Angels, Demons and the New World . Edited by Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xii + 318 pp.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Angels, Demons and the New World . Edited by Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden . New York : Cambridge University Press , 2013. xii + 318 pp.Book Reviews and NotesReligion--a central motivator of Spain's imperial project in the early modern period--has long been a source of fascination for scholars of Latin American colonial history. From the sixteenth-century evangelization projects to the flowering of Baroque Catholicism in the seventeenth to the changing role of the church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, numerous scholars have addressed topics such as the institutional church, popular religiosity, and Catholic cosmology in Latin America. This excellent edited volume focuses primarily on the latter theme; specifically, the role of supernatural beings in colonial Spanish American mentalities.The role of the devil in the New World has been ably explored elsewhere by the editors of this book, Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden, as well as by a number of the contributors. In this project, they build upon and expand upon their earlier studies of Spanish American demonology to include angels, a fitting addition to the scholarship on Spanish Catholicism, with its Manichean, dualistic tradition of the eternal battle between good and evil. They take up the question of the reasons for the persistence of belief of angels and demons in the post-Reformation period. Noting that Europe's Patristic and medieval heritage had produced religious cultures "marked by an immense appetite for contact with the supernatural" (1), they address the ways that demons and angels were conceptualized and represented by theologians and the laity, and explore the "impact and long-term repercussions of the Reformation and the Renaissance" as well as "the relationship, interaction and evolution of 'elite' and 'popular' mentalities" (4).The book is divided into three sections, "From the Old World to the New," "Indigenous Responses," and "The World of the Baroque." These sections thus trace the evolution of Spanish religious culture from the late fifteenth century to the early eighteenth. The first section's three essays examine the intellectual histories of angelology and demonology in Europe, and the creative ways these theories were advanced and received in their New World settings. Andrew Keitt addresses early modern European discourses on superstition, medical humanism, and preternatural philosophy, concluding that theologians' interest in educating the laity on the folly of superstition, and the developments of medical humanism, illustrate some of the nuances of early modern Spanish intellectual life and should not be taken as evidence of an incipient scientific rationalism. Kenneth Mills, meanwhile, complicates the histories of the devil in Spain and its colonies by examining the writings of two Hieronymite friars who traveled together to Peru at the turn of the seventeenth century, emphasizing the interactions between Spain and the New World, and rejecting a more teleological model of religious diffusion from Spain. Fernando Cervantes, for his part, also emphasizes the negotiations that took place among different groups, but focuses on the central place of angels in the sixteenth-century evangelization projects, thus highlighting the interactions between European and indigenous ways of perceiving the liturgy. …