Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico Before the Reforma

by William B. Taylor

Overview

The vast literature on Our Lady of Guadalupe dominates the study of shrines and religious practices in Mexico. But there is much more to the story of shrines and images in Mexico's religious history than Guadalupe and Marian devotion. In this book a distinguished historian brings together his new and recent essays on previously unstudied or reconsidered places, themes, patterns, and episodes in Mexican religious history during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

William Taylor explores the use of local and regional shrines as well as devotion to images of Christ and Mary, including Our Lady of Guadalupe, to get to the heart of the politics and practices of faith in Mexico before the Reforma. Each of these essays touches on methodological and conceptual matters that open out to processes and paradoxes of change and continuity, exposing the symbolic complexity behind the material representations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826348548
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	02/15/2019
Series:	Religions of the Americas Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

William B. Taylor is the Muriel McKevitt Sonne Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Figures ix

Foreword xi

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction 1

Part I Images and Shrines 13

1 Images and Immanence in Colonial Mexico 15

2 Two Shrines of the Cristo Renovado: Religion and Peasant Politics 63

Part II Our Lady of Guadalupe: Toward a History of Devotion 95

3 Mexico's Virgin of Guadalupe in the Seventeenth Century: Hagiography and Beyond 97

4 Places of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Eighteenth-Century Mexico 117

5 Guadalupe, Remedios, and Cultural Politics of the Independence Period 139

Part III Beyond the Colonial Period 163

6 Shrines and Marvels in the Wake of Mexican Independence 165

Notes 207

Index 281

Editorial Reviews

"Shrines and Miraculous Images is a collection of essays on religious venerations in pre-industrial Mexico, written by a leading voice in the field with decades of meticulous research in ecclesiastical archives. . . . The book is an instant classic and a significant contribution to the understanding of Mexican culture."—Juan Javier Pescador, Comparative Studies in Society and History



"This is an important book by an accomplished historian. William B. Taylor provides us with an innovative collection of six essays that demonstrate how historians can use images to analyze social and cultural history."—The Americas

"Taylor charts new ground in the historiography, and thus 'synoptic' view of the image-based piety that will help to guide research on Mexico's religious history for years to come."—Journal of Latin American Studies

From the Publisher