Mexican Karismata chronicles the life of Francisca de los ?ngeles (1674?1744), theødaughter of a poor Creole mother and mestizo father who became a renowned holy woman in her native city of Querätaro, Mexico, during the high Baroque period. As a precocious young visionary and later as the headmistress of an important religious institution for women, Francisca actively partook in the project to revitalize the Catholic cult in New Spain?s northern regions led by her mentors, the Spanish missionaries of the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith. Her copious correspondence, containing hundreds of unedited letters, documents the personal experience of popular Catholicism during the high Baroque period in New Spain. Francisca?s journey to God did not follow prescribed hagiographical guidelines, drawing its inspiration instead from an eclectic mix of the doctrines of the Counter-Reformation, medieval spirituality, and local traditions. Her ecstatic apostolate to the dead and living often bordered on heresy but found acceptance and came to fruition under the protection of Querätaro?s ecclesiastical and secular elite. Her life shows how mystic rapture and sociability joined in this colonial variation of Early Modern Catholicism and demonstrates the remarkable vitality and openness of urban spirituality in the New World.

Through a thoughtful consideration of the complexity of the religious landscape of the Atlantic basin, the collection provides an enriching portrayal of the intriguing interplay between religion, gender, ethnicity, and authority in the early modern Atlantic world.

The history of emotions is a new approach to social history, and this book is the first in English to systematically examine emotions in colonial Mexico. It is easy to assume that emotions are a given, unchanging aspect of human psychology. But the emotions we feel reflect the times in which we live. People express themselves within the norms and prescriptions particular to their society, their class, their ethnicity, and other factors. The essays collected here chart daily life through the study of sex and marriage, love, lust and jealousy, civic rituals and preaching, gambling and leisure, prayer and penance, and protest and rebellion. The first part of the book deals with how individuals experienced emotions on a personal level. The second group of essays explores the role of institutions in guiding and channeling the expression and the objects of emotions.

This history of the political economy, social relations, and cultural debates that animated Spanish North America from 1500 until 1800 illuminates its centuries of capitalist dynamism and subsequent collapse into revolution.

A history examining the interactions between church authorities and Mexican parishioners&—from the late-colonial era into the early-national period&—shows how religious thought and practice shaped Mexicos popular politics.

This book analyzes Spanish rule and Catholic practice from the consolidation of Spanish control in the Americas in the sixteenth century to the loss of these colonies in the nineteenth century by following the life and afterlife of an accidental martyr, San Felipe de Jésus. Using Mexico City–native San Felipe as the central figure, Conover tracks the global aspirations of imperial Spain in places such as Japan and Rome without losing sight of the local forces affecting Catholicism. He demonstrates the ways Spanish religious attitudes motivated territorial expansion and transformed Catholic worship. Using Mexico City as an example, Conover also shows that the cult of saints continually refreshed the spiritual authority of the Spanish monarch and the message of loyalty of colonial peoples to a devout king. Such a political message in worship, Conover concludes, proved contentious in independent Mexico, thus setting the stage for the momentous conflicts of the nineteenth century in Latin American religious history.

Edward Wright-Rios examines the much-maligned--and sometimes celebrated--character of Madre Matiana and her position in the development of Mexico.

This book uses a gender perspective to examine sermons and other officially endorsed discourses of the Catholic Church in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico City. Analyzing the different ways that, over time, gendered images, metaphors, and hagiographical examples were used in sermons and other documents, the book examines how the church negotiated challenges to its cultural and ideological hegemony. Beginning with sermons from the early eighteenth century, the author follows the evolution of church discourses as preachers reveled in Baroque analogies, embraced ideals of the Enlightenment, targeted women's alleged moral vices at times of political crisis, and ultimately turned to notions of women as "the devout sex" in order to combat incipient liberalism. Put another way, liberals after independence were not the only ones to assert a kind of "republican motherhood": preachers countered with a vision of "Catholic motherhood" that had great resonance in Mexico even into the twentieth century.

A highly readable survey of women's experiences in Latin America from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.