Reviewed by Susan Juster | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.4

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Reviewed by Susan Juster | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas. Edited by ALLAN GREER and JODI BILINKOFF. (New York: Routledge, 2003. Pp. xxii, 317. $90.00 cloth, $24.94 paper.)

Reviewed by Susan Juster , University of Michigan

The sacred has an uncanny ability to show up in unexpected places, far from home. Historians of Latin America have generally been more imaginative than their counterparts in North America in tracing the peregrinations of the sacred during the era of conquest and colonization, thanks in no small part to the material and symbolic richness of the religious culture they study. Catholic regions offer the cultural historian a feast of holy things, from a bewildering variety of saints (some official, many unauthorized) to the "living" artifacts that came with them—body parts, object relics, wonder tales, miracle-working shrines, hagiographies, manuscripts written literally in blood. Protestant cultures offer far less for the historian to chew on: a narrow range of Bibles and other "godly" texts, along with a smattering of simple religious objects, most of suspect provenance. With the exception of Carla Gardina Pestana's essay, which explores the martyrdom of Quaker missionaries in Puritan Massachusetts, none of the chapters in this intriguing volume ventures outside the Catholic regions of New France and New Spain in their quest for the holy. This, I think, is a shame, even if the roots of this scholarly bias are entirely understandable. "Discovering the Holy" in the materially deprived and spiritually austere climate of British North America, where saints are all too human and the supernatural exists in fugitive form only, is not always the most rewarding task. But it is there to be found for those who look hard enough, as David Hall, Jon Butler, and others have taught us.

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