Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500-1800 (review)

Colonial Saints is an outstanding compilation of fourteen essays by scholars in history, art history, and literature from Canada, Latin America, and the United States. The collection offers a series of historical and cultural readings that point toward the relevance of saints in the understanding of the colonial political and spiritual culture in the American hemisphere. The essays offer new examples of transatlantic continuity and hemispheric connections. With an interdisciplinary approach, religious spirituality is viewed in terms of a cross-cultural conquest that transcended time, influenced politics, and shaped cultural identity. Many essays demonstrate that Colonial sainthood was a religious, social, and political construction that played a major role in colonial history (e.g. religious contact, conversion, and resistance to Christianity). Some essays underscore the relevance of saints' lives on issues of gender, race, and class. In many cases we learn how these categories help define local culture and early national ideals.

The excellent introduction by Jodi Bilinkoff provides an overview of the Western cult of saints that led to the proliferation of hagiographies and popular religious manifestations during the early modern period. Against the Middle Ages, she explains how the emergence of the printing press and the Counter-Reformation were fundamental in the reproduction of saints lives and their inscription in the early modern worldview. The introduction justifies the selection of essays and brings to the forefront common themes across the Americas that tend to be studied in isolation. A key statement that should resonate with scholars of religious colonial culture is that while we try to understand the "spiritual conquest" of the Americas we must also acknowledge the "conquest" of Christianity. Transculturation occurred both ways, and the study of colonial religious culture and its present legacy certainly demonstrates this experience.

The articles are grouped into three sections. The first section, "Cultural Mixing," explores how the manifestations of the sacred in the Americas must be studied within a wider cultural context that is not only white and Christian. Villaseñor Black presents a comparative study of the maternal archetype found in the depiction of St. Anne, mother of Mary. She links the Mexican emphasis placed on St. Anne with its deep cultural and political roots. Another piece from this section, by Ronaldo Vainfas, in a similar manner looks at the colonial legacy and transformation and appropriation of St. Anthony in colonial Brazil. Blurred boundaries between indigenous and Christian beliefs, a theme found in several essays of the collection, are explored in Tuer's excellent reading of the Creole Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya's La conquista espiritual del Paraguay. In this section the essays explore compelling Amerindian and African appropriations.

Essays in the second group, "Holy Women, Holy Men," shed light on martyrdom and male and female holiness. Jodi Bilinkoff, for example, engages the hagiography of Gregorio Lopez by Francisco Losa to show the complexities of life-writing within the context of the Counter-Reformation and the common thread of transference that can be reproduced in hagiographies and biographies between author and subject. In the last section, "The Uses of the Sacred," the essay by Julia Boss explores the relationship that seventeenth-century Catholics in New France constructed between hagiographies and accounts and relics. Two other outstanding essays study independently two crucial icons, the Mexican Guadalupe by William Taylor and Santa Rosa de Lima by Kathleen Myers. Regardless of the vast literature on these two figures, they are able to shed more light with an insightful analysis on the politics of hagiographies in the process of canonization (Myers) and the role of financial records on the centuries-long debate on the apparitions of Guadalupe (Taylor).

Colonial Saints is a well balanced, comparative, and interdisciplinary collection. These elements compete to offer an insightful and comprehensive view of saintliness in the Americas and diverse approaches for its study.