Can I read Alone Before God : The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico on EtoBox?

Alone Before God : The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico by Pamela Voekel is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Alone Before God : The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico about?

Focusing on cemetery burials in late-eighteenth-century Mexico, Alone Before God provides a window onto the contested origins of modernity in Mexico. By investigating the religious and political debates surrounding the initiative to transfer the burials of prominent citizens from urban to suburban cemeteries, Pamela Voekel challenges the characterization of Catholicism in Mexico as an intractable and monolithic institution that had to be forcibly dragged into the modern world. Drawing on the archival research of wills, public documents, and other texts from late-colonial and early-republican Mexico, Voekel describes the marked scaling-down of the pomp and display that had characterized baroque Catholic burials and the various devices through which citizens sought to safeguard their souls in the afterlife. In lieu of these baroque practices, the new enlightened Catholics, claims Voekel, expressed a spiritually and hygienically motivated preference for extremely simple burial ceremonies, for burial outside the confines of the church building, and for leaving their earthly goods to charity. Claiming that these changes mirrored a larger shift from an external, corporate Catholicism to

Author

Pamela Voekel

Publisher

Duke University Press Books

Published

2002

Language

EN

ISBN

9781282920545

Subjects

History, Political Science, Religion