The church of the dead : the epidemic of 1576 and the birth of Christianity in the Americas / Jennifer Scheper Hughes.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preface. Mortandad : requiem -- Introduction. Ecclesia ex mortuis : Mexican elegy and the church of the dead -- Theologia medicinalis : medicine as sacrament of the mortandad -- Corpus coloniae mysticum : indigenous bodies and the body of Christ -- Walking landscapes of loss after the mortandad : spectral geographies in a ruined world -- Hoc est enim corpus meum/This is my body : cartographies of an Indigenous Catholic imaginary after the mortandad -- Conclusion. The church of the living : toward a counter-history of Christianity in the Americas.

"In 1576 a catastrophic epidemic devastated Indigenous Mexican communities and left the colonial church in ruins. With its horrific final symptom of hemorrhage from the nose, the unfamiliar disease, which the Nahua named cocoliztli, took almost two million lives. In the crisis and its immediate aftermath, Spanish missionaries and surviving pueblos de indios held radically different visions for the future of church in the Americas"-- Provided by publisher.