematically depreciated by their agnostic Victorian successors. This chapter offers a revisionist account of the many achievements in eighteenth-century Anglican divinity.



2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 474-487
Author(s):  
Marie-Pauline Martin

Abstract Today there is a consensus on the definition of the term ‘rococo’: it designates a style both particular and homogeneous, artistically related to the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI. But we must not forget that in its primitive formulations, the rococo has no objective existence. As a witty, sneering, and impertinent word, it can adapt itself to the most varied discourses and needs, far beyond references to the eighteenth century. Its malleability guarantees its sparkling success in different languages, but also its highly contradictory uses. By tracing the genealogy of the word ‘rococo’, this article will show that the association of the term with the century of Louis XV is a form of historical discrimination that still prevails widely in the history of the art of the Enlightenment.



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