Religion, Power, and Politics in Colonial St. Augustine (review)

In the history of Spanish America, Florida serves as an example of the maritime periphery, a non-profit outpost beside a vital seaway, with or without a hinterland of mission provinces. Singly and in packs, scholars have searched and researched the barrel wells and parish registers of the presidio of St. Augustine, a microcosm of Spanish American life for two and a half centuries. This book, part of the growing Ripley P. Bullen Series edited by archaeologist Jerald T. Milanich, is in good company.

Observing that studies of religion in colonial Florida have "focused almost exclusively" on the Franciscans, Kapitzke sets out to describe the dynamic religious world of the Spanish parish, examining the conflicts which introduced disorder and assessing their effect on the local balance of power and the community of the faithful. The volume concentrates on the 1680s and 1690s, when Florida's documentary record swelled with the paper duels of parish priests, governors, Franciscans, and treasury officials. The author does not answer his own question of whether the increase was due to a rising level of controversy in St. Augustine or whether it was, simply, that a larger share of the record began to survive, thanks to the Crown's concern about the English colony up the coast. After the late 1690s, the stream of documents decreased, and Kapitzke follows suit, with less than two chapters on the controversies that swirled from the 1730s to 1760.

The book opens with a discussion of the religious environment, an "ordered cosmos" of ritual and ceremony characterized by daily prayers and masses; weekly sermons, hymns, and announcements from the pulpit; sacralized birth, death, and marriage; and, on holy days of obligation (38, three times as many as were observed by Indian converts), religious theater and processions, making religion, as the author points out, a diversion as well as a duty. Compadrazgo, seating protocols, graded sepulture, confraternities, and third order societies reinforced the social hierarchy, while the Inquisition guarded moral behavior and enforced respect for the sacred. In this deeply Catholic society, "foreignness was measured by religious adherence rather than by nationality or race" (p. 9). The author's approach to the rhythms of the parish, informed by religious studies, complements this reviewer's treatment of the same parish in Situado and Sabana (1994), which focuses on its material culture and finances.

Kapitzke narrates and in some cases adds detail to a familiar set of stories about religio-political conflicts of the 1680s and 1690s, inspecting them for signs of change in the balance of power between the civil and religious hierarchies, both of them branches of royal government under the patronato real. The first story illustrates the politics of religion, with parish priest Joseph Pérez de la Mota using every available weapon in his campaign against governor Juan Márquez Cabrera, from denunciation in the pulpit to refusal of absolution, excommunication, and harassment by the Inquisition. Two story cycles feature parish priest Alonso de Leturiondo. In the first, Father Leturiondo battles two successive governors to protect the honor of his office and augment its revenues. The second centers on his jurisdictional struggles with the Franciscans (which the author argues were not part of the secularization conflict because no Indians were involved) and exposes the tensions between the secular and regular clergy. The sanctuary stories of condemned pirate Andrew Ranson, "miraculously" saved from the garrote and whisked into a chapel, and of two separate Cape Verdean slaves accused of murder, show religious authorities asserting their independence at the governor's expense by allowing offenders to "flee to the sacred."

Moving into the eighteenth century, Kapitzke briefly discusses the peninsular-creole conflict within Franciscan ranks and the reforms launched by auxiliary bishop don Francisco de San Buenaventura Martínez Tejada, who pushed the secularization issue and brought about the dissolution of the doctrinas...