Sanctuaries of Spanish New Mexico by Marc Treib (review)

96 BOOK REVIEWS an attempt to deal with the problem presented by his friendship with Ms. Swan. In an epilogue, "Teilhard and the Feminine," Father King rehearses (as he did in pp. 158-174 of his 1988 book, Teilhard de Chardin) the role played both by the idealized view of women and the friendship of specific women in Teilhard's life and thought. This handsome and useful compilation would have been enhanced by the inclusion of an index of topics as well as that of names. Joseph M. McCarthy Suffolk University American Sanctuaries ofSpanish New Mexico. By Marc Treib. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1993. Pp. xviii, 352. 855.00.) A big, handsome production designed by the author, this volume brings California to New Mexico. Even though Marc Treib earned degrees in architecture and design in the late 1 960's at the University of California, Berkeley, where today he is professor of architecture, and the University of California Press published the study, the subject is not California missions, but, surprisingly , New Mexico missions. It began as a guide book. Treib then perceived the need "for an architectural history that synthesized material from these [i.e., previous] studies and bolstered them with fieldwork and formal analysis" (p. xii). To that end, he achieves a neat balance of words and pictures. Still, it is the latter initially that stand out—dozens and dozens of crisply reproduced black-and-white photographs, period shots interspersed with the author's; a rich color section of his prints (featuring in plates 16 and 17 a creative juxtaposition of natural lighting in church and kiva); and an impressive series of floor plans all to the same scale, allowing easy comparison (as with distinct seventeenth) and eighteenth-century structures at Pecos on facing pp. 212— 213). Accessibility determined Treib's selection of churches; because the pueblo ofSanta Ana is rarely open to visitors, the eighteenth-century monument there gets left out. His choice of the word "sanctuaries" allows him to add to the usual canon of roofed or ruined New Mexico mission churches a number of non-mission buildings that served the Hispanic population of the colony. Part I sets the scene physically and culturally. Treib is at his best discussing continuities, discontinuities, and accommodations between Pueblo Indian and Spanish building traditions, as well as the architectural tides that washed over New Mexico after U.S. occupation in the mid-nineteenth century. In Part II, BOOK REVIEWS97 the author offers well-crafted compilations detailing the often-confusing successions of churches that occupied at least twenty-nine different sites. Here, he utilizes almost every pertinent published primary source, numerous specific secondary studies, along with the standard general ones: Prince (1915), Forrest (1929), Kubier ( 1940), Hewett and Fisher ( 1943), and Kessell (1980). To see the evolution of these historic monuments through a modern architect 's eye is delightful. "The play of curvilinear and planar forms in adobe" (caption 15—3), referring to the famous buttresses and apse of Ranchos de Taos, or Las Trampas, with "the most poised facade of the New Mexican churches, a composition pitting the strong verticals of the towers against the lighter wooden balcony" (caption 13-1)—who but an architect? Typical is this description ofthe same church inside: "Fortunately, SanJosé is not covered by the tin shed roofs that now protect many of the adobe churches, and as a result the light quality from the windows—however enlarged—and the clerestory reveal an interior characterized by softness and repose. The wash of light over the white plastered walls and the soft rendering of the prismatic masses create a spacial impression that complements the cubic forms of the exterior towers" (p. 176). Even we who fret about the Californication of New Mexico can celebrate Marc Treib's welcome contribution of this beautiful guide-book-turnedarchitectural -exposition. John L. Kessell University ofNew Mexico Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America By Matthew Dennis. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 1993. Pp. xiv, 280. 837.95.) Cultivating aLandscape ofPeace deals with relations between the Iroquois, Dutch, and French in the seventeenth century, prior to the British conquest ofNew York and the development...