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

Alone Before God is an ambitious intellectual history that examines changing funerary practices in late-colonial and early-republican Mexico in order to provide a window onto the broader transformation of Catholic thought and elite religiosity during a period of religious enlightenment. Voekel exposes Catholic thinkers' growing criticism of elaborate, baroque funerary processions in the late eighteenth century as the portents of a reformed Catholic sensibility. Whereas baroque religiosity emphasized collective enactment of religious devotion, the importance of intercessors and mediators with God, and burials in churches and other holy places, the reform Catholicism that took root in late colonial (Bourbon) urban areas—particularly among the newly rising elite classes—stressed individualism, rationality, and the trappings of egalitarianism. Historians have long associated these latter values with the secular and increasingly anticlerical liberalism that became the dominant element of Mexican political culture after the 1821 independence from Spain, but Voekel challenges this interpretation, tracing their origin instead to Mexico's experience of reform Catholicism.

Voekel examines the social impact of reform Catholic thought by analyzing wills executed in Mexico City that made provisions for their authors' funerals. She developed an extensive database of selected wills, divided into a primary set of 350 composed between 1710 and 1860 and a secondary and less detailed set of 1,750 beginning in 1620. In addition, Voekel makes a close reading of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century newspapers, religious tracts, and publications written by leading intellectuals and clergy in Mexico City and the city of Veracruz. Thus, the book not only explains the intellectual underpinnings of reformers' attempts to curb the pomp of baroque funerals—a campaign that Voekel describes as a "strategic strike at the spiritual sanctification of social hierarchy" (5)—but also demonstrates that a rising collection of urban elites responded to the clerical campaign by specifying their preference for modest funerals and cemetery burials. This analysis allows Voekel to draw two important conclusions. First, urban elites began to accept the Church reformers' vision and adopt a more individualistic, unmediated relationship with God. Second, the reformers began to regard both salvation and material success as a matter of individual virtue rather than inherited privilege, thereby anticipating the positivistic, elitist, and self-congratulatory liberalism of the later nineteenth century.

The book's latter chapters discuss the subjugation of Mexican burial practices to medical authority in the early nineteenth century. As Church reformers recruited notions of public health to justify their support for burials in cemeteries rather than churches, they contributed to the medical profession's emerging claims of expertise and control over issues of sanitation. This line of analysis leads Voekel into a discussion of professional licensing organizations, such as the royal Protomedicato (Board of Medical Examiners), as well as of medical professionalization and licensed practitioners' hostility toward midwives and other traditional healers. While compelling, the emphasis on the rising medical profession distracts to some extent from the book's primary focus on enlightened religion and dilutes Voekel's fundamental point that the origins of Mexican modernity lay in the religious rather than the secular realm.

Overall, however, Alone Before God presents a balanced and convincing argument based on an impressive, century-and-a-half sampling of wills, along with more traditional sources of the social/intellectual historian's craft. The book will find a wide audience among historians interested in religious thought, the rise of the medical establishment, and modernity. Moreover, no scholar interested in the origins and impact of modernity and liberalism in Mexico or Latin America more generally can afford to ignore Voekel's insights into reform Catholicism's influence on the political culture of the independence era and nineteenth century.