"Examines writings by three early modern Spanish Franciscans in Mexico. Alfonso de Castro, an inquisitional theorist, offers a defense of Indian education. Alonso Cabello, convicted of Erasmianism by the Mexican Inquisition, discusses Christ's humanity in a Nativity sermon. Diego Muñoz, an inquisitional deputy, investigates witchcraft in Celaya"--Provided by publisher.

At the end of the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I forced the Irish Franciscans into exile. Of the four continental provinces to which the Irish Franciscans fled, the Prague Franciscan College of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary was the largest in its time. This monograph documents this intense point of contact between two small European lands, Ireland and Bohemia. The Irish exiles changed the course of Bohemian history in significant ways, both positive — the Irish students and teachers of medicine who contributed to Bohemia’s culture and sciences— and negative — the Irish officers who participated in the murder of Albrecht of Valdštejn and their successors who served in the Imperial forces. Dealing with a hitherto largely neglected theme, Parez and Kucharová attempt to place the Franciscan College within Bohemian history and to document the activities of its members. This wealth of historical material from the Czech archives, presented in English for the first time, will be of great aid for international researchers, particularly those interested in Bohemia or the Irish diaspora.

By 2025, Latin America's population of observant Christians will be the largest in the world. Nonetheless, studies examining the exponential growth of global Christianity tend to overlook this region, focusing instead on Africa and Asia. Research on Christianity in Latin America provides a core point of departure for understanding the growth and development of Christianity in the "Global South." In The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Christianity an interdisciplinary contingent of scholars examines Latin American Christianity in all of its manifestations from the colonial to the contemporary period. The essays here provide an accessible background to understanding Christianity in Latin America. Spanning the era from indigenous and African-descendant people's conversion to and transformation of Catholicism during the colonial period through the advent of Liberation Theology in the 1960s and conversion to Pentecostalism and Charismatic Catholicism, The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Christianity is the most complete introduction to the history and trajectory of this important area of modern Christianity.

During early modern European expansion, America emerged as dynamic meeting ground, continuously forging multidirectional global encounters. Relating Continents dismisses the semantics of ‘encounter’ which, in the politics of naming, euphemistically substitutes invasive violence, but invests in the notion’s dimension as an enactment of literary, cultural, and social relations, fusing people, goods, texts, artifacts, ideas, and senses of belonging. Understanding the practice of relating as both connecting and narrating, this anthology investigates the linking of continents in Romance literary and cultural history, as well as the tales of entanglement produced in the process. The contributors revisit the worldwide impact of distant or in-person negotiations between conquerors and local actors; they assess how colonial interventions shift hemispheric native networks, and they examine the ties between America, Africa, and Asia. By doing so, they prove the global constitution of early modern Spanish and Portuguese American literatures, their historical and cultural contexts, and their long-lasting legacies.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, ecclesiastics and others created religious texts written in the native languages of the Nahua and Yucatec Maya. These texts played an important role in the evangelization of central Mexico and Yucatan. Translated Christianities is the first book to provide readers with English translations of a variety of Nahuatl and Maya religious texts. It pulls Nahuatl and Maya sermons, catechisms, and confessional manuals out of relative obscurity and presents them to the reader in a way that illustrates similarities, differences, and trends in religious text production throughout the colonial period. The texts included in this work are diverse. Their authors range from Spanish ecclesiastics to native assistants, from Catholics to Methodists, and from sixteenth-century Nahuas to nineteenth-century Maya. Although translated from its native language into English, each text illustrates the impact of European and native cultures on its content. Medieval tales popular in Europe are transformed to accommodate a New World native audience, biblical figures assume native identities, and texts admonishing Christian behavior are tailored to meet the demands of a colonial native population. Moreover, the book provides the first translation and analysis of a Methodist catechism written in Yucatec Maya to convert the Maya of Belize and Yucatan. Ultimately, readers are offered an uncommon opportunity to read for themselves the translated Christianities that Nahuatl and Maya texts contained.

A survey of the latest scholarship on Catholic missions between the 16th and 18th centuries, this collection of fourteen essays by historians from eight countries offers not only a global view of the organization, finances, personnel, and history of Catholic missions to the Americas, Africa, and Asia, but also the complex political, cultural, and religious contexts of the missionary fields. The conquests and colonization of the Americas presented a different stage for the drama of evangelization in contrast to that of Africa and Asia: the inhospitable landscape of Africa, the implacable Islamic societies of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires, and the self-assured regimes of Ming-Qing China, Nguyen dynasty Vietnam, and Tokugawa Japan. Contributors are Tara Alberts, Mark Z. Christensen, Dominique Deslandres, R. Po-chia Hsia, Aliocha Maldavsky, Anne McGinness, Christoph Nebgen, Adina Ruiu, Alan Strathern, M. Antoni J. Üçerler, Fred Vermote, Guillermo Wilde, Christian Windler, and Ines Zupanov.