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Drawing on texts written by and about European and Euro-American captives in a variety of languages and genres, Lisa Voigt explores the role of captivity in the production of knowledge, identity, and authority in the early modern imperial world.The practice of captivity attests to the violence that infused relations between peoples of different faiths and cultures in an age of extraordinary religious divisiveness and imperial ambitions. But as Voigt demonstrates, tales of Christian captives among Muslims, Amerindians, and hostile European nations were not only exploited in order to emphasize cultural oppositions and geopolitical hostilities. Voigt's examination of Spanish, Portuguese, and English texts reveals another early modern discourse about captivity--one that valorized the knowledge and mediating abilities acquired by captives through cross-cultural experience.Voigt demonstrates how the flexible identities of captives complicate clear-cut national, colonial, and religious distinctions. Using fictional and nonfictional, canonical and little-known works about captivity in Europe, North Africa, and the Americas, Voigt exposes the circulation of texts, discourses, and peoples across cultural borders and in both directions across the Atlantic.

Through a fascinating discussion of religion's role in the rhetoric of American civilizing empire, The Imperial Church undertakes an exploration of how Catholic mission histories served as a useful reference for Americans narrating US settler colonialism on the North American continent and seeking to extend military, political, and cultural power around the world. Katherine D. Moran traces historical celebrations of Catholic missionary histories in the upper Midwest, Southern California, and the US colonial Philippines to demonstrate the improbable centrality of the Catholic missions to ostensibly Protestant imperial endeavors. Moran shows that, as the United States built its continental and global dominion and an empire of production and commerce in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Protestant and Catholic Americans began to celebrate Catholic imperial pasts. She demonstrates that American Protestants joined their Catholic compatriots in speaking with admiration about historical Catholic missionaries: the Jesuit Jacques Marquette in the Midwest, the Franciscan Junípero Serra in Southern California, and the Spanish friars in the Philippines. Comparing them favorably to the Puritans, Pilgrims, and the American Revolutionary generation, commemorators drew these missionaries into a cross-confessional pantheon of US national and imperial founding fathers. In the process, they cast Catholic missionaries as gentle and effective agents of conquest, uplift, and economic growth, arguing that they could serve as both origins and models for an American civilizing empire. The Imperial Church connects Catholic history and the history of US empire by demonstrating that the religious dimensions of American imperial rhetoric have been as cross-confessional as the imperial nation itself.

Cut loose from their ancestral communities by wars, natural disasters, and the great systemic changes of an expanding Europe, vagabond strangers and others out of place found their way through the turbulent history of early modern Spain and Spanish America. As shadowy characters inspiring deep suspicion, fascination, and sometimes charity, they prompted a stream of decrees and administrative measures that treated them as nameless threats to good order and public morals. The vagabonds and impostors of colonial Mexico are as elusive in the written record as they were on the ground, and the administrative record offers little more than commonplaces about them. Fugitive Freedom locates two of these suspect strangers, Joseph Aguayo and Juan Atondo, both priest impersonators and petty villains in central Mexico during the last years of Spanish rule. Displacement brought pícaros to the forefront of Spanish literature and popular culture-a protean assortment of low life characters, seen as treacherous but not usually violent, shadowed by poverty, on the move and on the make in selfish, sometimes clever ways as they navigated a hostile, sinful world. What to make of the lives and longings of Aguayo and Atondo, which resemble those of one or another literary pícaro? Did they imagine themselves in literary terms, as heroes of a certain kind of story? Could impostors like these have become fixtures in everyday life with neither a receptive audience nor permissive institutions? With Fugitive Freedom , William B. Taylor provides a rare opportunity to examine the social histories and inner lives of two individuals at the margins of an unfinished colonial order that was coming apart even as it was coming together.

Since The Catholic Historical Review, founded to focus on North American Catholic history, has published few articles on early Christianity, this essay focuses mainly on the book reviews published. Since 1915, there have been major shifts in the historiography of late antiquity and late-ancient Christianity. More recent interest in social and cultural history has strongly influenced the creation of new areas of scholarship.

This article reviews recent literature on U.S. religious institutions and argues that a new paradigm is emerging in that field, the crux of which is that organized religion thrives in the United States in an open market system, an observation anomalous to the older paradigm's monopoly concept. The article has six sections: first, a brief survey of the paradigm crisis; second, a development of the concept of an open market in the historiography and sociology of U.S. religion; third, fourth, and fifth, arguments that U.S. religious institutions are constitutively pluralistic, structurally adaptable, and empowering; sixth, a consideration of recent religious individualism in the light of the new paradigm. A conclusion sketches some research implications.

As it happens with other early-Modern corpora, the descriptive texts from 16th-century encounters of the Portuguese colonizers in Brazil are well-known for their strangeness. In them we find references to entities like monsters and demons, bizarre descriptions, and odd classification systems of plants and animals. For the most part, these elements are dismissed as mere eccentricities by modern scholars studying these texts. Instead, this book takes these elements seriously. They are focused on and tackled with a theoretical tool_styles of thinking_not yet used in Luso-Brazilian studies, and coming from another field of inquiry: philosophy and history of science. By doing so the book aims to unveil epistemological and ontological issues in which colonial and post-colonial studies are entangled, and which have a relevance that goes beyond debates concerning, for instance, the formation of Brazil's cultural identity. This book contributes to Luso-Brazilian studies, science studies, and the history of the early-modern period. The notion of 'styles of thinking' as presented and used in it benefitted from the many discussions about philosophy and history of science that emerged since the 1980s, with authors such as Ian Hacking, Lorraine Daston, and Peter Galison, who have already done much reassessing critically what is best in the work of previous authors such as Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn, and Michel Foucault. This book considers that the well-known puzzling passages of the corpus of the Portuguese have a fictional and figurative character that acquires full intelligibility in view of literary and mystical traditions typical of the late Renaissance, and influential over the Portuguese. Nature is understood as emerging from an excessive source which permanently overflows it and which is impossible to refer and depict literally. The book points to the fact that such an idea would connect the Portuguese with other peculiar pre-Modern and post-Modern authors with similar ontological insights: from the neo-Platonists to Boccaccio, Nietzsche, and more recently, Derrida.

This article seeks to redress certain historiographical oversights in the study of Father Divine's Peace Mission movement by turning away from exclusive consideration of Divine's own theological agenda and toward the very tactile devotional culture of his diverse followers. Recent scholarship has rightly pointed out the influences of New Thought on Divine's theologies of materialization and on his reconceptualization of cosmic dramas of personal and corporate salvation, developments that can be seen in the theological sensibilities of his followers as well. Yet, the Peace Mission's “living epistles” also had deep histories, whether personal or familial, in Protestant and Catholic traditions that were not simply discarded when they turned to Father Divine. Lastly, much of the current scholarship on Father Divine and the Peace Mission has been limited to the highly charged Harlem decade of the 1930s. Drawing on the rich material archive of subsequent decades, this article looks primarily at the Peace Mission's activities of the 1940s and 1950s, thus yielding insight into the changing racial dynamics of the movement as well as its ongoing relationship with postwar American cultures.

(Originally published in the first issue of the Journal of Church & State in 1958.) Identifies the religious motivation behind the English colonization of America in the 17th century & traces how religious intolerance was transmitted to colonial New England. The power of the Church of England in the early Massachusetts Bay Colony & Puritan persecution of \"dissenters\" are documented, noting the close relationship between church & state across all the New England colonies except Rhode Island, which never had an established church & was the first to promote religious freedom. The gradual spread of this new consciousness of religious liberty across the New England area by the mid-18th century is described. K. Hyatt Stewart

“Iglesia me llamo” (“church is my name”) was the only phrase uttered over and over by numerous criminals during judicial interrogations that took place at various times throughout the Iberian kingdoms that ultimately became Spain, and their American colonies. This expression meant that even after committing heinous crimes, those outlaws received shelter at local churches and thereby felt entitled not to disclose any information to justice officials about their conduct. Such criminals were confident that it would not be easy to remove them from the church for punishment. Indeed, groups of wrongdoers turned churchyards, churches, their cloisters, and their adjoining cemeteries into permanent residences. They were alleged to move freely in and out of church buildings under cover of night and to bring friends, lovers, and liquor in for enjoyment. Their presence terrorized neighbors and passersby, and inconvenienced priests and parishioners alike.

Jenkins discusses how themes such as circuit, place, and performance may fit alongside others such as diaspora and network within attempts to consider the lives of the American Irish in spatial as well as historical terms. The necessarily selective set of works were taken from a range of North American locations and extending occasionally to Ireland, highlighted other familiar themes such as collective memory, contestations of identity, and the routines and practices of everyday life, and at various points suggested their potential for comparative inquiry with other segments of the \"global Irish.\"