The Regular Clergy and Reformation in the Early Spanish Caribbean, 1493-1580

Embargo until
2022-12-01
Date
2018-10-26
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Publisher
Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
This dissertation examines how the Church's regular orders, such as the Hieronymites, Dominicans, Mercedarians, and Franciscans, transformed the early Spanish Caribbean and subsequently influenced practices of conquest, settlement, and religion throughout the Americas. While studies based in terrestrial spaces have dominated the history of religion in the colonial Americas, I argue that the failures, controversies, and fragmented landscape of the early colonial Caribbean were equally important in the development of early modern European empires and Catholic missionary practices. This dissertation uses the activities, appointments, and writings of the Caribbean regular clergy to analyze missionary and imperial ideology at the edge of empire. While often ignored in histories of the sixteenth-century Reformation, the early Spanish Caribbean was at the center of perpetual ecclesiastical schemes of reform even as it was being remade and literally re-formed by dramatic demographic changes.
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Keywords
Caribbean, Religion, Regular Clergy, Friars, Catholicism, Reformation, Colonialism
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