That the Spanish conquest and administration of territories in the Americas was conditioned in various ways by the centuries-long encounter between Islam and Christianity in Iberia is generally accepted. That New World experiences influenced interactions between Old Christians and Moriscos in Iberia is, while perhaps not actively contested, less often considered. This coproduction of what he calls New Spains is the subject of Hamann's Bad Christians, New Spains. The book deftly and creatively traces the course of two sixteenth-century inquisitorial cases, in Oaxaca and in Valencia, to show the ways in which common concerns and challenges structured both.
The twinned microhistories around which Hamann makes his case are complex. The first, in the Nochixtlán valley of Oaxaca, involved competition between European-born local powers and attempts to enslave Native Americans, steal mulberry leaves, and hide traditional holy objects from Inquisitors. In Valencia, meanwhile, Sancho de Cardona, almirante de Aragón, was alleged to have opposed Inquisition restrictions on suspected Jews, denied permission for traveling friars to preach to Moriscos on his land, and rebuilt a decrepit mosque. In analyzing these cases, Hamann returns often to early modern understandings of conversion as a kind of reduction (reducción), which he defines as a process both of persuasion and of a return to an earlier cosmic order, one closer to the perfection of Eden.
Despite official policies that non-Christians be “reduced and converted to our Catholic faith” (277), Hamann presents an intimately detailed picture, via witness testimony, context, and a wide array of relevant scholarship, of what were complex local processes of negotiation, coercion, and coexistence. After introducing the cases themselves, Hamann maps the investigations against the sacred and social landscapes of the Nochixtlán and Guadalest valleys in chapter 2, “Geographies of Discord.” He then, in “Catholic Catholicisms,” examines disputes between secular and church authorities over non-Christian practices. Nobles used notions of Catholic ecumenism to carve out a space in which such practices might be tolerated and regulated, thus defining themselves as “king and pope” in the lands they controlled (82). He develops this argument in the succeeding chapters (“The Poverty of Economy,” “Ruination,” and “The Excavation of the Dead”) by showing how such notions, though inspired by economic motives, led Old Christians such as Cardona (or encomendero Fernando de las Casas in Oaxaca) to assert authority over non-Christian rituals, objects, buildings, and bodies. The final chapter, “Chronologies at War,” is perhaps the most original, as Hamann demonstrates how flexible models of time in the Ñudzavui, Muslim, and Christian traditions allowed various interpretations of the social and cultural dislocations of the sixteenth century.
The depth and breadth of Hamann's research makes it impossible to offer a comprehensive summary here; one of the great advantages of the book is the richness of his explorations. Even so, some of his references range quite far afield—for instance, the discussion of Luther's metaphor of the Basilica of Saint Peter as built from the bodies of the faithful, with which Hamann introduces his chapter on the dead—and are only loosely tied to the matters at hand. Yet, though it sometimes loses sight of the inquisitorial investigations, one of the great advantages of the book is the richness of Hamann's explorations; he provides a deep window into how social relations were structured through materiality and temporality.
The title of the book is somewhat misleading: neither the Atlantic nor the Mediterranean features prominently. This is perhaps a problem of framing. Hamann's portraits of communities in a time of transformation are valuable in their own right; his discussions of how such entanglement worked on a local level effectively challenges the idea that colonial Latin America and early modern Europe are somehow separate. But the neologism “Mediterratlantic” distracts from, rather than highlights, these real contributions. The book includes a variety of images: landscapes, maps, iconography, and illuminations. But Routledge's decision to present many of these on partial pages, notably folios from the Zouche-Nuttall and Vienna codices, is perplexing; one struggles to follow the analysis when details of the relevant image are so minute as to be barely visible. Despite these minor problems, this is a work of admirable scholarship, one that rewards the reader with its many and insightful observations.
