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Theater of a Thousand Wonders

Theater of a Thousand Wonders
A History of Miraculous Images and Shrines in New Spain

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Part of Cambridge Latin American Studies

  • Date Published: October 2016
  • availability: Available
  • format: Hardback
  • isbn: 9781107102675

$ 181.99 (C)
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About the Authors
  • The great many shrines of New Spain have become long-lived sites of shared devotion and contestation across social groups. They have provided a lasting sense of enchantment, of divine immanence in the present, and a hunger for epiphanies in daily life. This is a story of consolidation and growth during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rather than one of rise and decline in the face of early stages of modernization. Based on research in a wide array of manuscript and printed primary sources, and informed by recent scholarship in art history, religious studies, anthropology, and history, this is the first comprehensive study of shrines and miraculous images in any part of early modern Latin America.

    • Contains extensive research into little-known archival and early printed sources, offering a more comprehensive study of image shrines in New Spain
    • An interdisciplinary approach viewing the shrines in the context of art history, religious studies, history, and anthropology
    • Pays attention to the reception as well as presentation and promotion of religious images and material culture, addressing more directly and historically the question of reception that has intrigued art historians for a generation, but has yet to be closely studied
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    Awards

    • Winner, 2018 Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History, Latin American Studies Association
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    Reviews & endorsements

    'The distillation of a lifetime of study, Theater of a Thousand Wonders tells a story of affection, veneration, petition and grace across the Mexican landscape in the colonial period. Careful, attentive, and reflective, William B. Taylor examines how shrines were founded, what made them succeed or fail, how they changed over time, and the material aspects of their miracle-workings images. His wise work finds universal patterns in the local and recalls the marvelous side of long-forgotten lives.' William A. Christian Jr., author of Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain

    'Theater of a Thousand Wonders is an erudite historical anatomy of miraculous images and shrines in colonial Mexico. Breathtaking in its scope, and based on meticulous and exhaustive research, this revelatory study will compel readers to rethink their understanding of religious devotion in colonial Mexico and of the hundreds of 'little Heavens on earth'. Taylor presents us with the story of a resilient and vital enchantment even in the face of the secularizing impulses of the Enlightenment and Bourbon reformism. It is a stunning achievement.' Susan Deans-Smith, The University of Texas at Austin

    'Theater of a Thousand Wonders is a remarkable work of scholarship. Bringing together decades of research on the saints, shrines, images and miracles of colonial New Spain, William Taylor not only offers a beautifully written panorama of the country’s religious geography, but also a thoughtful examination of the meanings of such places and events for the colony’s everyday Catholics. Embracing meditations on race, material culture, art, and the history of emotions, it is one of the great contemporary works of religious history to be mentioned in the same breath as Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars.' Benjamin Smith, The University of Warwick

    'Theater of a Thousand Wonders is at once bold and ambitious, measured and thoughtful. Alert to the challenges of historical interpretation, Taylor tells his story of shrines and sacred images with a unique sense of time. This richly illustrated study distills years of careful, painstaking research in numerous archives and libraries, bringing together far-flung and disparate sources as an orchestral conductor, harmonizing a complex assortment of instruments into a stirring symphony.' Brian Connaughton, Metropolitan Autonomous University

    'Theater of a Thousand Wonders stages more than a few wonders of its own, especially in its deft conjoining of dazzling detail and breath-taking scope. It’s an extraordinary study of colonial sacred spaces and devotional objects by one of our most eminent historians of Latin America religion.' Thomas A. Tweed, author of Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion

    'A remarkable study to savor, intricately organized and as rich in case evidence as in expansive vision. Taylor's Theater of a Thousand Wonders somehow grounds and humanizes miraculousness while allowing it to soar, joining the particularities of New Spain to an ever-widening Christendom.' Kenneth Mills, University of Michigan

    '… an important statement about the prominence of image cults in early modern Hispanic America.' Gervase Rosser, The English Historical Review

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    Product details

    • Date Published: October 2016
    • format: Hardback
    • isbn: 9781107102675
    • length: 738 pages
    • dimensions: 235 x 158 x 48 mm
    • weight: 1.2kg
    • contains: 79 b/w illus. 1 map 5 tables
    • availability: Available
  • Table of Contents

    Part I. Bearings: Historical Patterns and Places of Image Shrines:
    1. Formative developments, 1520s–1720s
    2. Growth, other changes, and continuities in the late colonial period
    3. Miraculous images of Christ and the Virgin Mary
    4. Advocations of the Virgin Mary in the colonial period
    Part II. Soundings: Divine Presence, Place, and the Power of Things:
    5. Making miracles
    6. Relics, images, and other numinous things
    7. Religious prints and their uses
    8. Placing the cross in colonial Mexico
    9. Pilgrims, processions, and Romerías
    Conclusion
    Appendix 1. A checklist of colonial image shrines
    Appendix 2. When shrines began
    Appendix 3. Other saints, a brief appraisal
    Index.

  • Author

    William B. Taylor, University of California, Berkeley
    William B. Taylor is Muriel McKevitt Sonne Professor of History, Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Research for this book took him to Spain, Guatemala, various archives and libraries in the US, and many places in Mexico. It is a culmination of many years studying religious life and especially political and cultural power in colonial Latin America. Earlier books include Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (1996) and Shrines and Miraculous Images: Essays on Religious Life in Mexico Before the Reforma (2010). He is the recipient of several awards including the Albert J. Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association.

    Awards

    • Winner, 2018 Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History, Latin American Studies Association
    • Winner, 2017 John Gilmary Shea Prize, American Catholic Historical Association
    • Winner, 2017 María Elena Martínez Prize in Mexican History, The Conference of Latin American History

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