The Worlds of Junípero Serra: Historical Contexts and Cultural Representations ed. by Steven W. Hackel (review)

The canonization of Saint Junípero Serra y Ferrer in 2015 was an important moment in the conceptualization of the missions and of Serra himself. This collection of essays, the fruits of a conference held in 2013 at the Huntington Library, helps to provide a many-faceted view of the man and his era. The title is accurate in that these essays explore not just Serra but the various worlds in which he lived, from Mallorca to Mexico, and on to California. It is not simply geographically oriented, rather it looks at the cultural and social worlds in which the friar existed. In this sense it is a very valuable work because of its depth of analysis. Hackel’s introduction to the volume not only honestly notes the controversy surrounding Serra, but it also establishes the need for continuing study of the man and the missions.

The four sections of the book fall into two parts. The first traces Serra from his early life as a student and professor on Mallorca to his life as a missionary, first in New Spain and then in California. The second part looks at the aesthetics of Serra’s era and then the impact that Serra and the missions had after the friar’s death. The contributors are important scholars, including Richard Kagan, Robert Senkewicz and Rose Marie Beebe, Karen Melvin, and Hackel himself.

The first three essays, about Serra’s life and studies on Mallorca, are brief but fascinating in that they look closely into his education, the curriculum, and culture of the island in the early eighteenth century. As a lasting legacy, there remain nearly a thousand pages of notes taken by Serra as a student and professor, along with another 800 pages of notes taken by a student from his lectures. These are rich insights into the missionary’s mind before he departed for America.

The second section focuses on Serra as a missionary. An excellent chapter by Anna M. Nogar analyzes the influence of Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda on Serra. She was a seventeenth-century nun of the Franciscan family. In his missionary efforts, Serra remarked on the importance of her book, La mística ciudad de Dios, and her writings in general, especially in spreading the Marian doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.

In this section, David Rex Galindo considers life in the great Franciscan College of San Fernando de Mexico, where Serra received his missionary training for the trek to the northwest. Three chapters consider Serra’s missionary method. Karen Melvin focuses on his use of a simple folk style in attracting the faithful to a deeper Christianity, while José Refugio de la Torre Curiel studies the use of the confessional as a missionary tool. Beebe and Senkewicz tackle the difficult task of analyzing Serra’s evangelization among the natives. They recognize that central to Serra’s missionary approach were two irreconcilable core elements: attracting the natives to the faith through kindness and humility but also punishing them when they failed to follow rules that they had no part in creating and possibly did not fully understand.

The second half of the book deals more with the aesthetics of the era and also with Serra’s reception in later periods. In the first part, Clara Bargelini and Pamela Huckins look at the aesthetics of churches with which Serra would have been familiar; then they consider how he adopted and adapted that vision in the missions that he created in California. The essay by Cynthia Neri Lewis considers Serra’s relationship to paintings by José de Páez, three of which he brought with him from central Mexico to the California frontier.

In the last section, two essays study how later periods embraced Serra. Richard Kagan posits that the popular image of Serra was invented in the late nineteenth century as part of a “Spanish Craze...