Plagues Priests and Demons - Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New by Daniel T Reff (2005).pdf - Magia - historia magii - morefaya2006

PLAGUES, PRIESTS, AND DEMONS

Drawing from anthropology, religious studies, history, and literary the-

ory, Plagues, Priests, and Demons explores signiﬁcant parallels in the rise

of Christianity in the late Roman Empire and colonial Mexico. Evi-

dence shows that new forms of infectious disease devastated the late

Roman Empire and Indian America, respectively, contributing to pa-

gan and Indian interest in Christianity. Christian clerics and monks in

early medieval Europe, and later Jesuit missionaries in colonial Mexico,

introduced new beliefs and practices as well as accommodated indige-

nous religions, especially through the cult of the saints. The book is

simultaneously a comparative study of early Christian and later Spanish

missionary texts. Similarities in the two literatures are attributed to simi-

lar cultural–historical forces that governed the “rise of Christianity” in

Europe and the Americas.

Daniel T. Reff is an associate professor in the Department of Compara-

tive Studies at Ohio State University. He is an anthropologist and enth-

nohistorian who has done research in northern Mexico, the American

Southwest, Spain, and Portugal. He is the author of numerous articles on

colonial Mexico in journals such as American Anthropologist , American

Antiquity , and Ethnohistory .Heisthe author of Disease, Depopulation,

and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518–1764 (1991), and

editor and co-translator (with Maureen Ahern and Richard Danford)

of the ﬁrst critical, English-language edition of Andres Perez de Ribas’s

History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith Amongst the Most Barbarous

and Fierce Peoples of the New World (1999 [1645]). He has been a resident

scholar at the School of American Research and is the recipient of major

research grants as well as a University Fellowship from the National

Endowment for the Humanities.

Plagues, Priests, and Demons

Sacred Narratives and the Rise of

Christianity in the Old World

and the New

DANIEL T. REFF

Ohio State University

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

one

Introduction

two

Disease and the Rise of Christianity in Europe, 150–800 C.E.

three

Disease and the Rise of Christianity in the New World: The Jesuit

Missions of Colonial Mexico

122

four

The Relevance of Early Christian Literature to Jesuit Missionaries

in Colonial Mexico

207

vii

CONTENTS

Conclusion

237

Bibliography

245

Index

281

viii

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