Building Colonial Cities of God. Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain by Karen Melvin (review)

Writing on the religious orders of New Spain is not an easy task. It demands solid research to examine the great variety of published and unpublished documents, books, articles, and doctoral theses. That would be reason enough to appreciate this book of Karen Melvin. But the subject of her work is what deserves special mention. The study of religious orders in New Spain customarily has focused on the evangelization of the Indian communities. Little work has been done on their activities in the cities where a significant number of churches and monasteries have been established since the second part of the sixteenth century. Melvin has dealt skillfully with this topic, studying the importance of the mendicant orders in building the religious culture in urban centers of colonial Mexico.

Given the vast range of this matter, the author has chosen an intelligent approach to deal with it. She has divided the book in two parts. The first one studies general themes pertaining to five mendicant orders: Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, Discalced Carmelites, and Mercedarians. Through a close examination of religious chronicles, manuscripts, and rare book collections, Melvin details, among other issues, the founding of religious houses in the cities, the patterns of and reasons for their urban expansion, and the impact of eighteenth-century reforms on the presence of the mendicant orders in the cities. Special attention is given to the identities of each order and to the role of their clergy as preachers, confessors, spiritual directors, alms collectors, educators, and urban missionaries. Conflicts emerging from these activities with the episcopal authorities are well exemplified with the study of the disputes between the Discalced Carmelites and Juan José de Escalona y Calatayud, bishop of Valladolid (Morelia), over his attempts to regulate the activities and internal life of the Carmelites.

The second part of the book examines the relationships between the mendicant orders and provides a comprehensive discussion of their contributions to the practice of urban Catholicism in colonial Mexico. Given the impossibility of studying all the issues involving this topic, the ones chosen are sufficient to reflect the complex variety of religious experiences conducted by the mendicant orders in the cities. Notable is the study of the so-called “Ordernspatriotism”—that is, the fight for the orders’ rank in urban society, which was especially evident in the numerous disputes over the place of the mendicant orders in religious processions. Equally significant is the study of the conflicts over the territories in which the orders sought to have influence within the cities. Special devotions such as the Immaculate Conception or the stigmata of their patriarchs also were points of discussion—for example, Franciscans, Dominicans, and Carmelites arguing for the devotion to the stigmata of Ss. Francis, Catherine of Siena, and Maria Magdalena de Pazzi.

The last chapter of this second part is a fine summary of the most significant activities, conflicts, and contributions of the mendicant orders to the urban religious culture of colonial Mexico. The author takes Toluca (near Mexico City) as a case study, as this city has hosted two major mendicant orders: the Franciscans (since the sixteenth century) and the Discalced Carmelites (since the seventeenth century). The discussions of these orders over territoriality, third-order memberships, sermons, processions, and spiritual directions are a good example of the complex relationships and influence of the mendicant orders in colonial Mexico.

Melvin, evoking Robert Ricard’s classical work on sixteenth-century Mexico, is inclined to call the activities of the mendicant orders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the “spiritual consolidation” (p. 267) of Mexico. Her research could be interpreted by some church historians as strengthening the view of the Catholic Church as one of the first global organizations of early-modern Europe. Melvin’s book provides enough evidence to argue that the Church in New Spain is not only a missionary extension...