Holy Organ or Unholy Idol? focuses on the significance of the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and its accompanying imagery in eighteenth-century New Spain. Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank considers paintings, prints, devotional texts, and archival sources within the Mexican context alongside issues and debates occurring in Europe to situate the New Spanish cult within local and global developments. She examines the iconography of these religious images and frames them within broader socio-political and religious discourses related to the Eucharist, the sun, the Jesuits, scientific and anatomical ideas, and mysticism. Images of the Heart helped to champion the cult’s validity as it was attacked by religious reformers.

The Christian image in the process of modern globalisation Drawing on original research covering different periods and spaces, this book sets out to appreciate the specific place of images in the history of evangelisation in the long modern period. How can we reconceptualise the functions of the visual mediation of the gospel message, both in terms of the production and reception of this message and in terms of its effective mediators, artists, religious, and cultural ambassadors? The contributions in this book offer multiple geographical and historical insights regarding the circulation of the image on the global scale of the Christianised world or the world in the process of being Christianised, from China to Iberia. Combining the contribution of historians and art historians, the authors highlight the points of intercultural encounter and tension around preaching, catechesis, devotional practices and the propagandistic use of images. Through its aesthetic and social study of the image, and by examining the inner and outer borders of Europe and the mission lands, Eloquent Images contributes significantly to the history of evangelisation, one of the major dynamics of the first European globalisation.

This work explores a generational history from America's Colonial period to the United States of contemporary times. A novel historical approach will rely on generational markers every 15th year, rather than yearly astronomical dates. This method will make history more accessible and its patterns more apparent. Identified from cultures presented in an earlier volume, the phasings are: 1) "Invisible" Beginnings; 2) Establishment and Testing; 3) Novel Consolidation and Opening Up, 4) Crisis and Creativity; 5) Empire and Inclusion, and 6) Rigidification or Renewal. This history does not seek to hide or obscure the shadow side of America, nor does it fail to present beauty and light, especially during the 30s generational phase. One discovery prompted by this generational time chart was to more fully consider the importance of New Spain in understanding U.S. history. A second and related theme is inclusion of the Indigenous, whose influence extends to all phases of American history. Come journey with us and experience historical events and people's lives generation by generation, and see how they fit into historical phases. Such an awareness, the author contends, will help us to make the generational choice of our times.

The Wound and the Stitch traces a history of imagery and language centered on the concept of woundedness and the stitching together of fragmented selves. Focusing particularly on California and its historical violences against Chicanx bodies, Loretta Victoria Ramirez argues that woundedness has become a ubiquitous and significant form of Chicanx self-representation, especially in late twentieth-century print media and art. Ramirez maps a genealogy of the female body from late medieval Iberian devotional sculptures to contemporary strategies of self-representation. By doing so, she shows how wounds—metaphorical, physical, historical, and linguistic—are inherited and manifested as ongoing violations of the body and othered forms of identity. Beyond simply exposing these wounds, however, Ramirez also shows us how they can be healed—or rather stitched. Drawing on Mesoamerican concepts of securing stability during lived turmoil, or nepantla, Ramirez investigates how creators such as Cherríe Moraga, Renee Tajima-Peña, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Amalia Mesa-Bains repurpose the concept of woundedness to advocate for redress and offer delicate, ephemeral moments of healing. Positioning woundedness as a potent method to express Chicanx realities and transform the self from one that is wounded to one that is stitched, this book emphasizes the necessity of acknowledgment and ethical restitution for colonial legacies. It will be valued by scholars and students interested in the history of rhetorics, twentieth-century Chicanx art, and Latinx studies.

In The Beating Heart, Robin Choudhury explores how the heart has been represented over time and across cultures. He investigates the interplay between the heart depictions of successive eras and the prevailing cultural discourse – religious, social, philosophical – of each. In parallel, he considers how the 'scientific' understanding of the function of the heart has unfolded over 2,500 years, from the observations of Aristotle, through detailed anatomical descriptions beginning in the Renaissance, to the emergence of experimental physiology in the seventeenth century, culminating in the twentieth in full understanding of the molecular and cellular processes by which the heart beats autonomously. The Beating Heart is a beautifully illustrated journey of discovery across four millennia of human history, in the company of an author whose medical knowledge of the heart is matched by his fascination with the visual arts.

The Age of Revolution has traditionally been understood as an era of secularization, giving the transition from monarchy to independent republics through democratic movements a genealogy that assumes hostility to Catholicism. By centering the story on Spanish and Latin American actors, Pamela Voekel argues that at the heart of this nineteenth-century transformation in Spanish America was a transatlantic Catholic civil war. Voekel demonstrates Reform Catholicism's significance to the thought and action of the rebel literati who led decolonization efforts in Mexico and Central America, showing how each side of this religious divide operated from within a self-conscious intercontinental network of like-minded Catholics. For its central protagonists, the era's crisis of sovereignty provided a political stage for a religious struggle. Drawing on ecclesiastical archives, pamphlets, sermons, and tracts, For God and Liberty reveals how the violent struggles of decolonization and the period before and after Independence are more legible in light of the fault lines within the Church.

"It was mid-December 1610 in Mexico City. The Church was in its preparatory season of Advent, leading up to the celebration of Christ's birth at Christmas. The nuns of the Encarnacion convent had just celebrated the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, on 8 December. But now, in this time usually filled with joy, some of the nuns were nervous. Their choirbooks were missing. Without them, the nuns would not be able to celebrate the anniversary of Christ's birth adequately. A musician priest of the metropolitan cathedral, located just three blocks from the convent, had caused the nuns' alarm: Antonio Rodríguez Mata (d. 1643) had all five of the missing books. He had borrowed them from Sister Flor de Santa Clara, the convent "vicaria de coro" (choir vicar) but had failed to return them despite the convent's repeated requests. The diocesan vicar general and the attorney general were summoned. The nuns of the Encarnación demanded that Mata be imprisoned if he failed to return the books immediately following the denunciation. The threat of jail time was serious, but so too was the alleged offense: Mata was impeding the nuns from performing their liturgical music for Christmas"--