Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas (review)

As both the editor’s introduction and the afterword by Patricia Seed suggest, the eleven studies collected in this volume, taken as a group, serve rather to illustrate the kaleidoscopic variety of ways in which gender, race, and religion interacted in the early modern Americas than to support the construction of any overarching synthesis of this variety. Most of the essays focus on the later colonial period, and roughly half address some portion of the Spanish American empire.

Opening the first of four overlapping thematic sections, on “Frontiers,” Alida C. Metcalf surveys and categorizes the go-betweens who mediated between indigenous and European societies in Brazil during the first half of the sixteenth century, arguing that despite several well-known examples of indigenous women as go-betweens, men in fact dominated this role. Turning to New Spain’s northern frontier, Bruce A. Erickson discusses a mid-eighteenth-century series of scandals at the presidio and mission of the Río de San Xavier in Texas, emphasizing the victimization of both Spanish and indigenous women by a military culture of gendered violence and a societal sexual double standard. Finally, Ben Marsh finds in the scarcity of white women in Georgia during the first two decades of British settlement, from 1732 to 1752, both opportunities for social advancement and the exercise of power by some women, white and non-white, and greater vulnerability to abuse and exploitation for others.

In the first two essays of the section on “Female Religious,” Susan Broomhall examines how the chronicle of the Benedictine nuns of Beaumontlès-Tours, in Tours, France, comes to minimize the ethnic difference of Antoinette de Saint-Estienne, the Canadian-born daughter of a Frenchman and a Mi’kmaq woman, who was educated in the abbey after being sent to France as a child and professed as a nun there in 1646; and Joan C. Bristol discusses the contrasting case of Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, a black slave who spent most of her long life in a Discalced Carmelite convent in Puebla, Mexico, and professed there when mortally ill in 1678. In the history of the convent written by the local priest José Gómez de la Parra a quarter century later, unlike the Tours chronicle, Juana’s blackness is emphasized and her virtue made an exception to her race, a reflection of the influence of the extraordinary virtue of the convent’s white nuns. Oddly, Bristol never addresses the fact that the words placed by Gómez de la Parra in Juana’s mouth and chosen by Bristol for the title of her study, “Although I am black, I am beautiful,” have their source in the Song of Songs (1:5). In the section’s remaining essay, Kathryn Burns analyzes the construction of indigenous honor through the establishment of communities of indigenous beatas (women living a religious life outside the convent) in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cuzco, Peru.

Nora E. Jaffary opens the third section, “Race Mixing,” with an exploration of the differences between patterns of Spanish and indigenous sexual activity and kinship structures suggested by applications for dispensations from marriage impediments in the Archdiocese of Mexico City during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Perceptions of mixed-race individuals are the focus of the second essay, Yvonne Fabella’s discussion of the negative image of the free mulatto woman, a transgressive figure who destabilized the hierarchies of race and gender, in Michel René Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s 1776–77 proposals for the reform of the French administration in Saint Domingue, while Bethany Fleming treats the positive mediating role of métis (mixed French and indigenous ancestry) women on Mackinac Island, between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Lastly, in the section on “Networks,” Nancy E. van Deusen examines the transmission of spiritual...