Shrines and Miraculous Images
Shrines and Miraculous Images
Religious Life in Mexico Before the Reforma
The vast literature on Our Lady of Guadalupe dominates the study of shrines and religious practices in Mexico. But there is much more to the story of shrines and images in Mexico’s religious history than Guadalupe and Marian devotion. In this book a distinguished historian brings together his new and recent essays on previously unstudied or reconsidered places, themes, patterns, and episodes in Mexican religious history during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
William Taylor explores the use of local and regional shrines as well as devotion to images of Christ and Mary, including Our Lady of Guadalupe, to get to the heart of the politics and practices of faith in Mexico before the Reforma. Each of these essays touches on methodological and conceptual matters that open out to processes and paradoxes of change and continuity, exposing the symbolic complexity behind the material representations.
Shrines and Miraculous Images is a collection of essays on religious venerations in pre-industrial Mexico, written by a leading voice in the field with decades of meticulous research in ecclesiastical archives.…The book is an instant classic and a significant contribution to the understanding of Mexican culture.
This is an important book by an accomplished historian. William B. Taylor provides us with an innovative collection of six essays that demonstrate how historians can use images to analyze social and cultural history.
Taylor charts new ground in the historiography, and thus ‘synoptic’ view of the image-based piety that will help to guide research on Mexico’s religious history for years to come.
William B. Taylor is the Muriel McKevitt Sonne Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley.
