Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico Before the Reforma (Religions of the Americas Series)

The vast literature on Our Lady of Guadalupe dominates the study of shrines and religious practices in Mexico. But there is much more to the story of shrines and images in Mexico's religious history than Guadalupe and Marian devotion. In this book a distinguished historian brings together his new and recent essays on previously unstudied or reconsidered places, themes, patterns, and episodes in Mexican religious history during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. William Taylor explores the use of local and regional shrines as well as devotion to images of Christ and Mary, including Our Lady of Guadalupe, to get to the heart of the politics and practices of faith in Mexico before the Reforma. Each of these essays touches on methodological and conceptual matters that open out to processes and paradoxes of change and continuity, exposing the symbolic complexity behind the material representations. Religious images have always been a vital element in Mexican culture. The vast literature on Our Lady of Guadalupe dominates the study of shrines and religious practices in Mexico. But there is much more to the story of shrines and images in Mexico's religious history than Guadalupe and Marian devotion. In this book, a distinguished historian brings together his new and recent essays on previously unstudied or reconsidered places, themes, patterns, and episodes in Mexican religious history during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Taylor considers such examples as a charred handprint from Purgatory, our Lady of Light's censored Leviathan, and the surprising rise of pilgrimage in the nineteenth century. Why were these shrines and images so important to so wide a range of people of different class, caste, and ethnicity? How was their vitality understood and nurtured? How did they connect the world of direct experience to imagined worlds beyond?

The vast literature on Our Lady of Guadalupe dominates the study of shrines and religious practices in Mexico. But there is much more to the story of shrines and images in Mexico’s religious history than Guadalupe and Marian devotion. In this book a distinguished historian brings together his new and recent essays on previously unstudied or reconsidered places, themes, patterns, and episodes in Mexican religious history during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

William Taylor explores the use of local and regional shrines as well as devotion to images of Christ and Mary, including Our Lady of Guadalupe, to get to the heart of the politics and practices of faith in Mexico before the Reforma. Each of these essays touches on methodological and conceptual matters that open out to processes and paradoxes of change and continuity, exposing the symbolic complexity behind the material representations.

The vast literature on Our Lady of Guadalupe dominates the study of shrines and religious practices in Mexico. But there is much more to the story of shrines and images in Mexico's religious history than Guadalupe and Marian devotion. In this book, a distinguished historian brings together his new and recent essays on previously unstudied or reconsidered places, themes, patterns, and episodes in Mexican religious history during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. William Taylor explores the use of local and regional shrines, and devotion to images of Christ and Mary, including Our Lady of Guadalupe, to get to the heart of the politics and practices of faith in Mexico before the Reforma. Each of these essays touches on methodological and conceptual matters that open out to processes and paradoxes of change and continuity, exposing the symbolic complexity behind the material representations. William Taylor explores the early history of local and regional shrines, and devotion to images of Christ and Mary, including Our Lady of Guadalupe, to get to the heart of the politics and practices of faith in Mexico. These essays explore particular images, shrines, and sometimes conflicted relations among their human custodians. The essays touch on methodological and conceptual matters that open out to processes and paradoxes of change and continuity, exposing the symbolic complexity behind the material representations. --Book Jacket Images and immanence in colonial Mexico Two shrines of the Cristo Renovado: religion and peasant politics Mexico's Virgin of Guadalupe in the seventeenth century: hagiography and beyond Places of Our Lady of Guadalupe in eighteenth-century Mexico Guadalupe, remedios, and cultural politics of the independence period Shrines and marvels in the wake of Mexican independence.