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Catholicism and the History of Latin America: A Review Essay
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Taylor, William Barrett |
| Copyright Year | 2013 |
| Abstract | remarkable. Since 1958 he has composed a steady stream of books and articles on an array of subjects in Latin American and Spanish history, all of them packed with insight and information, all of them of lasting value. If anything, he has picked up the pace in recent years, producing fully realized life-and-times biographies of Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín, and now this survey of Latin America’s “religious history.” The subject of New Worlds: A Religious History of Latin America is not altogether new to the author— he wrote a chapter on the Catholic Church in Latin America from 1830 to 1930 for the Cambridge History of Latin America (1986), and his Bourbon Spain, 1700-1808 (John Wiley & Sons, 1989) includes substantial attention to the politics of Church and state in the 18th century—but it presents a different kind of challenge than his other studies. His first book, Spanish Colonial Administration, 1782-1810: The Intendant System in the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata (Athlone Press, 1958), remains one of my favorites. It was the first well-researched regional study of the Spanish Bourbons’ reform of provincial government in the American colonies, where intendancies were especially consequential for the collapse of the empire and the politics and economy of a future nation. A touchstone for the narrative thrust of that book is the third Marqués de Sobremonte, celebrated in his time as a model intendant, but a resounding failure when he was promoted to viceroy in a time of crisis. Leaders, political regimes, and decisive events are threads running through all of Lynch’s scholarship. He is a leading authority on Latin America’s independence movements in the early 19th century, and even when he takes on such sweeping subjects as Habsburg and Bourbon Spain (in three volumes) and anchors them in economic and demographic data, it is states, leaders, and political and economic turning points that come to the fore. The same is true in this new book. Church history and religiosity in Latin America are not subjects for the casual author looking for ripe fruit on a low-hanging branch. It is a vast, controversial field still in great need of original research. The secondary literature is patchy, and much of the best scholarship has been published recently, apparently after Lynch began to write his book since he uses little of it. There is neither a thick base of monographic scholarship to draw upon nor a string of earlier surveys. Up to now, the outstanding attempt by an Anglophone scholar to survey the whole of Church history in the region was published nearly eighty years ago and it limits the discussion to Church-state relations.1 In attempting more, New Worlds makes a very welcome contribution. Its panorama of events, likely turning points, and patterns in Church history will be a touchstone of debate and enlightenment for years to come. Lynch sets the bar high: “a modern history of religion in Latin America” from the 16th century to the present that promises to account for “all the major issues” and considers “not only the religion |
| Starting Page | 22 |
| Ending Page | 24 |
| Page Count | 3 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1353/hsp.2013.0007 |
| Volume Number | 14 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://muse.jhu.edu/article/499768/pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1353/hsp.2013.0007 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
