| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Alone Before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico. By Pamela Voekel. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. viii + 336 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $64.95, cloth; $21.95, paper.)

In her aptly titled book, Pamela Voekel advances a compelling thesis with profound implications for our understanding of the critical period in Mexican history between the last decades of colonial rule and the first fifty years after independence. Rejecting the existing historiography that casts the major conflicts of the late colonial era as those between church against state and of the early national period as those between secularizing liberals and religious authorities, Voekel argues that the emergence of a new form of Catholic piety, one stressing the virtues of self-discipline and the need for a direct, personal relationship to God, led, instead, to a religious war. Representing the first full-length study of the Catholic Reformation in eighteenth-century Mexico, Voekel's book posits a religious basis not only to these struggles but to the emergence of modernity in Mexico.

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