St. Joseph is mentioned only eight times in the New Testament Gospels. Prior to the late medieval period, Church doctrine rarely noticed him except in passing. But in 1555 this humble carpenter, earthly spouse of the Virgin Mary and foster father of Jesus, was made patron of the Conquest and conversion in Mexico. In 1672, King Charles II of Spain named St. Joseph patron of his kingdom, toppling St. James--traditional protector of the Iberian peninsula for over 800 years--from his honored position. Focusing on the changing manifestations of Holy Family and St. Joseph imagery in Spain and colonial Mexico from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, this book examines the genesis of a new saint's cult after centuries of obscurity. In so doing, it elucidates the role of the visual arts in creating gender discourses and deploying them in conquest, conversion, and colonization. Charlene Villaseñor Black examines numerous images and hundreds of primary sources in Spanish, Latin, Náhuatl, and Otomí. She finds that St. Joseph was not only the most frequently represented saint in Spanish Golden Age and Mexican colonial art, but also the most important. In Spain, St. Joseph was celebrated as a national icon and emblem of masculine authority in a society plagued by crisis and social disorder. In the Americas, the parental figure of the saint--model father, caring spouse, hardworking provider--became the perfect paradigm of Spanish colonial power. Creating the Cult of St. Joseph exposes the complex interactions among artists, the Catholic Church and Inquisition, the Spanish monarchy, and colonial authorities. One of the only sustained studies of masculinity in early modern Spain, it also constitutes a rare comparative study of Spain and the Americas.

"Detecting numerous occasions when Joseph is invoked for protection from plague, foreign invasion, and threat to the Church, the author emphasizes the contemporary currency - in both theology and art - of the Maria-Ecclesia typology and concomitant conceptualization of St. Joseph as heroic protector of Mary and the Church. Here challenged are the long-held view of the saint's unimportance prior to the Counter Reformation and old assumption that pre-Tridentine images were often intended to demean him."--BOOK JACKET.

Satire, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Art, c. 1300-1550 is the first to reclaim satire as a central component of Catholic altarpieces, devotional art, and veneration, moving beyond humor's relegation to the medieval margins or to the profane arts alone. The book challenges humor's perception as a mere teaching tool for the laity and the antithesis of 'high' veneration and theology, a divide perpetuated by Counter-Reformation thought and the inheritance of Mikhail Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World, 1965). It reveals how humor, laughter, and material culture played a critical role in establishing St. Joseph as an exemplar in western Europe as early as the thirteenth century. Its goal is to open a new line of interpretation in medieval and early modern cultural studies, by revealing the functions of humor in sacred scenes, the role of laughter as veneration, and the importance of play for pre-Reformation religious experiences.

A new edition of the “brilliantly original and highly sophisticated” study of saint worship after the fall of the Roman Empire (Library Journal). In this groundbreaking work, Peter Brown explores how the worship of saints and their corporeal remains became central to religious life in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. During this period, earthly remnants served as a heavenly connection, and their veneration is a fascinating window into the cultural mood of a region in transition. Brown challenges the long-held two-tier idea of religion that separated the religious practices of the sophisticated elites from those of the superstitious masses, instead arguing that the cult of the saints crossed boundaries and played a dynamic part in both the Christian faith and the larger world of late antiquity. He shows how men and women living in harsh and sometimes barbaric times relied upon the holy dead to obtain justice, forgiveness, and power, and how a single sainted hair could inspire great thinkers and great artists. An essential text by one of the foremost scholars of European history, this expanded edition includes a new preface from Brown, which presents new ideas based on subsequent scholarship. “Informative…demonstrates once again Brown’s genius for sharing with his readers the fruits of not only his own painstaking and meticulous scholarship but also his penetrating understanding of the evolution of Western culture as a whole.”—Religious Studies

The publication of the King James version of the Bible, translated between 1603 and 1611, coincided with an extraordinary flowering of English literature and is universally acknowledged as the greatest influence on English-language literature in history. Now, world-class literary writers introduce the book of the King James Bible in a series of beautifully designed, small-format volumes. The introducers' passionate, provocative, and personal engagements with the spirituality and the language of the text make the Bible come alive as a stunning work of literature and remind us of its overwhelming contemporary relevance.

In spring 1996, Saint Joseph's University hosted the exhibition "The Holy Family as Prototype of the Civilization of Love: Images from the Viceregal Americas," which commemorated the 75th anniversary of the introduction of the Feast of the Holy Family to the liturgical calendar of the Universal Church. The exhibition displayed paintings from the Spanish Colonial period, rare books and engravings from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, and lithographs and devotional paintings on tin from nineteenth-century Mexico and New Mexico. Culled from private collections, galleries in Miami, New York, Washington D.C., and institutional collections of several Catholic universities, these art works offered a visual chronicle of the evolution of devotion to the Holy Family.