Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Religiosity, or the observance of religious norms and practices, molded the ways in which all three of the major continental cultures that met in the Americas understood the natural world and human society. Religious traditions, institutions, and specialists played fundamental roles in structuring and controlling societies in Europe, Africa, and the indigenous Americas. Differing spiritual beliefs and practices lay at the heart of many of the cultural and social interactions of the colonies, including conflicts over the unequal access to power and resources imposed by colonization. Members of all these groups interacted with each other, borrowing selectively, bowing in varying degrees to colonially imposed practices, and reshaping their religiosity into richly varied phenomena that defy any neat description and categorization.This chapter provides an entry point to colonial religiosity through three types of colonial religious subjects and their spheres of activity: nuns, heretics, and witches. Each term paradoxically defined both the center and the extremes of colonial religiosity, the limits of good and evil. These were apparently eccentric subjects, who expressed beliefs, concerns, and practices shared by large populations within colonial society. Though European meanings value the term “nun” as positive, and “heretic” and “witch” as negative, all three terms impose a single ... log in or subscribe to read full text