The Devil in the New World : the impact of diabolism in New Spain

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The Devil in the New World : the impact of diabolism in New Spain

Fernando Cervantes

Yale University Press, 1994

  • : pbk

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注記

Bibliography: p. [162]-172

Includes index

内容説明・目次

巻冊次

ISBN 9780300059755

内容説明

Within the extensive modern literature on the evangelization of the New World, the Devil has been little discussed. Yet until the end of the 18th century, missionaries themselves perceived diabolism at the heart of the Native-American belief system and at the root of their own failure to establish a church purged of Satan and pagan superstition. This book not only shows that the Devil mattered, but that diabolism lay at the core of early-modern assessments of non-Christian religious systems, and the bitter fight to subdue them. In illuminating a neglected aspect of the European encounter with America, Cervantes sets the full history of the "spiritual conquest" in a rich and original context. He reveals how native Americans themselves received, and re-interpreted, the view of Christianity presented to them, how they refused to see the world as the missionaries saw it. Based on an exhaustive examination of archival sources, the book brings into clear focus the complex, often bewildering, and sometimes tragic clash between a theology which posited the existence of competing forces, and one which insisted that all deities were multiform beings within which good and evil coexisted. The book however does much more: it deals in compelling and persuasive detail with the social history of the interaction between the two cultures, explaining not only the impact of European ideas upon the New World, but the influence of diabolism on the conceptual apparatus of the old. And it provides a subtle account of the role of diabolism in the emerging baroque culture of the 17th and 18th centuries which strikingly challenges conventional explanations of the growth of scepticism in the period. In giving the Devil his due, Cervantes' elegant and sensitive analysis transforms our bleak picture of the contact between the Native-Americans and their conquerors.
巻冊次

: pbk ISBN 9780300068894

内容説明

Until the end of the eighteenth century, missionaries to the New World agreed that diabolism lay at the heart of the Native American belief system and at the root of their own failure to establish a church purged of Satan and pagan superstition. The Devil mattered, and he occupied a central place in discussions of all non-Christian religious systems and in the bitter disputes over how to combat them. In this elegant and sensitive analysis, Fernando Cervantes gives the Devil his due, illuminating a neglected aspect of the European encounter with America and setting the full history of the "spiritual conquest" in a rich and original context. He reveals how Native Americans reinterpreted the view of Christianity presented to them, how they refused to see the world as the missionaries saw it. Drawing on archival sources, he brings into clear focus the complex, often bewildering, and sometimes tragic clash between a theology that posited the existence of competing forces and one that insisted that all deities were multiform beings within which good and evil coexisted. He deals in compelling and persuasive detail with the social history of the interaction between the two cultures, explaining not only the impact of European ideas upon the New World but the influence of diabolism on the ideology of the Old. And he provides a subtle account of the role of diabolism in the emerging baroque culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that strikingly challenges conventional explanations of the growth of skepticism in the period.

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