Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New (review)

This study offers readers several rich lines of inquiry, the most prominent of which revolve around the author’s hypothesis about why and how religious change occurs. A second prominent thread investigates the influential legacies of early Christian sacred narratives. On all counts, Daniel T. Reff is to be applauded for his rare determination to explore religion as connected to broader social, economic, and political developments and to analyze colonial Latin American history within a series of larger frames that would have been natural for his historical subjects. Along with his analogical and big-picture determinations, the author brings deep familiarity with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources on key Jesuit evangelization settings in northwestern Mexico. Reff’s hypotheses about how best to conceptualize religious change and to understand early-modern religious authors follow up both his study Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518–1764 (Salt Lake City, 1991) and his landmark contributions to the annotated edition and English translation of Andrés Pérez de Ribas’s monumental 1645 Historia de los triumphos de nuestra santa fe (as the History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World, Tucson, 1999).

Reff trains his eye, most signally, on conditions of crisis arising from ravaging waves of epidemic disease and demographic collapse in the circum-Mediterranean and European world between c. 150 and 800 AD, on the one hand, and colonial Spanish America between c. 1520 and 1720, on the other. He argues that sheer numbers of dead, together with other associated calamities, upheavals, and profound dislocations, gave rise to similar cultural processes and created powerfully comparable scenarios for human actors that ought to loom larger in our explanations of the “rise of Christianity.” Reff is productively aware of religious change as a constant negotiation between institutional responses to such challenges and the more idiosyncratic and popular effects. Yet, although the comparison ought to prove usefully provocative for students less inclined to test conclusions in broader frames, scholars of Christianization across a transoceanic Iberian world, like their colleagues studying late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, will be less than satisfied by Reff’s somewhat inevitable tendency to generalize from quick syntheses. Moreover, a certain reductionism creeps into the analysis of epidemics and conversions to Christianity, provoking questions that, although terribly difficult to support with empirical data at either end of his comparison, might not have been evaded. How far does the hypothesis take us before other complicating factors need consideration and fuller integration? What to do, for instance, when sources suggest that in some places mortality rates for non-Christians were lower than for Christians? And what to make of the pluralizing nature of Christianity in both settings: the fact that the interculturally negotiated settlements in novohispano missions—not to mention a wider Spanish America—varied greatly and under sometimes vastly different circumstances? As Reff repeatedly helps scholars to see, even the most purposeful clerical portrayals reveal vital clues about indigenous social realities and interaction: one subject’s crisis was another’s opportunity, and even so originally foreign a set of ideas and practices as these Christianities can become naturalized, owned by others apart from those who would seek to sanction them. It comes down to a question: How much of people’s attraction to Christianity in apostolic and early-medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as in postconquest Spanish America, can be so instrumentally keyed to desperation and suffering that it results in conversion?

As scholars of late-antique and early-medieval evangelization scenarios continue to ponder transcultural and religious change over vast expanses of time, they may welcome Reff’s deft provocation but may still be hungry for the messier...