Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic (review)

This interdisciplinary collection of essays provides fertile ground for scholarly inquiry on the colonial history of this hemisphere. The twelve chapters and “Final Reflections” offer readers a balanced approach and a wealth of information with which to understand this transatlantic encounter that often involved contradictory objectives—religion and compassion pitted against self-interest and conquest. As the editors point out, European colonization of the New World must be understood in its entire complexity; England’s colonizing efforts perhaps owe more to Spain that previously thought. This approach, using historiography and literary analysis, gives rise to Atlantic studies in an assessment of religious conflict among Europeans, not just violence to native peoples; accusations of cruelty abound while lands inhabited by non-Christian natives were even deemed “empty” or vacuum domicilium (Carla Gardina Pestana), thus justifying imperial expansion. The editors wisely arrange essays by topic into three parts: I, Launching Imperial Projects; II, Colonial Accommodations; and III, Violent Encounters. Each essay addresses a common set of questions on the interaction between religion and empire. Legal, literary, and archival documents are all brought to bear concerning ways in which Europeans sought to establish and maintain their colonies and manage the Christianization of native inhabitants.

In part I Rolena Adorno goes a stage further regarding the well-known debate in Valladolid between the royal chronicler Sepúlveda and the Dominican friar Las Casas, whom she sees primarily as a legal scholar; the encomenderos still managed to repeal New Laws he espoused for indigenous rights. Barbara Fuchs considers literary models and the picaresque in captive narratives. Linda Gregerson examines the challenges of the New England Company to bring the Gospel to a people with no tradition of writing.

Part II largely involves missionary efforts and devotional practices both in Catholic and Protestant traditions. Cornelius Conover focuses on St. Philip of Jesus, the Discalced Franciscan martyred in Japan in 1597. Politics and religion intertwine regarding intercessional powers of local patron saints. St. Philip with very human defects begins the tradition of “Creole saints,” including the Virgin of Guadalupe and even St. Teresa of Ávila who wrote on the Christianization of these new lands. Father Chaumonot’s autobiography exemplifies the struggles of a Jesuit missionary who often lost his native French language. Allan Greer likens his narrative to the picaresque novel, yet with “feminine” compassionate descriptions of native peoples in New France. Karen Bross shows that in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the conversion of native people often confirmed the belief in the second coming of Christ; she studies Henry Jessey’s book on conversion, published in 1650, a year seen as a transition to the end of the world. Dominique Deslandres’s analysis of the prophetic nature of dreams shows that Huron dream culture could become an obstacle to conversion.

In part III Bethany Wiggin examines German migrants to Pennsylvania and their impact on a nascent abolitionist movement against the African slave trade. Katherin Ibbett presents Marie de l’Incarnation’s concept of martyrdom and the interior way; her accounts of violence between missionaries and Iroquois reestablished the importance of sacrifice in a colonial setting. Violence, however, occurs among European colonists themselves. Patrick Erban studies the Mennonite Martyrs’ Mirror—confiscated in 1776 as a pacifist, and therefore loyalist, book—and community building in Pennsylvania. In this same vein, Susan Juster writes about iconoclasm, a practice firmly entrenched in England (God is to be represented in the Word, not in icons), and challenges notions of religious freedom; John Eliot’s Indian Library was destroyed as idolatrous, much the same as the Spanish destruction of Aztec pictographic codices.

Paul Stevens’s “Final Reflections” focus on Protestantism in British imperial design. As with Catholic empires, Protestantism cannot fully explain attempts to legitimize possession and conquest. Since God’s grace is a gift to the individual mediated by Christ’s death, Stevens argues, Protestant imperialists become emboldened...