RELIGION AND REFORM IN COLONIAL SPANISH AMERICA: Religious Experience in Latin American Culture before Independence

The works under review here are united not only by their concern for religion, ideas, and society in colonial Spanish America but equally by a common didactic orientation, which is very strong in each of them. Taken together, they are a good gauge of recent advances in dealing with religion in studies of Latin American history and the rethinking of how religion touches the heights of empire building, the valleys of confrontation and crisis, and the daily and frequently inglorious struggles of quotidian existence. Castro's book and the collective volume edited by Schroeder and Poole share a common concern for the Indian in colonial Latin America. But in dealing with the great lifework of Bartolome de Las Casas, Castro is more directly concerned with how today's misunderstanding of Las Casas's moment and his efforts in the past reveal an enduring legacy of colonialism toward indigenous Americans in the New World. Consequently, his study is clearly argumentative, with a singular desire to make the reader perceive Las Casas and his times in a new and more critical light than Lewis Hanke purportedly shed on the great defender of the Indians of the New World. Taking issue with a Hanke-inspired vision of Las Casas has a long history, yet Castro's stance is extreme. Schroeder and Poole's collection has no such singular intent. The contributors to this carefully crafted volume work from a great variety of sources in pursuit of their analytical goals. Adapted from the source document.