The history of emotions is a new approach to social history, and this book is the first in English to systematically examine emotions in colonial Mexico. It is easy to assume that emotions are a given, unchanging aspect of human psychology. But the emotions we feel reflect the times in which we live. People express themselves within the norms and prescriptions particular to their society, their class, their ethnicity, and other factors. The essays collected here chart daily life through the study of sex and marriage, love, lust and jealousy, civic rituals and preaching, gambling and leisure, prayer and penance, and protest and rebellion. The first part of the book deals with how individuals experienced emotions on a personal level. The second group of essays explores the role of institutions in guiding and channeling the expression and the objects of emotions.

In 1761 Ilarione da Bergamo, a Capuchin friar, journeyed to Mexico to gather alms for foreign missions. After harrowing voyages across the Mediterranean and Atlantic, he reached Mexico City in 1763. His account reveals the squalor, crime, and other perils in the viceregal capital, and details daily life: food, public hygiene, sexual morality, medical practices, and popular diversions. His observations about religious life are particularly valuable. Ilarione also describes mining and refining techniques, recounts a bitter and bloody miners' strike, and recalls traveling across bandit-infested wilderness to Guadalajara. After his return to Italy, Ilarione wrote an account of his journey, published here for the first time in English. The editors have liberally annotated the text, written an introduction about Ilarione's life and the historical context of his journey, and included more than a dozen of Fra Ilarione's original drawings, including maps and sketches of Mexican flora. Daily Life in Colonial Mexico is a welcome addition to the firsthand literature of New Spain.

An account of the transformation of cultural assumptions affecting parental authority and children's freedom to choose marriage partners, this book traces colonial period changes in ideas about free will, love, and honor, and in the views of the Catholic church.

This book explores the history of marriage and marriage-like relationships across five continents from the seventeenth century to the present day. Across fourteen chapters, leading marriage scholars examine how the methodologies from the new history of emotions contribute to our understanding of marriage, seeking to uncover not only personal feeling but also the political and social implications of emotion. They highlight how marriage as an institution has been shaped not just by law and society but also by individual and community choices, desires and emotional values. Importantly, they also emphasize how the history of non-traditional and same-sex relationships and their emotions have long played an important role in determining the nature of marriage as an institution and emotional union. In doing so, this collection allows us to rethink both the past and present of marriage, destabilizing a story of a stable institution and opening it up as a site of contest, debate and feeling.

A trans-cultural collection of studies on early modern imagery of the phenomena of pain and suffering and viewers’ potential responses. Authors variously consider pain and suffering as somatic, emotional, and psychological experiences.

A prominent scholar of Mexican and Latin American history challenges the field's focus on historical memory to examine colonial-era conceptions of the future Going against the grain of most existing scholarship, Matthew D. O'Hara explores the archives of colonial Mexico to uncover a history of "futuremaking." While historians and historical anthropologists of Latin America have long focused on historical memory, O'Hara--a Rockefeller Foundation grantee and the award-winning author of A Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico--rejects this approach and its assumptions about time experience. Ranging widely across economic, political, and cultural practices, O'Hara reveals how colonial subjects used the resources of tradition and Catholicism to craft new futures. An intriguing, innovative work, this volume will be widely read by scholars of Latin American history, religious studies, and historical methodology.

Argues that laywomen's interactions with gendered theology, Catholic rituals, and church institutions significantly shaped colonial Mexico's religious culture.