In Europe’s early modern Atlantic world the association of religion and empire may be said to begin with Spain’s conquests in the Americas, from Columbus’s Caribbean landfall in the autumn of 1492, through and well beyond the defeat in the 1520s of the mainland empire of the Mexica in the Central Valley of Mexico and in the 1530s of that of the Incas in the Andes of South America. The wedding of cross and sword, harking back to the Roman emperor Constantine’s campaigns after his conversion to Christianity, gained new life in Spain at the end of the fifteenth century....

Studies of English expansion have concentrated on the justifications deployed for taking the lands of indigenous peoples. Expansion, however, took place not only in the context of the process of dispossessing native peoples while wielding legal and religious arguments; it also occurred in the context of struggles between rival European claimants. If Europeans used their own perceived cultural superiority to the original inhabitants to justify invasion, other ideas—such as the false religion and brutality of rivals—had to be brought to the fore to defend aggression against fellow Europeans and Christians. English activity in the Atlantic entered a new...

This essay is an attempt to think through the fragile and purposeful nature of religious difference in the sixteenth-century transatlantic world of Spain and England. For this early period religious difference between Catholic Spain and Protestant England is often taken as a given, when in fact such difference was very much up in the air and often pressed into service to make a point about national distinction. As Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has recently argued in Puritan Conquistadors, the worldviews of English and of Spanish settlers in the New World had much in common, from their belief in the presence and power...

Six months after the trial and execution of Charles I and two months after the formal declaration of an English commonwealth, amidst deliberative and legislative action on such urgent matters as the settling of army accounts, reforming of the admiralty, assessment and collection of taxes, impressment of sailors, billeting of soldiers, fen drainage, coinage, abolition of the Deans and the House of Lords, pursuit of the war in Ireland, and the sale of forfeited royal and bishopric lands, the Parliament of England turned its attention to a project we may at first imagine to be more remote. On the strength...

The Atlantic fleet in September and the mail ship in May brought Mexico City “news and mercies” from Europe.¹ Residents bombarded travelers and new royal administrators with questions about the latest current events and court gossip in Spain. Even more important for the Catholic Empire of Spain, boats carried mercies in the form of royal decrees and devotional privileges like beatifications and canonizations.² From the arrival of the fleet of 1628, Mexico City learned that Pope Urban VIII had beatified the very first holy figure born in the Americas—its own native son, Fr. Philip of Jesus. The Discalced Franciscan...

Historians find it hard to resist the lure of the Jesuits. From the time of Ignatius to the dissolution of the order in 1773, members of the Society of Jesus played a central role, not only in the religious life of early modern Europe but also in its scholarly, scientific, educational, and political life. More important to colonialists, the Jesuits fanned out across the globe, and in their efforts to convert the heathen nations they developed a deep acquaintance with the languages and cultures of America, Africa, and Asia. Dedicated missionaries with a complex relationship to European imperium in the...

Sometime before 1647 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, an Algonquian woman and her husband decided to join a community of recent converts to Christianity. Some of them had begun living together in the town of Nonantum, and this couple found reason to move there also: perhaps they had lost kinfolk in the several plagues that swept through native communities since the English had come; perhaps the members of their families who had survived the plagues had become “praying Indians,” and this couple wished to remain with them. Perhaps they had lost land to English settlers, or felt that they soon...

“The dream is the oracle that all these poor Peoples consult and listen to, the Prophet which predicts to them future events, the Cassandra which warns them of misfortunes that threaten them, the usual Physician in their sicknesses, the Esculapius and Galen of the whole Country,—the most absolute master they have.”¹ By these words, written at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the superior of the Huron mission, Jean de Brébeuf, drew the contours of a culture of dreams that he failed to find legitimate; neither did he believe it compared favorably to that of the ancient Greeks and...

Although Britain did not officially declare it for another three years, in 1753 war already filled colonial Pennsylvania’s air. Periodicals teemed with speculation about its outbreak; talk of war and peace saturated even apparently apolitical publications, such as the High German American Almanac:

Newcomer: The Germans will soon be half English and say “Hau di thu?”

Resident: What does that mean?

Newcomer: I’m not quite sure myself, but I’d certainly like to know.

Resident: When the first settlers came to Pennsylvania and found no houses, no horses, no cows, no fruit, no mills, no salt, and no bread, they had...

In 1622 the Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila was canonized and her spiritual autobiography, or Vida, one of the most widely read texts of the Counter-Reformation, became even more popular.¹ In France, where it had been available in translation since 1601, it was recommended reading for women seeking to deepen their understanding of the Christian life. The young French Ursuline Marie Guyart (1599–1672), later to take the name Marie de l’Incarnation, wrote in her own account of her spiritual development that her confessor had asked her to read Teresa’s text in 1627. At that stage Marie was not yet...

When the brutalities of the French and Indian War came upon Pennsylvania in 1755, Governor Denny indignantly reported the slaughter of frontier inhabitants, buttressing his calls for a colonial defense: “Four dead Bodies, one of which was a Woman with Child, were brought to Lancaster from the neighbouring Frontiers, scalped and butchered in a most horrid Manner, and laid before the Door of the Court House for a Spectacle of Reproach to every one there, as it must give the Indians a sovereign Contempt for the Province. . . . The poor Inhabitants where these daring Murders were committed, being...

The conventional story of New England religion begins with a litany of what was not there: to quote David Hall, “no cathedrals, no liturgy, no church courts, no altars or candles, no saints days or Christmas, no weddings, no pilgrimages nor sacred places, nor relics; no godparents, or maypoles, no fairy tales, no carnival.”¹ To which the observer of Europe’s bloody and protracted wars of religion—the violent underbelly of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations that tore the continent apart for nearly two centuries—would add: no pogroms; no religious riots on the scale of the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day...