Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New

by Daniel T. Reff

This comparative interdisciplinary study of the rise of Christianity in the late Roman Empire and in colonial Mexico reveals that epidemic disease undermined pre-Christian societies, contributing respectively to pagan and Indian interest in new forms of social and religious life. Christian clerics and monks in early medieval Europe and, later, Jesuit missionaries in colonial Mexico, reacted by introducing new beliefs and practices and accommodating indigenous religions as well.

Genres: History, World History, Religion

306 pages, Paperback

First published June 12, 2004

Reviews

[Jason Dyck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jesuit missionaries in northern Mexico, we are often told, were civilizing heroes who risked their lives to convert simplistic “savages” to Christianity. Daniel T. Reff—an ethnohistorian at Ohio State University—questions this vision of the colonial past with a comparative history of evangelization. Despite the centuries separating them, he argues early modern Jesuits in the Americas were similar to early Christian missionaries in the Roman Empire: both sought to convert non-Christian peoples in the wake of epidemic disease, using charity and other Catholic rituals to draw them into their faith. They were better able to explain and prevent sickness, seriously undermining the traditional power and authority of local leaders. Reff rewrites the history of religious change in northern Mexico in at least three other important ways. First, he refuses to dismiss sacred history as the pious fiction of a more credulous age. Through a close textual analysis of early Christian literature and mission histories, he reads against the grain to shed light on native voices buried in the historical record. Second, Reff adapts an ethnographic view of cultural relativism, allowing him to place natives and Jesuits in the same conceptual space. In his reading, one is not superior to the other; they both developed complex cultural systems, specifically religious beliefs and practices centred on the spirit world to ensure their overall wellbeing. And third, natives are agents and not mere victims in the colonial story. Acculturation is not a one-way affair for Reff, for natives influenced the Jesuits and the overall mission context. Instead of passive receivers, natives reworked many of the teachings and rituals of Catholicism according to their own beliefs and practices. At times, they were even teachers and preachers of Christian teachings, specifically native catechists. In sum, Plagues, Priests, and Demons offers students and scholars a refreshing look at colonial rule in frontier contexts like northern Mexico, one that challenges the Eurocentric assumptions of older mission histories.