The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City (review)

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, "a religion of outward gesture and ritual observance" flourished in New Spain as missionaries, priests, and Catholic devouts in general sought to honor God and the saints through veneration of religious images, the adornment of sacred space, the enhancement of liturgical rites, prayer, the performance of bodily gestures, and other practices that served the faithful in forging symbolic unions with the sacred. By the end of the colonial period, however, groups of bishops, priests, and lay people were attempting to downplay the practices and meanings of baroque Catholicism, as a simpler and more interior piety emerged. For Larkin, this transformation rested on specific understandings "of the very nature of God," which in turn shaped Mexico City's religious culture during the last century of the colonial period (1696-1813).

The book is divided in two parts. Chapters one through five constitute the first section, which focuses on baroque Catholicism. Chapters six through nine explore the project to reform religious culture in Bourbon Mexico and address the "new pious practices" that reformers and the faithful negotiated by the end of the colonial period. The prose is elegant and the narrative is efficient and clear; more importantly, Larkin's use of the abundant primary sources he gathered at various repositories in Mexico City, including the Archivo General de Notarias where he found 1,722 wills from seven sample years, as well as his pertinent dialogue with other voices in this field, account for a compelling argument that challenges previous explanations of issues like the correlation between religion and the rise of modernity in Mexico or the changes and continuities in religious practices.

The use of wills as primary sources merits special consideration in this case. Departing from quantitative analysis of wills, Larkin decided to "analyze religious clauses qualitatively" during four selected "plague years" and three "control years." He then proceeded to examine all the wills written in Mexico City's notaries during each sample year, reading through the words and gestures of notaries, testators, and other witnesses in an attempt to identify changes and continuities in pious activities. Larkin's success in portraying the multiple meanings of religious practice in colonial Mexico stems partially from his understanding of testators' religious directives as a window to colonial Mexican religious sensibilities. However, it is important to bear in mind that Larkin's discussion focuses almost exclusively on the Spanish population of Mexico City, "as less than 3 per cent of the entire testator population was non-Spanish" (p. 20).

Inspired by Pierre Bordieu's insights on habitus and practice, as well as by Armin Geertz's concepts on religious culture, Larkin proposes in Part one that Tridentine Catholicism was founded on an epistemology that "untied sign and signified," allowing for bodily connections with divinity and above all making God, the saints, and the heavenly kingdom present within the world. Larkin's selection of "sacred immanence"— understood as the ability of belief to inhere within physical objects—"performative piety," "liturgical gestures," and the quest for "splendor" in worship as analytical categories, provided him with an effective framework to organize the testators' pious directives and to show how the Spanish population of Mexico City "participated in the baroque religious culture of the age" (p. 91).

Baroque Catholicism, concludes Larkin, was "more than display" (p. 76). Although it is very difficult to establish how often or deeply the devouts tried to establish a connection with God in this context, baroque Catholicism was a religion of sacred immanence, one in which the faithful approached the Eucharist and images of saints, performed symbolic actions with their bodies, cared for the ornament of sacred space, and participated in confraternities, as means to forge unions—individually and collectively— with the divine and to partake in the collective quest for salvation. Perhaps Larkin's interpretation...