Martyrdom, Matrilineality, and the Virgin Mary

This chapter focuses on a later stage in the Mariana Islands mission and on Father Augustinus Strobach, another purported avatar of Francis Xavier. Inspired by the Spanish ‘Xavier,’ Diego de Sanvitores, Strobach journeyed from Bohemia to the Marianas to suffer martyrdom and help plant the seeds of Christ among the Chamorro. His story underscores that Jesuit self-fashioning was bound up with imposing patriarchal norms and controlling the sexuality of converts, especially women. Matrilineal traditions in the islands became a chief point of friction while also paving the way for the Cult of the Virgin championed by Jesuits like Strobach. Marian devotion became an avenue for indigenous women, as it had long been for European women, to claim influence and agency within patriarchal Christianity.

Devotions of Affliction

From 1736 to 1739 an outbreak of matlazahuatl, likely typhus, ravaged the Valley of Mexico. In Mexico City, public responses in the form of hospital care, processions, and numerous devotional acts were documented by Cayetano Cabrera y Quintero, an eyewitness and promoter of the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe. His plague chronicle provides a point of departure for a deeper history of the dramaturgy of epidemic outbreaks, in which public pageantry and appeals to beloved saints transformed cities and towns into thoroughfares of saints and devotees. This chapter examines how these performances were both sponsored by corporate bodies and solicited by laypeople well into the eighteenth century, when administrators aggressively pursued sanitation and hygiene campaigns alongside divine succor.

From Herbals to Walled Gardens

Chapter ten focuses on botanical thought of the Middle Ages in the Roman, Eastern and Islamic Empires when herbals devolved from practical field guides to decorative status symbols, and Dioscorides developed his classifications of sex in plants according to anthropomorphic criteria, such as hardness or softness. Dioscorides’ authority endured into the sixteenth century. Sources including The Book of Idols and the Ethiopian Book of Enoch inform the discussion of pre-Islamic vegetation goddesses Allat and Al-’Uzza, and the Satanic Verses. Zakariya Muhammad Qazwini suggested the palm was human-like, with two sexes and “a sort of copulation” required for fruit production. The Quranic story of Mary and the date palm reprised “The Cherry Tree Carol,” both evidencing her assimilation of pagan goddesses. After the Council of Ephesus’s sanction of the cult of the Virgin as Theotokos, her cult bourgeoned. Her imagery often centered on gardens, fruits, and flowers symbolizing her purity.