| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Alan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff, editors. Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500–1800. New York: Routledge. 2003. Pp. xxii, 317. $24.95.
This important collection of essays provides a superb account of the emergence of distinctive new forms of hagiography in the Americas. Like other European institutions in the New World, churches, especially in the Catholic colonies, were constantly called upon to adjust to the contingencies of colonial life. The need for accommodation was readily apparent to missionaries and other religious men and women in the Americas who sought to canonize or otherwise memorialize the most notable figures of their churches. "To study the saints of the New World during the centuries of European colonization," coeditor Jodi Bilinkoff observes, "is to contemplate the 'spiritual conquest' of the Americas to be sure, but also the American 'conquest' of Christianity" (pp. xiv-xv).	1
The appropriation and transformation of the cults of the saints in the Americas, and the real and perceived conflicts with the church hierarchy that New World religiosity produced, is a central concern of the contributors. In this context, visual evidence figures prominently in the essays. Charlene Villaseñor Black demonstrates that devotion to St. Anne flourished in Mexico even as the post-Tridentine church sought to suppress this devotion and to promote an increasingly patriarchal view of the Holy Family in both Spain and the New World. Black suggests that "[t]he preference for the extended matriarchal family in Mexican Holy Family images may be traceable to the influence of indigenous family structures" (p. 22). The fact that some paintings of St. Anne included representations of Indians and Africans helped to increase the popularity of the cult. In a different Mexican context, Antonio Rubial García makes effective use of paintings in his exploration of the controversies that attended the proposed canonization of Juan de Palafox (bishop of Puebla). Devotion to Palafox not only in Mexico but also throughout Spanish America produced only a small body of hagiographical literature, and his beatification process was driven by the iconography that this devotion produced.	. . .

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