Angels, Demons and the New World

by Edited by Fernando Cervantes , Andrew Redden

• ISBN13: 9780521764582
• ISBN10: 0521764580
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-04-08
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

When European notions about angels and demons were exported to the New World, they underwent remarkable adaptations. Angels and demons came to form an integral part of the Spanish American cosmology, leading to the emergence of colonial urban and rural landscapes set within a strikingly theological framework. Belief in celestial and demonic spirits soon regulated and affected the daily lives of Spanish, Indigenous and Mestizo peoples, while missionary networks circulated these practices to create a widespread and generally accepted system of belief that flourished in seventeenth-century Baroque culture and spirituality. This study of angels and demons opens a particularly illuminating window onto intellectual and cultural developments in the centuries that followed the European encounter with America. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of religious studies, anthropology of religion, history of ideas, Latin American colonial history and church history.

Table of Contents

Introduction

From the Old World to the New

The devil in the old world: anti-superstition literature, medical humanism and preternatural philosophy in early modern Spain

Demonios within and without: Hieronymites and the devil in the early modern Hispanic world

How to see angels: the resilience of Mendicant spirituality in Spanish America

Indigenous and Afro-American Responses

Satan is my nickname: demonic and angelic interventions in colonial Nahuatl theatre

Vipers under the altar cloth: Satanic and angelic forms in seventeenth-century New Granada

Where did all the angels go? An interpretation of the Nahua supernatural world

The World of the Baroque

Angels and demons in the conquest of Peru Ramón

Winged and imagined Indians

Psychomachia Indiana: angels, devils and holy images in New Spain

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