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Exporting the Catholic Reformation: Local

Religion in Early-Colonial Mexico. By Amos
Megged. Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions 2.
Leiden: Brill, 1996. 191 pp. \$71.50 cloth.

Carlos M. N. Eire

Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture / Volume 68 / Issue 01 / March 1999,
pp 239 - 240
DOI: 10.2307/3170188, Published online: 28 July 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/

abstract_S0009640700071833

How to cite this article:

Carlos M. N. Eire (1999). Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture,
68, pp 239-240 doi:10.2307/3170188

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BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES 239

Exporting the Catholic Reformation: Local Religion in Early-Colonial Mexico.

By Amos Megged. Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions 2. Leiden: Brill, 1996.
191 pp. $71.50 cloth.
In the author's own words, the purpose of this book is "to offer a fresh
cultural interpretation" of the impact of European Catholicism on the reli-
gious life of the native peoples of southern Mexico in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (1). The "fresh cultural interpretation" boils down to
this: the conversion of the natives was a process of negotiation, compromise,
and accommodation. Scholars who are familiar with the history of the
Christianization of the Americas might call into question the claim that this is
really a "fresh" interpretation. Historians of culture might also raise the same
question. But the ultimate value of this book, fortunately, does not rest solely
on the author's claims to innovation, or on the question of whether or not
these claims could stand up to scrutiny. This is a truly fine local study of the
ways in which European clerics sought to replace the religion of the Central
American natives with their own Spanish Catholicism.
Megged's study focuses on southeastern New Spain, covering an area now
shared by the nation of Guatemala and the Mexican state of Chiapas. The
book is divided into five chapters, with an introduction and an epilogue. The
introduction contains a brief outline of the book and its aims, as well as a
compact discussion of the relevant interpretative literature. At the outset,
Megged makes it known that he has read widely, not just in the history of
colonization, but also in the history of early modern European religion and
culture. The chapters break down as follows: chapter 1 analyzes now the
Catholic clerics interpreted the religion of the natives; chapter 2 outlines the
various administrative and cultural obstacles faced by the missionaries in
transplanting Tridentine Catholicism to a remote corner of Mexico; chapter 3
focuses on some of the principal ways in which Catholic ritual became
institutionalized at the local level by the missionaries; chapter 4 probes the
missionaries' collective mentality by scrutinizing their own definitions of the
concept of "idolatry," and their attitudes towards the ancestral religion of the
natives; chapter 5 is a brief survey of some of the most salient examples of
native resistance to the Spaniards' missionary efforts.
Megged's study is based on a very wide range of archival and printed
sources from both sides of the Atlantic: Spain, the Vatican, Mexico, Guatemala,
and the United States. The documents themselves also range impressively,
and include such disparate sources as legal court records, visitation reports by
bishops, missionaries' letters, teaching manuals, catechisms, printed treatises,
and dictionaries.
When all is said and done, this book offers up much in the way of detail,
and thus expands our knowledge of the way in which religion was trans-
formed on the local level in one part of New Spain. As far as the larger picture
is concerned, though, this book does not make great analytical strides for-
ward. This is not so much a book about the exportation of the Catholic
Reformation as it is a book about the transformation of native religion; nor is
this as much a cultural history of the Spanish missionary effort as it is a
narrative of the nuts and bolts of a forced mass conversion, told largely from
the documents that were left behind by the missionaries. As the title indicates,
Amos Megged also wants to make much here of the fact that this was not
merely Spanish Catholicism that was being exported, but rather that of
Tridentine Reformation, which was not only more vigorous, but also much
240 CHURCH HISTORY

more inclined towards uniformity and homogeneity at the expense of local

diversity. Exporting Catholicism was a difficult enterprise to begin with, but
exporting Tridentine Catholicism was an even harder task, Megged reminds
us repeatedly. In the end, though, Megged cannot really deal so much with the
Catholic Reformation as with the specific local difficulties faced by clerics who
happened to belong to the Tridentine church. Though he makes valiant efforts
to set his narrative and analysis against the larger background of what was
transpiring in Spain and Europe, his focus remains fixed on the distinctive
tasks faced by Catholic clerics in a different world, where there was no corrupt
church to "reform," but rather an entire culture to transform.
Ultimately, Megged seems to offer an ambivalent conclusion. After reading
about the myriad ways in which the Tridentine missionaries and the natives
negotiated a kind of religion that was as local and native as the Catholic
Church would allow, we are told that the native traditions were ultimately
"crushed under the wheel of conversion" (160), and are offered as an example
of this crushing process a hybrid Christian/native ritual from present-day
Oxchuc. (A similar ahistorical leap from the sixteenth to the twentieth century
is made earlier, on 73, also as a means of identifying the hybridization of
religion in this area.) Whether this anachronistic example points to a negoti-
ated religion or a "crushed" religion remains unclear. Also unclear is Megged's
assessment of the relation of this process to the Catholic Reformation.
This book should naturally prove of greatest interest to historians of
colonial Central America and historians of missions, for whom it should prove
quite useful, perhaps even enlightening owing to its wealth of details, and its
firm anchoring in primary sources. Historians of the Catholic Reformation,
too, might want to dive into this rich collection of locally specific facts, all of
which ultimately relate to the expansion of the Catholic Church in the early
modern era.
Finally, a relatively small but significant point needs to be raised: this book
is full of typographical errors. As someone who has been burned many times
by the negligence of publishers (even to the point of having a book published
with the title misspelled on the spine), this reviewer is wary of calling
attention to production flaws, but in this case the mistakes are glaring enough
to deserve comment. At $71.50, or any price, such carelessness should be
considered an intolerable affront to the author and his readers.
Carlos M. N. Eire
Yale University

Women, Religion, and Social Change in Brazil's Popular Church. By Carol

Ann Drogus. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. xiv
+ 226 pp. $26.00 cloth.
The historic changes experienced in Latin American Catholicism in the
years following the Second Vatican Council, including the rise of liberation
theology, have drawn the attention of a wide range of scholars. Many studies
have examined the church's institutional changes, especially the growth of
base Christian communities (CEBs), and its activism on behalf of human
rights violations and socioeconomic justice, particularly in places like Brazil,
Chile, and Central America. While a number of observers have noted the
central (often majority) role of women in progressive Catholic projects, so far
few full-length studies have explored the complex and ambivalent relations