| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Daniel T. Reff. Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 290. Cloth $60.00, paper $21.99.

Daniel T. Reff has delved more deeply into the beliefs of Jesuit missionaries than any other scholar of northern Mexico. Reff was trained as an anthropologist, and this book, which emphasizes disease as a key factor in attracting converts in the periods of early Christianity and the missionary north of Mexico, reflects both his previous publications and his comparative approach. In Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518–1764 (1991), Reff drew on the work of William McNeill and Alfred Crosby to answer questions raised by his own fieldwork in Sonora, Mexico. He boldly proposed that epidemic disease (which began to devastate the north even before effective Spanish contact) was the major factor explaining why indigenous peoples accepted Jesuit missionaries and allowed the reorganization of their communities and subsistence strategies under the mission system. Subsequently Reff participated in the translation and annotation of a key ethnohistorical source for the early period of Jesuit missions in northern Mexico: History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith Amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World, by the Jesuit Andrés Pérez de Ribas (1645; translated by Reff, Maureen Ahern and Richard K. Danford, and published in 1999). More than ever struck by Pérez de Ribas's rhetorical strategies, Reff looked to their origins, and what he found led to the book under review.

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