Review

Author(s): Patricia Seed

Review by: Patricia Seed
Source: The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 90, No. 4 (Oct., 2004), pp. 831-832
Published by: Catholic University of America Press
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Accessed: 02-11-2015 19:41 UTC

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 BOOK REVIEWS 831

archives of Propaganda Fide, neither of which are well known. Jaime Valenzuela

Marquez suggests new lines of research into seventeenth- and eighteenth

century Latin America: processions, confraternities, shrines, convents, popular
notions of sin, etc. Two authors, Claudia Rolle and Paolo
Broggio, deal with the

Jesuits. Roble studies the "policy of holiness" in the Jesuit missions in Paraguay
and Bolivia. The missionaries fell prey to a "Utopian temptation "when they held
up the primitive church as their basic model for the mission Indians. Paolo

Broggio shows that the Jesuits applied European baroque piety and practices to
their urban missions in Latin America, but there were differences, too. In the
New World the sacrament of confession played a key role in the evangelization
of the Indians.

Francesca Cant? addresses the question of why Rose of Lima became so pop
ular not only among the Creole ?lite, but also among the Indians. Rose, of

course, became one of the first of a Creole identity, but she also
symbols
seemed to fulfill several messianic prophecies. Sara Cabibbo reviews the curi
ous but not uncommon case of Mar?a d'?greda, the Span
seventeenth-century
ish contemplative who was "transported" in her mystical visions to the New
World. In an age in which women could not do missionary work, some of them
fulfilled that need in their visions. Oscar Beozzo studies the cult of the saints
and the Virgin during the first stages of
the evangelization of Brazil. Beozzo car
ries out a detailed study of the names of parishes from the sixteenth to the nine
teenth century as a way of determining the popularity of certain saints and
Marian titles. He also proposes further research into the possible connections
between certain saints and African cults.

This is not an organically unified work, but rather a collection of essays deal

ing with the same general Indeed, Propaganda the two on

subjects. chapters
Fide its library and archives,
and although very informative, do not really seem
to belong with the other essays. In any case, the individual essays, which the ed
itor terms as "works in progress," contain up-to-date bibliographies and in most
cases provide interesting and new avenues for research

Jeffrey Klaiber, S J.
The Pontifical Catholic University of Peru
Lima

Alone before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity inMexico. By Pamela

Voekel. (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2002. Pp. viii, 336.
$64.95 clothbound; $21.95 paperback.)

If you have ever wandered through Mexico's many churches and noted the
numerous burial crypts near the altars of saints, you may have wondered why
people chose to be buried there. Looking at the dates on those tombs,you may

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832 BOOK REVIEWS

have noted fewer interments from the eighteenth and later centuries. Like me,

you may have wondered when and why individuals ceased being buried in the
churches. By sampling wills from a broad swathe of Mexican history7, Pamela
Voekel illuminates the answers to both why individuals chose to be buried in

churches, and why they stopped. During the seventeenth century, burials were
costumed and staged rituals, with professional mourners hired to fill
elaborately
the ranks of funeral processions. The wealthy often left jewels to adorn the im

ages of Mary and the saints as well as setting aside funds for Masses to be re
cited for their souls. Often they insisted upon being interred close to the chapel
of a particular saint or image of Our Lady.

Late eighteenth-century secular and religious reformers sought to reduce the

immoderate displays of religious faith during mourning rituals in favor of an in
terior piety, and called for less elaborate funeral arrangements. Whether per
suaded by the leadership, or following the changing directions of their own

beliefs, testators requesting simple funerals increased from a scant 5 percent at

the start of the century to a third by the first decades of the nineteenth century.
In the same period, gifts of jewelry and elaborate ornamentation for the saint's

images declined to a negligible 3 percent while charitable bequests for the poor
increased markedly. The desire for one's corpse to reside near a saint waned dra

matically from 73 per cent in the 1710's to 12 per cent in the 1850's. But this
shift was also propelled by secular leaders' push for a fundamental relocation of
final resting grounds.

At the end of the eighteenth century in Mexico, as in Spain, secular officials be

gan to urge the transfer of burial grounds from churches to cemeteries, often on
the city's outer limits.
Propelled by a growing concern that church-interred

corpses contributed to epidemics, these reform-minded Catholic leaders held

their ground against ?lites who viewed such demands as undermining their social
status. Religious orders and members of the lower clergy also opposed the new

measures; both stood to lose significant income from the shift to cemetery burials.

Resistance to the demands for less ostentatious funerals were initially greater
in Veracruz than Mexico City, but when changed trade regulations increased the

prosperity of the merchants, this new bourgeoisie sided with the Catholic re
formers in favoring simpler burials in suburban cemeteries. In an insightful
comparison with changes in wills in England and France at the same time,
Voekel notes that in both countries, the spiritual dimensions of wills receded

during the eighteenth century, while in Mexico, religiosity remained, but shifted
toward more modest rituals and increased giving to the poor. In providing us
with such useful information and such thoughtful analyses, Voekel has con
tributed significantly to our understanding of a difficult topic?the changing
nature of religious faith in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico.

Patricia Seed
Rice University

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