Shrines and miraculous images

Religious images have always been a vital element in Mexican culture. 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. Taylor considers such examples as a charred handprint from Purgatory, our Lady of Light's censored Leviathan, and the surprising rise of pilgrimage in the nineteenth century. Why were these shrines and images so important to so wide a range of people of different class, caste, and ethnicity? How was their vitality understood and nurtured? How did they connect the world of direct experience to imagined worlds beyond? William Taylor explores the early history of local and regional shrines, and 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. These essays explore particular images, shrines, and sometimes conflicted relations among their human custodians. The essays touch on methodological and conceptual matters that open out to processes and paradoxes of change and continuity, exposing the symbolic complexity behind the material representations. --Book Jacket.