The Devil in the New World: Impact of Diabolism in New Spain - Hardcover

Within the extensive modern literature on the evangelization of the New World, the Devil has been little discussed. Yet until the end of the 18th century, missionaries themselves perceived diabolism at the heart of the Native-American belief system and at the root of their own failure to establish a church purged of Satan and pagan superstition. This book not only shows that the Devil mattered, but that diabolism lay at the core of early-modern assessments of non-Christian religious systems, and the bitter fight to subdue them. In illuminating a neglected aspect of the European encounter with America, Cervantes sets the full history of the "spiritual conquest" in a rich and original context. He reveals how native Americans themselves received, and re-interpreted, the view of Christianity presented to them, how they refused to see the world as the missionaries saw it. Based on an exhaustive examination of archival sources, the book brings into clear focus the complex, often bewildering, and sometimes tragic clash between a theology which posited the existence of competing forces, and one which insisted that all deities were multiform beings within which good and evil coexisted. The book however does much more: it deals in compelling and persuasive detail with the social history of the interaction between the two cultures, explaining not only the impact of European ideas upon the New World, but the influence of diabolism on the conceptual apparatus of the old. And it provides a subtle account of the role of diabolism in the emerging baroque culture of the 17th and 18th centuries which strikingly challenges conventional explanations of the growth of scepticism in the period. In giving the Devil his due, Cervantes' elegant and sensitive analysis transforms our bleak picture of the contact between the Native-Americans and their conquerors.

Fernando Cervantes is now lecturer in Hispanic and Latin-American studies at the University of Bristol.