The church of the dead : the epidemic of 1576 and the birth of Christianity in the Americas

Summary: "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"--

Record details

ISBN: 9781479802555
ISBN: 1479802557
ISBN: 9781479802562
ISBN: 9781479802586
Physical Description: print
xviii, 245 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.
Publisher: New York : New York University Press, [2021]

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Formatted Contents Note:

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.