Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Identity, 1600-1810

Bibliographic Data

ID2835519
AuthorsChristopher Eric Garces (Princeton University, corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume84
Issue1
Pages139-141
Publication date2004-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-84-1-139
OpenAlexW1519306183
LanguageEN
Citations received12

Despite the ubiquity of regional saints and their deep symbolic influence on life and history in Latin America, comparatively few scholars have studied the discourse of saintliness in cross-regional perspective. Ronald J. Morgan’s elegant volume reviews the early Spanish American history of the saint’s Life (Vida), a genre of sacred biographical writing reflecting the colonial societies in which they were written.The actual subject of Spanish American Saints, its title notwithstanding, is not the saints themselves but the work of their hagiographers in New Spain and Peru. Aspiring, often defiant biographers used their pious works to influence the public reception of exemplary Christian heroes in both the Universal Church and their own devotional communities. These authors (male religious or secular clergy) and their immediate audience (mainly literate criollos and peninsulares) were “relatively elite” members of colonial society (p. 33). Morgan argues that hagiographers’ claims about local saints were deeply caught up in the regional defense of criollo identity and the shifting post-Tridentine interests of religious and secular authorities. Sacred biographies of the heroic dead began to embrace Spanish America’s living arguments about the cultural politics of sacred behavior. Morgan thus views these posthumous Lives as paradigmatic social documents: practical ciphers of shifting political tensions and ethnic values.It is novel and challenging to view the regional meanings of saintliness without surrendering priority to pilgrimage, religious persecution, ecclesiastical promotion, civil-religious hierarchies, the growth of cultic devotion, or even the saints’ acts themselves. Instead, Morgan interprets the shifting “identity rhetoric” of sacred biographies. The core of the book comprises five case studies of regional saints from New Spain and Peru: Sebastián de Aparicio, Santa Rosa de Lima, Mariana de Jesús, Catarina de San Juan, and Felipe de Jesús.The author, following David Brading and Antonio Rubial García, considers the symbolism of Spanish American saints to be peculiar and distinct from European counterparts. Mariana de Jesús, for example, shared much in common with the older and officially sanctioned Rosa de Lima, including popular titles (Rosa, Azucena), religious exercises, mystical experiences, and a “salvific relationship with homeland or patria” (p. 109). But the Quiteña Mariana’s studied imitation of the viceregal capital’s Rosa de Lima additionally served, within her sacred biographies, to raise the religious aspirations of hagiographers located in secondary urban centers on a par with their peers in viceregal seats of authority. Criollos apparently defined themselves not only in relation to transplanted peninsulares but also between cities.The sacred reflections of criollo culture are still more varied and interesting. Peninsular friar Sebastián de Aparicio spent his adulthood in Puebla, Mexico, where he developed a reputation as an extraordinarily pious individual and thaumaturgic practitioner of religious duties. His biographers highlighted his association with “both Spains,” while drawing attention to the actual, “derivative” peninsular source of his religious authority within his novohispano acts (p. 172). Spanish colonial saints could attain their odor of sanctity from the confusion of European religious personalities, charitably reworked in response to local political dilemmas. In Morgan’s view, Spanish American saints’ associations with criollo identity either stained or empowered their claims to authentic sanctity. These associations were shaped by the inescapable political anxieties of biographers’ own lifetimes.The most significant contribution of this volume lies in its analysis of hagiographic technique. Chapter 2 elegantly captures the literary tactics that lay behind the choice of subjects. Morgan describes the various “functions” of hagiographic writing strategies, the relation between religious authorship and second- or third- person experience with saints, the importance of hagiography as an alms-collecting technique, and the catechistic role of saints’ images in promoting the development of specific cults. He gives cautious attention to the mutual influence between politics and religious writing.This innovative perspective curiously effaces the lived, historical meanings of actual saints’ symbolic actions. Religious biographers, Morgan soundly observes, were often the primary or secondary witnesses, keepers, confessors, believers, and long-term promoters of exemplary Christian life. Yet they did not write in isolation from the undead piety of these exemplary individuals or their indirect critiques of existing political order—they could not escape the influential symbolic shadows of saintly acts even centuries removed from them.Morgan’s insightful reading might have benefited by exploring the triple relationship between regional saints, the devotional communities that partly re-formed alongside them during their own lifetimes, and the always-shifting regional problems of viceregal sovereignty. Less emphasis on sacred biographies and more on local testimony in beatification proceedings—the actual voices in living dialogue with Spanish American saints—would have greatly strengthened the source work in this volume. These considerations aside, the author skillfully traces the intellectual paths by which Spanish American biographers reinvented the meanings of saintly acts and furthers our general understanding of the politics of saintliness. Further critical studies of hagiography—of colonial saints’ multivalent interactions as well as their long-term cultural effects—should be well served by Morgan’s contrary elaborations of traditional sacred history

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Colonialism · Elite · Identity (music · Literature · Pilgrimage · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Sociology · Theology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies

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