The changing practices and meanings of Catholicism in Bourbon Mexico are the subject of this study, based on research in the last wills and testaments of the faithful of Mexico City as well as contemporary devotional literature and ecclesiastical documentation. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, baroque Catholicism, with its exuberant ornamentation of sacred space and lavish rituals, dominated both ecclesiastical and lay religious practice in New Spain. During the second half of the eighteenth century, a group of reforming bishops attempted to remake religious culture, to move the...
The changing practices and meanings of Catholicism in Bourbon Mexico are the subject of this study, based on research in the last wills and testaments...