TY - JOUR
AU - Grow, Matthew, J.
AB - In The Worlds of Junípero Serra, a collection of essays that began as a conference at the Huntington Library in 2013, contributors reevaluate the life and cultural legacy of the controversial Franciscan missionary from Mallorca, best known for initiating the system of Spanish missions in present-day California. The collection grows out of a renewed popular interest in Junípero Serra, inspired by the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth in 2013 and his canonization by the Catholic Church in 2015; the renewed scholarly interest is perhaps best represented by Steven W. Hackel's Junípero Serra: California's Founding Father (2013). Hackel, also the editor of The Worlds of Junípero Serra, has put together an intelligent collection of essays that explores the historical worlds that created Serra and illuminates the contested representations of him. The collection is emphatically multidisciplinary, with chapters written by specialists in art history, Spanish, medieval Iberian literature and culture, humanities, and the history of Spain and the United States. And it is decidedly global, both in the contexts in which it considers Serra and in its contributors (who work professionally in Spain, Chile, Mexico, and the United States). The authors bring wider views to previous studies on Serra, which have largely focused on his California years (1769–1784) and the contested history of the missions he established. The essays are divided into four sections. The first three essays examine Serra's years in Mallorca, where he lived until age thirty-five. John Dagenais's intriguing textual study, for example, uses more than 2,100 pages of class notes to assess Serra's intellectual and religious life as a student and a teacher at the Convent of St. Francis. The next group of five essays focuses on Serra's years in Mexico and his approach to the Franciscan missions. Anna M. Nogar demonstrates the deep influence on Serra of Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, a seventeenth-century nun believed to have spiritually traveled to New Mexico to preach to Indians in their language. Other essays examine Serra's life at the College of San Fernando in Mexico City, his “popular missions” to Catholics in the villages of New Spain, and the tension between utopian vision and daily life at Mission San Carlos (p. 107). In the third part, comprising two essays, scholars demonstrate how Serra used art and architecture to convey his vision of Catholicism and convert Indians. The final section, an additional two essays, examines cultural representations of Serra in the centuries since his death. Richard L. Kagan, for example, describes how the anti-Spanish Black Legend in the United States largely disappeared during a “Spanish craze” in the late nineteenth century, helping transform Serra into a popular hero (p. 227). This book succeeds unusually well in publishing a cohesive set of essays that provides unexpected insights into the worlds inhabited by Serra. It is a model of how multidisciplinary conversations, deep archival research, and new contexts can illuminate a subject as well known as Serra. © The Author 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Worlds of Junípero Serra: Historical Contexts and Cultural Representations
JF - The Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaz188
DA - 2019-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-worlds-of-jun-pero-serra-historical-contexts-and-cultural-0aG3pRr8g0
SP - 153
VL - 106
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -