Alone before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (review)

If you have ever wandered through Mexico's many churches and noted the numerous burial crypts near the altars of saints, you may have wondered why people chose to be buried there. Looking at the dates on those tombs, you may have noted fewer interments from the eighteenth and later centuries. Like me, you may have wondered when and why individuals ceased being buried in the churches. By sampling wills from a broad swathe of Mexican history, Pamela Voekel illuminates the answers to both why individuals chose to be buried in churches, and why they stopped. During the seventeenth century, burials were elaborately costumed and staged rituals, with professional mourners hired to fill the ranks of funeral processions. The wealthy often left jewels to adorn the images of Mary and the saints as well as setting aside funds for Masses to be recited for their souls. Often they insisted upon being interred close to the chapel of a particular saint or image of Our Lady.

Late eighteenth-century secular and religious reformers sought to reduce the immoderate displays of religious faith during mourning rituals in favor of an interior piety, and called for less elaborate funeral arrangements. Whether persuaded by the leadership, or following the changing directions of their own beliefs, testators requesting simple funerals increased from a scant 5 percent at the start of the century to a third by the first decades of the nineteenth century. In the same period, gifts of jewelry and elaborate ornamentation for the saint's images declined to a negligible 3 percent while charitable bequests for the poor increased markedly. The desire for one's corpse to reside near a saint waned dramatically from 73 per cent in the 1710's to 12 per cent in the 1850's. But this shift was also propelled by secular leaders' push for a fundamental relocation of final resting grounds.

At the end of the eighteenth century in Mexico, as in Spain, secular officials began to urge the transfer of burial grounds from churches to cemeteries, often on the city's outer limits. Propelled by a growing concern that church-interred corpses contributed to epidemics, these reform-minded Catholic leaders held their ground against élites who viewed such demands as undermining their social status. Religious orders and members of the lower clergy also opposed the new measures; both stood to lose significant income from the shift to cemetery burials.

Resistance to the demands for less ostentatious funerals were initially greater in Veracruz than Mexico City, but when changed trade regulations increased the prosperity of the merchants, this new bourgeoisie sided with the Catholic reformers in favoring simpler burials in suburban cemeteries. In an insightful comparison with changes in wills in England and France at the same time, Voekel notes that in both countries, the spiritual dimensions of wills receded during the eighteenth century, while in Mexico, religiosity remained, but shifted toward more modest rituals and increased giving to the poor. In providing us with such useful information and such thoughtful analyses, Voekel has contributed significantly to our understanding of a difficult topic—the changing nature of religious faith in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico.